LET IT SNOW

His name was McClure and he came in The Last Mile once in a while. He’d usually sit by himself in a corner near the front window. He’d drink a Michelob, occasionally had a burger. He dressed like a guy who worked a few jobs, managed to get by. He wasn’t bad looking; it seemed like he should have more life prospects. He looked to be about late thirties, maybe forty, dark blond hair, average build, blue eyes if I’m remembering accurately. The closest I ever got to him was when we both found ourselves sitting side by side at the bar and he was playing Keno and doing well — until he wasn’t. He had on a dark jacket over a white shirt. He had his Michelob. Deano, the bartender brought him his second bottle. That was his limit, two and out — then, he was off to no one knows where.

That night sitting at the bar next to me he mumbled something and smiled sadly. I thought he was talking to me, so I said, “what was that?”

He said, “take care of yourself. Saddest words in the world.”

I smiled. “I guess they could be,”I said.

“No,” he said. “They are. And he mumbled the words again, “take care of yourself.” At that moment, Sticky Sammartino came up and started talking to me about something, damned if I can remember what. Whatever it was, it was funny enough to make us both laugh. Then, when I swung around on the barstool again, the guy was gone. His second pilsner of Michelob had a half finger of beer left in it. Deano came up at that point to ask me if I wanted a second tonic and cranberry with a slice of lime (my whimpy drink), and I said, no just a glass of quinine, then I had to be going. But I said, “Deano, this guy who was sitting here who usually sits over there (I gestured toward the front windows.) “What’s his name?”

“McClure,” said Deano.

“He got a first name?”

“Carl.”

“Carl McClure. He live around here?”

“Don’t know. I never got past his name. And I didn’t get that from him. Vinny Gianetti was talking to him one night, sat right down at his table, decided the guy looked lonely. You know how Vinny is. But he didn’t get much in the way of a biography, either. Vinny says they talked about sports.” Deano collected my empty glass and said, “did he tell you about the saddest words?”

“Funny you should ask. ‘Take care of yourself.’ What up with that?”

Deano leaned across the bar. “If you’d asked him, and he’d had a little extra to drin, he might have told you. Vinny never heard anything about that from him. Like I say, it was sports or stuff about the old days around Wonderland or over the the Downs. For Vinny, as you know, that was his life for a long time, and Carl McClure wasn’t much interested in any of it, I’m sure, or interested in sharing anything personal with Vinny, God bless Vinny for trying to open him up a little.

“But the first time I asked him about himself, he’d drunk more than his quota. He was at four beers in just an hour and I suggested maybe he slow down or I give him some coffee or a Coke. That’s when he says to me the saddest words, and I asked him, Why? why’s that so sad?

“He surprised me then. Because he kind of started rolling out a load of personal stuff. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to hear, but, you know how it is with bar tenders, like everybody’s heard Sinatra singing, ‘set ’em up, Joe, and all that ‘quarter to three’ stuff. Ole Carl kept it relatively short and sweet and it was mainly about a girlfriend — a short-lived episode. He says this new girlfriend woke up with him one morning and told him she wouldn’t be coming around for a while. I think he figured this was her trying to figure out whether he wanted her to come around anymore. She lived a long way off and flew in to be with him after originally meeting him someplace like Vegas or Reno. They’d gotten to gether a number of times like that. He was living in Arizona at the time, around Phoenix, I think he said. So he says he wasn’t totally sorry the relationship was coming to big crossroads. He knew it had to happen sooner or later. She was the first woman he’d really seriously dated for any length of time and really liked. She was good looking and, yeah, he liked her alright, but still didn’t know her that well (although from the evidence, I’d say he knew here REAL well. I my book getting intimate is REAL well and you don’t go there unless you’re serioius. But I guess he’d been seeing her just about as long as he thought he could show her any real attention before crawling back into his shell — maybe a couple of months, and I guess he figured it might be best if they separated or at least cooled things off. We’re talking about a real loner here — never married, family history a big mystery. I don’t know anybody who ever cracked the shell around here and Vinny was the only guy who tried — except, come to think of it, I DID see at least one woman walk over to him one time — a friend of Brenda Finch, you know that nurse who comes in here after her shift. It was one of her friends. I mean, the guy’s not bad looking, so she got bold, but maybe a half hour after a whole lot of chit-chat sitting at his t able, she gets up and goes back to the table with Brenda and her other friends, having tried and failed at mission impossible.”

At this point, a couple guys started getting loud over a Bruins game up on the TV over the bar, so Deano leaned in closer. “So here’s this Carl with a woman who says she’s going to go away, and he pretty much shrugs, but he figures he should ask why or where she’s going, but he knows she’s just gently breaking up with him. So he asks why she’s going away. She says it’s because she’s going to be a mother. Carl was surprised by that, but not real concerned. But that’s how she put it, not that she’s pregnant, but, ‘I’m going to be a mother.’ It kind of shows how she felt about that state of affairs. She was happy aboute it. Carl, for h is part, just didn’t know there was another guy in her life. And he thought it was real nice she’d found somebody and also knows they’re parting company alright, but, just out of curiosity, he says, “who’s the father?” Carl says the woman looked at him kind of strange and says, ‘why, you are.'”

Things had settled down in the Bruins game but the reconditioned old juke box suddenly starts up with “Born to Run” and I’m thinking that’s a little too on the nose for what I’m hearing, but I say, “what’d was Carl’s reaction to that?”

Dean didn’t answer right then. Three weeknight regulars came in from their bowling night over in East Boston and Deano squared them away with their usual drinks. Then Jackie the Crow was asking him something about plans to expand the kitchen, then he was back with my glass of quinine, crossed his arms on the bar again and says to me, “I kind of can’t believe how things when down from there, at least as old Carl tells the story. He says he got up out of the bed, went to the window and realized his life had just changed in a big way. But he didn’t want it to change. It was all pretty sudden, and he didn’t know if this was the right woman for him or any of that, because this definitely forced that issue. But, no, he was feeling mainly he didn’t want any life changes that morning. It was, as it happens, close to Christmas, and he’s figuring he’s going to have to call his mother for the first time in a long time, and this wasn’t the kind of news he wanted to have to be telling her. And the woman sensed that, sensed his reluctance, and probably was heartbroken, not getting the happy reaction she expected from the baby’s father. But then, he remembers she did say she was going away for a while, like back to St. Louis or Chicago or wherever, probably to tell her family or whatever. And at the same time, Carl’s beginning to think that maybe he liked her more than he thought. He didn’t mention her name or anything, but he’s probably thinking he’s being all kinds of intimate with her, so maybe they’d been seeing each other long enough, longer than he’d seen anybody else and maybe she’s the one — if there was ever to be a ‘one.’ I think he was deciding if he was in love with this woman. — I mean, like I say, it’s pretty plain from news like that that he’d gotten to know her real well whether he realized it or not. I mean we’ve all been in situations where we have to decide whether to hold on or let go, right? So here he’s thinking he held on longer than he wanted or expected — and now he’s about to be a daddy.

” But, then, his thoughts changed directions, and I mean — you saw the guy tonight — I mean I can’t figure him out, really. But I’m picturing him standing there in the bedroom and saying nothing and so the woman — I mean she must have been upset at this point, since she didn’t get the reaction she expected, so she says, ‘what do you think I should do, you don’t look like you’re happy.’ Carl says he just stood there and didn’t say anything. Nothing! He thinks maybe he was in shock. “

I asked Deano, “how did he know this woman wasn’t, you know, lying? Just trying to….”

Deano said, “I asked him that. He said he knew she wasn’t that kind of person, wouldn’t lie about something like that. I guess he felt he knew her that well.

“But she just sat on the edge of the bed. And I imagine the silence in the room was deafening, right? Until his clock radio went off. This was how he woke himself up for work — a cheap old low-tech clock radio from Walmart turned to some easy listening station that wouldn’t blow him out of bed, just wake him up slowly. And out of the radio came a chorus singing, ‘let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…’ You know that main verse from, the weather outside is frightful’ and all that. Yeah, it’s Christmas time. Carl says he wasn’t religous or into the holidays at all, but that was when he realized it was not only Christmas time, it was the day before Christmas Eve. He hadn’t even been thinking about the date, or even buying a gift for this woman who was, like twenty years old , and was offering him a gift, you might say.

“That’s the thing he realizes all of a sudden. He says it was like the radio was telling him , let life in, let snow fall on you — rain, life, Christmas, whatever! Let life come down on you like sunlight or frost or snow — or grace or something — let it fill the room, fill your life, cover this woman and you, fill your closed little fortress of a world And all of a sudden, he was thinking about a wife, a kid on the way, then another kid, a family, a house, a good job, calling his mother, telling her the news (he didn’t have any other family and his old man had died years ago.) So, he’s thinking, this could be his big crossroads and I should choose the right fork.

“Then, he says it all went away. All those thoughts. All that was left was bad thoughts about –responsibilities, the trouble raising kids, possible health problems, money problems, arguments and the consequence of getting to know people, especially a woman, too well. Letting her into your life….”

I asked, “so the woman’s twenty. How old was he when all this happened?”

“I asked him that,” Deano said. ” He said he was twenty-two at the time. Just starting out. Had a good entry level job in a software start-up when the whole IT thing was just revving up.”

I asked, “so what’d he said to the woman? Not a woman, really. Just a girl with a baby? It doesn’t sound like he popped the question.”

“No,” said Deano. “He says he totally didn’t know how to handle the whole thing. He just stammered, asked the woman if she wanted some coffee or some breakfast. She didn’t. She just sat at the edge of the bed, looking real sad. So he shaved, showered and got ready to go to work, leaving the woman sitting there.”

“Seriously? That was it?”

“Well, he had to get to work, and I guess maybe he knew she knew how to ge to the airport, but, yeah, very strange. And when he came back to his apartment after his shift, maybe around six o’clock, he found a note she’d left on some paper she found. She left it right on the bed, which she’d made up as if nobody had ever slept in it. It said something like, ‘sorry this wasn’t good news for you like it was for me. And now I guess it’s just bad news for both of us.’ Then she says, ‘ someday some woman will make you the happiest man in the world with this news.'”

I smiled at that. But Deano, after telling me that actually looked like he was going to cry. And after a good little pause, he dropped the kicker. He says she’d signed her name, just he first name and added, “take care of yourself.”

I sat back on the stool, gave Deano a long look. “So, well…” I said. And that’s all I could say. Suddenly, those words did seem like the saddest words in the world. I swear, I almost cried, which sould have been strange. The guys on the stools next to us were going crazy over the hockey game again. I guess the Bruins had just scored.

I asked Deano, “Did he ever call her?”

“No.”

“She ever call him?”

“No.” He gave the bar a swab.He says this was in Arizona where, like I say, he was working at the time. I guess he’s not originally from around here. I think he said he got transferred here by G.E., then laid off. I don’t know how he found this place, to be honest. He’s not a big drinker. Maybe the name got his attention.” Deano laughed at that. I did, too, and I said it out loud: ‘The Last Mile’. Perfect.”

“Needless to say,” Deano said, “he had a pretty lonely Christmas that year, not that he wasn’t used to that.” Then he chuckled. “No snow falling on him, either. Not in Arizona. I guess nothing else ever fell into his life unexpectedly, sort of like grace.”

Grace. Now there’s something I never, ever heard Deano talk about before. I guess maybe I don’t know that much about Deano, either. Everybody’s a stranger, to a degree.

I asked, “he never heard from the woman again?”

“Never.”

“Has no idea about her or the baby?.”

“Well, not until he got curious again one day about a year or two ago. He Googled the woman’s name and her hometown, whatever it was. Some small town in Illinois. Up pops a picture of her on the Society page with the guy she was marrying. He had her married name to work with now, so he Googled that, too. Nothing. But then he goes on Facebook. And there’s the two of them about fifteen or so years ago on a cruise ship looking real tanned and smiling and with a kid, a boy about twelve years old smiling along with them and the ship’s captain, and the caption on the photo says the kid had won the cruise for them by winning a national Boy Scout science project by inventing something that helped predict weather for farmers. The kid even got the thing patented and he was sitting between them in the picture. Everybody was smiling.”

Deano put on this best, most ironic smile, and I said, “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” Then I asked, “did the kid look like him?”

“Funny about that,” Deano said. “I asked him, and he just stared straight ahead. My guess is he had found himself looking at himself in another, better world full of love and roses and snow storms and sunshine and proud moments at award ceremonies — and cruises. He was looking at happy people out on the ocean. And he was probably sitting in a room hanging over his laptop, all by himself.” Deano backed up, stood up straight for a second, then leaned in again, real close. “And Carl says he went deep on the woman’s Facebook page and saw they had other younger kids, a couple of girls. There were pictures of them from the cruise, too. They were a family. Then he says, he’s never looked at it again — never even looks at Facebook anymore. And nobody’s gonna find him, because he’s totally not a social media guy. Total blackout. He’s a loner every way you can think.”

“So I wonder why he comes in here,” I said.

“Right. The Last Mile. For the noise, maybe. At least there’s life here, on the last mile. I hope we see him again, to tell you the truth. He hasn’t been in since that time he talked to you, so far as I know.”

I thought about all that as the hockey fans were groaning. I guess the Red Wings had just scored on the Bruins. Deano was looking a little meditative. We were both feeling real sad for the occasional Last Mile Lounge patron named Carl McClure.

“And,” Deano says,” that young woman obviously wasn’t lying, or gold digging after a twenty-one year old IT worker. She was for real. And call me old fashioned –everybody does, as you know — but I say, don’t sleep with any woman you don’t plan to marry. In fact, marry her first.” Deano –I’d say he’s pushing thirty — was telling me this as a guy we all know is not married, though the women love to flirt with him, and doesn’t have a girlfriend, isn’t gay (guys have come in here and flirted with him, too). These are probably all reasons Joe Barron, the guy who owns this joint, hired him. And they’re probably the reason Carl McClure opened up to him. Just like Sinatra: “Set ’em up, Joe, I got a little story I want ya to know….”

And I know both of us where thinking, there’s a little ‘Carl’ out there somewhere. He’s an adult by now, probably wound up at M.I.T. or someplace, probably making money hand over fist, living large, probably got a nice girlfriend. Don’t know if he ever plans to come looking for his old man — his ‘natural’ old man, so to speak. Not likely, from the sounds of things.

“And I gather Carl never got married. That woman of his dreams every came along and make him the happest man in the world?”

Deano swabbed the bar top. “I’d says the old clock radio’s up on that one. I’m guessing he may live over in Lynn. Like I says, probably originally from out west somewhere. Maybe Arizona originally, as a matter of fact. All by himself. Works nights, three different jobs. He smiled.”So I guess he’s ….taking care of himself.”

Deano and I both pondered that. Then he went back to work tending bar. I sipped my quinine.

We haven’t seen Carl McClure for a while at The Last Mile. I hope we do. I might tell him a few places he can meet a nice woman. I’m not sure this is that place.

Meanwhile, I stayed a little longer than I espected that night, thinking about things. Deano got me a cup of coffee to go with my water, unsolicited and on the house. I guess he was taking care of me. Come to think of it, who likes to take care of themselves? Somebody’s got to bring you coffee.

Around midnight when The Mile was nearly empty, I looked out the front door.

It was snowing.

GAZA

The sin at our origin. The Lord of Filth.

Satan, which means enemy, Apollyon

Which means Exterminator

Beelzebug, which means Lord

of Flies or Beelzebul, which means

Lord of Filth

The rest are an evil anonymous

multitude.

Pre-conscious terrors.

Demons. Meanwhile,

Leaflets shower d own. Leave, abandon your home

Run

Though you may be killed on y our way.

Fortunes of War.

War is the suspension of all

Fortunes.

Hamas. Lords of Filth

In Arabic, it looks like this:

 حركة المقاومة الإسلامي

Which translates, Resistance

Or some such meaningless thing.

Right.

Lies.

Meanwhile,

We’re coming, we will scour hot rubble.

We’ll find you.

But find me an end to this.

Find the baby killers.

But find me an end to this.

An end.

The End.

But…

World’s over for a while.

Maybe forever. War Without End

Which is the Middle East, Beelzebul’s

Playground. Cradle of Civilization.

Land where it all began.

Where there is war with out end.

War always feels like the end. It never ends.

Savegery.

Maybe civilization, and the world’s

Proud self-sufficient hopes, died with the first war

The first hurled prehistorica rock. Somewhere

Maybe Times Square

But, for now…

Words. Talk. Useless

Somewhere some guy I know

Is probably sitting on the world’s toilet,

reading his iPhone, seeing the news and saying, blithely,

“This too shall pass.”

As if history were a bowel movement.

Because who can excrete

or defecate reality?

Who can ever pass that load?

The Filth in the bowl this time is called

Hamas.

__________________

Wilfred Owen, January 19, 1917, writes his mother that “No Man’s Land is pockmarked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer…No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, cratere-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

Wilfred Owen, soldier and poet, was killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal, November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice.

Now, tell me what that was all about?

______________________________________________

This time…

No Man’s Land is orange Gaza dust, close by the Holy Land and The Wailing Wall, where the promises of deliverance began

where the young raved

Til dawn, and the devil on scooters, came, rudely ended the party and Sara and Ira were hunted

Like animals. By animals.

On barren orange dust “like the face of the moon.”

Hunted like animals.

All sin involves following one’s own desire

And then comes The Lord of Filth

To Gaza.

__________________________________

“The bitch that bore him is in heat again.” -Brecht, of Hitler.

Gaza.

Gaza

Gaza

The Lord of Filth walks in Gaza.

HELLO, OCTOBER

I wish I were wandering the tented lanes of an October Festival. I wish I could smell apple blossoms (no, that would be springtime), smell cidar boiling, purchase for fifty cents (benefiting school children) and sip some cidar with clove, lemon and cinnemon, see oak and maple and birch along the streets bordering the town green, buy seasonal fruit, bite into a sweetly tart fruit, yes, both sweet and tart; see mountains beyond the tent-tops and rooftops, and see a fountain and statue in the heart of town, see the leaves turning.

I have seen and been such places on October days, brown and gold.

But my heart was always just a little heavy in northern Octobers. And so, too, in southern Octobers.

Now, that’s a failure of gratitude. I must be grateful. Name that sorrow that overlays everything. I can’t. As sweet-smelling macadam is laid down over dirt country roads on sultry Mondays, I can’t for the life of me recall the ‘where or when’ of a memory beneath life’s black, hot layers of ordinariness. So be it. Go on remembering. It is 5:26 a.m.. Light is coming. I prefer the dark, the quiet.

So much wasted time. So many fears. So many wrong turns, delays. But that’s life. The black, winding road to the October Festival is just a road. I wish to arrive.

There are those journal entries where we write. “Another year, nothing changed.”

But we should be glad when nothing has changed.

The leaves are changing up there. Yes, a good change, a season defining marker of mountain time within northeastern time.

Here, in Florida, the same abiding green, but a breeze yesterday, today the humidity again. But it will change. I see sun out there. I must drive across the bay to Tampa, grateful for days and weather in stasis. There will be traffic. The wind moves slowly among the palm fronds at either end of the bridge. I will find a mysterous but welcome haze ceiling off the Bay’s horizons as I flow with the death-dealing traffic across the causeway. Is it October? Where is the Festival?

Time present and time past

Are both, perhaps, present in time future,

And time future present in time past.

Wrote the poet.

I’m no poet.

But here I am. Writing. October again.

Hello, October.

Everything will change, and feel like nothing has changed.

That’s life, that’s good.

But I wish, yes, I were alone, still healthy, maybe forty or thirty again, and walking up to a smiling woman in a flannel shirt to buy her jam, the autumn breeze blowing, the mountains in the distance. The leaves crackling.

At dusk, maybe someone in the village will invited me onto their porch.

We’ll have hot tea as night falls, contented strangers.

But, in a windowless wilderness of corridors stripped bare by an infinite regression of florescent tubes of brightness, I am, in my mind before this October dawn in a foreign place, working down a green bottle of something from a vending machine. That, not the wide beautiful porch overlooking the Festival is where I spend my mind’s time.

October is outside, feeling the same as this inside of imagined people in cubicles.

There are calendars on desks. Yes, it’s October.

But it might as well be January, or July.

October, come for me. Change me. Keep me grateful.

Come for me. Greet me, whisper “hello.”

It is 5:45 a.m. now. Greet me again at 5:45 p.m.

Take me back to the Festival.

Too soon, it will be, Goodbye, October.

So, Hello.

BRUISED REEDS

Dr. Samuel Johnson, from his 18th Century Prayers and Meditations, wound up speaking to me unexpectedly tonight. I opened an old literature text book of mine, and there they were, his words — and I was hearing his voice, the voice of a giant; among the most exalted figures of his or any time, especially that brainy time in which he lived. He was speaking to me from the heart of the Age of Enlightenment in which the mind was allegedly trumping faith and civilization had at last emerged fully from the grip of the Age of Darkness or, as it is commonly known, the Dark Ages — a time before the Renaissance and High Middle Ages that we now know was not so dark; was actually rich in scholarship and the slow, cloistered but deep, relentless nurturing of Christian civilization due to blossom brilliant hearts and minds, Dr. Johnson, it seems, among them, though, as an Anglo-Catholic, he remains a product of Henry VIII’s rebellion, however knowingly.

There he was, on the page before me, in 1761, calling out to our heavenly Father, almighty and most merciful God in whose hands are life and death….

I guess, on this late rather anxious and unhappy Sunday evening, I needed to hear a smart guy saying he believes in God. He was writing in a journal, and, in doing so, must have –through his famous amanuensis and biographer Boswell — intended to share it with me in the 21st Century.

Easter Eve, 1761

Since the communion of last Easter I have led a life so dissipated and useless, and my terrors and perplexities have so much increased that I am under great depression and discouragement; yet I propose to present myself before God tomorrow with humble hope that He will not break the bruised reed.

So devout, so humble.

As I copy this, Barbara Streisand and Don Johnson are singing a duet on that little 21st Century device in which you ask an imaginary woman named Alexa to play music. Diane requested this, for dinner. Barbara and Don, of Miami Vice fame, are saying, over and over to one another, I love you….

And then, Barbara alone, there’s a place for me….from West Side Story.

Is there a place for us? Barbara and Don ask a good question. And, well, life in ours and any time can be itchy. For instance…

At the gas pump of a filthy 7/11 in Tampa this afternoon, an older guy in shorts and jersey was done pumping gas, but would not move his high-end Porsche, even as we waited in my old Forester behind him, because with sqeegee and cups of water he was methodically cleaning the windshield of his top-of-the-line sedan edition of the coveted automobile, which markets for about $125,000 new and $77.000 used.

We waited. He went on splashing water on that crystaline windshield. “I’m going to be cleaning my windshield a bit longer,” he said. He indignantly directed us to another of the four pumps, only two of which had the gas cap on the passenger side, which I need. Another one was broken, as indicated by the red plastic bag over the pump nozzle handle. Another was occupied. It had seemed exedient just to wait for our Porsche owner to move away, since he was done pumping gas. The Porsche and its owner were worth more money than I’ll ever see in my life. He probably lived in one of those palatial south Tampa mansions.

But for Mr. Porsche, an absolutely spotless windshield was salvation.

Dr. Johnson, in a journal entry of April 21st, 1764 at age 55, wrote, my indolence, since my last reception of the Sacrament, has sunk into grosser sluggishness, and my dissipations spread into wilder neglicence. My thought have been clouded with sensuality; and except that from the beginning of this y ear I have in some measure forborne excess of strong drink, my appetites have predominated over my reason.. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year; and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without leaving any impression….Grant, O Lord, that I may receive the Sacrament with such resolutions of a better life as may by thy grace be effectual, for the sake of Jesus Chrsit. Amen.

No more singing in the other room. I have eaten a chicken dinner 262 years and several months after the esteemed Dr. Johnson wrote those words. I wonder what Barbara and Don are doing tonight?

The guy at the 7/11 pump — he finally pulled away, but I’d already had to move a bit awkwardly into positon at another pump — has no doubt stowed his Porsche in his garage with a very clean windshield and eaten his dinner.

Perhaps he’s unwisely left that Porsche out under a tree, where a seagull or one of the other many seabirds in this region will teach him the transgency of all material cleanliness and he shall be forced to go on, once again, with a profound sense of futility, seeing the world through the clouds of avian feces spattered over that once perfectly clean windshield. The same spattering will cloud his visiion — or perhaps plunge him into a deep revelation. Perhaps, after a white dove like the Holy Spirit deposits an act of grace on that glass — even white doves have to crap before they “sleep in the sand” — he might think suddenly of the people he made wait at the pump in the filthy parking lot at the untidy, malfunctioning pumps (the kid in the 7/11 had to instruct me that the REGULAR button would only work if I punched it repeatedly. I’ll bet Mr. Porsche didn’t have that kind of trouble.

But perhaps Mr Porsche, graced by bird crap that falleth on the just and the unjust alike, might, after a jolting metanoia, sell everything and….what might be next for casually elegant, invincibly arrogant, filthy rich Mr. Porsche? A bruised reed with the illusory belief that his windshield is the window to his soul might even be visited with chunk of cement off a crumbling bridge. I pray not. Lord, please protect Mr. Porsche.

Perhaps he’ll stumble on some words by Dr. Johnson. Not that they are sharply and obviously relevant. But Dr. Johnson is always relevant –for the ages, ours and his. Someone is watching, almighty and most merciful. He sees you holding up people at the gas pump. He sees you through your spic-and-span windshield. A bruised reed at the wheel.

And, on that great celestial Interstate, I see Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 2024 Porsche Macan convertable traversing the clouds…Boswell at his side with his iPad, catching every word.

Amen.

EARTHLY IMMORTALITY

British novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (she’s a woman), writing vividly in the July 10, 2023 National Review about the modern quest for immortality, reminds us that there’s a difference between wanting to feel young — to have energy, to be free from pain and impairment, an ambition with which most of us would be sympathetic — and wanting to look young.

She claims that 46-year-old Tech tycoon Bryan Johnson boasts that he has the lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a man age 28. Shriver also claims he employs thirty doctors for his Project Blueprint to remain personally youthful, while getting regular transfusion of his 17-year-old son’s blood. His regime also incudes microdoses of Botox and the injection of salman-sperm DNA around the eyes. (Apparently, the son doesn’t mind the transfusions but, Shriver opines and many would agree, this seems an entirely vampirish practice.)

Shriver has obviously been thinking about the youth craze for some time. “For the Silicon Valley set, as for their neighbors in Hollywood,” she write, “appearance seems to be paramount. Especially for people so wealthy that money is meaningless, youthfulness is the preferred currency.”

She admits she, too, is vain. (and I’m also a charter member of that Vain #MeToo Movement.) But, she adds, “It’s just that a smoother complexion in middle age…is hardly one giant leap for mankind.”

Most of her essay deals fascinatingly and in considerable depth with the strikingly large tech industry working to cancel death and allow us to live forever — about which she concludes, “the vision of a species that has calcified into the same individuals forever, with no renewal, no turnover, no children, is ghastly.”

And that’s not half of the ghastliness.

MEMORIES OF THAT GENTLE DESCENT AT SUMMER’S END

August 31, 2023. Woodstock, Georgia….

I knew it would fly, this summer, this year. Hot, so hot. Time in the hills and by the mountains of upstate New York. And the Mohawk. Gone. Memories now. Another summer gone. Another year going….

I write from Woodstock, Georgia (again), having made perhaps an extreme decision to go an extreme distance to be away from the first of the season’s Gulf of Mexico hurricane threats. A long drive, but some peace at the end. I’m always in search of peace.

I guess almost every Labor Day, whether I realize it or not, I think of Joe O’Donnell. He was my peer, an intelligent childhood neighbor who grew up, like me, on Neponset Avenue. We were never in any school class together, never really truly close friends, though friends for a significantly memorable period. I think he wound up a year ahead of me at the Catholic school after tonsil and adnoids removal in third grade caused me to repeat the year. So we weren’t classmates.

Joe always had a crewcut, always seemed a trifle more intelligent than his years. I watched him, at least once, be the victim of a bully. He seemed to brush the experience off. To this day, I harbor anger on his behalf for the bully whom I met some years back at a wake ( which is where people from the old neighborhood always meet over the bodies of fellow neighbors and chums). The bully had become a somber, probably harmless working class adult with a perfectly nice, even pretty, wife, although I did sense a certain hostility enveloping him — and me. He’d grown up poor with probably a poor family life. I’ll make that excuse for him. We all, most of us, grow up. He might have done a better job of it than me.

But back to Joe O’Donnell

Joe’s father had been a World War II paratrooper who’d spent time with a broken leg as a P.O.W. of the German’s. Joe, by contrast, was not paratrooper material, nor was I. Riding our bikes was about as daring as we got. We were once both on a youth basketball team and mutually fretted about not being called upon to play. But, inwardly, I knew I could hardly dribble the ball and had been spared humiliation and was masking my relief with false indignation. Joe, perhaps, the same.

Joe’s mother was a wonderful woman who, come to think of it, masked her emotions pretty well in order to deal with life’s challenges. I say this because I met her at a 1989 Catholic neighborhood reunion and learned how upset she’d been when a raised multi-pane porch window at the O’Donnell’s house slipped free of its hook-and-eye overhead latch while roofers hammered overhead and came smashing down on me, putting my head right through one of the panes, leaving a scatterring of broken glass on my head. I wasn’t hurt, or even upset. I was half amused. Perhaps I’d been nicked and perhaps there was a little blood. Mrs. O’Donnell came rushing out, obviously concerned. I asked, calmly,”am I cut?” She said, “you’re ears hanging off, now stand still.” And, paradoxically assured by this and the absence of pain, that I was fine, I stood still while she commenced to clear away the mantel of broken glass and lift the window to free me.

But at that meeting with her three decades later, I became aware that she’d been deeply upset by the incident. I assured her it was a non-event for me, and how much I appreciated and was reassured by her tough-minded intervention. It did not seem to ease her own traumatic memory and, perhaps, guilt. So, yes, Joe’s mom knew how to hide her true feelings, at least at the point of impact.

And now, as I come to think of it — why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion? I believe I asked about him, and got no good answer why he was absent.

Again, about Joe, and as regards our friendship….

What is it that makes companions of people in their very early years other than proximity — people who will probably drift far apart when they move? Joe never moved — not for many years, anyway.

He seemed smart, but given to masking childhood’s typical petulance and easy emotions and tears, unlike his only younger brother Kenny or his young sister who were open books. In that sense, he always seemed a little older than his years. We were just kids who lived three houses and a short street crossing part. I don’t recall how we started hanging out together at maybe age eleven or twelve. What did Joe see in me? In him, I saw, as enumerated, a bundled up temperment that somewhat mirrored my own. Maybe that was the attraction — and the fact that you could have an intelligent, albeit still immature conversation on what we knew of the world.

Then, suddenly we were teenagers, probably both thirteen, still unathletic, perhaps only beginning to be interested in girls. There were no girls around that Labor Day weekend, though I was very interested in one. I never recall talking to Joe about girls, but we probably did. They were something else we were probably still a little afraid of.

And why do I think of Joe specifically at Labor Day? Because on our bicycles we rode from Neponset all the way out to the Blue Hills on Labor Day weekend on what I think was 1960. The Blue Hills were quite a distance, at least five miles. But I don’t recall anybody driving us there. Once there, we peddled all the way up one, probably the principle one, called Big Blue. It was not overly steep, that winding uphill blacktopped road, but still a bit arduous as he stood up to peddle and peddle and peddle, likely criss-crossing the road, on our very ordinary bikes of no particular brand.

It might have been the first year before full-fledged adulthood that I understood or cared about Labor Day’s significance as summer’s end point, and, accordingly, felt, again for the first time, that wistful sense of seasonal passage to fall and the end of unbridled childhood freedom and the looming return to classroom drudgery. For though technically now a pubescent teenager, I was still, in essence, a child who’d relatively belatedly mastered the balancing act that was riding a bike. It was still three years before I would be old enough — and more or less required — to “labor” for money, five years before I had a license to drive a car.

But it was still a time when summer was understood to be a period of unburdoned childhood freedom and, for me, that coming start of the school year registered an inordinate sense of dread, for I did not like school. (In retrospect, I sense that Joe O’Donnell, on the other hand, probably enjoyed school.)

It was warm. There were a good number of people out enjoying the weekend at the picnic areas we passed and at nearby Houghton’s Pond. But we peddled laboriously in tandem and in solitude on the shoulder of the two-lane road, for probably for over an hour, wondering when the ascent would ever end for us.

Then –suddenly — we felt ourself briefly to be on more or less level ground, still peddling gently for several yards. Then came our reward, a slow, steady downhill coast, riding about twenty-five yards apart, Joe in front…a slow, gently winding journey of –how long? Was it just a half mile? As much as a mile? It seemed, happily, very long, and cooling to us in jerseys and jeans we still called dungarees.

When it was over, I pulled up next to Joe and he said, like an adult, “it was a great feeling, wasn’t it?”

So, I guess Joe DID share his feelings. He did then, at least.

In our subsequent teen years, Joe and I drifted apart. He went off to Latin High School, the very best public high school in Boston and the oldest public school in the nation. I chanced to see him perhaps just once at Field’s Corner rapid transit (now MBTA) station, both of us either enroute or coming back from school (I was at Gate of Heaven in South Boston.)

I talked to him about the way famous authors’ stories we were being taught, as I recall, and how I disapproved of the method of the teachers. And he said, in that slightly sententious boiler plate adult way he had –“no, that is no way to enjoy a book.”

I presume he did well at school. He was bright. But somehow, I sense that science or math probably interested him more than literature, regardless of how it was being taught.

Flash forward….I learned he became an accountant….and flash further forward….

In 1999, six firefighters died in the burning of the Cold Storage facility in Worcester. Joe’s younger brother Kenny had become a Boston fire captain. I met him outside the church where the first of the six funerals for the men was being held. He was there with hundreds of other Boston jakes, paying his respects. I was covering the event as a Boston TV news reporter.

“How’s Joe?” I asked.

“He died,” Kenny said.

I was shocked. He would have been just a little over fifty, like me.

This was December. It had just been a matter of months. Pancreatic cancer. All very quick. Joe had become an accountant and a father. He was living up in New Hampshire. Kenny said he’d been fishing with him shortly before the diagnosis.

So I was doubly sad on that sad day of a funeral — for a fallen firefighter, and for Joe, now a figure in distant memory. I wondered, did he still have a crew cut? Did he still enjoy riding a bike? Obviously, he’d taken up fishing

But, again, almost without fail, I think of Joe on Labor Day. I pray for him. There must have been a widow and children. I pray for them, too.

And I suppose there are people enjoying the day all these years later in the Blue Hills where we made that little memory. I wonder if Joe recalled it as fondly as me — or recalled it at all.

So….time…..memory

Tonight, here in Woodstock, Georgia, I’m due to go to a high school football game. It’ll be some other kid’s memory.

The hurricane has swept off. Wind, a precarious life, a movie playing in the next room. I’m feeling it all, anxious, not quite at Labor Day rest.

What was that about boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? (Fitzgerald)

(And I wonder as a matter of fact –why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion with the rest of the family? Okay, he lived in New Hampshire and now had a family of his own. Distance puts up borders. But sometmes family borders go up, too. Was he keeping his distance for other reasons? His mother, now also deceased, told me (when I met her long after that reunion and when she again brought up her trauma over my head through the window) that Joe’s death deeply affected his ailing and seemingly tempermentally far more rugged dad. Again, hidden emotions.

And now I remember — she told me this at the father’s wake, for she’d lived on past both her son and her husband.

Rest in peace, Joe O’Donnell — and all O’Donnel family members.

Wishing Labor Day peace of mind — to workers, and to all of us who labor, compulsively, at remembering life’s little joys and sorrows at summer’s end and all through the year. They don’t always make for a Happy Labor Day, or peace of mind.

Let’s settle for gratitude. A grateful Labor Day. We’ve made it to another September. Go for a bike ride.

Amen.

AIN’T IT A SHAME?

In November, 2021, all kinds of negatative cultura/political “stuff” was coursing through our nation’s bloodstream with blinding speed, rivaling the ravages being inflicted on us by the pandemic. It was about the same time Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema was under prolonged attack by fellow Democrats for holding out on key tax, health and climate legislation.

In that November period, the reliably insightful Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review suggested that the countercultural Left, like the Marxist-Leninist Left before it, was Dionysian in character, given to public theater like Occupy Wall Street and even following their political enemies into the toilet, as they had recently done to Senator Sinema.

“The essence of totalitarianism,” wrote Williamson, “is the abolition of private life and privacy. “

Now, Senator Sinema is an Indpendent. And I understand a third of voters in once-reliably Republican Arizona are registered as Indpendent.

But Elvia Diaz, writing for the Arizona Republic, levied a decidedly negative and cynical assessment of Sinema’s Party shift a year after Williamson noted her persecution at the hands of the Leftists. Diaz wrote in December, 2022, “She’s ditching the Democratic Party because she either figured she can’t win a primary or she no longer needs the party’s money and infrastructure for her next move – or both.

“Her trajectory suggests she’s adept at ditching anyone or anything no longer useful to her. She began her public life as a Green Party activist. That went nowhere so she became an independent, which didn’t work, either. Her big break came after she conveniently became a Democrat.”

Maybe so.

Sinema wouldn’t be the first politician to shed seeminglyi bedrock ideological affiliation and drift among Parties looking for a softer resting place for their self-centered political aspirations. Consider Joe Biden, the “moderate.” Don’t make me laugh. Donald Trump, loyal Republican. Yeah, right.

But can we deny Sinema’s assessment that “pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges – allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities, and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.”

Isn’t that where we find ourselves in August, 2023?

Ain’t it a shame?

THE F.B.I.

As multiple political and law enforcement embroglios engulf us, I’m going to indulge, very briefly, my fears and mixed feelings about the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Bureau’s credibility has unquestionably been compromised by the domestic security missions it has undertaken. It has come to light, for instance, that agents were infiltrating and investigating Catholic Latin Mass-goers as potential terrorists. On what evidence did they undertake such a thing?

It remains, as far as we know, a bureacracy still capable of remarkable achievements in the area of criminal investigation. Of that I feel certain.

But it has been assigned contradictory missions. This has generated problems. It has revealed incompetence, malfeasance and political bias in its ranks. This has hurt its reputation. We know supervisors tapped into partisan sources in their investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged Russia ties, such as uncorroborated Hillary Clinton campaign opposition research. Prior to that, by contrast,agents had cleared Mrs. Clinton of any wrongdoing in her email scandal despite finding that she had recklessly mishandled classified information and destroyed government records. It’s true, the investigation tarnished her image. She lost the election — and blamed the F.B.I. She might be right. But, here again, should such investigations be in the perview of the F.B.I.?

You might ask – who else should handle them? Well, frankly, I don’t know. But where the target of the investigation is an elected official, trouble in the form of political bias seems to ensue. Is it impossible to de-politicize the Justice Department? One would hope so.

Meanwhile, can we have any faith the Bureau is doing any better handling the multifaceted Trump investigation into, among other things, mishandled classified files? You can be certain Trump supporters don’t think so.

An agency like the F.B.I. lives by its reputation and credibility. It is just one of the federal agencies many Americans have ceased to trust.

That’s a problem for all of us.

SORRY, NIGHT GENT, WHEREVER YOU ARE…

For I missed your beautiful smile.

What –and who — on earth am I talking about? Well…

It occured to me last night — and I cringed at the memory — that there were embarrassing moment during my TV career when I had to cancel interviews with people I know were, for various reasons, eager to tell their story to a television audience — and this despite their trepidation about going before the camera. Often you’d find yourself gently pleading with them to put aside their timidity and consent to appear, only to be forced later to cancel out.

For some reason, I’m especially recalling the time working for Channel 7 in Boston when I was reporting on efforts to end dog racing in Massachusetts. Accordingly, I had set up an interview with a trainer at Wonderland race track in Revere, Mass. I was to meet him —and his champion greyhound, named Night Gent. This excited me. Yes, I love dogs, but more than that, viewers love seeing animals and they liven up a story.

Then, for forgotten reasons doubtless beyond my control and perhaps frivilous and unnecessary as often happens in TV (e.g., allegedly important “breaking news” somewhere), I was forced to cancel the interview. Thereafter, because the news cycle keeps turning, I wound up never doing the interview or the story.

The next day, I made a point of calling the trainer, apologized, and sheepishly asked if the cancellation had greatly inconvenienced him.

He was cordial and forgiving, but immediately noted, in a wry tone, that in order to make his celebrated canine ready for his close-up, “I even brushed his teeth.”

Boy, did I feel terrible! I’m sure old Night Gent felt even worse. What dog likes having his teeth brushed?

Come to find out: In 1986 (about the time I was going to meet him),Night Gent captured the Derby Lane Sprint Classic down here in Florida and was named to the All-America team. I believe he may even be in the Greyhound Hall of Fame. He was a super-star! I’d have brushed my teeth to have my picture taken with him –and, of course, feed him a biscuit or two.

But, alas, the moment, and Night Gent, have gone gently into that goodnight of dog racing, for the sport is on the wane and, at least in Massachusetts and other states, been banned outright, perhaps for good reasons.

I hope Night Gent‘s years in retirement were restful and rewarding, with naturally sparkling teeth. And that, first of all, they retired his toothbrush.