A Few Dutch Words

A young couple sat down at the table next to mine where I sat sipping Earl Grey tea and reading the mystery novel which arrived in the mail yesterday evening. Trying to read from then on, because the man spoke in one of those radio announcer voices that even at normal volume carry across a large room. And so, while reading the same three sentences on page 23 over and over, and understanding not a word except 'and' and 'the', I began to eavesdrop.

I didn't help. The context of what they were talking about was as mysterious as those three sentences. Until they changed the subject and the man said: "And after all those rejections, by  the family, university, work , women, he rejected himself!" What?  His companion then asked him the question I wanted to ask: "Rejected himself? What do you mean?"  "He moved to Russia, changed his name, his habits, his way of thinking."

That's all I heard.  They changed the subject again, or did they?  They spoke of family matters, and I don't know why but  got the impression that the man who "rejected himself" was a family member or a friend.  But maybe he was talking about a movie or a novel.

I couldn't hold it any longer, got up and went to the bathroom in the corner of the cafe.   When I returned, the couple was conversing in one of the languages that I fluently don't speak.  I recognized it as Dutch.   Were they Dutch? Their English was free of a foreign accent.  I took a look at their clothes and shoes seeking signs that their foreign make was different from the foreign make of the clothes and shoes we wear in America, but I didn't notice any indications.

But I heard, or thought I heard, in their conversation a few Dutch words that I had managed one way or another to acquire over the years, 'geweer', 'moord', 'vijand', that translate to 'gun', 'murder', 'enemy', respectively.

They finished their cappuccinos, got up, carried their empty cups to the bus tray by the counter, which told me that they knew the routine and had been here before, and stepped out,  crossing the street eastward toward the university.   I looked around me checking if I was in a dream world, or on some other planet, not believing what I had just witnessed.  The table to my right was empty and clean, were these people here a moment ago, did I read it in my mystery novel, or did I make it all up?

Theme of a Dream

Where do these themes come from?

A bus goes to the airport every 30 minutes. Unreliably.  Sometimes it doesn't show up. There is only one evening flight to London from here (well, at least that's true), that is often booked up.  I'm waiting at the bus stop near a young Indian fellow.   We miss the streetcar (yes, a streetcar not a bus!) we were supposed to board, while I was explaining the situation to him. We walk to an office to buy airline tickets, but the flight may be overbooked anyway, and we won't know until we arrive at the airport terminal.  I'm going to visit a friend of a friend who just moved there (that's true, too).  But how is he going to host me if he himself is being hosted by friends of friends?  We walk back to the bus stop, when I remember that it'll be cool in London this time of year. I turn to go home to fetch my leather jacket.  Will I make it on time?

Displacement

We were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri who has a new novel out ("The Lowland").  As is often the case, I haven't read the works of the  writer, but have read plenty about her.   She was born in England, grew up in the United States, her parents traditional Bengali, who spoke their native language at home, she never "lived fully within" America, as she says, married a non-Bengali against the wishes of her parents, and now moved her family to Rome, Italy,   'giving her children a taste of the same "loss of place"' (quote from the Wall Stree Journal.)

Her novels are about dislocation, and that is what we spoke about.  He told me a story of a Filipino man living in the United States, who traveled to Manila, shot two people to death there, then boarded a plane to Los Angeles returning to his quiet life as a respectable member of the community.   A classic hitman scenario is where the hired killer visits a city, kills a stranger, and quickly returns home.  But this wasn't it, our man knew his victims, it was some kind of a family feud, betrayal, revenge.

The story provoked my imagination, but there was too little detail to look it up on Internet. And if the man got away with it, how did his story get out and reached my interlocutor?  In any event, it's a seed of a story about displacement and ties to the past that somehow, some way cannot be broken.

Scholarship

- You're a comedian.
- I am?
- At this rate you'll grow up a sad clown!
-  Deep down all clowns are sad.
- You'll be nothing but a sad clown.
- What are you?
- I'm a Shakespearean scholar.


- See this stack of  money?
- What about it?
- Get me a bottle of tequila in 5 minutes and it's yours!
-  I can run to the store in 5, back in 5, how about 15 minutes?
- No, 5 minutes or no deal.
- Gimme an empty bottle and I'll fill it right away for you!


- Excuse me, where does bus number 52 stop around here?
- I'm sorry, I don't take buses, but where are you going?
- To the Village.
- Keep going this way and there at the corner you'll see a bus stop.


- Have you ever seen a situation where there are two families, and due to some outside circumstances, one family's loss is the other's gain, and for one reason or another they must get along with each other.
- That's weird, I don't think I have, give me an example.
- I'll tell you next time we speak.  Ponder it in the meantime.

The Name Game

Everybody knows that Tony Curtis was born as Bernie Schwartz,  Judy Garland as Frances Ethel Gumm, and Elvis Costello as  Declan Patrick MacManus, Ringo Starr as Richard Starkey.  Benjamin Black is the nom de plume of literary writer John Banville when he stoops down to writing criminal mysteries. Prince is the artist's actual first name, as is Madonna.  Keith Richards was at the beginning of his career Keith Richard. Something to do with a dispute with his father.  Keith Moon's birth name was Keith Moon. Did those who did change their names change their names legally?  Kirk Douglas, who had two previous names, probably did, because his son is also named Douglas (Michael).  Bob Dylan's son is Jacob Dylan, not Jacob Zimmerman.

Everybody knows that you love me baby 

Everybody knows that you really do 

Everybody knows that you've been faithful 

Ah give or take a night or two 

Everybody knows you've been discreet 

But there were so many people you just had to meet 

Without your clothes 

And everybody knows 

(Leonard Cohen - birth name Leonard Cohen.)

What interests me today are minor changes to family names.   There was a televangelist (TV evangelist) named Jim Baker who conducted his televised sermons and (primarily) money appeals with his wife Tammy Faye Baker, who had been born as Tamara Faye LaValley, and died as Tamara Faye Messner, after divorcing Jim and remarrying, which all happened following a scandal, collapse of their 'ministry', and criminal conviction and jailing of Jim on mail fraud charges.  But wait, Jim's family name was 'Baker' but he changed it by adding a second 'k' (before or after the first 'k', that is the question?), and so, both he and Tammy Faye were appearing on TV's religious PTL Club ('Praise The Lord') channel as the Bakkers!  What's up with that?

I once knew a rock musician who added a second 's' in the middle of his last name,  then years or decades later dropped it, and having discovered his roots changed his first name to an ethnic sounding version of it, so that he was no longer a Jerry.

There have been instances of artists' names being inadvertently misspelled by their agents, managers or publishers, and they stayed that way.  (I can't recall the examples when I need to cite them.)

Look up  "The Name Game" novelty pop record by Shirley Ellis on YouTube.  It went to number 3 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1964.

Unavoidable Staircase of Memory

I'm a slowpoke, slow on the trigger, what are the other clichés for slow reaction time? Oh, yes, Diderot's staircase, L'esprit de l'escalier. But that's not quite that.

I read about an intriguing idea,  it catches my attention, and when I finally realize its depth some days or weeks later, I've already  lost the source of my read and forgotten all the thoughts behind the idea. Like the idea expressed by a musician, or music historian or ?, in an interview published by a San Francisco newspaper once (but when?), that a musical composition should be heard only once. Or, more recently, a book review in the Wall Street Journal (what book?) where the author, or the reviewer (which?) refers to music as an "unavoidable art".  Here at least I happen to remember the reasoning behind it, but as always there was more. All irretrievably lost.

You tell me that Google knows everything?  Well, let it locate the source of these two ideas!

Pancakes

You think you have crazy dreams?  Well, listen to this (and interpret, if you must.)

We woke up in a hotel and walked to the room next door still wearing our pajamas. There, we showed something on the computer screen to Vladimir Putin.  (Yes, he's been in the news lately, and this week on the cover of TIME magazine's three international editions, but not the US edition - don't want to embarrass main sewer media's domestic hero.)  Then we all walk out onto the mall outside following Vladimir. I note to my My companion notes that he is a small man, and I reply that he is strong, and trained in martial arts. Putin goes his own way, we go ours.  "Where are we going?" I ask her (don't ask me who she is, I don't know), and she answers "To the Museum of Modern Art, there is something there I want you to see."  We are still wearing our nighties.

Next, we return to the hotel.  People in Putin's room are looking for him.  Russians, Americans, a small crowd.  We tell them that he went out, all by himself, and without bodyguards; unlike most others of his stature, he's not afraid to do that.  More conversations.

We are hungry and walk toward the counter serving breakfast. Pancakes.  The menu hanging above is not clear, prices are not displayed.  Other customers are ordering.  I ask her, "What do you want?" She, now dressed in an elegant dress, is walking up the stairs, speaks to me, but doesn't answer my question,  OK, I'll order for myself, once I talk to the woman behind the counter, and figure out what's what.

Screwtop

I was in a grocery store yesterday afternoon picking out wine to take to a friends' house.   I grabbed a bottle of Zinfandel which I had drunk and enjoyed last week, when my companion commented, "Screw top?" I put it back on the shelf.  "You're right, that's seen as cheap."  I picked another bottle, Zinfandel too, which had a cork.   Later I read that most wines sold nowadays in Australia and New Zealand have screwtops, or 'screw caps'.   Change is coming. More and more wines I see in the store have screwtops.  They're not destined to be put in your wine cellar for the next 12 years, but who does that?  I prefer screwtops to plastic corks which are often impossible to pull out, and when you do succeed, they are impossible to put back in the bottle.

I haven't tasted the wine I ended up buying, but later I bought another bottle of Zinfandel with a screwtop, which I am sipping now.  This one does taste cheap.

DODGE

I was leaving a supermarket this afternoon carrying a plastic bag filled with my purchases, a can of Foster's, an English cucumber, and I don't remember what else,  when I spotted a middle aged black man loading his groceries into the trunk of a brand new car that looked like this.  Is it a Dodge Challenger, the picture of which I spotted earlier in the day on Internet? Coincidence.  He noticed my interest, turned toward me and said "It's called 'No wife and no children'".  Come again? "It's called 'no wife and no kids'". OK, I got it.  "A beauty!" I said.   Indeed. Back to retro look of the pony cars of the 1960s.  

The man then standing right next to me behind this magnificent machine pressed a remote control  in his hand and the car engine started.  "See?" he said.  Just like that.   Next year, self-driving cars.

Oh, and finally the remote wouldn't open the driver door at first.  "That's because I'm standing right next to you," he said, before asking me if I'll be watching a boxing championship match tomorrow  in Las Vegas  between Floyd Mayweather (44-0, 26 KOs) and Canelo Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KOs).


"Happy Friday the 13th," he said before driving off.

Jazz Modern

Passage of Time

I was sitting in a corner cafe this afternoon, talking with my friend about literature and about conversations, among other things, telling him a couple of jokes that I had caught in the morning, which has lately  become a sure signal that I would later run into him and have an opportunity to repeat them, when I looked out the window and saw a group of 8 or maybe 10 young women in shorts and T-shirts waiting for a traffic light change.   The cafe is located smack in between the university campus and the surrounding dormitories and student housing, a long block to the  East,  and the start of a popular jogging trail, a short block to the West, and these girls were obviously running together, or if you prefer, jogging.

"Look," I said to my friend, "the academic year must have started, the freshmen are running!"

A few minutes later another group passed outside the window.   In a month, these groups of excited new students, new friends, will whittle down to twos and threes, as their school work increases, new friends  become old friends, and enthusiasm for running wanes.   But this annual sight is one way we measure passage of time in this town

Voodoo

This story has been hibernating in my notebook for several years, waiting  for an ending, a resolution of some kind, all in vain.  But some things don't resolve, or resolve themselves away from our eyes and ears.

I ran into Terry at the city library. He told me he was researching the practices of the occult.  We hadn't seen each other for 27 years, since graduating from college.   He grew up in this town where I was living, and he moved away soon after graduation, while I stayed behind. He returned only sporadically for short visits with his family. Some people escape from  places onto which others eagerly descend.

We went for a coffee and Terry told me this story. Several years earlier,  he was living in New Orleans.  There he ran into his high school sweetheart.  She was divorced, as was he, and they started seeing each other.  One thing led to another and they became engaged, planning a wedding and a move to New York City, where both of her brothers lived.  They made a short trip to Manhattan, to orient themselves and to look for an apartment, and then, immediately after returning to Louisiana, unexpectedly, she broke off the engagement, refusing to give him an explanation.

"Welcome to the club!" I told Terry when he told me this, I having experienced similar unexplained breakups myself. .

He wrote her several letters to which she never replied. He was upset, heartbroken, and decided to deal with his  emotional turmoil by travelling abroad.  He got a job with an international development agency, and traveled to Haiti where he stayed for 18 months. Terry spoke fluent French, which proved marginally useful communicating with native Haitians, he told me.

After Haiti, the agency sent him to Africa, the country of Senegal, if I'm not mistaken (my notes aren't clear), a former French colony, where he spent another year working before returning to the States.

Now, that is shortly before the time when we met each other, his former fiancee sent him a letter.  In it she explains that it was her brother, whom he had met when they were visiting Manhattan, who had advised her to break off the engagement.   Terry suspected it from the beginning, but she of course denied it at the time.

Her brother, a stockbroker on Wall Street, met with some financial misfortunes, and ended up a drug addict and alcoholic on skid row.  She had been trying to help him without success.   She then went seeking help to some kind of psychic or fortune teller or gypsy, or all three of them in one person, and the woman (these magicians are always women, aren't they?) persuaded her  that there is a curse, evil spell,  jinx or voodoo on her brother, and she identified its source as Haiti, where, as Terry's ex-fiancee somehow knew,  Terry had spent some time.  And so, assuming that the hex was Terry's doing (!), she begs him in the letter to reverse, to cancel this evil spell.

"She's a regular churchgoer, a devout Christian," Terry told me, "and still, she plays with Tarot cards, visits these fortune tellers.  What am I to do?"