Wait It Gets Better

Civilizations rise and fall, their years being numbered around 500. If ours began with Jamestown, then we are at 400, which dovetails nicely with global warming. I am 100 years old. When I was young doctors made house calls and sent their bills in the mail. Made in Japan was a joke about shoddy goods. We had corporal punishment and drop drills at school. The phone number of my father’s store had 6 digits–there were no area codes, no zip codes. And there was only one kind of kryptonite.

Now I read in the paper, or dreamed I read, that women’s voices are deepening. They are sounding more and more like men. Take that, creationists!

Graham, in the next room, is moping because I won’t give him a vitamin pill.

“You’ll choke on it.”
“No I won’t.”
“I even choke on it.”

I crush the pill and feed him some. “Good,” he says, but doesn’t ask for more. He’s on to rolling his ball.

“Why does it roll straight?”
“Newton’s First Law of Motion.”

He repeats the phrase. He is inventing physics. He will certainly win a MacArthur grant, at the very least. He will discover new kinds of kryptonite, new phone numbers with eight, nine, ten dimensions. But it’s all too fast. I am still trying to remember whether women’s voices are really deepening, or if it was just a dream.

And we have only 100 years left.

You know how when you lay
yourself down in the back porch
hammock, sleep all day and
wake up thinking: am I still married?
Those kids of Judy’s—are they
grown yet? Is that model rocket
still in the basement—the five
fins that took all the glue?
It’s the same in those stories
where the girl has to sweep
the ashes from the fire for seven
days, until the dark man lets her go—
only it could be seven years, or seven
decades in your life until
the lock springs open, and now
grown-up with gold in your pocket,
you stride into the breezy afternoon.

Isn’t that the way of things—
dropping breadcrumbs faithfully,
so sure and full of hope,
then looking back and the crows
already making off with them.
You could be anyone thinking
these thoughts.
You could have wandered
into this life by mistake and still
be on the second wish, or run
anytime to the edge of the forest,
calling out for the red-haired man
to take you back to the palace
where the King and Queen
remain with their son or daughter,
the feast set out, silver
glinting in the torchlight, honeyed
pears and apples from Damascus,
everyone silent as the drawbridge
clinks lower, waiting for your sword
on the iron door.

First published in Twelve Los Angeles Poets (Bombshelter Press)

That’s all today, just this cool picture of Graham I’ve been saving. I know it’s a cheap blog entry, but jeez, it’s pure cellphone artristry.

And I’m not going bore anyone by complaining about having no time, or make excuses for myself with another “why I’m not writing this month” title, or try to get someone to feel sorry for me; but this is how pathetic we are: we cancelled Netflix. The same three movies lying around month after month. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

The Dog Ears have been invited to create an evening of short plays by the Road Theatre in the San Fernando valley. But that is not what I’m worrying about.

There is a story that in someone’s mythology the world is supported on the back of a giant turtle. Someone says, “What’s holding up the turtle?” Someone answers, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Or they answer, “It’s turtle all the way down.”

When I first heard this story, it was the single turtle version. The mythology was supposed to have been Native American, the someone asking the smart alec question was supposedly European, and the someone answering it was a medicine man, who prefaced his answer by saying, “I know your tricks.”

The single turtle offers simplicity and elegance and has always seemed to me no better or worse an explanation for things than the Big Bang: “What’s before the Big Bang?” “It’s Big Bang, all the way down.”

Now I find I have been duped. In checking internet references, I note there are infinite variations on the story, it is a sort of internet urban legend, and nobody seems to know who said it first, or whether it was turtle or turtles. On the internet anyway, it’s stories, all the way down.

Surely, at some time and place outside the internet, some real person really must have said “turtle(s) all the way down.” But this assumes a reality outside the internet, and perhaps it’s internet all the way down?

Moral: Always google your stories before reporting them. Then make up your own.

Once upon a time I studied acting with Peggy Feury at the Loft Studio on LaBrea. From the moment I climbed the stairs to the Loft she became magnetic north in my creative life, and I am still digesting lessons she taught. Years later, after her tragic death, I started writing letters to her.

Dear Peggy,

You assigned a play, a scene from the play, and a partner. I read the play and the partner and I worked on the scene. Then we ran the scene for you and you spoke to us about it. We rehearsed more, brought the scene back, and you spoke again. This took two weeks. Then another scene, same process, then another, for three years, time off for vacation. Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Behrman, Genet, Pirandello, Albee, Miller, O’Neill, Wedekind, Brecht, Coward, Ibsen, Barry, Feydeau, Bergman, Pinter. Fifty scenes? A hundred? More than I remember. More Chekhov than I wanted. Not enough Albee. When you spoke, my ignorance stunned me. Not ignorance of myself; that was a given. Ignorance of the play I had read and worked on. When I thought a scene had been about A and B, it was really about C and D. Not probably C and D. Not a matter of artistic difference between you and me. A matter of seeing. Once you opened my eyes, the truth was plain and incontestable, right there in the lines: Martha hated her husband. The doctor knew he was a fraud. I read and re-read. Where had I been? Was I born so stupid? It brought me to despair. Once, thinking I saw a life raft, I asked you: Peggy, how many times do you need to read a play to get it? You told me the number, which I have never forgot, and I slunk away. Years later, thinking myself bereft of things to write about, sorry I had not made different choices, climbed other mountains, I found solace in Wallace Stegner, whose remark—any life will provide the material, if it is attended to—called back your answer: one time. That’s what you need, that’s what you have.

One of the things I love about my cellphone camera is the unreal quality of the photos it takes, like an old Polaroid. Here is Holly. Absolute dreamy, don’t you think? It isn’t easy to get a picture like this. To get the right effect, you often have to point at something very dark or bright, then, to get the color just right, whip back to your subject before the camera adjusts the metering, the result being more or less blurred.

Yesterday, a perfect day in breezy Santa Barbara at the zoo and by a pool with Holly, Graham, his friend Ella, and Ella’s sweet dad, David. Then the return to sweltering LA. Last night, this dream: Holly and Graham are gone. I am living alone and abandoned in an apartment. I try to make friends with some guys. It’s nice, but something is missing. I must learn all I can about Frank Sinatra. Albums of his arrive in the mail, albums I have never heard of, albums with grainy, cellphone camera pictures. They tell the whole, sordid story: women, booze, women, booze, women. In my loneliness, I have to understand it. I get in my car. I drive somewhere, looking for clues, any clues.

I wake up, Holly and Graham next to me.

Go figure.

*

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

– Bette Davis

*

You could say it was an ordinary July 4th at a friend’s — some sparklers, a few red devils, a little too much beer. I thought so too, until I got home and developed these pictures. All I can say is what appears in the photographs is not what I thought I was seeing at the time. Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see — that’s my motto. Yet how can I discount the evidence of my own hand? You be the judge, dear reader.

Word spread quickly through the crowd that this was to be no ordinary night. Here see the rapt few awaiting manifestation

which comes as the sound of pipes, then a flame.

The Attic diety Hermes alights, sweeping doubt away.

Moved, the crowd re-enacts an ancient ritual. And then

the Archangel Gabriel appears. Note the child in the foreground.

The Angel touches the girl. Instantly she begins reciting whole passages from Finnegan’s Wake, a book she’s never read.

Inexplicably, a pit opens in the earth emitting a strange light. The elders confer and decide to seal the opening — and not a moment too soon, as thereafter

the True Cross is brought forth from the waters, and

the Ancient of Days, I Am That I Am, reveals himself

to the ecstatic celebrants on the shore.

And yet one more wonder: just an ordinary looking guy lighting a sparkler, right? Wrong. This man has been positively identified as the Wandering Jew, and is 2,000 years old. True to form, he was not invited to the party, but arrived unannounced and joined in when nobody was looking.

Exhausted by events, Graham seeks the shelter of his mother’s arms. The reclining figure above him to the right is the Holy Virgin — the giveaway is the drapery by Michaelangelo.

And I only am alone escaped to tell thee …

So this is what I’m into lately. See, Holly has this album of his with the cheesy title, “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.” Not swinging, but swingin’, which means really swinging, maybe a free martini or something (so you wouldn’t want to miss out)–o’ lethal apostrophe! Anyway, ignore all that; listen to the album. Then listen again. I’ll loan it to you. There is a David Austin rose called Abraham Darby, which you must inhale the scent of. There are Big Sur and Florence, to which you must go. There are, I suppose, a thousand other things I would tell you about. But there is also Sinatra, incandescent in his Capitol years. Here: try this. Or samples of this. It probably won’t inspire a great play, although, who knows? But it will make you happy.

In the morning he’ll be four.
Round-faced pirate, bear-hunter,
slayer of robots, perfect song.

He will climb between us
to nuzzle away reverie
and the muse, all those plays,
& drag me downstairs
for pet shop, Holly
pretending to sleep.

This is a little dog,
he says,
He has no home.
I pay the dollar,
fold him in my arms:
I’ve been looking
for one just like this.

Later his first two-wheeler,
shortcake, talking
games, Vicki fresh from
Oregon; though I have no
time anymore, must
remember to call
the optician, lose
ten pounds, & something
else, etc.

Still later the bath,
milk and apples, stories:
Bartholomew and the Oobleck,
Frog and Toad,
faint lullabies,
and lay we down
again to drift
among crickets,
so very faint
I pray, upward
floating: one
more, just one
more
day.

Come wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving,
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come even if you’ve broken your vows a thousand times.
Come. Come yet again. Come.

- Rumi

Just a thought.