Tag: 5-minute Fiction

Goodnight, Gracie

Bo awoke early. Earlier than usual. He intended to have what Ellie referred to as a decent breakfast. Eggs, toast, fruit? Muesli? More protein? Less protein? He was determined but remained unsure of what to make and chose instead to shower and wait for her to get up.

They had been living in an independent living community for almost a year, and Bo felt an increasing degree of acceptance of the arrangement. It was part of a continuing care retirement community. It was expensive. He had researched it. They had planned well to meet the initial costs and the monthly fees.

He called it The Home. Ellie did too.

Mike Barletta lived there. Sam Janssen was considering it. It would be good. Or, it would be what it would be.

He showered. Long and hot, and toweled off on the soft bathmat while listening to Ellie dressing and leaving the bedroom.

These long mornings together, after so many years spending most of the time apart during the days at work were, on the whole, good for him. He wanted them to be good for both of them. But, again, he was unsure. He knew that he could sometimes be demanding. When he had been, he immediately would see how it affected her. A momentary wince. A reticence to respond.

He sensed, too, that this move would, unlike the several  other moves they had made together, be different. Perhaps with more baggage rather than  less. Not only that, but it would be the last move they would make together. That it might cause a material shift in the way they related to one another. The proximity and pressure of their near constant presence. What they might be thinking and guardedly not saying. Feeling and not expressing. Seeing and not seeing or choosing not to see.

He wondered, too, if others in the community, men he might see every day and spoke with often, also feel that need for some degree of the tentative remoteness he was feeling? Was there something so essentially threatening and fear-provoking in the prospect of daily contact, scrutiny, and exposure? Or was it just him? Dreading to approach it from any distance or angle. That there might be some deeply hidden secret past that would be discovered. What Anna Freud may have called protective foundational repression. A forgotten bill left unpaid many years ago accumulating exorbitant interest, a final letter from a wronged and jilted lover never mentioned, or an incriminating photograph, whose possible existence was being denied and hidden under the basement stairs among wads of old insulation and dried mouse droppings.

As Ellie passes the bathroom door, Bo is reciting in his deep precise Bud Abbott voice, “I am telling you,” he is saying, “Who’s on first. What’s on second, and I Don’t Know is on third.”

Moving bowls and pans from one place to another in the kitchen she, in her best, searching, Lou Costello voice, “That’s what I said, ‘who’s on first?’”

When she hears him coming up behind her, she turns. He looks at her.

“What?” she says to him, reflexively touching her cheek with her fingers.

“Nothing,” he tells her.

“No, don’t say that. I know it’s something. The way you’re looking at me. Is there schmutz on my face?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“It’s just that you look different.”

“Good different or bad different? Tell me.”

“Just different. You look older.”

“What?”

“There are like new lines on your face, around your nose, that I don’t remember seeing before.”

“Like when I was twenty-three or yesterday?”

“I didn’t see you yesterday. I had my surgery yesterday and came home and slept all day.”

“Then the day before that? Tell me.”

“Yes. The day before that.”

“Bo, Honey. Nothing has changed. I am the same as I was two days ago.”

“You just look different.”

She sees his concern. “Come with me,” she says. Taking his arm, she leads him back toward the bathroom. “Close your eyes,” she tells him and she reaches into the room and turns on all of the lights. “Don’t open them until I tell you when and do only do what I tell you to do.”

“Ellie.”

“Trust me,” she says, and she turns him around, so his back is to the mirror. “Don’t open them, she tells him and, steadying him gently on his shoulder, she moves around him and stands so that they are now face-to-face.

“It is very bright in here,” she tells him. “So, slowly, I want you to open one eye at a time and look at me.”

He does as she tells him. Left eye then right eye. Left eye then right eye.

“What do you see?”

“Oh, my God.”

“Tell me.”

“With my right eye you look normal. Like my Ellie Mae.”

“And?”

“And with my left you look like you did in the kitchen. Older, sort of.”

Bo, they are both the same me. You are different. The lines have been there. They are part of me. You are only seeing me clearly now with the eye you had the cataract surgery in. You have a new clear lens in that eye. Look at the wall. What color do you see?”

“White.”

“What  was it two days ago?”

“Gray.”

“Same wall. Not old or young. Different. Now, look in the mirror. Look at yourself.”

“My God, Ell, I look so much older. There are lines and creases I had not seen before. And I’ve lost so much hair. It scares me. I don’t want to look  so old.”

“Boey, trust me, you’ll get used to it,” she says and leads him back toward the kitchen. In the morning light through the kitchen window, she turns to him and says, “It will all be okay.”

Then slowly jiggling a thick, imaginary, George Burns’ cigar to one side of her mouth, she says, “Say ‘Goodnight, Gracie,’”

“Goodnight, Gracie.”

Laramie

At the end of December, with a cold Brooklyn wind blowing and snow plowed into steep banks on the curbs, Marvin Zwillig, sweating in his puffy down jacket, loaded the rented E-Z-load U-Haul rollup rear-door van double-parked on Thirteenth street. Eleven cardboard cartons filled with dishes, silverware, books, scarfs, mittens, his computers, chargers, notebooks, pens, shirts, pants, earmuffs, overcoats, his bicycle, and snowshoes.

Thirteenth is a narrow one-way street heading west, downslope toward the harbor. Toward the Statue of Liberty. Marvin, too, is determined to head west. Toward liberty. That’s the plan.

“Marvin?” Lee Ann, his wife of thirty-five years, wrapped in a wool coat, arms across her chest, asks. “You think they don’t have pots and pans in Wyoming? Believe me, they do. Maybe even Cuisinarts. You don’t have to pack everything you own. This isn’t a Wagon Train episode. They might even have running water, buckwheat, and flannel shirts.

The Marvin Zwilling is the fourth person from his block about to leave Thirteenth Street for Laramie, Wyoming. The thirty-fourth if you count along all of Thirteenth, from Prospect Park West down to the Gowanus Canal.

Marvin had told her, back in the spring, well over a year ago, “Get ready, Lee Ann, if we lose the house in in November, we’re moving. We’re going to Wyoming.”

“What are you talking about?” she had said then.

“The world is changing, LeeAnn. The country is falling apart. It’s time we stop complaining and do something. Someone has to.  Tariffs. School shootings. Climate. Pop-up wars. Shrinkflation. Abortion. Vaccines. Epstein. The filibuster. Gerrymandering. Crypto. The Court. The country is splitting apart under us like we’re all standing spread-legged with one foot on either side of the San Andreas fault, wondering dumfounded which way should we go?

“So that means we have to move?”

“So, we just have to stop talking about everything, as if it is the new normal. We’ve got to take it seriously. Do something. Make difference”

“I am taking things seriously, but how does that have anything to do with Wyoming? Where’d you get that idea?

“Melanson.”

“Melanson?”

“He figured it out. If we don’t win the House back, that’s bad, but then we absolutely can’t lose the senate. If we do, it’s all over.”

“But… Wyoming?”

“Wyoming is the key, Lee Ann. It’s simple math. Listen, do you know which is the least populated and, coincidently, the most solidly red state in the nation?

“Let me guess… Wyoming.”

“Right. Wyoming! And, do you know how many people live in Brooklyn? I’ll tell you. Two-point-five-seven-seven million.”

“And, let me guess, Wyoming has…?”

“Bingo. Wyoming has precisely five hundred seventy-eight thousand, eight hundred and three. Total. The whole entire state. And seventy-three percent voted for Trump. That’s four hundred and six thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two votes and he won the state. And, how many senators does Wyoming have? And how many does New York have?”

“Two. I get it, Marvin, and two. The same.”

“So, Melanson says, New York doesn’t need our votes. Park Slope definitely doesn’t need us. And so, if we can just get eighty-seven thousand people to move from Brooklyn to Laramie, we can flip the state. Eighty-seven thousand and we flip the whole state and we’re up two senators. Lee Ann, we can be the flapping seagull whose wings divert the tornado, the leaf falling from a tree in the forest that troubles the distant star. We can do that. It makes the greatest sense.”

“No, Marvin. It does not. His numbers don’t sound right to me. They may to you and Melanson, and maybe to someone who wants to ride horses to work, but not me. I can’t do that. I can’t leave here. My work. Our friends. Our apartment. Our healthcare. This is our home. Our city. We’re here and not in Laramie for a good reason. A lot of good reasons.”

“But please think about it. We rent our apartment for a few years. You can write anywhere.”

“You know that’s not true. I can’t work just anywhere. I need people. Vibrancy. Face-to-face with the soul of a live, changing, self-critical, city. The dogs and babies in the park. Whole Foods. Essa Bagel’s steamy windows. Ray’s pizza. The commotion. The variety. Excess and access. The song someone is humming on the F train. All of that. No. I can’t go. I won’t go. I can’t live any place else.”

In late November, as Marvin was packing his boxes, Lee Ann raised her objections again. again.

“And, besides Marvin” she said, “this scheme of yours is totally dishonest. It’s false and illegitimate. Something you’d be enraged at if they did it to you. You’d be nothing more than rustlers there. Vote rustlers. And you know what they do to rustlers. My god, all I can think of is Matthew Shepard and he was only gay and no rustler. What do you think they’ll do when they get wind of what you’re up to? Don’t you think they don’t already know?”

“What can they do?”

“What can they do? Were you sleeping through January 6 and the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti? They’ll pull you out of your car, break down your door, gas you, handcuff you and deport you to Abu Ghraib or some equally horrific dark place. You think your life, our life, is worth giving up for a couple of senate seats?”

Marvin, now waiting for Melanson to show up, is sweating and shivering. His feet are cold.  A key in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The boxes are in the double-parked U-Haul.

“One last time, Marvin, I am here, your kids are here, your mother is here, your cardiologist and allergist and all the other ‘ologists’ you see are here. But most of all I am here and I don’t want you to leave me. I am afraid for you and every day without you will be miserable. I am frightened and miserable now. Unload the truck. Please. I can’t let you go. I thought I could but now I know I was kidding myself thinking you would change your mind.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. The thought of her feeling afraid and miserable shook him. He too felt miserable. Heartsick. Afraid.

The winter sun was setting below grey clouds. The lights of the city were coming on. Snow was soon to fall. The torch of the Liberty statue was lit and Melanson was late. And when he failed to come Lee Ann went up the stairs to their apartment and Marvin went to find to find a space to park the U-Haul.

When Life is Enough

Noah Larsson lay in bed. An empty water glass on the bedside table. His reading glasses resting on his copy of McCoullough’s The American Spirit. The curtains are drawn closed but still the white afternoon light and heat penetrate the room.  

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties each night.

When he awoke earlier, he’d turned on his side to get up. He needed to go to the bathroom and down to the kitchen for something to eat. He could not. He had not even the strength to move his legs over the edge or shift the weight off his bad shoulder.

The bed was the one in which his father had been born; in the house his great-great grandfather had built, in the town in which he’d cut stone from the steep, deep sides of the granite quarries.

Larsson had been a Navy man, joining right out of high school, flying crew in east coast patrol bombers.

After he was discharged, he met Margret. Two months later, they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottninghol. They took a bus to Stockholm to meet her parents. They stayed a week, returning to Boston, to take whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter, Ulla.

He started an accounting business he’d kept for fifty years, moonlighting selling insurance for a company in Hartford. He never took out a policy of his own. With his clients, he never spoke about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was the right thing to do.

Margret died young. There was not a day he did not mourn for her. He raised Ulla until she married and left home. For fifty years he kept the old house. And when Ulla, too, died young, he mourned doubly each day.

He paid his bills on time, read books by Goodwin, Tuchman, and Mantel, remembering each one as they sat in rows on his bookshelves. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm in good running order.

He saved every nickel, owed not a penny, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Mailed fruit boxes from Florida each Christmas to close family. Late in life he found companionship with a woman close to his age whose quiet good humor and cooking he enjoyed. 

He never spoke ill of another soul. He kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit a light only when he needed one, shutting it off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and warmed  Swanson’s dinners in the microwave. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will and never would.

Trust one’s own counsel, keep one’s affairs in order, plan well and prepare for adversity, ask for no favors, offer kindness and accept kindness with grace . That’s all one need do.

He’d handwritten his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law. He had files and note cards for everything, catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a single newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, a cup of hot coffee in front of him, and a smile on his face. He found comfort in solitude as well as community.

Later in the blistering August afternoon, Noah’s son-in-law and his new wife came to check on him and found him in bed with the door and windows closed and the air conditioner off.

“Oh my God, Noah,” he said. “It’s like an oven in here. It must be a hundred.”

“Noah? Can you get up?” said the woman, “Open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Don’t you turn it on!” Noah said. “It’s old and it won’t last if you run it too hard.”

“Noah it’s so damn hot in here, you won’t last as long as the A/C if you don’t let us turn it on.”

They managed him out of the bed, to the bathroom and down on the stair-chair to the kitchen. He drank a glass of orange juice, ate an egg,  toast, and a cup of coffee. He thanked them and asked them to help him move to the couch in the living room where he could rest, which they did and where he fell quickly asleep.

When they returned and tried towaken him the next morning, they called the police. The ambulance came. From the couch, in a weakened, near inaudible voice, he said, raising his head, “I know my rights. I have authorized no healthcare proxy and no power of attorney. I speak for myself. You can’t make me leave my own house! I refuse any treatment, to be placed on a gurney, or to be taken to the hospital or anywhere else. I need rest. Leave me and do not come back under any circumstances.”

They did as he asked.

He lay his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes. The afternoon was waning.

When he was younger, he had smoked a pipe, as had his father. His grandfather’s meerschaum. He imagined himself now filling the bowl with fresh tobacco from a leather pouch, tamping down the soft, thin aromatic ribbons with his finger and putting a match to them, drawing in the warm soothing sweet savory smoke into his mouth and deep into his soul.

His bones and muscles relaxed to nothingness. Gone was the sensation of lying on the couch. Intermittent light and shade through the window drift over him as at the beach when thin cirrus clouds pass slowly across the sky. Moments of cooling shade alternating with warming rays of sun. His mind finds rest, carelessly floating on a calming sea before slipping beneath it into a long dreamless sleep.

The Shape We’re In

I tell you this story from the vantage point of having lived through several presidential administrations which I thought at the time were the worst that ever could be, only to be judged wrong by a new one which was exponentially more terrible. The current administration may be the absolute bottom of that rancid barrel, and possibly so bad that it could conceivably be the last one we see. Though of course, I might be wrong.

A week before Christmas 1988, in the darkest hours of the year, I made gingerbread cookies.

I rolled flat the ball of cold dough I had made on the floured cutting board. I was listening to The Band. Levon Helm.

The Weight. The Shape I’m In. His voice was a muddy truck on a rough upstate road. His dirt farmer voice pushing through the roadside brambles. Singing how he felt. How I felt. How we all felt. The shape we were in.

It had snowed three inches that week, and by that time forty thousand eight hundred forty-nine men women and children in the country had died of HIV/AIDS in the six years since we’d recognized that an epidemic had begun.

I set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and peeled each figure apart and laying them flat and brown on the baking sheets. Dozens of them. Arms and legs outstretched.

With the edge of a spoon, I drew eyes and a smile into each face. A Greek chorus, now, of eager Athenians bearing citizen witness to the events to come.

The number of deaths, their constancy, the relentless procession of them, had become the landscape. The gestalt. The number itself was benumbing. A monochrome veil over your vision while you could still clearly see and feel the enormity of each passing; each life’s loss.

The constant cloud of death hung about us; about all of those I worked with. The dread of it stitched onto the edges of everything, even in the campy, offhand-sounding humor. We cared for the sick and scared, studied the data and the pathology, the science and medicine and the hopeful rumors of unlikely cures.

Reagan had long since shown himself to be the devil. He surely knew better. His friends were dying around him. Nevertheless, he acted as if he was simply callously clueless, when he was, demonstrably heartlessly uncaring and cruel.

Regan’s willful ignorance and inaction were incomprehensible. To what end, six years in, would he not lead the mobilization of medical care, research and compassion?

The gingerbread cookies would be my Christmas gift this year for our work group. We all made cookies to share. Tiny pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse. We had no holiday party. There was no holiday. We’d exchange the boxes and bags and jars before leaving work on Christmas eve and be back the next day.

I took a step away from the counter and looked at the figures. Each one of them. Arms and legs outstretched. Their smiling faces.

A smile came to my own face, and grew slowly, and I began to laugh. It became a big, head-tipped-back, body laugh, reaching out to the corners of the kitchen .

It upwelled from deep within me. I was work- and world-weary and sleep-deprived and the laugh did me good.

Rolling out another ball of dough, I cut the next batch of figures and found myself pressing a downward frown into each of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made me laugh, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me.

Tears filled my eyes, overflowing my cheeks and I cried as I could never remember doing. He cried for myself, and everyone and everything. For all of us. Our frustration and fear. Our sadness, our rebellion, and anger and our helplessness.

A skin-prickling sadness, not only for myself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and all the Johns and James and Emilys, and every other one of the friends we had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces I’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia or a other diseases that ravaged them. And those for whom AZT promised a cure but only made the dying harder.

Friends I knew and did not know, younger than me, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed. All of them who had not had the care they needed, the research they demanded, the recognition as humans in need which they deserved, because the president of the country they lived in could not abide helping them or funding the research that might save them, and could not, even as men and women he knew, died all around him, Reagan could not even speak the name of the disease they had.

When all the cookies were done, the smiling and the frowning, I bundled them, warm, together and wrapped them in white tissue paper and tied green and red ribbons around their waists. The house was quiet. I was exhausted. I was drained, and I most needed to sleep.

That was over forty years ago. We lived every day with the consequences of the government’s lack of action and human compassion, and its willingness, born out of ignorance, to discriminate and marginalize people based upon its own politics. It resulted in an early and painful death by an infectious disease for many thousands in the U.S. and millions worldwide.

Our experience with the COVID pandemic was taken from the same disastrous playbook. Politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, and willful ignorance of public health practices resulted again in the death of  tens of hundreds of thousands of men women and children.

Now, once more, politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, willful ignorance, lack of human compassion, and a blatant disregard and disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, is unfolding daily in full view. We can not yet know how many lives have been, and will be, sent into turmoil, hardship, disappearance, torture, illness, and possible death by a government sworn to follow the constitution and other laws, acting rightfully and impartially for the sake of the citizens and the society.

The Witnesses

Schreiber and I are having breakfast together. In a coffee shop overlooking the harbor. At another table, closer to the kitchen, a group of other men are talking.

Schreiber has brought his knapsack.

“What did you bring to show me today?” I ask.

“A book. I’ll show you. Let’s order something first.”

I look at the menu as does he and we order. Egg sandwiches. Mine with cheese and spinach. His with sausage. He orders two, one to bring home to Lorraine.

“Before you show me the book,” I say, “I have to ask you, did you see Swalwell’s post on Instagram last night?”

“Yes,” he says, “and that’s just what I want to talk about.”

We pause for a moment when our order is brought to the table. He lifts the book from his bag and reads me the title. “I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933 -1941, by Victor Klemperer.”  He hands it across to me. A hard cover. It must weigh four pounds.

“Have you read it?” I ask, opening it. He has underlined some sentences and written notes in the margins with pencil.

“I’ve started it,” he says. “It’s from a diary he kept. It was only printed a few years ago. There are two more volumes, 1941 to 1945, and one more but I haven’t gotten either of them yet. I read a dozen or so pages every night. I hate to put it down. It’s the most important book I’ve ever read.”

“Tell me.”

“I will but…,”  and removes another item from the bag. A daily calendar. I lay the Klemperer down on the table as he opens the calendar, turning it toward me. His handwritten notes in black ink. Smooth, even, rounded script, in tight lines filling the pages.

“I have begun to write my own diary,” he says. Once I started this one,” tapping his finger on the Klemperer. “And you should too. We must do this now, each day so that in the years to come there will be a record, a personal one, that tells people what is happening here. In our country. To all of us. The threats. The intimidation. The chaotic new rants each day. The silence and complicity of people who know better and should do better. I wake up and I write down what I am thinking and feeling. Not full sentences. What new angry idiocy I have heard he has said yesterday and overnight. Listen to this,” he says, taking his notebook back, opening it to the last written page. “Trump fired the FBI agents. Tariffs on Mexico and China. He’s crazy. It’s all bullying. Vendettas. Today I will get cash,” he reads, looks up at me, and then turns back the calendar. “I get cash now. A little each day. While I can. Chuck Todd and Jim Acosta are leaving MSNBC and CNN. Planes crash over DC. Trump blames DEI.”

He looks again at me. “That was yesterday. All that in one day. And this very morning I go to order the second volume, and I click on payment, and what do I see?… access denied in bold red letters. Do you know how I felt? I will find out why at the bank later, but still…”

I don’t know what to say to him. The look in his eyes.

He puts down the calendar and picks up the Klemperer book.

Opening it, “Listen to this,” he says. “This is from 1933… March 10, Friday evening…” He closes the book on his index finger and looks again at me. “Hitler was elected Chancellor on January 30 of 1933, and now it’s March 10, a month and a half, and he is writing, … ‘I called January 30 terror, but that was a mild prelude, the business of 1918 is being repeated, only under another sign, the swastika. It’s astounding how quickly everything collapses.’”

He looks up for a moment and then back to the page, lower down, “’Day after day, commissioners appointed, buildings taken over, newspapers banned, flags raised by order of the Nazi Party,’ are you hearing this?” he says to me.

“Yes,” I say, looking at him for an instant and then averting my eyes.

“And here, March 17, ‘No one dares saying anything, everyone is afraid. March 20 … every new government decree, announcement, etc. is more shameful than the previous one.’”

“Michael, …” I say.

“One more, one more, and then I’ll stop, … April 20 to 25, “’… trembling and slavish fear all around… ‘they are expert at advertising… ‘everyone knuckles under,’” he runs his finger swiftly along the line and then down to another… ‘all the same conversations, the same despair… catastrophe is imminent.’”

He looks at me. I feel he is wholly there in that past moment in that past place. And then, now, he is here, and he still feels the same. The same pleading look in his eyes. “Do you hear these words?” he says to me. “This was from April 1933, mind you, not 1938 or 1941. This is before the SA men start rounding up people, or the SS and the pogroms and the camps, before the killings started. 1933,” he repeats.

He has not touched a bite. Nor have I. The waiter comes with two coffee pots. One decaf, one regular. “Can I warm them up for you?”

“Yes, thanks,” I tell him. “Regular.”

“Decaf for me,” says Schreiber.

“You want those wrapped up?”

“No thanks.”

The men at the other table have left.

“Schreiber,” I say, “the book can’t be all like that, can it.? He must also write about family, regular everyday things, his work.”

“No, you’re right. He does. He does. His teaching, his writing, his wife, friends, movies, just like we do. You and I.”

“And that’s the point though isn’t it,” I say. “You’re saying he’s seeing everything sane and normal and good is being broken apart, soon likely to be lost and…”

“… And,..” Schreiber cuts in, “still, he might be having egg sandwiches with a friend in coffee shop by the water, despite what the future might bring. Right?”

“Yes,” I say. “And we know what his future did bring. Don’t we.”

Slow Dancing

Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.

“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”

It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.

They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.

Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.

The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.

No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.

“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.

“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would  turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.

He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.

That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.

No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.

The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.

The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.

And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.  

Wednesday Morning White Boy Blues

“Get up,” she says.

“Get up!”

“What?”

“Your phone is buzzing.”

“Is there any coffee?”

“I’ll ask Higgins to bring you some. Answer your phone.”

“Who’s Higgins?”

“Yeah, who’s Higgins, you got that right, just answer the damn phone.”

“Hello?” He fumbles on the night table for the joint he started and let burn out last night. He puts his glasses on and clicks on his phone. Holds it loosely to his ear.

“Hey, Home boy, where you at? What up, my man? You coming in today? I got something I want you to do for me.”

He moves the phone closer to his ear, covers the phone, and speaks into it . “Nothing, man. Just chillin’ here. Sure, I’ll be there.” He motions for his wife to leave.

“Who is that?” she says. He waves her away. She sits on the side of the bed.

“Nothing, No one. No, not you man. I was talking to somebody else. It’s okay, man. It’s cool. Look can I call you right back?”

Word, dude! she hears before he clicks off.

“That was Benny,” he says.

“Benny Wadsworth, our boss?”

“Yeah.”

“And he talks like that? And what kind of big thing does he want you to do?”

“No, no. It’s nothing. I don’t know. That’s just his way sometimes. You know, he acts easy, chill. That’s all. Just one of the boys.”

“Just one of the boys? Which boys? Are you one of the boys? That’s silly question. Isn’t it? Because he was just talking to you that way. Does he talk to clients like that?”

“No, I don’t know. Some, maybe.”

“He’s a grown man. He runs a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more, and he talks like he’s fifteen years old wannabe with his orange pants hanging down below his ass, holding onto his crotch, waiting in line in a lunchroom upstate for a juvee he says he didn’t commit? And what kind ”

“Come on, Essie, give me a break.”

“You talk like that?”

“No.”

“But you condone it?”

“He’s my boss. I don’t condone anything. I do what I have to do. Put up with what I have to. I’m nothing without him. He calls all the shots.”

“Well, you better give that whole idea a little more thought, like what kind of shots. And you think you’re nothing? You think I like to hear that? What am I then? How am I supposed to feel when you say that? How do you think I feel when you say she’s ‘just somebody else?’ Maybe you should take a good look at all of this. We’re in this together. For your sake and mine.”

He gets his clothes on and leaves for work. He takes the subway across the river, getting off at Rector Street. He buys a coffee and a bagel from the vendor on the corner and brings it up to his desk. He connects his computer into the VPN, logs in, and he sits.

He looks around the room.

It’s seven fifteen a.m. Twenty-five other white boys like him in clean, white Succession-looking shirts and royal-blue ties, headphones over their neat razor cuts, staring at three screens lit up in front of them. Smiling false smiles and making pencil marks on yellow note pads. Following the rules. Putting in the time. Keeping in line. Doing what’s needed to do to make a dime.

Who the hell am I? What the hell am I doing?

 I pull down two hundred and fifty K and I still have to suck up to anyone one step up and two steps ahead of me just to keep that going. It’s like they own a piece of me and they do. Sometimes I feel like a shit for doing that, but my boss makes ten times that and gets good seats in Nobu, free tickets to  the U.S. Open and a season pass to the Nets and Giants every year and I wait around and treat him like he can do no wrong and see if he’ll ask me along one day.  I mean why does he get the free tickets and shit? In what world does that make sense. He makes millions and they give him free shit. I have to pay for everything. He screws anyone one he can for an extra buck. And what, he gets the free ride? And I get what?

Everything I have, the home, the car, nice clothes, kids in a good school, could be gone with one bad week. One bad day. One mistake. One slip. Gone. No one is going to care about me or what happens to me. Security walks me to the elevator. Then what do I do? I’m out on the street and who would give a rat’s ass for me?

I have bills up the ass and my marriage is desiccating. I know that. My kids think I’m old and ask me why I’m tired all the time.

I work hard. I work hard for what I have. For what we have. I take the subway every day. I’m not ignorant. I know lots of people have it worse off than me. I see that. I feel bad for them. But what? Does that make me feel any better? It doesn’t.

And assholes like Benny just make it all worse for guys like me. Because they act like misogynists and ignorant know-nothings who think they know everything, and keep others down, I get treated just like one of them when I walk into a room. No one even waits to hear what I’m going to say. Like I’m wrong before I say a word. Just for the way I look.

I feel squeezed all the time. I’m in the middle. The people on top get anything they want and the people on the bottom want to take what I have. Does that sound fair to you? I mean, I’m squeezed. No one gives me anything. And then what? I have to watch what I say, how I look. I’m white, I get that. Do I have any control over that?

And in the meantime, I get treated like I’m always the bad guy. I’m the white guy in the room with a little money so what do I know. I know history. I know inequality. But I’m a human person like everyone else. Don’t write me off and just give me the smirk and roll your eyes routine because I’m white and a man. I mean, how does that feel fair? I always give people a seat on the subway, but even then, even this morning for crap sake, I get the smirk, like I’m only doing that because of what people might think, not because I think it’s the right thing. Or I’m condescending or just performing. You think any of these other shithead grunts around me care about anything or anyone except themselves? Not chance. Make it now, they think. Screw everything else and everyone in your way.

Shit! Why me? Everyone leave me alone. Sometimes I feel like I should just quit. Leave. Go away. Pack us all up and go someplace. Far away. Start over. Take some cash and disappear. Get out of this city. Open a grocery store someplace. Shit. I don’t know. Just leave me alone for Christ’s sake.

Laying (Some) Matters to Rest

On a clear afternoon in June, Otto Gruber met his two sisters for lunch at Gennaro’s in White Plains. Their father, Otto, Sr. passed at seven that morning in a nursing home in Greenburg. A decision they had made not to resuscitate in his third, recurring, intractable bout of aspirational pneumonia. They had been there with him when died.

They sat in a booth. Elke and Marta, both of whom were much younger than he, sat on one side, Otto on the other. While he waited when they went to wash up, he looked at the family photos of successive Gennaro generations. Each one smiling. All in front of the restaurant just as it is now.

Simple, sincere, faces of old men and women holding babies. Can families really be like that? As a child, he’d never been hungry, never been beaten, or abused. His parents were neither alcoholics nor drug users. There were books to read. Clean clothes. His parents were civil to one another. They never had much money. They were Roosevelt Democrats and voted for Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. Was he happy, though? No, he’d say. He wished he could say differently.

When his sisters returned, the owner, a woman named Maria-Vita, came out of the kitchen, wiped her hands on a towel. “Give me a few minutes, hon, and I’ll get you folks started. I just made some rollatini di melanzane.”

She set down three glasses of water and handed the menus to Elke.

Otto said, “Well, I guess that’s it. It’s over.”

“Thank God,” said Elke.

I mean,” he said, “when your parents die, you’re really, finally on your own. There’s no more mama and papa. You’re alone. You look back and wonder, ‘Was any of that worth it?’”

“What kind of a way is that to look at it. This is the time to get closer. You’re not alone. You have us. Of course, it all wasn’t so smooth sailing. No family is, but they tried. We all tried. ”

Marta said, “I’m getting some wine. You want some?”

“Get a Barolo and I’ll have some,” said Elke. “Are you having any?”

“No, not for me,” he said.

Maria-Vita returned with the wine and glasses. “You’re the brother,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I love your sister.”

“Yes, I’m the brother.” he said. “Yeah, Elke, she’s great.”

“Look, give me back those menus. I’m bringing you fresh bread from Viglioti’s, a tomato salad, and the rollatini I made. You have enough on your minds.”

“I hope she’s quick, I have to get going.”

“Oh, please, Otto, that’s enough.” Your father died four hours ago, you could at least have a little heart. Take a few minutes and say something nice and kind about him. Not just, move along, the shows over, he’s dead and gone and, guess what, nobody cared, anyway.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” he said. “Let’s each say something nice. You go first, Marta.”

“Do you remember the time, he…,” said Marta.

“He, what?”

“Don’t interrupt her.”

“… he…”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but the happy little family you both lived in was not the one I did,” he said.

Maria-Vita brought the bread, three ample white bowls and a platter of steaming rollatini in red sauce with fresh cheese on top. “Eat,” she said.

They spooned rollatini from the platter into their bowls, broke off pieces of bread and dipped them into the sauce. They ate quietly.

“Look, I’m not complaining,” he said. “I just had a different life than you both did. Not horrible. It just wasn’t all that good. I was a kid. I just wasn’t a happy kid.”

“But they loved you. They must have. Mom did. I know that. She thought you were like a god,” said Elke.

“That may be true. I think she did. She was distracted. Fragile. Like she might do or say something wrong. Worrying about everything. Afraid one night he might not make it home.”

“Well, he did that to her. His parents were like that, too. Stiff. Old school. Not very affectionate. Never smiling. That must have affected him.”

“I know. I see that. But you’re saying treating people badly because of how you grew up is just okay? And I shouldn’t complain. Just forgive and forget. Let go. Put it all behind me.”

“I guess, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Do you remember it being like that?” Elke said to Marta.

“No. I was happy. They got me a dog after you moved out.”

“I heard about the dog, and how did that work out?”

“Not so good,” Marta said.”

“No, not great,” he said. “And why? I’ll tell you why. Because neither of them liked dogs and your mother was terrified of them. He knew that and yet he bought you a dog for which he had to build a cage in the basement, and it barked all day long driving her crazy, right? You had a good time with that?”

“No. That was horrible.”

“It must have been. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you and for the dog and for them. But it wasn’t the dog’s fault. You don’t blame the dog for complaining. Something was wrong but he just didn’t know what.”

“So, you’re saying…what? You were treated like a dog?”

 “No. I’m saying, I don’t know. I never told anyone this but, he never once said, ‘I love you’ to me, never once put his arm around me. For a kid, that’s pretty devastating.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“Me, too.”

“Me too. I’m sorry for myself. But I have to go. Please tell Maria the eggplant was the best! No shit, that’s worth remembering fondly.”

He left, got into his car, put his hands on the steering wheel and sat there. The sky was still clear. The faint white face of the moon. He sat there until a knock on the side window startled him.

“Marta,” he said. Her cheeks were smudged. He lowered the window.

“You’re right,” she said. “You did live in a different family. I’m sorry. I don’t remember it being that bad for you. But when you left, it was like the lights went back on after a thunderstorm at four in the morning. The air was suddenly easier to breathe! Your story isn’t the only story. It’s not. It’s only yours. Don’t try to make it mine or make me feel bad because it wasn’t.”

She turned away and walked back toward the restaurant.

Then she stopped, turned, came back to the car.

“And, one last thing,” Marta said, “it is not lost on me, nor should it be on you, that you are a male, you are older, you make more money than I do and, in general, you have more power than I do. You dominated that whole conversation in there. You intimidated us and, instead of remembering the still-warm body that was, and still is your father, you talked only about you. If you ever want to have a conversation with me about my life, how I feel, how it was all like for me, what I think, let me know. I’ll be there. And while you’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, take a good long look in the mirror.

The Way Things Work Out

When Bix was young and newly married, before he had a child of his own, when he knew all he needed to know about pretty much everything; most everything that mattered; most everything that mattered to him; he knew a couple who had a young child, an infant. Brown-eyed like her father. Soft black hair. A pinched chin like her mother. He was sure that with a pencil, a piece of paper, a Punnett square, and a few minutes he could suss out all the probabilities of that combination happening. It was just dominants and recessives. Like heads and tails. That was what he knew, what most people knew then; dominants, recessives, and probabilities. Probabilities ruled.

He’d been in college with Vincent, the father of the young child. A philosophy major. The mother had been a teacher where Bix taught high school Bio. So, they were all friends. Not close, but friends. People he knew. Not that well. But none of that really matters. They were just two people he knew who had a child. A girl. Maybe two or three weeks old, maybe six months. He didn’t pay too much attention to other people’s children then.

What he knew then about children was that, if things worked out, most of the time, probably, when you had one, there’d be a few months of listening to their soft breathing in the dark room next door, lifting your head to the sound of a call or a cough, holding your breath until another cough came, or a swallow, a cry, or the rustling of a shoulder finding a new resting place by the side of the crib. And you’d turn your head back to the hollow of your pillow and fall back to sleep while someone else fed it or changed its diaper.

That’s if things worked out.

He and his wife had visited them, the couple, once, on an unusually warm November evening. The child was named Clair. Clair de lune. He could see her rounded face from across the room, resting in the angle of her mother’s arm, partially hidden by a thin flannel cover.

After the child had been put to bed and quieted, they all sat in the living room.

The couple kept the door to the child’s room ajar and would take turns getting up to bring drinks, clear plates or whatever, and stopping to listen at the child’s door in the lighted hallway. They’d then come back and sit on the couch for a few minutes.

After a while, Bix’s wife said, “We should go now and let you two get some sleep while you can.”

“No, no,” said Vincent, his friend, the philosophy major.

“Oh, my goodness, are you sure? I wish you could stay longer,” said the child’s mother, Lindy, or Lorraine, he couldn’t recall which, and she went into their bedroom coming back with their coats.

On the drive home he thought, they fuss so much. Worry too much. He’d said so to his wife. She turned from looking out the window to look at him.

And then he and Mara had children. Twins.

He found himself thinking of Vincent and Lindy. And of himself back then, when he knew so much about so little and so little about so much. How little he knew then of wakeful nights when every sound in the dark comes freighted with ancient, existential, fear, alerted to every nuance of sound, nerves as taut as a mousetrap in a kitchen cupboard, and of gratefulness in the morning after a peaceful, uneventful, night believing, hoping, that things would work out as they had done last night. The way probability says it should work out, the way it should work out in a well-ordered, teleological, universe. The right way.

For Vincent and Lindy, and their little girl, Clair, it did not work out so well.

A few short weeks after Bix and Mara had put on their coats and said good night, and after they drove home thinking about what they would or would not do when they had children, and then about work and other things and other people, they heard the sad news about the child. About how the child had died in bed during the night; one night, not that night, but a different night. Another night of listening to the silence through the child’s open door.

And, somehow, even then, he shoved that into the recycling bin of his thoughts … because things usually work out well, don’t they? But deep down knowing that the improbable is not the impossible. Else, why read horror stories or watch Stephen King films to attest to your own invulnerability?

And then, for Bix, the years of parental basal-metabolic worry came and went; listening to soft breathing and mashing bananas to silky sweet smoothness evolved into cutting grapes in half, and blowing across hot bowls of vegetarian vegetable soup, sitting on edge on the edge of a sandbox in the park, and figuring out how to remove a square piece of cut carrot from deep in a squirming nostril. Saving growth charts and Crayola drawings of Mommy, a calendar of milestones, and progress reports and SAT scores.  He  heard his own voice say, “Did you do your homework?” “Who’s driving tonight?” “No matter what you have done or what time it is, call me and I’ll be there in five minutes to pick you up,” and “Because I said so.”

And so, having traveled that far, like Bix, you figure things will all work out okay.

Then your kids get married and move away, or just move away, just as you had hoped would happen, knew would happen, feared would happen, and you wait for texts or phone calls. Track them on Find My Friends. And maybe they come back after a rough breakup or needing space to figure out what they really want to do or who they really are. And when they go again you say our door is always open. And even when they call you with biopsy results, you say, because you believe it, as he had come to believe it, that things will work out okay though you know that only sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t. And you suffer when they don’t and fret when they do.

And so, if it all works out, as it did for Bix, one day they do come back, and tell their own kids to sit quietly, and they stand by the door to your bedroom with a tissue in one hand and a glass in the other. And they listen to your breathing, and read to you, and kiss your forehead at midnight, and ask, “Are you warm enough?” “Can I get you water or anything?” And then they will all go to sit in the living room and talk quietly among themselves and wait for you to fall asleep.

Border Crossing at Halls Stream Road

He found a place on the map just west of Halls Stream Road, upstream from Beecher’s Falls, where the road bends left and the stream bends right and the border lies just west of both of them. Where the stream is wide and shallow, hidden in the trees, and you can see the farms in Canada so clear and near you could high arc a baseball and hit the bright white side of the closest one.

His pack holds his passport, chlorine tabs, matches, phone, tarp, and Clifbars. A flashlight. Water bottle and meds for a week. He considered packing his father’s fixed-blade Hunter knife, though he had no coherent picture of why, or how, he might use it if the need arose, nor what that need might be. What if he was stopped by a patrol and they found it?

He’d once before felt the need to leave. In Nixon’s War. In the draft. Quakers handed out pamphlets from platforms and wished him well. The fear to him was visceral. In his gut and the options were to him like trees in fog. The language of 4-F, 2-S, and 1-A made it seem that way. So too, the muddily ill-defined illegality of it. As was, he thought, the war itself. The moral dilemmas. Was there honor or safety anywhere. He waited, considered what would happen to him at the border, so he never left. He aged out in ‘69. No decision being the decision.

The waves of dread and worries came with the seasons. Daily, almost. Diffuse, becoming sharper. Oppressive. Accreting like rust and corrosion. Kent State. Reagan. Bush. Bush. Iran Contra. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Columbine. Sandy Hook. “How’s that hopey changing thing working out for you?” Tea Party Two. McConnell. Proud Boys. Q. Trump’s odd inchoate internecine war. The great carbon bootprint. All that is solid undermining all that had once seemed so certain, so solid. Marx, vilified unheeded: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

“Why are you doing this?” she said to him. “We’re okay here. There’s no danger. Is there?”

I worry every day, he told her. January 6, new-breed warriors. Waiting for Kristallnacht. “That won’t happen here,” she said.

Then January 6, again, he said.

But, it’s more than that. He told her, I don’t want to live anymore in a country like this. The oily grasping. Condoned. Encouraged by corrupting militaristic capital. They own it all and still want more. We bleed debt and blood in the streets. No one cares for long enough to do anything. I want to feel free. I don’t want to die never knowing better.  

He left a note. Wait to hear from me.

In Queechee, in the parking lot near the gorge, he met a man with a car. I’ll give you half now, he offered. They drove north beneath an August-green awning.

Stop here, he said. The stream there was slow and shallow. The white-sided farm across the way. Quiet, like a softcover children’s book.

He paid the driver the other half. He lets the car turn and leave.

This is not El Paso. He knows that. He is no Nicaraguan. He is only who he is.

It is all relative in degree. He could no longer live the American life. Dumbed-down, consumer capital-driven life, politically oligarchic corporate greed. A duplicitous mythical monopoly game of liberty and justice for none, where people go hungry, unhoused, profiled, drugged and hopeless.

In the stream up to his knees. He walked with the current, along the slow edge.

A mile or two. Then south along the Canadian side of the road. Vermont over there to the left. He was free. Sort of. He tipped up a sip of water in the shade. Alert for what or who might be lurking. Following.

Let them stop me, he thought. No one did.

He pressed open the door of the first café he saw. The first town. Ordered a Tim Horton’s and a roll. Took a seat by a wide window. Watched people come and go. He’d planned nothing further along than this. No more than sitting right there. Passing unmeasured minutes. Unbothered. Maybe this is how it will be. He doesn’t know. He will soon gather his things, step outside. Call home.

Ronald Reagan’s Christmas Cookies

Greg Molson followed the recipe for gingerbread cookies he’d found in his sloppy, falling-apart, copy of The Joy of Cooking, page 662:

Beat softened butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in molasses. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture in three parts, alternating with the water. On a floured surface, roll the dough to your preferred thickness.

His copy was the one bought years ago for his wife, before they’d gotten married. The one he’d wrapped and carried in his suitcase on their trip to the Sha-wan-ga Lodge Resort and Conference Center, where they stayed for a three-day, four-night honeymoon in the sweltering Catskill Mountains, among waves of shrill families, clouds of mosquitos, a tight circle of faux-log cabins, six varieties of flapjacks and canned fruit cocktail at each meal, and a deep green lake with unseen slimy, slithery, scaled things that rubbed up against his bare legs like a school of subaquatic feral cats.

“Just so you know, Greg,” Marsha said, on the ride home from the Catskills to their new apartment in Yonkers, holding a cigarette tipped toward the open car window, “Just so you’re not surprised, when we get back, I don’t cook.” 

When she moved out, leaving him after seven slow years of increasingly insurmountable, unavoidable, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences between them, Joy was the one book Marsha left behind for him on the kitchen counter.

Of course, she ate. Certainly, she ate. She ate with relish and gusto. That was something, in fact, that Molson liked so much about her. She loved food. All food. Italian, French, Chinese, burgers, shrimp scampi, pizza, mac and cheese, chow fun, and noodle kugle. Her mother cooked for her. Her grandmother cooked. Her brother-in-law cooked. Her friends cooked. But, in their overheated Hertz rental with the windows down, heading south on the Taconic Parkway, she told him clearly, emphatically, resolutely, and in no uncertain terms, that she did not, could not, and would not cook.

He was disappointed to hear her say that. He didn’t say so in so many words.

“Oh,” he said.

So, by dint of circumstance and dedication, never having cooked a meal before in his life, he found himself going into markets, filling shopping carts and brown bags with handles with what he needed. He stocked the cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, and breadbox. He learned to cook. He learned to love it. He found rest and refuge in it.

Joy became his bible.

And, so, when Marsha and he went their separate ways, he made, ate, and served to others what made him happy. He worked hard. And he came home each evening to a kitchen of respite and re-charge.

The idea for gingerbread cookies came from the need to bake something Christmassy to give to the people he worked with. They made, boxed, and ribboned packages of miniature pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse, which they handed out with big grins at the holiday party. Gingerbread cookies seemed to be just the right thing.

He mixed, cooled, and rolled the dough. Set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and separated out the gingerbread figures. They lay flat and brown on the parchment paper, looking up at him.

And standing at the counter with his floured fingers, he felt moved somehow at that moment, an irresistible urge to draw a gentle, curved, line of a mouth into each figure. A thin, up-turned, simulacrum of a smile.

He took one step back and looked at them. Their arms and legs outstretched. Their dotted eyes. Their smiling faces.

A slow smile came to his lips. It grew and broadened. And he began to laugh. A big, loud, head-tipped-back, open-mouthed, laugh. A nothing-held-back, totally uninhibited, burst of child-like laughter. He was overtaken, carried away by his own laughter echoing in his empty kitchen.

He felt an expansive release from deep within. His body, weary and sleep-deprived, let loose an anthem of inchoate joy. A feeling so surprising and foreign to him that he could find no word to give it.

He laughed in wonderment and deep awareness. How, almost out of the blue, had a bunch of corny cookie faces which, just a moment before, had been blank, and on which, with the tip of a fork and the curved edge of a spoon, he had drawn a simple smile, had looked up at him and had done this to him?

And so, with intention and only a moment’s pause, he turned the spoon around and he pressed a narrow furrow of a frown into one of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made him laugh, he felt a sadness grip him, and he began to cry.

Tears welled in his eyes and overflowed his cheeks. Crying as he could not ever remember doing in his entire life other than the day his mother had left him at the door of his kindergarten class on the very first day of school and turned away from him leaving him in the doorway in the firm grip of the tall sharp-faced, Mrs. Howell, and closed the door behind her.

He cried without trying to stifle it. Unselfconsciously. Without covering his eyes. Crying. Letting go, he felt, of days, and months, and years of submerged, un-cried sadness.

A sadness, only then at that very moment, so clearly to him that his skin prickled with gooseflesh, that he knew it was not for himself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and every other one of the friends he had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces he’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia.

Men and women, younger than him, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed.

And then he laid all of the cookies, smiling and frowning, in careful rows on the baking sheet and he cried and laughed as he looked from one of them to another and, when he felt ready, he opened the oven door, and wiped his eyes. Grateful, in a way, that he had known each and every one of them.

In the Last Days There Will Come Times of Difficulty (2 Timothy: 1-2)

Morse Sheffield lay alone in his bed in the late heat of August. Shades pulled down against the sun, darkening the room. The air, close and heavy. A thin sheet over him. He is dreaming his unpleasant dreams.

Someone on the stairs. Two of them. His father. Leave the cat alone. Do your homework. His mother. Come take your bath. Morse? Morrison? You hear me? Cold and wet. Dust in the air and in his mouth. Knocking on the door. Go away. I’m not dressed. He’d wet the bed again. His legs would not move. Tangled sheets around his ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse? Are you here?”

A hand pushes against the door.

“He’s in here,” one of them, a young woman, says.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here. Morse? Morse?”

“It must be a hundred in here.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Simon, open that window. Morse?

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Can you get up?”

“It’s Didi, Sigrid’s daughter, Morse. Can you sit up? Do you need help?”

Didi.

“Do you have any water? Simon, go get him some water. Help him up.”

I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

Yes. Can you give me my robe?

“Get him his robe. And turn on the air conditioner.”

“Don’t turn it on. Leave it. I don’t want it on.”

“But it’s so hot in here, you’ll die. Get him some water. Do you want some water?”

I need to go to the bathroom.

“Simon will help you. Morse, Simon will help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“It’s Simon, Morse, can you get up? Morse, lean over this way.”

I can’t. Don’t touch that shoulder.

Simon walks with Morse into the bathroom, helps him turn and eases back him down on the toilet seat.

“Are you okay in there?”

Don’t come in. Just help me get my shorts down.

“Ask him if he wants something to eat. Should I call 911?”

Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I will not go. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Please. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.

For over a week, the heat had been oppressive. Over ninety each day. The nights unbearable.

Sigrid, who came in to clean once a month, is the one who had found him. She knocked on the bedroom door. He told her to leave. To go away. She called the brother. The one with the house by the water. The only family of his she knew. No answer. She called her daughter Didi.

“You have to come to Mr. Sheffield’s house. He’s in his bedroom with the door closed and it’s a hundred and ten up here. He won’t let me go in.

Morse Sheffield had been a Navy man. He joined right out of high school. 1944. An air crewman, flying patrol bombers on the Pacific coast.

He met Margret in college. In ’55 they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the freighter Drottningholm to meet her parents in Stockholm. They married there and, after Oslo, Paris, and London, they made a home back on the east coast, in the town where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had grown up.  

He had no trouble finding work. Enjoyed working, no matter the job. He was gregarious. They liked his attitude.

He and Margret were together. They had a daughter. Life had no end.

Then Margret died and, soon after, Agatha got married and moved away.

He stayed in their small dark house on the corner of a quiet street up the hill from the center of town. His sadness weighed him down.

One winter he’d fallen down the back stairs carrying a bucket of trash out to the garage and he lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw him. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked his neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You have no right to take me anywhere. This is my home. Getting old is not a crime. I want to stay in my home. This is my home, and you have no right to take me from it. Living alone is not a crime.

The officer helped him back up the stairs, made a note in his notepad and said, “Mr. Sheffield, you’d better get someone to put a railing up along the stairs there for you.”

Thirty-five more years he lived there. Went working in an office in a nearby town, keeping house, paying the bills on time, reading books on the war, Lincoln, the depression. All the presidents. He kept his Saab running, saved his money, trusted few people, had fewer friends. Year after year. Solitary. Thoughtful. Kind. Carefully generous. Never speaking ill of another. Keeping things in order. Was he happy? It was not a question anyone would think to ask him.

He started his own business and kept it going for a few years, working out of his home, selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death.

He’d say that keeping your affairs in order, preparing and planning, not being a burden, was what mattered. He wrote a will. Leaving the house to his son-in-law. The one who had married Agatha. His only child. His only daughter, who died young and fresh, just like her mother had.

He turned the lights off when he left a room. Wrote reminder notes to himself and thank-you and birthday cards to others. He cooked when he was able and ate what he made, and then later, when he couldn’t manage the pots and pans, heated up the Swanson’s pot pies and frozen dinners in the microwave. He didn’t renew his tickets to the symphony. He had to stop walking to the beach and the market and the bookstore.

He wrote notes with detailed instructions in uniform capital letters and taped them up on everything. “Unplug when not in use” over light switches. “Do not touch” on bookshelves, file cabinets, the stove, cupboards.

He catalogued boxes of 35 mm prints, names, dates, and places on the back. Made notes of thoughts and quotes and left them folded in the books he’d read. David McCullough. Goodwin. Tuchman. Caro. The Bible.

Didi waited at the bottom of the stairs. Simon had helped Morse fit himself into the stairlift. He rode down holding on to the armrests, in his slippers and his robe.

She had opened the back door and the window above the sink. He ate the eggs and sausage and sipped the tea she prepared for him, eating without speaking, and when he’d had enough, he asked Simon to help him go back upstairs.

You’re both kind, he told them. I don’t want you to call anyone, and please shut the door when you leave.

In the evening, Didi returned with a small dinner she prepared. When she could not waken him, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the local hospital. He refused treatment and was moved to a bed near a window in the nursing home nextdoor. He took no food. He accepted only pain medications he could take with a sip of water.

Morse Sheffield passed away in bed in a quiet room near a window. Neither in the bed of his dreams nor in the one or in the manner of his own choosing.

It’s Life. Period. Goodbye

Jake Greenfield brought in the mail. Careful not to let his cats out.

Among the bills and flyers was a green square envelope.

He shut the door firmly and ran his finger under the envelope flap. He removed a note card.

“Dear Jake, My dearest brother Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.” No further details, except that a memorial was planned at Sam’s home in Essex on the coming Sunday afternoon.

It was signed “Rebecca, Sam’s Sister, PS, I would love to hear from you.”

Jake sat on a chair beside the kitchen table. He took a long slow breath. Holding the card in his lap.

“Sam,” he said.

In high school they called Sam “the Russian.” He was not Russian. His last name was Rudski. So, they called him the Russian. His family was Polish. Maybe. Maybe Slovak. Maybe Latvian. Nobody knew or cared. Neither did he.

He was quick to smile. Quick to say, “Do what you guys want, I’m going home,” and the only one who saw no reason not to eat the last slice of pizza. 

There were three of them back then. Jake, Bob, and Sam, who hung out together. Played ball together. Driver’s licenses. First legal beers. College.

When Kennedy was shot, they watched the TV together. Then Oswald. Jack Ruby raising his right arm straight out from his shoulder, with the Dallas police and the reporters in black felt fedoras standing around, and he shot Oswald square in the belly with a pistol he’d pulled out of his overcoat pocket. Oswald winced.

They drove down to DC in Sam’s VW and waited in the dark cold wind outside of the Capitol to walk past the quiet coffin and then over to Lafayette Park, to sit on a blanket under the trees on the curb across from the White House. They watched Bobby, Jackie, Caroline, and John John walk behind the casket.

What they were seeing was unfathomable. They were nineteen. It was something never to be forgotten.

Sam was the first among them to fall in love. The girl lived up in White Plains. He sent her flowers and after he paid for them, he called Jake to say, “alea iacta est,” like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The die was cast, he said.

Everything they did or said back then was concrete, momentous, consequential, black and white, final, irrevocable. Neither good nor bad. It just was. They never gave a thought to any time beyond the present. Who they were was who they’d always be. There were no thoughts of the future beyond which shirt you would put on in the morning or which classes you had the next day.

Then there were weddings. First jobs. Children. They each moved away. None of them went to Vietnam. They grew beards and long hair. Bob worked for a big Pharma company. Jake got teaching job. Sam got a job working for Anaconda Copper right out of Fordham.

One day he showed up at Jake’s house. “I quit,” he said. “They are just fucking up Chile, paying people shit wages, mining the crap out of the ground. Capitalist shitheads,” he said. “They don’t give a shit about anything other than screwing people for profits. I can’t do that anymore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I got a teaching job in Roxbury.”

“Where’s that?”

“Boston,” he said.

“A good job?”

“Boston’s all fucked up. Desegregation. Bussing. Crazy racists attacking school buses. Throwing rocks and bottles at kids. Retrenchment. Poverty. I’ll teach in one of the schools.”

“Oh.” Jake knew nothing about Boston or Roxbury. He was teaching in the Bronx. The South Bronx. High school biology. Things were not good there either.

They all moved around again. Grad schools. New jobs. Not necessarily better jobs but jobs they liked to think were better.

After another move, Jake got a call from Sam. “I moved to Essex. I found your number in the phone book.” They went out for burgers and beer at a place called the Farm or the Barn and talked about work and their new hearing aids.

When Jake got laid off in 2008, he started doing freelance work. Writing. Sam became a psychologist and stopped selling sandwiches and DVDs. They kept in touch.

One afternoon, Sam rode his new Yamaha 500 over to Jake’s. They sat in folding chairs on his back porch. They wore warm jackets and drank hot coffee.

“You look sad,” Sam said.

“Sad? I don’t know. You know I had a heart attack a year ago.”

“You told me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, and you said you were doing fine.”

“I was.  I still am. A lot of stuff going on. I’m okay.”

“Listen, Jake,” said Sam. “I see patients all day long, and they say, ‘yeah, I’m okay,’ and I look at them and I know they’re not. We both know they’re not. I look at them. They look at me. Their eyes. The way they sit all folded up, looking out the window. They start talking and in three minutes tops, I get the whole picture. I’d love to say to them, ‘Look, we can drag this on for a few months or years and neither of us wants to do that. So, give me the word and I can tell you right now exactly what your problem ia and what you can do to change it. Period. Goodbye.’”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying. I know you. You lost your job, and you had a heart thing, and you have a hearing problem. It’s life. You had a lousy marriage and that’s over, and now you have great one. Something’s bothering you but it’s not the job or money or your heart, or your hearing. You think I don’t have shit going on? You think the guy next door doesn’t? Look around. See the trees. You have food in the refrigerator. You have a woman who loves you. I’ll tell you right now, what your problem is. You haven’t told her how you’re feeling. You’re holding it all in. Like your father. Go in there and tell her what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what you’re worried about. And twenty minutes from now, guaranteed, she’s going to grab you and hug you and the sun will come out and light up your sorry-ass face like high noon on the goddamn equator.”

That day on the porch was the last time Jake saw Sam.

The letter surprised him. He never expected, never thought, that one day he’d be sitting in a chair by his kitchen table holding a letter saying, “Dear Jake, My dearest brother, Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.”

Just like that.

“Jake,” he could hear Sam saying, “it’s life. There is no secret. Nothing to figure out. It’s life. Period. Goodbye.”

Umi, Annunziata, and String Theory

Umi and Annunziata. Side by side. No earbuds. No Beats. The Harvard Bridge. Sunny. Warm. Late October afternoon. Cross breezes push ripples upstream.

Umi, I didn’t mean that I don’t really believe in string theory. I do, but…

… But Nuzzi, that’s exactly what you said, like in front of the whole class. I was like totally freaked. I never heard you say anything like that before.

I know. But I think I was just trying to say that it has no physical or philosophical relevance to me or to life, fundamentally. To actual life. Here and now. To you and me or anyone on the planet or in the entire universe.

In Theoretical Physics? Saying you don’t believe in string theory. Space-time. The event horizon. General relativity. The most basic theories of totally everything?

No, Umi. I was just like ‘Ok, so that’s how everything got created and all.’ As if that explains everything like life and all. But I mean it just doesn’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with real life.

What do you mean? Doesn’t it? The origin and expansion of the universe? The elemental seeds of all life?

It’s not that. It’s that it has no relevance to the lives we live. I mean I think of my grandparents and their lives. They got along great living in only three dimensions

Of course, and their life was good or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was terrible. But the world changes and we learn new things, face new problems that need new answers.

I know that. The mathematics. The theories. They’re quantitatively and empirically provable theoretical concepts. But pragmatically and humanistically? They’re real and measurable and you can believe in them but ultimately, they have no relevant meaning, philosophically or practically. They are barren terms with no influence how we live or how we might choose to live. To me, at least, and possibly to you too, if you think about it.

You think I don’t think about things like that? You think I’m a basic geek?  

No, yes, Umi, but I don’t mean it like that. I mean take gravity. Nobody knows what it is, but you trip on a crack in the sidewalk and you break your arm. That’s gravity. Human relevance. Pragmatic. Philosophically, too. You make life decisions based upon your understanding of gravity. You teach your children about it. You don’t say, ‘Oh sweetie, stay away from the event time horizon, do you?’

You sound like a narrow nihilist, Nuzzi. I mean thinking that there is nothing that means anything except eating, sleeping, shitting, and fucking. There is no greater good, nothing more than our lonely finite selves in a vast infinite universe.

Umi, I am so not a nihilist. I believe totally in life. Life is the center of all meaning. That is why the end of time personally, is the only meaningful philosophical concept for us. Nothing is even close. What we do as human beings, how we live, how we treat others each day, is inherently, genetically, socially, and culturally imbedded in our biological being. The impermanence of life, finite time, knowing that at some point it all ends. That’s the only relevant event horizon with any pragmatic and philosophical meaning, not what may or may not happen billions of years from now.

Is that where all this is going? Giving more meaning to death than to life? You’re totally contradicting yourself. Life has joy, mystery, adventure, discovery, creativity, doesn’t it? Our brains, our consciousness, evolved because we have the capacity to know that there is more to life and being human than what you are saying. More to finding meaning in life than painting the side of a barn, having babies, and doing the dishes.

I’m not talking about doing the dishes.

Yes you are, Nuzzi. You’re missing what is essential in being human. Sitting at the edge of the sea and looking out and wondering what is beyond the horizon, and the next horizon. Imagining the things that we can’t see, the things only humans can imagine. That’s what being human is.

I feel like I need to choose one or the other.

Nuzzi, it’s not one or the other unless we choose to make it that way. Our brains are big enough for both philosophy and theoretical physics. But I have to say, what problem has philosophy ever solved for us? Name one. What can we learn about life from a philosopher that affects anything of meaning. Has it ever prevented or ended a war or poverty, racism, genocide, misogyny, or… ………….. stop, don’t look at me. Just walk over to the rail and let those two old people with ski poles walk by. Don’t look around, just look out at the crews practicing down there, and, like, maybe point to one and laugh out loud or something.

Umi, are you okay?

I have this weird feeling, like someone has been listening to us, and it’s not like just listening but actually writing what we are saying, like not just writing but like writing dialogue for us, like making us say what we are saying, like right this second when I am saying what I’m saying, and I don’t even know what I’m going to say next and it made me say that I don’t know… It’s like someone is writing a story I’m in and putting words in my mouth. Both of us.

That’s so totally weird. You’re not making this up, are you?

Or maybe it’s like someone with a high-tech AI content-generator app is using like a universal, multilingual, transducer, computer dialog algorithm listening to us, with like a long-distance, uni-directional tele-focus microphone using voice recognition on us to grab our voices on re-synthesis software feeding it back to us make us say this stuff? I don’t even talk like this. Have you ever heard me talk like this before? Either way, I bet they’re going to publish this in some podcast or a short story collection, totally co-opting and commodifying us without our permission, making us like not real people but just made-up words.

Or maybe he’s just writing that too, and making me say that, and isn’t it weird that there are no quote marks around anything we’re saying.

… Nuzzi…what’re you doing? Get down.

HEY, YOU, LISTEN TO ME, WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING … “so cut the crap, you creepy piece of cow caca.”

The Game

Enrique Quinones started playing tennis at the age of four. He was good. Everyone in his town said he was good. His parents gave him lessons. His mother told everyone she knew that it was Enrique’s dream that he would one day be a great player like Alex Olmedo or Pancho Segura, or Gonzales. He, of course, wanted to be good like them but he said to his mother, “Mama, it is your dream for me to be a great champion, but it is not my dream.”

And so, when he was ten and old enough to travel on an airplane by himself his mother sent him to stay with her sister in America so that he could have a great teacher and become famous.

When his aunt Bellissima brought him to the tennis schools in San Diego, they looked at him and told her to take him home because he was too old to learn to be a really great player. And so she took him to the biggest and best and most expensive schools in California and soon found the one she liked the best: the SHOQ Academy.

“What does SHOQ stand for?” she asked the director. “Swing. Hard. Or. Quit,” he told her. She thought that sounded just right, this was America after all, and she signed him up. She told Enrique good-bye, that she loved him very dearly, that she would come visit him every two weeks, and that one day he would reach his dream of being a great tennis player. “Good-bye, Tia Bellissima,” he said.

When Enrique graduated from college and turned pro, Edberg, Sampras, Chang, and Agassi were the top pros and Djokovic, and Federer, and Nadal were about his age, and he knew that he would never win a tournament they were in. But his aunt told him not to be discouraged. She sent him money and care packages and told him to remember to swing hard and not to quit. And so, he did.

He played on the pro circuit, in feeder tournaments, traveling from one city to another, staying in cheap hotels and, reading Kant and Nietzsche and Arendt, and eating takeout and Clif bars with the other players.

He kept hitting hard and not quitting and he became better and better, earning more and more ATP points, which put him higher and higher in the draws, letting him play lower ranked players in the early rounds with a better chance to make it into the quarters, semis, and possibly the finals. The promoters were making money. The sponsors were making money. The coaches and managers were making money, and he was making money. But not anything like one might dream of.

For a couple of years, during which he was playing both singles, doubles, and mixed doubles on the tour, he made enough to cover the airline and hotel costs with a little left over.

In his tenth year on the circuit, at a tournament in Palm Springs, Fiona Adler, a woman he knew at SHOQ and who had become a sports journalist when she realized her tennis career wasn’t going to happen, approached him and they started seeing one another when they were both in the same city for a tournament. They ended up spending more and more time together, nothing serious, and eventually she told him her sister had seen him play and she had a young son for whom she and her husband wanted to find a teaching pro.

“Enrique, face it,” said Fiona, “you’re good but not that good, you’ve been in this game ten years and you’re never going to make it big. Quit while you’re a name people know and have some money saved. You’re good looking. You start teaching and women from all over will want to bring their kids to you.”

“I doubt it, but okay,” he said. And so, Fiona introduced him to her sister, Ariana, and her son.

The boy was quick and confident, with near-perfect, sweet, natural strokes. He could feel the game. You could see it in the way he met the ball, not overswinging like most kids. He was loose. He hit like he was having a conversation with the ball. A natural talent. Enrique moved to Long Island took a job at a upscale tennis club and took the boy on.

Ariana brought the boy for lessons every day after school and all day on weekends, though Cal, her husband told her it was a waste. He said, “Let’s take him down to Bollettieri’s school in Florida. The hell with this loser teaching pro. What can you possibly see in that guy?

Ariana saw a lot. “He’s a good teacher and he knows what tennis academies do to a young kid. He knows that Conor is good, not enough to beat a Djokovic. But he sees him playing in college and maybe pros and loving it. Let him do that. Don’t turn Conor into a commodity you can market for your own sake. Give Enrique a year to get him into the juniors and see how he does.”

“You’re being small minded,” he told her. “Conor needs a chance to be great. He can have six months. That’s all.”

Ariana said, “Thanks. You won’t regret it.”

Enrique took Conor to the boys’ twelves and in three months he got a national ranking in the juniors. Ariana went along to all his matches. The three of them got along well. Conor liked Enrique and Enrique liked Conor. The problem was that Ariana liked Enrique a lot and Enrique liked her too. A lot. And one night after they had all said good night at a cheap hotel in Cincinnati … well, you know what happened.

So Cal, hurt beyond belief, said, “Ariana, what did you think would happen?” He sued for divorce and he took Conor, who was hurt well within belief and would not say a word to his mother, and their other son, Chris, who was too young to believe or understand anything or even to know what was going on, down to Bollettieri’s, leaving Ariana the house and all of his winter clothing.

She was heartbroken. All she had left was a home with an island in the kitchen and a gazebo in the backyard, friends who didn’t call, and the hope that Enrique would not leave her too.

He did not. He told her he loved her, and they sold the house with the island in the kitchen and the gazebo in the backyard and moved to Ecuador, where he taught tennis at a club outside of Guayaquil, not far from where he’d grown up.

Ariana cried a lot, missing her boys, sending them cards on birthdays and holidays and in three years they went to see Conor play doubles at the US Open where he lost in the third round, and they all went out together to an Asian fusion restaurant on Queens Boulevard in Flushing.

Their waiter asked everyone to smile and to lean in together. “More close, please” he said, and he took their picture with two separate iPhones and brought them two separate checks.

Pickleball? Yeah, That Sounds Like Fun or Myron’s Pickleball Altercation

So, tell me, Myron, what happened.

I got into an altercation in the park.

Did you get hurt? What kind of an altercation? What park?

The park by Brooklyn Bridge.

Did anyone get hurt? Did the police come?

No, no. Nothing.

What nothing? You look a wreck.

It got a little heated. Nobody got hurt. Millstein stepped in before anything got out of hand. Millstein’s a big guy. He stepped in.

Where did he step in, Myron. Just tell me what happened. What did you do?

I was playing doubles with Singer, and that guy Mickey something, and Rosalie.

Rosalie?

Singer’s sister-in-law, and she had to leave and so this guy comes on the court. You know, the pickleball courts by the bridge.

Yes, yes.

And so this guy I never saw before comes on and he says he’ll fill in for her and before you know it, we’re warming up doubles, and it’s not like the usual friendly game. He’s hitting smashes and boom-boom right at you. In the warm-up! And so then when we start to play, he’s telling us all where we’re supposed to stand and how to call the scores and which side we should be serving on and who goes first. And what he was saying doesn’t make any sense, it wasn’t logical at all.

Wait Myron, you have to understand, not everybody thinks like you do. Not everything has to make sense. Yes, to you it does, but not everybody. Myron, you can’t argue with some people. It’s not good for your heart. You just have to walk away. Leave it be.

I should have but I admit I was thinking I know how to play this game and who’s he to tell me? We’ve been playing all summer. Nobody said we were doing it all wrong.

And you got into an argument about some farkakteh game? Give me a break. You don’t have enough things to worry about? Now you have to worry about somebody thocking a wiffle ball at your head when you’re standing in the kitchen. Please, Myron.

It’s not that.

Then what is it?

He was serving the ball from the wrong side of the court.

And what.

So I told him and he said that I was wrong. And I told him what the rule was.

What rule?

The rule about serving from the lefthand side when your score is odd, and he tells me he’s first server and the first server serves from the right side of the court, and I tell him no and he says that’s the way it is where he plays.

And where does he play?

The Villages. In Florida.

What’s he doing playing in Brooklyn Bridge Park on a Friday morning in September?

He comes up to live with his sister in Bensonhurst for three months in the summer.

What, they don’t have air conditioning in the Villages?

I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

What is the point?

The point is that he said that he knows the rules because he plays in big tournaments and everywhere he plays they play by those rules.

What rules?

The ones about the first server. I tell him he should read the rules.

I should read the rules? he tells me, you should read the rules, he says.

Myron, listen to yourself. Calm down. Show me the rules.

Why?

Because I want to see why two grown men are arguing over something so important as a pickleball game, that’s why.

Here’s the rule book. I’ll show you.

Myron, don’t show me. Let me read the rules. Go make some tea. I’ll come in when I’m finished.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass. Myron’s tea has gotten cold. Millie comes back.

Myron, you like this game? Obviously. This game with server one and server two, but sometimes server two serves first, and alternating sides of the court, side out, side in, even, odd, a line is in, but sometimes a line is out, and what’s the score? Two-two-one? One-one-what? Who makes up a game like this. With an eighty-six page rule book, yet? You know who? People with too much time on their hands and nothing else on their minds? And they make rules so that you get into an argument with some know-it-all-from Florida yet, with a two hundred dollar uranium-coated power paddle in his hand.

Silence.

Look, Myron, I have news for you.

What.

I hate to say this, but you’re both right, I think. Both you and Mr. Florida Villages bigshot, and neither one of you is totally right. Or wrong.

What do you mean?

It’s the rules, Myron. They’re screwy. They contradict themselves. I think.

Listen to this, “Rule 4.B.2. At the start of each game, the starting server begins the serve from the side of the court dictated by the score.” Okay. Then, “Rule 4.B.6.a. At the start of each side out, service begins in the right/even serving area.” It’s starting to get confusing. And then, “Rule 4.B.6.b. When the team’s score is even, the team’s starting server’s correct position is at the right/even serving area. When the team’s score is odd, the starting server’s correct position is at the left/odd court.” That can’t be, can it?

Right. No. Yes. Right. It makes no sense. I don’t know.  

So, you can understand how someone would believe the part that doesn’t make sense to you because it’s right there in the rule book and it’s just the part that makes sense to them?

Yes. Now I do.

Listen, Myron, you go back there and if Mr. Villages is still there you tell him you’re sorry and that it’s all so confusing and no hard feelings and that he should come home with you and have a cup of tea. And, look, if he’s not there just forget about it, he’ll tell all his friends about the Brooklyn jerk he met. So what? Then next time just play with people you know and if someone new comes on the court you just say we play by the Official Brooklyn Bridge Rules, and if he has a problem with that, he should go take it to City Hall like everyone else does. On the other hand, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.

Easter Dinner at Heidi’s in SoHo

Some time ago, a college friend of Simone’s, Heidi, I recall, a tall, slender woman with near-black hair pinned back, covering just the tops of her ears, invited us to an Easter dinner at the new apartment in SoHo she bought with her partner, a man named Nathan or Natan, whose name I had forgotten and which I didn’t quite clearly hear when Heidi said it as we were coming in the door, and I was reluctant, perhaps out of simple misplaced courtesy, to ask her later to repeat it hoping she would say it again when he came into the living room, where we were seated, or perhaps, she might call his name to remind him that we had arrived, or to tell him to come in to greet us from the kitchen where he was feeding the dog.

We had not seen them since their wedding the previous spring, an affair with well over a hundred guests, at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. At that time, it was the only occasion we had been to there and we both very much enjoyed it. In particular, I recall the setting for the reception in an enclosed tent, with flickering, lambent, afternoon light shifting slowly across the white-clothed tables, as it sifted through the tall surround of oaks and maples which were especially lush that year after seven consecutive weekends of rain in the city, much to the chagrin and concern of the local business owners who depended heavily upon the foreign and domestic tourist trade, already depressed significantly by the  global financial crisis and bank bailout in 2008. It was also the year in which I had been let go from a job I’d had for over fifteen years. The weather was cool. We were seated at a table near the bar with other friends of the couple whom we did not know and with whom we exchanged pleasantries until they got up to dance, after which we never saw them again that afternoon or, in fact, ever again.

Simone said, as we got off the subway at Spring Street, “Maybe we’ll see someone from the wedding there today.”

Heidi, in a phone conversation she had with Simone the week before Easter, said that they were not traveling this year because they had recently acquired a dog, a rescue animal which Nathan, or Natan’s, sister Ailene had adopted from the Bideawee on 38th Street several months prior and for which, sadly, she was looking for a new home as she was leaving the country and could not possibly take the poor-dear dog with her to the Bordeaux University on a Fulbright scholarship, could she? No, of course not, said Natan (let’s just call him that) to her and they’d be thrilled to take care of the dog whose name was Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, though I can’t quite recall which, but I know he was named after one of the French existentialists of the mid twentieth century, who were the subject of Ailene’s doctoral dissertation.

Sartre, I think that was the dog’s name, after finishing its dinner, strained its way into the living room where Simone and I were sitting talking with Heidi. Natan was holding the dog on a very short, taut leash which he immediately let drop and let the dog rush forward toward the couch in which Heidi, Simone, and I had settled ourselves. It stopped abruptly and crouched directly in front of her, and consequently, between Simone and myself, its front paws spread wide apart, its haunches up, looking up at her with its pink-rimmed eyes and naked gums, ready, I thought, to move in any direction.

“He simply adores Heidi. He tolerates me well enough, but he loves Heidi,” Natan said.

The dog was a brindle. An American Staffordshire terrier who Heidi said was terribly affectionate. “Pit bulls are, you know,” she said, “but just saying that name gets such bad rap from most people. But you two are dog people, I think Simone said, so…”

“Simone is the dog person,” I said. “Not so much me but…”

“Oh, well,” Heidi said, “he’s just a baby,” she said, looking down at the dog and pursing her lips as you might in talking to an infant in a stroller. “He’s just getting used to us and his new surroundings, you know, trying to get the lay of the land, you know, figuring out who is the alpha person here and all…”

“… He’s adorable…,” Simone told her.

“But, I should tell you that you must not look him in the eye. He doesn’t handle that well. And so, I mean it’s no big deal, nothing horrible has ever happened, but just don’t look him in the eye. Just don’t.”

“Shouldn’t he be on the leash? I mean with one of you holding it?” I suggested.

“Well, no,” said Natan, “he’s better off leash, I mean, that’s pretty much what we’ve heard, that dogs on leashes get more aggressive. Right?”

And then he stood up. “I’ll make us up some plates and bring them in and we can eat and relax and talk in here. We kind of made a mistake by putting his food bowl by the table in the kitchen and now he doesn’t like it if anyone else eats in there.”

“They’re pretty territorial, I think,” said Simone, nodding her head, looking over at me.

Natan came back in with four dinner plates on a tray which he set down on a sideboard. Generous slices of spiral honey ham, mounded mashed sweet potatoes, and rows of roasted asparagus.

“Simone said you were vegetarians, I think, but this is Easter, right, and this ham is fabulous. Have you ever had it? Be vegetarian on Monday, right?”

He placed a plate on each of our laps and he took a seat in a softly upholstered chair opposite the couch and, just as quickly as he sat, he got up and carried his plate down the hall into their bedroom.

“He’ll be right back. He doesn’t feel comfortable eating, you know, meat, in front of the dog, but he’ll be back after he finishes,” said Heidi.

Turning first to Simone on her right and then to me close by on her left, she said, “I’m so glad to see you both. So much to talk about. Eat, eat. Before it gets cold.”

Small Plane, Blue Sky

A small plane, a prop, single engine, buzzed overhead this evening

While I was watering the garden in the heat before sunset

In this long summer drought. Smoke from the smoldering earth in the woods

Up by the quarries, drifted grey down our street in the breeze.

Another plane flew overhead once, in another September. That September with the clear blue skies

When Giuliani walked with a gas mask on, in the ash that ran down through the narrow streets.

He made himself the nation’s mayor as we rushed around him to help with the bodies.

In the evening, we walked past the black and purple Firehouse on Tenth street

And clapped our hands and some of us cried for the men and women

in their black boots who nodded back to us, and we all smelled the reek in their skin.

Soon then, on another blue day, we sat by the open window of a wine bar on Smith Street

Across the river from the copper-green statue holding a torch in the distance.

I drank a glass of Barolo, and she had a Chardonnay and the first three fighter jets flew lightning low

In close formation over the city. Why now, I thought, while we could still feel the greasy residue on our arms and in our noses and we thought about the incinerated bodies.

The Barolo was dry. And the next day I took the subway to work under the river with the copper-green statue to a tall building on 34th street near the post office and saw the troops,

Standing in twos and threes, in Penn station with their eyes fixed and their guns they held tight, muzzles pointed to the floor, fingers looped around triggers, and I looked away. We all did. Heads down, in the press of settling dread, afraid to look up.

Considering Salvation at the Corner of Ninth and Seventh

Eric Winsome was stuck. At a veritable standstill. Physically, stopped in traffic behind a late model blue Toyota Camry on 7th Avenue at the corner of 9th Street, and existentially, locked in a self-imposed worry-worn straitjacket of self-absorbed spiritual stagnation.

The light at the corner was green but a crammed B67 bus, lights flashing, kneeled, angling into the intersection in front of Smiling Pizza, picking up a line of passengers: Men in work boots with lunch buckets, women with shopping carts, drooling infants, juuling teenagers, and homeless souls with sacks of clattering bottles and cans bound for redemption.

Louise Little, the driver in the Toyota, her NicoDerm patch running on empty, held a cigarette in her taut quivering lips and a Zippo in her right fist tapping on the steering wheel to the Deep Purple Smoke on the Water guitar riff, which she had not gotten out of her head since she woke up this morning. In nine seconds, tops, she would either light up the god-damn Newport or run the yellow light the instant the lousy bus gave her a chance.

Eric’s fog-like crisis of faith was, simply, his unwavering acceptance of the Calvinist sublapsarian belief in predestination and in the decree made by God before the Fall that he would choose from among the living, those to be saved, and those not. Eric was thirty-four and he could not know within which group he’d be counted. How could anyone know? he thought. Worry and doubt consumed his every waking moment. Not the least of his worries, though, was whether Wendy, the woman he loved, and to whom he had plighted his troth just shy of seven years ago, would be in the same state of candidacy for eternal salvation as he hoped he was. He had his reasonable doubts.

“Seven years,” she had told him, “is one hell of a long time for a woman to wait for you to make a decision. I can’t wait for ever. My mother keeps asking me, will he, or won’t he?” Just this morning, waiting to brush her teeth in his apartment while he took his time in the bathroom she said, “Eric, shit or get off the pot, I have to get to work, goddamnit.”

On the corner opposite Louise and Eric, stood Lois and Irv Rothstein, an elderly couple waiting for the light to change so they could cross the avenue and make their bus for the early-bird special at Juniors on Flatbush. Though they were resigned to the possibility of missing it, they retained the hope that, God-willing, the light would change before the bus righted itself and they could flag down the driver and make it across the street before it left the corner.

Irv watched the light. Louise watched the light. Lois watched the light. Eric watched the photo of Wendy he kept on taped to the dashboard in front of him, The B67 began its slow rise. The light changed. Louise lit her Newport. Irv and Lois began their walk across the avenue, waving and calling to the driver.

As she walked, Lois’s upper body swayed slightly from side to side. It was the thickening, stiffening, of the arthritis in her hips.

Her shoulders rocked first one way and then the other. It slowed her down, and Irv, a spare man, a few inches shorter than his wife, held tightly to the sleeve of her jacket, trying to keep her moving and on an even keel. He held on to the brim of his hat with his other hand.

The walk sign flashed, nearing the end of its orange digital countdown. 14…13… 12…

“Hold your horses,” said Lois to the young woman talking on her cellphone in the car behind the bus, her grim lips holding a cigarette in the driver’s side window, but it was only loud enough for Irv to hear.

“Come along, dear,” he said to her, with concern and considerable affection.

As the countdown reached three, they had made it safely to the opposite curb and then at the precise moment that the zero flashed, Lois turned to Irv, “I dropped my glove,” she said, and she lurched stiffly up onto the curb. Irv looked back.

The glove, in a shade of green that matched her jacket, which she had been holding in her free hand, and which Irv had bought for her on sale at the Conways in Manhattan for her birthday, lay half-way across the roadway. Irv let go of her arm, stepped back into the street, holding his hand up to the path of the traffic. Lois teetered.

Louise hit the gas at the green light and, when she saw the man, only a few feet or so from his outstretched arm, she slammed on the brake pedal and twisted the steering wheel to the right to avoid hitting him.

At that moment a car horn from behind Eric blew, startling him. He stepped on the gas, rear-ending Louise’s Toyota, inflating both of their airbags and pushing her car up onto the sidewalk hitting Lois squarely in her stiff hips and crushing her against the back of the B67.

Irv’s heart exploded with the impact of grief, and he fell to the pavement.

Louise was later saved by the ‘jaws of life.’

And Eric? He sustained, with vertebrae-cracking suddenness, multiple spinal cord ruptures causing his surgical team to place him in a medically induced coma until they would be able to assess the best course of action, if any existed, leaving him with only a 50-50 chance of survival and plenty of time to ruminate, in his solitude, on his chances of salvation.

Small Potatoes

Moses Singletary was scheduled to be the first speaker at the Thursday evening Board of Selectmen meeting public comment period but he was late, and so Marvin Swallows and Bertie McGinty went ahead and had their turn making their comments to the board. According to procedure at board meetings, their comments would be taken up at a future meeting, though by experience, no date would be set for that and, given the way the board worked, it was possible, and even likely, that they would never reach a decision about when they might even get to scheduling a discussion, let alone actually taking up the issue in a future public meeting, by which time their comments would be buried among the “Old Business” issues on the agenda, which required the re-initiation by the chair and agreement of at least two of the other four members, for discussion, and so they had not gotten to any issues raised in public comment periods in thirty-seven years of recorded board meetings. Nearly all the women and most of the men town, when they paid attention, either called it the BRA, Board of Recalcitrant Adolescents, or something the local paper wouldn’t print The new board chair, Brett Bogart, was the owner of a successful local business, Small Potatoes, located in the center of town, with, admittedly, the best fresh homemade French fries on the planet, served in neat European-style folded paper cones, with a variety of seasonings, available at no extra charge. The shop was a fixture in the community and his family was one of some sway and influence. Brett’s campaign slogan and his approach to governance was, “Our business is Good for Business” and most in town knew it meant something like, “Keep the status quo, support and protect, at all costs, the interests of the businesses in town and beware of outsiders or do-gooders who will bring ruin to what we have and cherish now and will want to build more parking” Marvin Swallows began speaking, raising, once again, his concern about the bell tower in the town square. “Anyone can see,” he said, “that the sea wall is cracking, eroding from below, on land that’s sinking each year in some places and rising in others, and soon, maybe in the next nor’easter it will fall, taking our houses with it and none of us can get flood insurance and we have to apply for federal assistance now to make the structural changes, and we can’t afford to just study it for another three years, because our homes are all we have and none of us are your town millionaires. So I make a motion that the Board…” “… I’m sorry, Mr. Swallows, that’s out of order. This is the public comment period, you can’t make motions at this time, next, Ms. McGinty… next,” Chair Bogart said. “Can’t you let Marvin finish,” said Ms. McGinty, “I’ll give my time over to him.” “Sorry, no can do, Bertie, and you’re out of order, too. That’s not the way we work. Next… Mr. Singletary.” Moses looked surprised. He was just getting his thoughts in order, having forgotten his introductory remarks, and reordering his notes. His hands were shaking. His voice was tremulous. “Chair Bogarts,” he said. “I’m not going to ask to give my time over to Marvin there so don’t cut me off, thank you. I have a petition here signed by forty-seven certified residents of the town, many of them right here tonight with a request for the Board to put the issue of the policy of the Board appointing or removing members of town committees, boards, and commissions, up for a vote on the next meeting agenda.” “It’s Bogart, no “s” Mr. Singletary, and time is short. Please get to the point of the petition you have there.” “I will Mr. Chair, but I have the floor, and this is the public comment period, and I am speaking for the public.  So please don’t interrupt me again until I relinquish the floor, as you so willy-nilly do to others. I will read the policy proposal, but I will say first and foremost, that this policy and every policy you may make is less of a concern to us than the board’s total lack of consistency with which policies are implemented. The board has an appalling record, for all to see, of following or not following policies or applying policies arbitrarily or retroactively to suit the board’s whims and preferences. And let me remind you that the board is elected by the people to do the administrative work the people have assigned to it and nothing more.” “You are out of order!” “No, you are out of order. Like it or not it, this is a public comment period, whether or not you like what the comments are or who is making them. But before I do, I want you to know that we all see what’s going on here. Whether it’s affordable housing, or the water regulations, or COVID mandates, or zoning, or the climate committee work, things we all care about, your wishes or your will are not our command anymore. “Moses, you’re not delivering the freaking ten commandments here. Get to your point, if there is one.” “You want the point? Here it is. If you remember your history, Alexis de Tocqueville visited us in the 1830’s and wrote a book praising our form of Town Meeting democracy… “Mr. Singletary you’re…” “This is not a question-and-answer period, Mr. Bogart, it is for public comment, and I will continue my public comment…” At that point there was, for the first time all evening, a round of applause from those in attendance. “You tell him, Moses!” they cheered, and they clapped louder, and Bogart called for quiet, and Moses kept on speaking, “… but de Tocqueville soon came to realize that democratically elected officials, like yourselves, when unchecked, would hold too tightly to their power and authority and democracy would be undermined and he said, and I quote…” Bogart banged his gavel on the tables. “No French quotes are allowed in here, Moses.” He turned beseechingly to the Town Clerk. There was a long moment of silence. Looks among the members of the board were exchanged. The Town Clerk rose to her feet. “I see no reason why quotes of any sort are out of order here,” she said. “You’re out of order too,” said Bogart. “The time for public comment has expired.” And then, in the silence that fell, forty-two of the fifty-three members of the public in attendance for the comment period, feeling somewhat vindicated, collected their things and made their way out the door. They gathered in the parking lot in the fading mid-summer light. They looked at one another. They all realized that Moses had not read a single word of the petition on board policy he came to read, and the warm sense of hope that they had felt when they left the building was, all too quickly, evaporating like sweat off a pig’s nose, into the cool night air.

Notes on the Celebration in Honor of The Essayist on his Ninetieth Birthday

The celebration in honor of a well-known essayist’s ninetieth birthday was held on the Saturday following his birthdate. A Saturday amidst the blistering heat of a northeastern July, an uptick in Covid-19 infections, fires in the west and in Europe, reports of a monkeypox outbreak among gay men, and news of the Pope’s visit to Canada to apologize for the church’s treatment of indigenous children.

Lily, the essayist’s wife, planned the celebration, addressed, stamped, and mailed the invitations, using names she gathered from the essayists address book.

Full vaccination required. No gifts. Regrets only. The invitation said and was signed simply in a firm hand, Lily.

At four, the room had filled with guests. The invitation had said, ‘four ‘til seven.’ Anyone who knew the essayist for any length of time had surely known that he was punctual and expected punctuality. He always made his expectations clear. He was a Marine.

He often told me, “If you’re on time, you’re late.” I took him figuratively though he meant it quite literally. “How does that work?” I’d ask him. “It just does,” he’d say.

No one spoke about the heat, or the pandemic, or the hearings on television, wearing masks, abortion, inflation, gasoline prices, Ukraine, or the media. All of that, they knew, was the essayists bailiwick. They found other things to talk about.

Prosecco in stemware and small hors d’oeuvres were passed on silver trays by young men and women wearing collared white shirts and black pants. The music from the speakers in the dining area set aside for the gathering was loud and conversation became difficult. Names were hard to hear.

“Guernsey?” I repeated, not really believing that could be the woman’s last name.

“No, it’s Gert Seavey,” she said.

I nodded.

I sat in a seat beside Lily. The essayist sat next to her at the head of the table. His three sons were there, sitting at another table. He looked over at them often.

After the dinner plates were removed, Lily stood and nodded to her three boys. The first one, the oldest, the one who had come in late, was the first to stand and speak.

““I just flew in from Paris, and the plane was late.”

“We all can see that,” said his father.

“I’m happy to be here, Dad,” said his son. “I have only one word to say to all of you that epitomizes my father best. Forgiveness.” Then he sat down. There was applause.

“Thank you,” said his father, so softly that only those of us closest to him could hear.

The second son spoke anecdotally, and then the essayist’s granddaughter raised her hand. “I love you, Boppa,” she said, “you are the smartest, funniest, and greatest man ever in the world.”

Her grandfather bowed his head. “Thank you,” he said to her.

Lily looked to the third son. He shook his head and didn’t get up, and so she walked to the end of the room, where it was the quietest. She asked the waiter to stop pouring wine.

She stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, and, because the curtains had not been drawn, she appeared briefly in silhouette surrounded in a halo of white light and seemed like a dark apparition in a dream or an afterimage following the sudden appearance of the Madonna.

She asked for quiet in a voice as soft as a dove and she turned to her husband, whose smile we all could see. From a pocket in her light-colored flowered dress, she read from notes she had written. She recounted how they had met and all of her husband’s many accomplishments in life and then she asked the essayist to come forward, and she kissed him on the cheek as they passed and returned to her seat at the table.

“That’s my first wife,” he said. “I always say that.”

The room quieted.

“You all know I have a tendency to be somewhat long-winded.”

“Nooohhh, Dad,” his sons said in unison.

“Please put your phones down and pay attention,” he said to us all.

He spoke without notes.

“There’s a line from Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, with an “E”, it goes something like ‘we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life back to when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire–a brain, a heart, a spirit.’”

“I dreamt last night that there are two paths forward for humans on earth. This earth, where we were born, where we live, and where we will die. The two paths are not mutually exclusive. And neither path is one that does our species credit.

“The vast majority of us are on a path we have no control over. Nine-nine percent of us, are on a path headed back in time to life at its most basic. Sweating in toil, planting the crops that will grow in the narrowing bit of land suitable for them, hunting what animals survive, and gathering the little water we need to live.

“Our disregard for water will be our undoing. Drought and flood and fires have already begun. You see it all around you. While corporations and governments husband our most essential natural resource for whatever profit they can make and power they can wield. We are watching the demise of most of what is human existence. We have set a rapidly degenerative system in motion by our lack of regard for the needs of society. One another. We have lost our social conscience.

“We had long survived as a species because we evolved as social animals. We need one another. But what we have done in the last two hundred years, as a result of our self-centered greed and avarice and our disregard for one another, has set us on a downward spiral which will consume us. Through starvation, drowning, unbearable temperature extremes, and the wars that will erupt and eliminate the rest of us, along with almost every other living species.

“We have brought this upon ourselves because we have not paid attention. We saw what was happening and we said that was somebody else’s problem and we kept on making plastic and burning oil and coal. How brutally ironic is it, is it not, that the lives of past plants and animals that inhabited this earth for millions of years before us, their very carbon souls, are what we are burning, and which will bury us and crush us under intense heat and unimaginable pressure back into carbon chains again, and that is all that will be left of us.

“It did not have to be this way. We have willfully disregarded the wisdom of the past generations who lived in concert with the land and the water and who were swept away by our greed and our guns and the rape of our natural resources. We laughed at their ignorant simplicity. Their traditions. We failed to learn from them and their respect for the mysterious power of nature.

“On the second, more narrow path, some few will survive. They will be the ones who had the privilege and resources unavailable to the rest. They may survive in small enclaves into a temporary future, perhaps using advanced AI computing and multidimensional printers to engineer some semblance of artificial nutrition and a livable environment.

But, surely, around them both, the earth and nature will heal itself, perhaps creating a natural re-arrangement of our DNA with the DNA and RNA from which we all came, and life on earth will go on. The Anthropocene epoch will end and surely, with it, other species will fill the gap.

“As Wolfe once said, you can’t go home again, and we cannot. Not when you have burned your home to embers and released the fumes into the atmosphere to smother you.

“So, pay attention. Love your family. Love one another. Love the life you have while you have it. Heal the earth in any way you can. Return to the simple life on the earth that created us in any way you can. Honor it. Eschew the false and artificial and disingenuous.

“That’s all there is and that’s all I have to say. Thank you for coming.”

And then the cake was plated and served. Coffee was poured. The essayist sat beside his wife and drank a glass of milk and then we said our goodbyes and went to our cars and drove back to our homes.

The Surest Thing

We heard that my father’s friend, Mel Metfessel, was buying Palestri’s market on the corner of Yonkers Avenue, across from the racetrack and next door to my grandfather’s hardware store, where my father worked as the assistant manager.

My grandfather owned the business and he said that made him the manager. From opening the store at nine until he locked the door at five, he sat beside the counter while my father stood behind it all day running the cash register.

Customers would walk all the way back to the counter, passing the washing machines, lawn mowers, hammers, screw drivers, nail barrels, and paint to talk to my grandfather, who they called Benny, sitting in the wooden fold-up chair with one leg crossed over the other, and ask him for what they wanted to buy.

“So, Benny, I’m looking for a fah.”

“What kind of fah?” my grandfather would say.

“A metal fah,” the man would say.

“Rasp or double cut?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whadaya mean you don’t know? Whadah you need it for?” my grandfather would ask him.

My grandfather would sit looking off at the wall on the opposite side of the store. He always did that when he was working. He never looked at the customers when he was talking to them, just at where the fahs or hammers might be, but not right at them.

“I gotta fah down the end of the spindle where it fits into the hole in the sta in Millie’s rocking chair,” said the man.

“Nahhhhh, you don’t need it!,” my grandfather would inevitably respond.

“Whadaya mean, I don’t need it. The spindle won’t fit the hole the way it is.”

“You don’t need a file for that,” my grandfather would tell him and then he’d turn to Dave, my father, and say, “Give him two sheets of thirty-six and two of the eighty sandpaper and charge him forty-nine cents, no tax, and put them in a bag.”

Benny never looked at my father either when he talked to him. Only after he’d say something and then only for a quick second and then he’d look away at something else again.

Metfessel, tall and beefy looking, missing one tooth, used to work for my grandfather. He made deliveries, unloaded inventory into the storeroom, and swept up before closing. He always covered his mouth with the back of his hand when he talked to you.

One day, Metfessel didn’t come to work. My grandfather said he’d got another job. “He don’t work here no more,” he said. That was all he said. That’s when we found out that Metfessel was going to work in Palestri’s grocery.

Palestri did a good business in dry goods, kitchen utensils, and grocery items. There was a Coca-Cola cooler across from the counter filled with ice. He taped a “No leaning” sign on the side by the crate for empties. Candy bars and cigarettes were on the shelves behind the counter. You had to ask Palestri for whatever you wanted, and he would reach behind him for it without taking his eyes off you and slap it down on the counter with a pack of matches on top, if you were buying cigarettes.

Every afternoon my mother sent me down for Chesterfields and told me to tell Palestri they were for her, not to forget the two cents change or matches and I could keep the two cents.

My father had gotten Metfessel a job working for Palestri as a stock clerk. He was working there for about two years when Palestri decided to sell the store to him and move to Florida. Metfessel told my father that he’d set Palestri up with a friend in Miami who’d get him a stake in the Dania jai alai fronton and maybe he might work his way into a piece of the greyhound action in Palm Beach. My father says that Metfessel knows all the right people.

My mother told my father, he shouldn’t get involved with Metfessel. “He’s a slick one,” she said.

“Slick?” my father said. He was smoking in the TV room.

“Turn the TV down,” my mother told him. “I can’t hear you.”

“Slick, I said.”

“No, Dave, you said, ‘slick?’ to me like a question. As if all of a sudden you didn’t know what slick means. And where does Metfessel get the kind money to buy a store in the first place?”

“What kind money?”

“What do you mean, Dave, ‘what kind of money?’ The kind of money you need to buy a store on the hottest real estate corner in the whole city.”

“Hottest?”

“Dave. Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“That.”

“What’s that?”

“Dave, cut it out. I know what you’re doing.”

“What’s he doing, ma?” I said.

“Yeah, Shirl, what’s he doing?”

“Go to bed, Ruthie.”

“Why do I have to go to bed?”

“It’s late. There’s school tomorrow.”

“School?” I said.

“Dave, tell her to go to bed.”

“Go to bed, Ruthie, and say goodnight to your mother.”

“Goodnight, mom.”

I lived upstairs, then. We all lived in apartments above the hardware store. My parents lived on the second floor. I lived with my grandparents and older brother up on the third floor. 

“David, did you have anything to do with this?”

“Which ‘this’?”

“Answer me, are you involved with Metfessel in this deal? Did you give Metfessel any money again? Did you ask my father for money? And don’t answer me with another question.”

“It’s a sure thing, Shirl. We could make an easy ten percent of the profits he makes over and above what he would owe us.”

“There is no sure thing, Dave. Here or anywhere. The hardware store was supposed to be a sure thing. The property in Florida was a sure thing. Look at us. We have nothing. Less than nothing. We live with my parents. I’m forty-seven years old. You’re fifty-six. We share a phone line with them. You work for my father. If he loses anything we lose everything, it’s over for us. All of us.

“Shirl.”

“Don’t ‘Shirl’ me. Did you ask my father for money? The truth. The absolute truthy, truthy, truth.”

“The truthy truth… no, not yet.

“Honest?”

“Honest truth. I swear to you on my mother’s soul, wherever she is.”

“Please don’t ask him. He hates Metfessel for selling Ralphie and Ernestine that pool for the roof over their garage. Dave, look at me. We have a kid in college. We own nothing. You know Metfessel would sell Ruthie and her dog for gas money if we ever took our eyes off them.”

“Ruthie, honey,” my mother called up to me, “I know you’re listening, I didn’t mean to say that about anyone selling you and Sinclair. I was kidding.”

“Shirl, baby.”

“Stop laughing and stop calling me Shirl baby, Dave. I hate that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother calls you ‘The Prince.’ She reveres you. We eat Chinese at their dinner table every Sunday night. She’d cut up your vegetables and spoon your soup into your open mouth if you’d let her. And all that matters to my father is that you married his only daughter.

“I know.”


“David. What kind of store is Metfessel planning to open? … David?”

“What kind of store?”

“Christ, Dave, you do the right thing! Stay out of this. Metfessel is trouble in a tee shirt. We don’t need his kind of trouble. We have plenty of other kinds.

“He has a head for business.”

“Yes, he has a head for business, and he has contacts and friends, and one day he’ll end up either in Sing Sing or in the river. Guaranteed. I need you, Dave. Please stay out of this.”

Metfessel got the store. But not with our money. Nobody ever heard from Palestri again. My grandparents moved to a condo in Lake Worth and gave both the store and the business to my mother. She told my father he should be the manager and she would do the bookkeeping. They changed the name to Dave’s Hardware and hired Ralphie to run the cash register.

The First Fruit Fly of July

“Will,” she says to him, “I see your July sadness taking hold.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Lin,” he says.

Will is standing by the lone window in the kitchen. One of the windows they’ve decided to have replaced. All of the windows need replacing. The cold air comes through them in the winter, and the heat in summer. The humidity in any season finds its way in. He is almost as old as the house is. He feels like his own heat is escaping. A coldness seeping in.

Linda is standing beside him.

“Do you remember that small two-bedroom we lived in, next to the big Congregational church in Brooklyn on Carroll Street that one winter?” he asks her.

“Of course. With the broken tile in the bathroom and the kitchen faucets that dripped, and wood floors that buckled and sloped toward the center, and how my mother came to stay with us to help with the twins.”

“And the windows that were cracked and broken and let the snow in?”

“And all five of us slept in the same bedroom at night to keep warm? Is it the windows that you’re worried about?”

“A little. I don’t know how we can pay for them. But, no, it’s not the windows. Not really.”

“Then what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything as in everything? Me everything?”

“Not you, Lin. The world. The country. So much is going on. All at once. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. But you haven’t shaved since Friday. You’re looking forlorn. Lost, in lonely the way you get. I knew this was coming.”

“You’re acting as if it’s my problem, all of my own doing.”

“It is, though, isn’t it?”

“How can you say that.? Roe v Wade, the EPA, open carry, the separation of…”

“I know. I know. The world is too much with you. You need to take some of it off of your shoulders.”

“Us. Isn’t it ‘too much with us’?”

“Yes, us, you’re right. But I mean you and me. Not everyone worries like you.”

“My sister.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

“Yes, your sister does. And Wordsworth did.”

“And Sinclair Lewis.”

“Yes, Sinclair Lewis.”

“And you, too,” he tells her.

“Yes, me too. But I am more concerned about you, Will. When I see you get like this, I know what’s coming. It’s like when I see the first fruit fly in July. It comes in the door or hidden in a bunch of grapes, and then they’re all over everything. The bananas, the peaches, the lemons. And when, I see that the look in your eyes, the far away, sad, searching look, as is if you alone need to figure it all out, or the world will crash, I know what’s coming. You start to lose patience with people. What they say. How they say it. Question their meaning. Not always. Only when you get this way.”

“What do I or we do?”

“About which, she asked.”

“The fruit flies. Me.”

“The same for both. Clean up. Scrutinize and wash everything that comes in the house, put the bruised fruit in the refrigerator, eat or compost the rest. Maybe even buy only what you can use or read in a day. And, absolutely, stop reading It Can’t Happen Here. Now. Today.”

“But, I’m almost finished. I have only eighty-three pages to go.”

“No more pages. Fini. You don’t have to finish it. Listen, either he liberates everyone from the concentration camps and prisons and saves his family and the whole country in the end, or he doesn’t. Right?”

“I just want to see how it turns out.”

“How it turns out? Will, does that matter? It’s a book. It’s not your horoscope. Look at me. The ‘It’ in the book is happening right here. Right now, today. I see it. You see it. I know that. You know that. Anyone paying even the slightest sliver of attention knows it. But you seem to feed on it. Or it feeds on you. You read about it, talk about it, write about it, resent others for not talking about it. You drink it in. You can’t get enough of it. You need to stop.”

“I know, but it is all so horrible, so planned, so evil, so depressing.”

“Go get the book, Will. The book and the country are two different things. Similar, yes. But one you have some control over and the other, you don’t.”

He retrieves the book from his bedside table.

“Give it to me. I’ll put it in the refrigerator for you. It will be safe in there, and here, read this one.”

“The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing?”

“Yes. You’ll love it. You’ll laugh for a change. You’ll smile. You’ll nod your head. You’ll give yourself a break from the angst. Wordsworth is gone. Sinclair Lewis is gone. Rousseau is gone. Huxley and Orwell. Gone. We are here. Right now, and we will endure. I know others will not, and that saddens me. But we will endure.”

“Endure?”

Yes, is that not what we are together for? To be together here and now? To share the load? We need to have the windows replaced because we are too cold in the winter and spend too much to heat the house… we can’t expand the supreme court, or eliminate the filibuster, or save the eel grass and the Amazon rainforests all by ourselves. We can only do those things if we feel empowered, not downtrodden, defeated. Let’s give ourselves a break before we both feel like a broken, leaky, window letting in the heat and fruit flies. Can you do that with me?”

Interlopers

It is the end of December. Snow is at the curbs and on the sidewalks. It is cold. Mike Zwilling is sweating. He has loaded eleven cardboard cartons filled with dishes, silverware, books, scarfs, mittens, two computers, chargers, notebooks, pens, shirts, pants, earmuffs, overcoats, his bicycle, and snowshoes, into a rented E-Z-load U-Haul rollup rear-door van, double-parked on Thirteenth street, just below the park. Prospect Park. Park Slope. Brooklyn.

Thirteenth is a narrow, one-way street heading west, straight downhill toward the harbor. Toward the Statue of Liberty. New Jersey. Mike, too, is determined to head west. That’s the plan.

“Mike?” Angela, his wife of thirty-five years, wrapped tightly in a wool coat, arms across her chest, asks. “What, you think they don’t have pots and pans in Wyoming? Believe me, they do. Maybe even Cuisinarts. You don’t have to pack everything you own. This isn’t a Wagon Train episode. They might even have water, buckwheat, and flannel shirts. Carhartt’s.”

The Mike Zwilling is the fourth person from his block to leave the Slope for Laramie. The thirty-fourth if you count along Thirteenth, from Prospect Park West down to the Gowanus Canal.

He had told her, back in the spring, well over a year ago. “Get ready, Angie, if we lose the house in the mid-terms in 2022, we’re selling. We’re moving. We’re going to Wyoming.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The world is changing, Angie. The country is falling apart. It’s time we stop complaining and do something. Someone has to do something.  Guns. Climate. War. Abortion. Vaccines. The filibuster. Gerrymandering. Crypto. The Court. The country is splitting apart under us like we’re all standing spread-legged with one foot on either side of the San Andreas fault, looking around like we’re next on line at the bakery.”

“So? So that means we have to move?”

“So, we just have to stop talking about everything like it’s a Netflix mini-series. As if, ‘things are going to shit and so let’s just call it the new normal.’ We’ve got to take it seriously.”

“I am serious, but how does that have anything to do with Wyoming? Where’d you get that idea?

“Melanson.”

“Melanson?”

“I was talking to him. He figured it out. If we lose the House, that’s bad, but then we absolutely can’t lose the senate. If we do, it’s all over.”

“And… Wyoming?”

“Wyoming is the key, Angie. It’s simple math. Listen, Ange, do you know which is the least populated and, coincidently, the most solidly red state in the nation?

“Let me guess… Wyoming.”

“Right. Wyoming!” And, Angie, do you know how many people live in Brooklyn? I’ll tell you. Two-point-five-seven-seven million.”

“And, let me guess, Wyoming has…?”

“Bingo. Wyoming has precisely five hundred seventy-eight thousand, eight hundred and three. Total. The whole entire state. And seventy percent voted for Trump. That’s four hundred and six thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two and he won the state. And, how many senators does Wyoming have? And how many does New York have?”

“Two. I get it, Mike, two. The same.”

“So, Melanson says, New York doesn’t need us to vote. Park Slope definitely doesn’t need us. And Massachusetts. California. Vermont, Illinois, or New Jersey. They’re all in good shape. And so, if we can just get eighty-seven thousand people to move from Brooklyn to Laramie, we can flip the state. Eighty-seven thousand and we flip the whole state and we’re up two senators and they’re down two. Angie, we can be the one flapping seagull whose wings divert the tornado, the leaf falling from a tree in the forest that troubles the distant star. We can do that. It makes the greatest sense.”

“No, Mike. It may make sense to you and Melanson, but not to me. It may make sense to someone who maybe wants to see what life in Wyoming is like. But that’s not me. I can’t do that. I can’t leave here. My work. Our friends. Our apartment. This is our home. Our city. We’re here and not in Laramie for a reason. A lot of good reasons.”

“You can, Angie. Please. Think about it. We rent the apartment for few years. You can work anywhere. Write. Do your translations. Whatever. Anywhere. Work is portable now.”

“You know that’s not true. I can’t do my work just anywhere. I need people. Vibrancy. Face-to-face with the soul of a live, changing, self-critical, city. The dogs and babies in the park. The baby bok choy in market. The steam on the windows of Essa Bagel. Real pizza. The commotion. The variety. Excess. Access. The thread of a song someone is humming in the bank. All of that. No. I can’t go. I won’t go. I can’t live any place else.”

“Come. Please. You can’t know what your one part will play. The change we might make for everyone, everywhere. Maybe even ourselves.”

That was Mike then. In early spring. 2021.

In mid-November they talked again. Prices were rising. Ukraine was lost. Congress had been lost too. Despite any of the hope that had survived the primaries.

People were indeed leaving. Inflation. Selling their homes to developers. Getting priced out of anything they might have afforded a year before. Gentrification, like flowers in a desert after a rain, was blooming in every neighborhood.

“We have work to do in Brooklyn,” she told Mike. “Brooklyn politics, all politics, always flows with the money. If you leave, the big money flows in, and we get washed away. They own the politics and make the policies. There’s real and honest work we need to do here. On our very own street. I’m staying. We need to organize right here,” she told him.

Mike is sweating and shivering. The boxes are in the truck. Limo drivers are squeezing by, giving him the finger, honking, trying to get by without scraping their cars against the U-Haul.

And there stands Mike. Keys in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

“You two new riders of the purple sage head on west and write me when you get there,” she tells him.

She kisses him goodbye.

The engine clicks on.

“Wait, Mike, wait. One more thing. We don’t live here by accident. We didn’t choose to live in Wyoming or anywhere else.”

“Angie.”

She climbs up on the running board of the van. Her shoes are soaked through. She grabs onto his arm and the wide mirror.

“This scheme of yours is totally dishonest. It’s false and illegitimate. A manipulation you’d be enraged at if someone did it to you. Just like what’s happening here to us. You’d be nothing more than rustlers there. And someone is going to get hurt. My god, all I can think of is Matthew Shepard. What do you think they’ll do when they get wind of what you’re up to? Let Melanson and his kid go if they want to. Get out.”

She tugs on his arm.

“Unload the truck. Please. I don’t want you to go. I can’t let you go.”

When We Were Mallards

When we first met, my husband, Mycola, told me that he thought we were like two ducks. Two mallards in a vast lake in a country far away. Like mallards, he said we were.

We were walking then, in our long overcoats, on a busy street in the city where we both lived. There were people and families all around us going into and out of shops and restaurants and sitting in the sun on benches in the park. Children running underfoot. Cars. Buses.

“Petra,” he said, as that was the name my mother called me by, “like we live in a mile-wide and ten-mile long lake with tall firs growing close to the very edge of the rocky shore, and plenty of places for us to build a nest and hide our ducklings in the reeds, whenever we would be fortunate enough to have them. And when the last of them grows up and flies away, we will swim side-by-side and stick our heads down deep below the surface and pull up bits of grass and noodle around for tiny crustaceans in the muck. And, we always be together and always be beautiful.

Sounds good, I told him.

And he said, “qwakk, qwakk.” And I loved him. You silly goose, I thought.

He is gone now and I live each day in great and constant misery. I live in a place of icy dark and metallic fear.

This is my life now, and for how much longer it will be I don’t know. This is not how it had been. When we were mallards. But that matters little now. Now, I cry and my body shakes so hard it is hard to take a breath. I wish for death but I only vomit.

I have no place to go. I have no home. No clothes apart from those I have on.

Two weeks ago, while we were sleeping, the door to our house was being battered and we could hear it beginning to buckle and break. Mycola and I woke my mother and our little girl and we ran out through the side door. We knew they were coming but none of us knew when that would be. We had heard the trucks but we thought they had passed through on their way to someplace else.

We ran in the rubble of the streets. My mother stumbled. She could no longer run. She fell and we tried to pick her up. She screamed in pain. She could not stand. Or she refused to get up. I don’t know.

Our entire world has been changed. We mean no harm to anyone. We hurt no one. Not once in my life have I hurt anyone.

I should say we meant no harm to anyone. Now, I have lost all my balance. My forgiveness.

When your mother has fallen and you cannot pick her up. When your child is running and trips on bricks and glass from the walls of the apartments your friends lived in on the fourth floor of the building you pass, and you can see their now-empty rooms and their broken, blackened, walls, and you see the face your daughter as she sees them too.

When you hear the crack and see the flashes and feel the air itself beat like a bully against your chest so hard it crushes you and a moment later it sucks the breath from your lungs, and you lose your grip on your bag and you cry out in the pain you have not yet felt.

And you cry out in a voice so loud it it hurts your throat, to a god you have believed in all your life, in a voice you never used before and to a god you do not know and who no longer can hear you.

And you think of Isaiah 2:4, “And he shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” You had read those words and you had once believed them.

And now you know that the world itself is a sword lifted up and thrust toward your throat. And your hands are tied behind your back like your husband’s were when he was beaten and dragged away and another man who lies dead on the ground beside you.

When nothing else has any meaning. This god or that god, or the rules of war.

What kind of people make rules of war like rules of grammar or poker? How do we need rules about who to kill, and when it is permissible and when it is not? Words without meaning which are ignored. Humanitarian is another of those words.

And then you see the last bus pull away without you. And there is no water and no food and no toilets.

When there is no hope, and the days of the hopeless hope you once had have passed, when you are crowded in amongst the dead and the starving and the dying, in the cold and dark, you will see, only then, what you could not ever have imagined when the world was big and the sun was bright and the air was clear, and war was only a word for a place where others lived and died, and conflicts which were given names and had dates of when they began and when they ended, and numbers of dead and wounded were counted, and crosses were hammered into the thawing ground with the rounded iron backs of shovels that had dug the shallow graves by men too old to fight.

And you will know how it was that men had done this because you saw the grim and vacant disregard in their faces, inches from your own. And know that they they had planned and considered this one option and that other option, and each one had only one intent and that was to kill this many nobodies here and that many nobodies over there as they could. And the greatest sinfulness that we have known and written down in all the holy history books and agreed to since the beginning of time, held no sway with them. That men with no souls had done this. And they did it with hot white hatred.

I know that now, and I know that this war, this new war without an historical name yet, and with no end date to write in books, will have no end for me. I will die in the midst of it.

And I hope for death to come. I need to live and I want to die.