I don’t close cupboard doors, vacuum my car floors, sit in a kayak with oars, or speak the language of the Azores.
I did, however, enjoy listening to Brazilian colleague Pedro speak Portuguese.
Just as I love watching and listening to murder mysteries in Spanish, Italian, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Icelandic, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, and Navajo with English subtitles. Never, under any circumstance, dubbed in English.
My favorite early-teen pop song, which I first heard in 1963 on my tiny orange transistor radio, was “Sukiyaki” by the Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto.
So too, I’ve seen the complete listings of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese and Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish films.
Sadly, I know, at 76, I’ll die monolingual in a multilingual country and world.
My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.
This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.
My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.
For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.
My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.
Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.
Grey-haired, stooped Mrs. Thompson always wore a dark sweater when she gardened in the summer. I wouldn’t have noticed except she occasionally retrieved a “foul” wiffle ball from her garden’s crocuses and peonies, with never a scold.
Her backyard bordered the driveway we shared with our neighbors, the Bartoski’s, with their garage serving as the backstop and our garage the pitching mound. An ancient, bowed wire-link fence served as the left-field foul line.
Like many major league baseball players in the fifties and sixties, I had an off-season job as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Times. Mrs. Thompson was one of my 44 customers, which meant on every Thursday evening, I would collect a weekly sum.
As a proper business boy, I carried a small three-ring notebook with a page for each client, containing perforated stamp-sized receipts. For change, I attached a coin changer to my belt.
Collecting gave this impressionable 12-year-old access to the early evening lives of adults other than my parents. Most invited me into their living rooms, including Mrs. Thompson. As far as I knew, she lived alone. My mother told me her husband had died years earlier.
I remember her front room was always warm and dark, with the shades down on each window. Once, it must have been late summer, early evening, she took me through the house to her kitchen in the back, with side and back windows that looked over the garden that bordered our play area.
I don’t remember what she said or what kind of cookie she offered. But I do recall the openings with rolled-up blinds that overlooked her backyard and our ballpark.
The only square inch of territory Emmy Lou didn’t snuffle was next to the red-topped fire hydrant. She snifaris to the spots less traveled.
As to Benji, when we visit during the winter, and his paws get cold, I’ll pick him up. Sort of a Footprints in the Sand deal, except he’s Jewish.
Photo by the author
Rebecca’s son, Jonathon, and family live with Emmy Lou in St. Louis. A daughter, Emily, plus clan are in Marblehead, Massachusetts, along with cats Wilbur and Orville. They adopted Benji after husband Aviv’s mother died last year.
The household of Rebecca’s oldest, Libby, in Washington, DC, lost Flash, an ancient Beagle, last year, who, unBeagle-like, allowed me to lead.
Another venerable hound, Sam, helped raise my two brothers and me. We discovered him in a turkey box under the Christmas tree in 1955.
One Saturday morning in 1971, our dad took Sam away.
Last night, Rebecca’s son-in-law, Jonathan, came into the house with a photo he had just taken of a beautiful sunset. I set aside Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas and hurried outside to capture my version. Something about twilight broke the spell of my nestling in.
Picture 11,687 lay fallow overnight until early this morning, when I read this terrific story by Maria Rattray about growing old that included the idiom ‘at the end of the day.’
Half-light, aging, day’s ending, I know what you’re thinking. And you are right. I’m 76. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But that’s not the end of the story.
I stole everything for this essay except for itself.
Even the last line, which I purloined from Mr. Dylan, that concludes the aforementioned book.
Try to create something original, you’re in for a surprise.
My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.
This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.
My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.
For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.
My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.
Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.
The photo is from Denny Prior’s self-published Memoir Growing Up Boomer
Some things change, and some things remain the same. This is me, fifty-six years ago, protesting Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University.
Last April, clad in my protest uniform, I was with hundreds more at a No Kings resistance day.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
The past curves back, more spiral than arc.
What remains is war. Always war. And stupidity. And blindness. And greed.
King Don is only the latest!
For you and me, it can feel hopeless. Unless someone offers us words that express what we feel. Then, we feel less impotent and alone.
In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard Classics Professor Richard Thomas puts it this way:
It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times insufficient…Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along.
Master Dylan adds this
It doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.
Where do these words, written so long ago, take you today?
The words for Dylan’s “Masters of War” came to him and to us in 1963.
Come you masters of war You that build the big guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’ But build to destroy You play with my world Like it’s your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you sit back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion While the young people’s blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain’t worth the blood That runs in your veins
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I’m young You might say I’m unlearned But there’s one thing I know Though I’m younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could? I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die And your death will come soon I’ll follow your casket By the pale afternoon And I’ll watch while you’re lowered Down to your deathbed And I’ll stand over your grave ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
Photo by the author of a figure in the Biblioteca in San Miguel, Mexico
I’ve definitely got a life to recall. It seems aeonian, but it’s only been 76 years. And will soon end. Soon, in relative terms, perhaps twenty years at most.There’s still work to be done.
Sadly, we aren’t here very long, are we? So we’d best not waste time.
It was only yesterday when my brothers and I were playing wiffle ball in the backyard, trying not to knock our mother’s Monday washing off the cotton ropes strung diagonally from the garage to hooks in the maple tree growing up through the lower-level concrete-block patio our dad rebuilt every few years.
Photo from a family album
Now, Dody, Pat, and Peter are gone. So is Paul, Sr, who took this photo, and who reminded us every Monday morning to help our mother hang the clothes before the first pitch and to ‘be careful of the clothes line.’
That leaves me to finish the game.
Peter died two months ago, and I’m his only surviving relative and the executor of his estate.
He and his late wife, Pamela, have left their money and property to the Sisters of Charity (BVMs), the religious order of our late aunt and Dody’s sibling, Sister Marilyn Thomas.
If you want the highbrow version of this story about a writer’s voice, read this terrific article by Charles Yu. It includes the words “elides” and “obviates,” two terms never used by me in my 811 tales.
Here’s AI’s rendition of Yu’s essay. It includes the phrase “key insights,” the best tell for plagiarized papers over my 40 years of college teaching.
In the photo, under the microwave on the left, you see Paul and Rebecca’s oven. Whenever their furnace blows, something behind the cooker rattles. It’s a repetitive knocking sound that, Paul wagers, is different from the clatter coming from a loose part in your kitchen.
This unique echo of their oven is its voice, its tone, its perspective. It can’t be replicated.
Just like this little essay. Its author’s screw-loose imperfection is its value in this anodyne (also used for the first time) world of AI.
