Fragments

It's all in pieces, like a smashed fine china saucer; I have no grand saga to relate, no complete 56 piece bone china dinner set.   Anecdotes, disconnected adventures, accidents and mishaps, brief stays, narrow escapes, journeys to somewhere and to nowhere, wanderings without purpose, and impasses.

I wanted to tell a story, one with a beginning, middle and an end,  a story long enough to fill up pages of  a hardcover novel, but I just don't have it, don't even have the sound and fury signifying nothing.

Clever limericks, bon mots, repartees, one liners, nothing but fragments.

The Purse

I met her during a walk in central park organized by our families.  She was accompanied by her boyfriend, who walked ten steps behind her carrying her oversize purse.   My cousin and I laughed discreetly, knowing that we'd never carry a woman's purse like a personal servant, or follow behind  like a Chinese wife.

Less than a year later, she left her boyfriend and came to me.  I had little to do with it, it was all her decision.  While she was a rare beauty, I was nobody's Prince Charming. She was strong willed, independent, and capricious. Soon, she moved on to other boyfriends, and later to multiple husbands.

"That's because you wouldn't volunteer to carry her purse," said my ever wise cousin, but what did he know?

The Opening Sentence

Two days after the election. The topic was crowd control.

- Have you heard of Bulwer-Lytton, he asked?

- Yes, I replied, fiction writer, he's the one who wrote Snoopy's famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night"!

- Well, he wrote a book titled "Public Opinion", about manipulating popular opinions in a democracy.

-  From a 19th century point of view, I asked?

- No, it was written sometime in the 1920s!

- Oh?!

He typed a name into a Google box as I watched him: 'Walter Lippmann'.

Two days earlier, on the election day morning, I attended a sales presentation (called 'a seminar') followed by a complimentary lunch at a local chain Italian restaurant.   The presenter was a small business owner whose last name was Free (!)  These are regular affairs, invitations arrive in the mail every six months, it was the  third time I attended in as many years, I have yet to buy something, and this time I was recognized by one of Mr Free's employees, so I'm burned there now.  Free no more!

During the 90 minute presentation, I learned not only the price ranges of the devices sold by Mr Free's outfit - from $1,000  to as much as $8,000 a pair  (although in many cases only a single one may be required), but also to my surprise that only about 30% of adults 65 years old suffer from hearing loss.

"It was a dark and stormy night" is the opening sentence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel 'Paul Clifford'.

20 Minutes Shorter

Chief Inspector and his deputy Inspector Fox are interviewing a suspect in her home.  The phone rings in the adjoining room, and she asks with a sarcastic tone in her voice if she may be permitted to answer it.  The call is for the Chief Inspector, and he leaves the room, she closes the door behind him, pulls out a cigarette case, lights up a fag (the scene takes place in merry old England), and on second thought offers one to Inspector Fox, who up to this moment stood gazing at a painting on the wall.  He declines.

The cigarette fills the dead time in the narrative while we wait for the Chief Inspector to return.  A common dramatic device in this television mystery production, and the only cigarette to appear during its 100 minutes.

How different from the film noirs of the 1940s!  There, cigarettes and cigarette smoke ruled, and not just in the productions featuring notorious chain smoker on an off screen  Humphrey Bogart.  There wouldn't be film noirs without night scenes, rain, nightclubs, shadows, doom and gloom and cigarettes.  Many cigarettes, always cigarettes.  As dead time fillers, scene stealers, social ice breakers, character descriptors and betrayers, as interludes, symbols, metaphors,  so many things in all those melodramas one can't possibly count them all without seeing again all  those films.  One gets the impression that an average film noir would be up to 20 minutes shorter without cigarettes. Sure, in some scenes the directors apparently cheated, not quite knowing how to resolve a scene they'd order a character to light up a fag.  So what?

And today?  Film noir is dead, cigarettes are mostly out, since if nothing else  their presence affects the official rating status of the movie - no chain smoker can be a hero in a drama rated for the whole family - what can replace cigarettes then as a prop and a dramatic device?

What has at least partly replaced cigarettes as a dramatic device in today's mystery movies is a cellphone.  Partly, because it cannot play all those roles that a cigarette played.  But it can fill a dead space, as we already noted, close or interrupt a scene, and move the action forward.  I have watched some recent films where the cellphone appears as often as a cigarette appeared in film noirs.

And the added benefit or perhaps drawback of having cellphones in a movie is that with the cellphone technology and fashion changing as fast as they have been,  the viewer can quickly place the action of the movie in time, even faster than judging the period by the look of the automobiles present which don't change as fast as these portable telephones.

Class Struggle

I don't make a habit of confessing, or as they say nowadays, sharing my life story to friends, foes and strangers.  Yet, an odd anecdote has sometimes a way of provoking an apropos confession from an interlocutor, as one did this past week during a lunch four of us were having at a Thai restaurant downtown.  D. spoke:

"I was dismissed as too low class by my ex's family, all of them doctors, scientists, Ph.Ds, she herself had a master's degree, while I was a self-taught Silicon Valley computer geek whose piles  of cash and stock options were just not sufficient to satisfy their yearnings for status and respect.  Divorce him, and she did, sayonara!   She later married a Ph.D in something or other and they are happily starving in Santa Cruz now.

After my divorce I ran into a woman I had known during my university days,  she dropped out before graduating and fell into the bohemian lifestyle among artists, hippies, junkies.  We went out for a while before she too dismissed me as too high class, one of the filthy rich, a one percenter.  

You can't make everyone happy!"

Identity

Identity was an idea I was interested in when I was starting art school, said a friend, while we were sipping our lukewarm cappuccinos on a hot October afternoon.  Identity - what you are, what anyone is.  IS, right?  And cannot not be.  Well, I'll never forget when I was told by professors and by fellow students, and this was a widespread opinion there, a truism, you might say, that identity is something you create.

Perceptual Distance

On social media and on news websites that offer the opportunity to comment, users, often appearing under screen nicks, type posts such as these "Congratulations Ms Celebrity on the birth of your child", "Condolences to the Family of the dead Mr Celebrity",  or "Happy Birthday Louis Armstrong", where Ms or Mr Celebrity appear as names of well  known figures.  This is no joke.   These are serious, sincere wishes.   What is going on?

Traditionally such wishes were delivered in person,  or by the postal service, or more recently by electronic mail.   And they were signed  by the sender,  somebody whom the addressee usually knew. And now?

I spoke about it to a friend.  People are posturing, I said to him, showing off their goodness,  even as they hide under nicknames.  No, no, he replied, or perhaps that's  part of it, but there is something deeper going on.   In addition to the celebrity worship, and the fantasy that many have that the celebrities and their private lives about which they know so much are important to themselves personally,  people get lost in this virtual reality of the Internet, as if there was an intelligent  being out there listening to them.

It reminds me of the early years of the cinema, he continued, when audiences spoke to the screen, advising the characters, warning them of dangers lurking.   There was a woman in the town where I grew up who was such a movie aficionado that the movie theater owner gave a free lifetime pass.  Now, this was of course 70 years after the early years of the cinema, and she was known to interact with the screen, shouting "watch out, he's around the corner!", "don't open the door!", and so on. We called her "No Perceptual Distance".  Yes, to this day people shout at their TVs, advise football players on the screen, let their emotions run watching live events, but these wishes typed on a cool medium of a computer are something new.  A virtual reality.

And since when did we start to wish dead people "Happy Birthday", I asked?

Prodigal Son Redux

A friend, who is a published writer, has told me he is writing a story about a prodigal son who returns home to Nebraska only to be rejected by his family and by people of his native town.  I don't know much about him (my friend) other than that he is from Nebraska and is not currently in Nebraska, and I asked him if the story was autobiographical.  He laughed and said that no, it was inspired by a news story he had read in a newspaper about something that happened in New England, "and on what you told me", and he decided to transplant the locale to the places that he knows well.

Following the rejection the principal character first leaves the town, then after some time, months or years, returns to exact his revenge. Whether that part is also based on facts or imagined I am not sure, and my friend didn't explain.  Nor did he explain what it was that I had told him that made it into his story.

92 Years Later

Her name was Hildegarde Nowak, she was a medical doctor and she married my paternal grandfather two years after his first wife, my grandmother died.  They shared their medical office across the street from a hospital at the street address number eleven. Did they also live there with my father who was then 11?  Seven years later my grandfather died and my father became an orphan at 18, starting his law studies.  What happened to Hildegarde I don't know, as I don't know how my grandmother died,or where she is buried.  I have found the location of my grandfather's grave.

All of this more or less, so to speak, information gathered from Internet searches, with little or no certitude. I found the name of Hildegarde Nowak, for example, in a digitized version of a newspaper published in a city some 75 miles from where they lived, four years after they married, and listing the names and addresses of thousands of doctors eligible to vote in the upcoming election of a medical society.

Is there more information to be found in archives of various institutions?  What happened to the records and certificates of births, marriages, deaths, degrees? And if they exist, are they accessible to us, or are they guarded by bureaucrats sitting in forts made of reams of paper?

I suspect I am the last person alive who knows something about Hildegarde Nowak, and certainly the last person who knows something, very little as it happens, about my grandmother.  It's been 94 years since she died.

People say that with today's technology more will be remembered and passed on to future generations.  I doubt it.  Unless you're a Rockefeller, Kennedy, or a famous serial killer, all knowledge about you (and me)  will be gone 92 years from now.

Downtown Madmen

The cafe is a safe place.  Patrons leave their electronics sitting on tables while they visit the restroom, stand in line at the counter or visit their acquaintances at far off tables.  One older regular without a moment  hesitation steps out the door to run errands downtown and stand in a long line at the post office, leaving behind his laptop computer set on top of a strange metal contraption which raises the screen and lowers the keyboard, all of it on top of a corner table which he must claim, I figure, early in the day.

On Thursday last week, I was sitting at a table against the back wall with my friend Roger, telling him jokes that I had found in a book of World War I memoirs, which were told by Hungarian soldiers marching to the Eastern front to be slaughtered in the battle of Rava Ruska during the early days of the war.  The jokes sounded fresh maybe because they were Jewish jokes, the characters in them invariably named Cohen and Weiss.

Roger, another avid reader, who unlike me reads mostly non-fiction, popular science and history books (we like to recommend books to each other and never reach for those recommendations)  but does not treat fiction with disdain as many science obsessed people do these days, was telling me about the languages of New Guinea, dozens or hundreds of them,  still unclassified and unwritten, and dying.

Noah, another regular at the cafe, then left his 17'' Dell laptop on the table near the entrance and walked over to join us.  He began to tell us about the growth of the Arctic ice in the past year or two, some 40%, he had read, all contradicting the disaster prognoses of the past decade.

A man shouting something outside was heard. I could see him from my seat, far out on the street, my companions could only hear him.  He was threatening to kill everybody unless the war was stopped, is what I could make out.  Then, a fire engine siren from the station around the corner sounded, heads turned again, the fire truck followed by an ambulance passed the cafe on the way to the disaster,  and the gentle hum of the cafe returned. Classical music played on the cafe speakers. The three of us continued talking.

A man walked into the cafe and sat down at a table near the entrance, his back towards the room.  I thought I recognized the shouter, but I said nothing.   After a few minutes he got up, approached the counter,  slipped a bill into the tip jar and walked out of the cafe.  We continued our conversation and then Noah returned to his table and his Dell computer. He raised his arms in a sign of frustration. What happened?

It turns out that the man, this mad street shouter, had eaten Noah's sandwich, picked up the dollar bill which Noah had left sitting on the table, and generously tipped the cafe's sandwich maker before going his way.

N not R!

Several ago,  my brother-in-law, one of those dangerous people who having tasted a little of something think themselves the all knowing experts on the subject of this something, attempted to persuade me that some website company would perform genealogical research free of charge for anyone who asked.   I was at the time beginning to become interested in the genealogy of my family having stumbled by accident on a sketchy genealogical chart which included my father and grandfather and was published online by a hobbyist professor at a San Diego, California university.

My brother-in-law convinced himself that the company behind this website would endeavor to fill for us in the holes in my chart and more, and ignoring my protests fed it information about me and my family.  Free of charge. To the website, needless to say!  Which was the point of this suckers' game.  The website, one of many such enterprises, started out collecting information from gullible internauts, only to begin selling it back to them and others once it built its database. Voila!   Neither my brother-in-law nor I have learned anything we hadn't known before.

Meanwhile, I continued my research, all of it on Internet as I reside far from the places where some physical records might still exist that haven't yet been digitized and published on the web.  My parents didn't leave behind much information about their parents and grandparents, and who can blame them - living as they were through tumultuous times they had better matters to worry about than vanity projects like genealogy.

It's been as I said several years. I haven't found much new information, nothing about my mother's side of family, and just a few details about my father's family to supplement the San Diego professor's chart.  My father's mother remains a mystery.  She died when he was young, 9 years old I only recently discovered,  and where she's buried I don't know. His father apparently remarried,  of this second wife I know nothing.   While the San Diego chart shows my grandfather's ancestors all the way back to the beginning of the 18th century,  when it comes to my  grandmother it only states her name and birthplace.

The other day a breakthrough of sorts.  I dug up on one of the genealogical portals the names of my paternal grandmother, her parents and her two sisters.  The records were added in July of this year by a man whose name sounds unfamiliar, and who, according to this portal, maintains 100 profiles there. Another hobbyist?  While the portal promises additional information for the sum of $119.40 per annum (0.40?!),  (and predictably demands your family information when you sign up for the limited free option),  it also displays large font question marks next to most of those details it offers me for free.  In other words,  they ain't got nothing more!

Oh, and in my grandmother's maiden name the 'r' in the San Diego chart is replaced by an 'n' in this new finding.

I took this correction to be correct, but it didn't lead me anywhere. I spent another fruitless day searching the web for new clues, and ended up reminding myself that for information to appear somewhere on the net where it can be found, someone, a live person, has to have a reason to place it there, and then to act on this reason. The search continues.

Droughts

We are experiencing another drought in these lands, a regular, once in a decade disaster here.  A desert will unfortunately  remain a desert underneath all those skyscrapers, shopping centers,  highways, palm trees imported from Mexico and eucalyptus trees from Australia.  News media report that good citizens have been squealing on bad citizens to the authorities.   Bad citizens have been observed by good citizens wasting water sprinkling their lawns, and washing their mega SUV vehicles, and they must be punished. Pavlik Morozov lives!

My own private insignificant drought has come to a temporary hiatus when I stumbled on two real-to-life stories, one of them only a conversation, actually, plus new info regarding my long lost mysterious paternal grandmother.  Now all I have to do is write it all down.

Dandelion Street

Dandelion don't tell no lies
a song line

The were two palm trees growing in  my neighbourhood. Two tall palm trees.   Growing in the backyards of family houses, the house three houses up from mine and the house neighbouring it on the street parallel to ours.   When I stepped out on my front porch and looked back over the roof of the house next door, I saw them there, rain or shine, winter or spring. I took numerous photographs of them whenever the light was interesting, all of the shots from this porch, as this was the best angle to photograph the palms,  unless, of course, I climbed on the roof, which I seldom did, and for reasons other than taking pictures.  Too late now.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the sound of power tools outside.   I walked out to see two Mexican men on top of the palm trees trimming their branches with chainsaws and machetes.   I grabbed my camera.  It turned out that the two property owners decided to cut down the trees because of all the trouble they had caused them, the dry leaves and branches falling,  requiring constant cleanup work,"scaring the children".   The Mexicans climbed the trunks, tools tied to their belts, and worked their way down.  First the top branches, then the trunks, piece by a footlong piece, and by the early afternoon the palm trees were gone, like they had never been there.

How long had they grown here, 50, 100 years?  There is no one here who remembers.  Who planted them?  They were the only palm trees on this block or on the eight blocks that surrender or touch it.  The nearest palm trees, neither one visible from my house, are a half mile up this street, and the other one a half mile down the parallel street.  While there is plenty of greenery around here, a fig tree and a plum tree in neighbours' backyards, dropping fruit on my property, an apple tree on my backyard, there have been more trees cut than planted in my area.

A street named after a flower with no flowers of the kind on it.  Are there oak trees on Oak Street, cedars on Cedar Street?  Grove Street has long been renamed to honour a modern hero and martyr, and only one public person dared to protest, while a local folk singer wrote a song in which he called anyone who referred to the street as "Grove Street", "racist", a modern crime more serious than murder.

There are plenty of palm trees of several varieties in this area which isn't very warm but it's not too cold.  Palm trees surrounding a parking lot of a multiplex theater and an office building in the neighbouring city.  Imported from Mexico 20 years ago.  Seven very long palms on top of the hill where religious colleges Catholic and Protestant reside. Palms here and there in residential neighbourhoods.  Palm trees are a commodity, bought, sold and apparently stolen, which makes me wonder why the two on my block weren't sold.  Perhaps removing them safely from the backyards  of family homes would have been too dangerous and too expensive, requiring helicopters and special equipment. Perhaps this variety isn't worth much.

Now, when I step out on the front porch the momentary illusion of paradise that the two palm trees produced is no more.




P.S. There is no Dandelion Street.

Profiles

A huge SUV shown in a movie made 10 years ago looks like it could have come out of a General Motors factory yesterday.  On the other hand, technological gizmos handled by the actors appear positively antique.  Was that the case with the movies made in, say, 1955, and watched ten years later?  But I digress.

I've returned to watching movies on Netflix.  As before, I'd prefer seeing films with some artistic ambition, but either there aren't many of those available, or I don't know where to look, and the usual critic and audience favorites don't interest me much.   So I queue up adventure flicks, James Bonds, films where bad guys chase Harrison Ford, or he chases them, where Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro play gangsters, and similar fare.   I rate them all generously when asked at the end of each projection, and a Netflix algorithm immediately suggests others of similar kind. And I still keep looking.

That reminded me of what happens behind the scenes, so to speak.  Netflix, as well as shopping sites and all social media sites collect information about our choices and behaviour online and compose profiles of each and everyone of us.  These profiles serve their mercantile purposes, help them in making suggestions, and are sold to their advertisers who in turn make their suggestions to us.  Whether they are psychological profiles or strictly product oriented profiles, and whether they are shared and consequently "improved" by their compilers, I do not know.   I do know, am pretty certain that they are seldom if ever examined by human eyes, and only serve imperfect computer program algorithms.   In other words, for now we are safe.

But a psychological profile that doesn't focus strictly on product choices, but on what these choices say about the buyer would be of interest to government agencies and perhaps to insurance companies.   Who is the person who watches violent thrillers, spy dramas, detective stories, visits anarchist and religious websites, and orders rolls of duct tape online, a macro photo lens and a shortwave radio receiver?   What does my profiles or profile say or suggest about me that I don't know myself?  A word to the wise: be careful out there.

Pretty Eyes and the Three Dollar Bill

"OK, I'm leaving at last,  you won't see me again!" I said to the woman, the manager there, and I stepped out of the office carrying my backpack. At least, that's how I remember it happened.  Outside I realized I had forgotten my photo camera and returned back to my old desk, where I discovered that the camera was already in the backpack. Oops! I retreated and, unfortunately, I ran into her walking to the elevator.   She saw me again, but said nothing.

Downstairs, I opened the front glass door to see that it was raining hard. I noticed George W. Bush standing under the awning, wearing a blue raincoat, probably waiting for a ride.  Laura will drive up a big olde SUV and pick him up, I figured, and wondered if they would mind giving me a ride to the station.  Then, a big olde SUV was turning from the avenue into the driveway when the rain suddenly stopped, and I proceeded to the path, two young women right behind me.

I asked them where they worked, and they said at the top floor, and explained the technology they were working on.  They must have arrived with the last corporate takeover, I thought.   I told them that I had been laid off two years earlier but somehow managed to hang around doing occasional and part time work until today when the gig finally ended  for good. Where do you live, I asked the taller woman. "In Napa," she said. "That's a long commute."

I started running along the avenue toward the station as I usually did, and the women were running behind me. I sped up wanting to lose them but they managed to keep up.   We arrived at the traffic light where you cross the avenue southward toward the station.  The light changed and we crossed together to the other side where we had to walk under construction scaffolding. There was a minor traffic jam there, some disabled people on wheelchairs were blocking the way and we had to wait, then squeeze in around them.

I found myself right beside the taller, prettier woman with large blue eyes. I told her, "You have pretty eyes".   We kept on walking. Suddenly our faces were close to each other, side by side, and I saw that she was as tall as me, maybe even a half  an inch taller.   She asked, "Are we going to stay at this stage?" and  I replied, "I want to see you again". She repeated "I want to see you again."  I wondered how my being unemployed would affect this acquaintance.

We arrived at the station and approached the ticket dispensing machine.  A couple of drunken old men were sitting on top of it and chattering.  I told them to shut up.   The taller woman wanted to buy a $20 ticket and inserted a $10 bill into the machine first.  I moved closer with the idea that I'll trade her second $10, and insert my 1, 2 and (2) 3 dollar bills that a bookseller had declared counterfeit before all this happened when I tried to buy two books for $7 each and he sold me one returning these bills.  Now by mistake the back of my right hand pressed a wrong button and the machine spat out a $10 ticket.   What to do now?  While I thought of a way to still get one $20 ticket instead of two $10 tickets, my bladder called and woke me up.   I got out of bed upset and depressed that the dream turned out to be only a dream.

Throughout the day I looked at women I passed in the store and on the street trying to match the face I saw in the dream, which didn't remind me of anyone I know.   In the afternoon, I walked past a McDonald's, and sitting by the window an older black man waved to me as if he knew me, and knew me well.  I didn't recognize him, but waved back nonetheless.

Jumping

"Never before have I wanted to jump inside a book and strangle the main character."  

This from a one star Amazon review of this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction.  One of those sentences that says so much so well in so few words that you wish you had said it yourself.

Mem'ries

I don't look for jokes, they find me.  It's true. Last time I looked for a joke, it had to be about cowboys, to send to a friend an MC at a cowboy concert, I went to joke websites and found nothing funny, but the very next day I read a review of some book that quoted a joke which I copied and forwarded to him.

On Sunday, a good joke found me and before I repeated it to anyone, two more arrived on Monday, the last one asking why a German must take two Viagra pills.  On Tuesday I forgot the one from Monday, and tried every trick to recall it.  Was it about somebody walking in the bar? Was it about passengers on an airplane with one too few parachutes, was it about a Jew and a priest?  None of the above. I tried single images: women, politicians, hunters.  Nothing worked.  No template I applied jerked my memory to remember the Sunday joke.  I couldn't remember where I had read it. I gave up and  began to worry about the usual age and memory related illnesses.  I'll have to write them down in the future, I decided, something I had never had to do in the past.

This morning I went to the fruit and vegetable market to buy a few things and to discover how prices shot up in just one week, I glanced at the stand with organic bananas, and it clicked.  Yes, the joke had a banana in it! In fact, the banana spoke the punch line.  It all came back.  The entire joke.

Then I realized that I had forgotten the second joke while  I still remembered the short one about the German.  I walked past the carrots (also organic), and remembered that there was a carrot in it.  No, the carrot didn't speak, but the hare certainly did.

All's well. Until the next time.

P.S. I still haven't written them down.

Conversing

Last week we talked about the short attention span of  current generations (which needless to say include ourselves.)  Blame television, computers, smartphones, overload of information, there is nothing original about this disturbing observation.  My friend noted how long conversations have disappeared from most human interactions.   People exchange bon mots, one liners,  clever remarks, like the characters they see  in TV sitcoms. I couldn't disagree (we nevertheless conversed for a couple of hours.),

Today, in the same cafe where I read whatever volume of fiction I have grabbed off the shelf that day, sipping my Earl Grey tea, sitting among  a dozen or two of students, seniors, all of them staring at the screens of their laptop computers,  mostly Apple Macs, it was crowded, final exams are near, I noticed a couple of youngish people, a man and a woman, both about 25 years old, sitting at one of the two large tables there that can accommodate a half a dozen people each, two older women with computers beside them, this young pair conversing the entire time I was there, two full hours, they were there when I arrived and when I left, they had no laptop computers in front of them like everyone else around except myself, smartphones sitting on the table, unused except as sort of pacifiers, turning them over, up and down in their hands, the way older generations in olden times would occupy their hands with pencils or pens, and talking the whole time, the young woman facing in my direction, pretty, long hair, no makeup, large eyes which she often turned up toward the ceiling as if concentrating or seeking inspiration, her eyes showing the largest whites I have ever seen,  totally absorbed in the conversation, unaware of being observed or of anything going on in the cafe or outside its wide windows on the busy sidewalk, except as mentioned the ceiling or maybe the fans turning beneath it.  I was sitting too far from them to hear what they were saying, classical music playing on the speakers as always, and I only managed to determine that they were speaking Russian like native speakers.

Impossibility of Knowing

A friend told the author that for years she had observed a particular couple in a cafe every day.  Then one day, the couple stopped coming, and as it turned out the man had been killed.   The story became the seed of a novel  titled  "Los enamoramientos" which has been translated as "the Infatuations". The author Javier Marias, the narrator, for the first time in Marias' novels a woman, the themes, those occupying Marias in all his novels, love, death, loyalty and betrayal, impossibility of knowing, as he says in an interview
"the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure."

I have read all of Marias' recent novels translated into English, and have just ordered A Man of Feeling, which he says is the first work where he developed his digressive style, and I must say that I have not yet read a more fascinating writer of such power, who gets to the core of things, and whose prose hits so very close to home as to become disturbing, sometimes forcing me to step back in the middle of a novel to take a breath and distract myself with some other author's writing, as happened a month or so ago, and again last night when I returned to the third volume of his masterpiece Your Face Tomorrow.


But let's stay with the main theme, which Marias says in an interview published on Youtube, has been a theme of all literature, the impossibility of knowing.   I know.  As I return in memory to things that happened to me in recent times and a long time ago, things like stumbles and failures, but also successes, I cannot honestly say why and how they came to be, I cannot to begin guessing the motivations and reasons of other people involved, and this can be particularly painful when one thinks of the defeats that somehow came my way all too often, or so I tend to think.  No, the truth is that I have been guessing at the others' motivations and I haven't reached any conclusions, just questions that I cannot ask of anyone, theories based on thin evidence, conjectures and fantasies. And why I behaved one way or another might have been clear to me at the time, but was it right, or should I have done something different, and if I had would the result have been different?

Words Forgotten

In the first volume,  Fear and Spear, of the three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow (page 85), a retired Oxford don Peter Wheeler experiences a sudden blockage and cannot find the word for the object he's asking the narrator to bring him.  It's not an age thing, we learn, just a momentary slip, something that happens to all of us, he calls it "momentary aphasia" and it happens to him with "the most stupid words", he says.   The word in question was "cushion".

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend and he was telling me how up until the 1950s , 1960s Americans had a common culture, references they all shared, agreed upon and understood.  This is no longer the case, we both agreed, and to describe it I sought a word that just wouldn't come eluding me completely.  I used some poor substitute, which I no longer remember, and then, an hour later, the topic long past, we were parting,  by a stroke of luck I somehow managed to avoid the familiar l'esprit d'escalier  experience by remembering the verb "to disperse". Yes, the culture became dispersed, I said.  But no, I later realized that a better word would have been "fragmented", and still not the word I needed.  I searched the Thesaurus and found nothing better.

Until three days ago, when I was reading Decoded by Mai Jia, where I found my word.  The following day, I tried to recall  the sentence in which it appeared, and I searched the book backwards 5 pages from where I had stopped, reading it forward, then 10 pages, again reading forward, then 15 and 20, until frustrated I gave up to return to my bookmark, when I found it one page back (202), where an epigraph from some book (non-existent) that the main character had bought is quoted saying (while describing  genius):

Like any other treasure in the world, they are delicate, fragile as a newly planted bud; once hit they crack; once cracked they fracture. 

Places, events, people

Yesterday, I learned that a place I last visited a decade ago, had dramatically changed.  It didn't wait for me, it didn't ask my opinion or permission, it just changed.

Somehow, places don't wait for us, don't long to see us, don't miss us.   You can hug and kiss the Eiffel Tower, but the Eiffel Tower won't hug and kiss you back because the Eiffel Tower doesn't know you and  doesn't care. People like to leave their palm or foot  prints on the freshly poured cement sidewalks to mark forever (they hope) their passing presence there, or they walk the paths that famous men walked years or centuries before them to feel what it was like, and still the places don't care.  Over the years, I watched a man living two streets over from me become old and die, his descendants then selling his house, and the neighbourhood forgetting he ever existed.  I may be now or soon will be the last person here remembering him.

A jazz festival is taking place in Bremen, Germany this weekend, Jazzahead it is called in English, and if you were there, come Sunday evening you'd have to pack up your things and head for home.  And if you weren't there, the festival would have gone on without you just the same, and would not miss your presence.   When I traveled to professional conferences, 3, 5 days in far away cities, I usually stayed at the conference venue until the last hour, attending the last sessions, after most of the participants had already departed for the airport, while I didn't want the conference to ever end.

If you've lived long enough in a metropolitan area somewhere on the planet, you might have acquired friends and acquaintances all over the world.  Presumably, they would be happy to see you where they live now, to buy you a drink, to show you around, and to tolerate your presence for a day or two. That's all fine, but you need someone to tolerate your presence all day every day.

Deep

It's an old story of a young man putting down a book he has finished reading, saying to himself "I can write better than that", proceeding to write, and eventually becoming a published writer world famous.  Many artists in all disciplines of art have gone to glory the same way.  That said, this is not the path you would follow if all you considered was the highest art, Rembrandt, Artur Rubinstein or Proust.  Seeing, hearing, reading the works of the masters can sometimes only discourage one from proceeding.  One can never measure up. No, I couldn't do better than that.  A different motivation must be found.

It isn't very difficult to create or  fake meaning in film and in photography.  Do you remember the shots of fog, rain, long shadows, vast empty prairies, and then the dramatic musical score, and how they all affected your emotions in a dark cinema? Filmmaking is a collaborative art, and the film director works with partners, script writers, directors of photography, composers, to assist him in creating moving pictures that carry or suggest some meaning.  But other than what was said in the dialogues, what was the meaning, what did the film tell us if anything?

I've been aware of these tricks and techniques for a long time, and perhaps it was  this knowledge that steered me  into photography and filmmaking.  But when in my wanderings I see interesting scenes and in a matter of seconds or sometimes minutes I press  the shutter of my still camera, and later edit the photos in a computer program the same way as I would correct them in a darkroom, no more than that, no Photoshop tricks, I don't know, I can't tell what if anything they convey and mean. Let the viewer decide.  What do the Richard Avedon portraits mean?  Or the million dollar Andreas Gursky photographs?  Is photography then a viewer's medium? The photographer suggests (or perhaps fakes), and the viewer makes up the meaning?

Since this is written word, let's return to it.  I have ideas for several short stories, and doubts about writing them down as I read in my spare time not the penny dreadfuls, not the airport bookstore literature, not Harry Potter, but top shelf literary works by acclaimed writers, writer's writers and other masters.  No, I couldn't do better than any of them, I'm thinking, as I struggle with my ideas searching for deeper meaning in them, and falling short unable to reach the profound insights and depth that these writers I read can so casually toss about.

Taking Care

Future Islands is a rock trio which suddenly shot up to the top after a recent appearance on David Letterman's television show (Youtube has it. It must be seen!)  Subsequently, the Google Play service filmed a promotional clip featuring the members of the band staring directly into the camera and answering questions about themselves .   They come out unpretentious and quite normal.

At one point, the lead singer Samuel Herring, asked what he misses, mentions his (presumably deceased) dog and says "She took care of me."  Hearing it, I though that only an artist could say such a thing.   She took care of me.  And only a pedant or a cynic would dismiss it, or demand an explanation.

In taking care of others, especially those unable to take care of themselves, like children or domestic animals, we let them take care of ourselves.  And only when we no longer have anyone to take care of, we must be literally and not metaphorically taken care of.

At one time I took care of her expecting nothing in return, but she betrayed me, went away and I never saw her again. I did in the end receive nothing. Perhaps  instead of expecting nothing I should have demanded everything.

The Translation

You can't complain that the world has forgotten you, when you yourself have forgotten the world.  My mobile phone, an antique model commonly called a flip phone, as opposed to the modern miracle preferred by the masses, a smartphone,  on the rare days when its battery is charged, seldom if ever rings, making powering it off unnecessary when visiting doctor's offices or cinemas.  The land line telephone, which connects to my house never touching land, at least not in its last half mile, rings every hour, voices offering me a new house roof, home improvement loans, presumably to finance the new roof, hearing aids (if I needed a hearing aid, would I be able to hear the hearing aid salesman's voice?), and other items I should not be able or allowed to live without.

Then, just yesterday afternoon, the land line telephone rang, I picked it up, and a female voice said: "Hullo Lucas, this is your aunt Cecilia from Sydney!  How are you?", the voice sounding as if we had last spoken a few days earlier, when in actuality, we had spoken some twenty years ago, and then about trivial matters over a bad connection.  I decided to use my best Rodney Dangerfield line in response, and said, "I'm fine now, Aunt Cecilia, but the last couple of weeks have been rough!"

"Oh, I'm sorry to heard that," said she, "Spring fever?"

"No, you must remember that it is fall in our hemisphere now."

Silence. Laughter.

"Your late mother told me you were a comedian."

"More like a clown without a circus. So, what's up, or shall I say, down in your upside down world?"

"It's you who's upside down, my dear," said Aunt Cecilia.

I hoped that next she'd tell me "I'm dying and decided to leave my interest in the diamond mines to you." I've never met aunt Cecilia, who's only a few years older than me, and whose exact relationship I'm not sure of, although it's been explained to me several times, remembering only that she's not my mother's sister like a regular aunt would be.   We're related, that's enough. She had married an Australian millionaire and moved there decades ago.

"I've got a favour to ask," she said, and I could swear I heard the British spelling of the word "favour" with the letter 'u'.

"Your wish is my command," I said, the diamond mine fortune still in the back of my mind.

"I have here an article you wrote in a Spanish film magazine, and I'd like to translate it and publish it here.  Do you have the English original handy?"

She told me the title.

"That one?  Oh, I wrote it in Spanish years ago," I lied.

"You speak Spanish?  I didn't know," she said.

"I was joking.  I'll have to look for it through my papers."

So aunt Cecilia was doing Spanish translations in her spare time now.  Certainly not to support herself, I figured.  The article in question was about a Russian film pioneer whose grandson I happened to meet and interview in New York.  When writing about historical figures you must strive to find an original angle, an impossible task when everything has already been said, or preferably a source which adds new information to what is already known about this figure, if you want somebody to publish the piece.  I got lucky that time.  How it ever got published in Spain, I don't remember.

"What exactly do you have in mind, if I may ask?" I said.

"Well, since you have the original English version, it would save me time and effort to use it as my translation.  If you don't object.  You'll get paid anyway"

I didn't object, and I started searching for a copy of the old article.

Fiction

I met a well dressed man today.  "Do you remember me?" he asked.  Although I recognized him at once after many years, I replied, "I don't know any prematurely balding men!"  He then said his name, which I had actually forgotten. It sounded Russian, ending in "itch", or perhaps "ish", but he pronounced it with an accent I thought sounded German.  "Ah, yes", I said, "You are the one who ordered his sister to break up with me."

People think that other people's wounds are mere scratches which heal quickly leaving no scars. The only cuts which don't leave scars are those made by a skilled surgeon, a specialist who hadn't seen you before, won't see you again, and presumably has no personal feelings about you one way or another. I've had such cuts. The man I met should have known about the nature of surgical cuts since his and his sister's father was a heart surgeon.

Mysteries

I was in a race one time, one that I could have won if I had followed the right strategy, because being the fastest is not enough when your competition (if any) is just as fast.  I didn't win, I'm still not sure why, I might have been too fast when I should have slowed down, or too slow when I should have speeded up, the strategy failed me, I hadn't followed it or completely forgot about it.

There are fantasy worlds created by writers of fantasy and science-fiction novels that you as a reader would like to visit or move to permanently.  And there are worlds created by writers of mainstream, realistic fiction that work in a similar way on one's imagination,  and while lacking the recognizable fantastic elements of those other genres,  when you think about it, they are these worlds as much fantasy as the others.  Not even journalism can relate a truly realistic picture of the world.  And then, there are the worlds of folk fantasies, and I'm talking about modern folk fantasies, those invented usually by city bound folks who serve us various private theories when unexplainable events happen.  Some of them are paranoid conspiracy theories, others vivid reflections of their creators' cheap reading and movie viewing habits, and most suggest a world controlled by some dark forces, a world you wouldn't want to visit or to move to live permanently.

Other people's craziness, mental and emotional states, issues and problems tend to be perfectly clear to us, with perfect and obvious solutions, only if we ourselves have gone through them and managed to resolve them for better or worse.  Otherwise, they are incomprehensible mysteries.

The Secrets of a Happy Life

I've long wanted to live on Cypress Avenue in the city of Belvedere.  No, it's not about a specific place, but about the names alone that stir my imagination.  Belvedere, from Italian, is of course a structure designed to command a view. It is also the name of an exclusive community-town in these parts.  I don't know if there is a Cypress Avenue in this Belvedere.

'Cypress Avenue', on the other hand, was a track on Van Morrison's classic LP album Astral Weeks, an album which took me a while to appreciate when it came out, and then only after I heard Morrison's next, more accessible album Moondance.  An acquired taste, Astral Weeks was.

There is a one city block short Cypress Street, which I passed walking home today, and which reminded me of these absurd longings.  There is also a Belvedere Street in our neighbourhood, which doesn't offer interesting views, but perhaps it did a century ago or so when it was first established and was surrounded by fields.

What I share with my frequently seen acquaintances are memes and private jokes that just the two of us understand, as they recall some earlier good times, earlier jokes or quasi-philosophical observations, and are now repeated under new conditions and contexts to brighten up the day and to re-establish the bond between us.  Some recent ones:  "You already know how to fish!", "Don't be so humble, you're not that great!"  There are others.

Seeing a BMW and Benz one after another zipping through a corner STOP sign yesterday afternoon during that walk I mentioned above,  I wondered if people who run STOP signs so cavalierly have better lives than mine, who doesn't (run STOP signs), and if they do, why.  (Life's not fair!) Perhaps the secret of a happy life lies in a character trait which includes among its manifestations a casual disregard for common rules.

Oasis

The sky is always blue, and the air warm but never too hot.  A gentle breeze blows from the desert in the evening.  Days are long and filled with pleasant things.  Nutritious, well prepared meals are served at regular hours, and refreshing drinks are available throughout the day and evening.   The library is stocked with classics in your native language. Works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere,  Twain, Dumas, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hasek are all there.  There is no television and no Internet, the mobile phone coverage does not reach here, neither do newspapers with their gossip, news of tragedies and disasters, petty political disputes, and their relentless self-congratulatory campaigns for ill defined social justice and goodness,  but the radio plays classical music uninterrupted by commercial announcements 24 hours a day.  A second radio channel plays acoustic folk music of various cultures, while all the remaining radio frequencies transmit nothing but static or silence.

No one among us is complaining.  The staff, who also live here, are young, multilingual, enthusiastic and always ready to fulfill our wishes. A  doctor and his two nurses are on duty should you need care or medications.  I spend many of my afternoons exercising in the well equipped modern  gym, and lap swimming in the Olympic size swimming pool.  During evenings, I read and scribble notes to myself.  Or play a game of chess or Go with some of the others.

From the rooftop of our fine hotel, where we play badminton or relax in Swedish made lounge chairs, and from the nearby hill where we take our after dinner walks in the shade of palm and eucalyptus trees, you can see through the desert mist the distant airport landing strip and an outline of the Boeing 777 jet that brought all of  us 239 here landing gently  in the desert after disappearing from radar over the ocean.  It is undergoing repairs, and when they are finished, in a week, month or perhaps a year or two, no one knows when, and no one seems anxious about it or in much of a hurry, it'll fly us back to where we came from. In the meantime, and I think I can speak for all of us here, we are happy at last.

Metaphysics

Sometimes people stumble inadvertently on deep philosophical truths.  Well, maybe not deep but interesting.  Consider this.  A store has a printed sign on its door which says:

A dog

Carried in your arms

Into the store

Is still

A DOG

Why hasn't anyone until now thought of expressing such overlooked truism in writing?

Or this.  Ten days after the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 no solid clues have emerged, and those disclosed during the first days, such as alleged ascent of the aircraft to the height of 45,000 feet have since been discounted. The media and the Internet are filled with "experts" and amateurs explaining to the world their sincerely felt theories, every one of them wilder than the next one. (Side effect of popular bad literature and movies.)

One such theory I've encountered asked why the U.S. president has been so "strangely" quiet about this incident, and concluded (it wasn't explained how!) that the silence indicated  the president knew much more than he was saying, knew what happened, and knew where the airplane was.

This inspired me to generalize this theory into a universal observation,  omitting the details of the incident and the person of the current president,  which with time regardless of the outcome of the mystery will become obsolete and irrelevant, and I arrived at this:

Nobody is saying anything, therefore they know everything!

Cat's Life

The cat leaves the house through the cat door, stays out for hours, comes back soaking wet, meowing loudly, as if to tell me about his adventures outside during the hours that I sat in front of the screen or read another book recommended to me by a newspaper critic, wondering what he (the critic, not the cat!) had seen in it that I still don't after 300 pages.  All this on a rainy day and night of the rainy season that has just been declared a draught by the government that constantly weighs and measures such things to make our lives better, it tells us, because what else is the government for, except to weigh, measure and dictate.  The cat leads a more interesting life  getting wet down there a few inches off the ground than I five feet higher all warm and dry.  If we could only communicate better.

And so, driven by some invisible, unexplainable force, I plug in her name, a name that I can barely remember how to spell, plug it into the Internet search engine, for the first time in I don't know how many years, or maybe for the first time ever, and find nothing about her, but much about her namesakes in various places around the world, because her full name is not unique, a doctor in Hollywood,  somebody in New Jersey,  Netherlands, a grave some place unspecified, the buried person eerily the same age as she would have been today.   On the other hand, I am with my unique name, all over the Internet,  I couldn't lie about my age, address or history without you finding out the truth using the same search engine, but she and others my age are nowhere to be found.

Personal computers have been around for 30 years, Internet for 20, and we, alive today,  not too old to be computer phobic, can still be totally absent from the online world.  And yet.  Maybe she's passed away, or lives as an anthropologist with the natives in some jungle.  Whoever wants to find me, can find me, and yet no one of my contemporaries does.  That's all right, I don't look for them either.

One of the few advantages of growing old away from the place where you grew up is that you avoid seeing those you grew up around pass away, become forgotten as if they never existed.

Dream Backwards

Dear J.

              Please forgive me for lying during the time of your visit when we stopped at the vista point of the famous bridge.  You remember that it was a sunny and windy day (it's always windy there),  you were wearing my overcoat and we were holding hands like a pair of teenagers. There were many other tourists there, we heard several foreign languages, constant clicks of camera shutters.  I was pointing out to you  sights of interest across the bay, when a middle aged couple approached us and the man asked a direct question that immediately identified him as American: "How long have you been married?", and I answered "Thirty years", even though we are not nor have been married. (Yet!)  He then said "I've been married twenty eight years.  We're from Iowa, where are you from?", and I answered saying "Chicago", even though I live here, and you have never left our hometown of Philadelphia.   I've been to Chicago enough times to be able to invent a home address and the name of a school where we would have sent our children, should he ask, but he didn't.   Then, his wife, I assume the woman was his wife, said, "It's awfully windy out here," and I momentarily forgot my false tourist identity and told her "It's always windy here," but immediately  realizing my mistake, I added "I read in the guidebook. Fodor's."  Yes, Fodor's. Always remember to decorate your lie with one incontrovertible truth.

Later in the car, you said you didn't like my lies, didn't understand why I had to lie.   What should I have told them? That we had been married and divorced from others, that our own love died thirty years ago to find us again only recently, that we each had had our share of disappointments and tragedies, betrayals and defeats, conflicts, intrigues and despair?  This couple returned to Iowa telling their friends there about a nice pair from Chicago they had met, who still loved each other after thirty years of marriage,  and what's wrong with that?!

I wish we had been married for thirty years, don't you?  But you can't dream backwards.

I send you all my love, hoping to see you soon,

Yours,

K.

Vanishing

Another acquaintance of mine has disappeared.  I asked people who knew him about it,  and they just shrugged.  Maybe they know and don't trust me enough to say, but the man is gone.  It happens all the time.   I'm thinking that perhaps it is my particular circumstances where people vanish, relationships break up suddenly, and that it is only me, my world that's constructed this way.

Because in the novels I read things like this don't happen, or when they do,  readers and reviewers complain about dangling, incomplete plots.  Life flows in literary works without constant crashes, without ends before the last page, without black holes.  In my own life, plots tend to stop suddenly, and when that happens, there is nothing to write home about. Is it just me, you then ask?  What did I do wrong?  What should I have done instead? Etc, etc.

It's different in popular songs. There, perhaps it is the short format that allows it.


Little Richard:
I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight.
I asked my friends about her but all they did was sigh

Carole King:

So far away

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

The Speed of Time

We were reading, my comedian friend and I, an article about Hong Kong physicists who said they had proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel an impossibility, when it occurred to me, a science ignoramus, that if said photons could be slowed down (they never said it was impossible), then time could proceed forward as before, while we along with our photons could stay behind travelling backwards in time, the only problem in view of the above finding would be returning back to the present, if we so desired.   Which  remark provoked my unknown comedian friend into asking, "what's the speed of time?".  I immediately wrote this phrase down, the way songwriters write down often banal phrases they hear for eventual future uses in song lyrics.   This particular one would fit perfectly into David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period.

And then it occurred to me that it is perhaps the comedians who more often than scientists stumble intentionally or by accident into deeper truths.   I was watching an appearance of a well known standup comic on a television talk show, and he asked (rhetorically) about people who sit in the audience of various events filming the stage with their smartphones.   They are watching the performance on a tiny screen, to watch the shaky results later on a bigger screen at home,  and this after paying high price for the tickets, to be there, when they're actually not completely there, he was saying. This reminded me of the time when I met an Israeli man while we were both traipsing through some European city playing tourists, and he explained that he, alone among the thousands of other sightseers  there, did not carry a camera, because he wanted to see the place through his own eyes and not through the camera viewfinder.

If all of the above is not terribly interesting, then know that there is a small proud town somewhere in the state of Oregon called Boring.

Ventilator

You can't be too careful when trying to avoid tempting the Devil into sending your way a ventilator of anger and rage.  A victim of murder narrates "Sunset Boulevard", the 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder,  there have been other movies and novels employing the dead man narration, and I suppose that if one was anticipating being murdered, he could write an up-to-the-minute story, the only problem being how to liberate the manuscript from the hands of the murderer. Howard Hughes and Charles Foster Kane are two people who ended their lives with nothing and nobody around them, and only with piles of money. A diplomat published a novel he spent a period of a dozen years writing, and which, he says, does not contain a sentence that didn't come with great difficulty.

A dream.  No one was interested in going so I went alone, and as soon as I sat down in the audience, I forgot why I was there.   I must have read something about the performers that drew me to this event.  A woman sitting next to me said that during the previous evening an old singer appeared, and she was there.  I knew this man when he was starting up, a subsequent one hit wonder, who somehow managed to stay in the limelight.  She said that he told her he was now a millionaire film director, but I'll have to check if that is true.  The performers then all came in a group of a dozen or so, they weren't musicians, and some of them sat down near me.  They divided the audience into groups and I found myself in a group with several of these performers.   We were shown pictures of regions of the world, physical maps as opposed to political, those multi-colored maps illustrating various characteristics of the land, yellow for deserts,  green for forests,  jungles and prairies,  beige for hilly terrains and dark brown for high mountains.  Each map had the names of major cities printed and strangely enough, it showed its region in complete isolation from the surrounding areas which were printed blank.  We looked at all these pictures and then there was an intermission.

After the intermission we were assembled in new groups, and my group stepped inside a roomy, dark bus to work.   We were given the task to identify the regions in the new set of pictures which were duplicates of the maps we had seen previously, except that all the identifying names had been changed into meaningless words.   We set out to work.  I got the idea to consult Google to find physical maps of Earth's regions and sought to find matches comparing the shapes of the regions.  I didn't succeed, but someone in the group did in the end  identify just one of the pictures correctly.

Voices

Found art. I  found this poem (?) on the narrow path which cuts across parking lots and a park leading from the train station through and to the residential areas. It was written on the  inside (!) of a torn blue envelope, one of those that are sent to all addresses every several weeks containing "valuable" coupons from car repair shops, smog check stations, pizza parlors, hearing aid vendors and other local businesses. There was no room to write anything on the envelope's face or back which contained more advertising, and even one half of its  inner side was covered by small print explaining the rules of some sweepstakes, so the clean inside had to suffice for whoever wrote this text.  I picked it up, read it, started walking, then thought better of it, stopped, pulled out  an old envelope out of my backpack, copied the poem to it, and set the original on the utility box by the path, a small rock on top of it, the owner might return to retrieve it, as it didn't look discarded and only lost.  I'll come back later to see if it's still there.  It said:


You ask if I speak to voices in my head
I have no voices in my head
No voices anywhere
I  speak to ears that don't hear
To heads that won't listen.

Emotional Megaphone

People seek a way to express their strong emotions. A release valve. And sometimes they find an emotional megaphone.   Thanks to modern computer technology a megaphone may be used over long distances, across continents and oceans. Megaphone is not a  tool of dialogue, it goes without saying.

She said, wrote on a computer keyboard "We must talk." I answered, also via a keyboard, "Talk, I'm listening."  Some people, even in face to face encounters, will approach you to say  "We need to talk" and wait for your answer, assent, or god knows what. Well, we're talking already, why the prelude?  And so, I answered "Talk, I'm listening."  But that's not what she had in mind. "Call me on Skype!" she demanded in Arial font.  Skype is a computer program, one of several such programs available,  which allow people to communicate face to face across distances using a computer camera and microphone. A visual telephone.  Listen to the other person speak while staring at his pimples, bad teeth, thinning hair, and judging his reactions to what you say by studying the pattern of his blinking.

I don't recall how I came to suspect what was up, it all happened a long time ago, I do remember that there were no other hints, but I decided that it would be prudent to avoid a face to screen confrontation, and I wrote that the camera of my computer wasn't operational, please write instead.   And she did.

She wrote on Skype, which can be used to pass written messages, awkwardly but it is possible, so why not use e-mail?!  And it was as I had anticipated a stream of angry  accusations, threats, warnings, all in semi-literate sentences, from this highly educated family member who took upon herself to judge my behaviour in matters which did not concern her, or affect her in any way, and was (my behaviour) innocuous, moral and perfectly legal.    I didn't respond, knowing that an emotional megaphone can only be provoked into greater fury if one only peeps a shy reply.

That was only a beginning, a prelude to a longer saga which is itself  a sad story for another occasion.

63 Friends and Other Dreams

I have 63 friends.  I'd prefer that the number were a prime number, but at least it is divisible by 3, and it'll change sooner or later anyway.  Actually, both words, 'have' and 'friends' ought to be surrounded by double quotation marks.  These are, if you haven't already guessed, Facebook "friends".  I know and have met a handful of them, and most of those reside thousands of miles from here.   Several of them are my former workmates residing in the area,  they're mostly inactive online, none of the active ones will communicate with me directly,  one's reputation after leaving a workplace takes a major hit.

Two I have known for decades.  Two are younger brothers of old friends who I hadn't known had brothers, one of them my oldest friend who passed away three years ago, the other a public figure who cannot expose himself on online social media.  So I have those two guys' brothers!

Most of those friends are people who asked me to friend them, on recommendation of some other friend, especially the hyperactive brother of the public person.  A man from Switzerland asked to friend me last week, I don't know who he is, he posts in German, and I figure must be a friend of my Swiss friend.   Others who asked to friend them have been musicians,  none except one widely known, all excellent and underappreciated, and I feel honored that they decided to connect, even if motivated by commercial reasons.   Two of these musicians are quite active, and we've had some lively exchanges, that could theoretically lead to actual friendships if we ever met.

And the one musician who is widely known and who asked to friend me a few weeks ago is none other than "Bob Dylan", if you can believe it. I can't and suspect it is an employee or a grandchild of the artist.  

I joined Facebook only because a member of my extended family named Carmen, the only name of a friend I will mention beside Bob Dylan's, with whom I had a one time business transaction, told me that she communicated via Facebook and I could take it or leave it.

All of the above leads to a darker conclusion, which was actually a preamble that started this arithmetic meditation late last night, long and sleepless for whatever reasons, and as I often do I reverse the order of things.   The conclusion was the cold hard truth that I have lost everyone, or that everyone has lost me, and that is a plain fact without any tears, regrets or accusations.

Someone in the house told me that she had phoned me during my absence and that my brother-in-law Tommy took the message.  I found Tommy in the basement hanging up his laundry on the line.  She told him to ask me to call her back.  Why, I wondered, we had broken up, there was nothing more to say, no leftover business to conduct.   I decided to call her only because I think one should  return all phone calls.  I had trouble finding her number on my cell phone, dialed it, she answered, noise on the line, sound of music, I had to say "Hello" three times before she spoke up and asked me if I understood why we had broken up?  More static on the line, a singer in the background singing in Portuguese, I could barely hear her and asked her to repeat the question.  She said that I should understand those reasons.  She didn't say what they were, and I answered asking rhetorically why it mattered, it didn't matter to me if I understand or not, no I don't understand and don't know why, and I realize that knowing and understanding won't change things, won't affect history, present or future.  The singer was singing another song, she didn't say anything, where are you I asked, who are you with, she didn't answer, the song continued, I waited for her to answer but she didn't and I woke up with the song ringing in my ears, not knowing where I was, who she was, and why Tommy was so young. .

Then I decided to write her a postcard.  I knew she wouldn't read a letter, so it had to be an open postcard.  What should be on the picture side? All black? No. Not a tourist view, how about a photograph of the ocean, nothing but the ocean to symbolize the distance between us.  Where would I find such a card? It would be unsigned, but she would know from the postal stamp,  I'd have to decide on the color of the ink, and it would read:

"I don't miss nostalgia.  

I don't miss anyone but her."

Aunt Sara

My parents were long dead by then, when a woman showed up at my doorstep, dressed in black, sunshades on, a violin case in her right hand, and while I was staring at the case wondering if it contained a submachine gun, yes, I've seen too many gangster movies, said, "Hi, I'm your aunt Sara!"

I said, "Uh, I don't believe I have an aunt named Sara!"

With her free hand she removed the sunglasses and asked, "And now?"
I must have opened my mouth wide, as I saw in front of me a picture perfect face of my mother's twin.  Is it makeup, plastic surgery or what, I thought,  trying to examine her features.  She looked more like my mother than my mother's older sister, my deceased aunt.  I invited her and her violin case inside.

She was a violin player, she said with the Q_______ Quartet, a world famous ensemble, that even I had heard about, and in the case was a 150 year old Italian made instrument that she didn't want to leave in the car.  She opened the case and invited me to pick it up, but  remembering my bad luck and tendency toward clumsiness in such situations I declined.   Aunt Sara then told me that she was born after her and my mother's father was killed, and her mother decided to give her up for adoption.  I realized that my mom and her older sister, my other aunt, kept this a secret from me, and they certainly must have known it themselves.  Aunt Sara said that she had found me through Red Cross.

"You're my only living blood relative!" she said.  That wasn't exactly true, as I had several cousins from my mother's side who would be her cousins as well.  In any case, I learned that she and the string quartet traveled the world, were based in Sydney, Australia, where two of the members were from, her husband was their manager, and they owned several apartments around the world, including one here in the city.  She promised to send me tickets to one of their appearances.

And as promised, a week later, a pair of tickets to a concert at the symphony hall arrived in the mail.  I went to see the quartet.  I called my mom's elderly  cousin, a distant aunt, to report all this, and she confirmed that indeed there had been a girl infant given up for adoption.   Then I heard nothing from Aunt Sarah for six or seven months.

She showed up again, this time without a violin and without sunglasses, dressed colorfully, and when I opened the door, said, "I need your help, my husband's dead!"

I invited her inside, and she explained that she wasn't a grieving widow because the marriage was merely a business arrangement.  She asked me to provide her with an alibi for the previous evening.  No, she didn't murder him, but there was another man involved, and she wanted to avoid a scandal.  I was on the spot, and I tried to persuade her that it wasn't a good idea, as the investigators would look for any inconsistencies in our stories and we just couldn't coordinate everything between us.  Besides, I had three guests here the previous night, so now I'd have to lie that no one but her was present.  But she begged me, and eventually I relented, we agreed on a story line, time, circumstances, details, conversation topics, menu, everything I could think of, knowing full well that it still wouldn't be enough for a skillful investigator to demolish.

Sure enough, a  couple of days later a police detective called me asking to verify her story.  The conversation was brief and he appeared satisfied with my answers.  As it later turned out, aunt Sara's husband was accidentally  murdered by a local impresario who negotiated with him the purchase of a 40 or 50% interest in the Quartet, and for some reason or another spiked his drink with a dose of sleeping pills that proved fatal.  The man went to prison, the Quartet continued touring.

Then, about a year later, a New York journalist asked me to speak about the case and I reluctantly agreed.   I told him our version of the story, he recorded it, and I asked that my name not be used in print, or I'll sue.  The story appeared in a national magazine a couple of months later.  In it, without mentioning my name the writer accused me of lying and being in cahoots with my aunt Sara, who had been allegedly in cahoots with the murderer, in a plot to take over the management of the Quartet.

Red Army, Cadillacs, and Blue Plates

My friend Mac paid me a visit, and brought with him as he always does a couple of stories. I didn't have a story of my own, so I made one up on the spot.  We settled on a bottle of California Sauvignon Blanc, corked, not screw-topped, as I didn't have any beer or his favorite red wine.

Mac told me how he once visited the town of Modesto, an agricultural center in California Central Valley.  He was short of funds and someone suggested a church where the homeless and poor were fed every evening.  All you had to do is listen to a preacher's sermon before they fed you, an old tradition dating back to Charles Dickens' London..   Apparently this was a training ground for fundamentalist Christian preachers, because the fellow preaching that evening was a real young greenhorn.

And he went on about how out of clay God created a perfect human machine. If you take a fine automobile like  Cadillac, he was extolling, in ten years the paint will be peeling, the seats, transmission and engine wearing out, the tires going flat.

A young country cowboy was sitting next to me, said Mac,  and he raised his hand and said, "Excuse me preacher, forgive the interruption, but people too break their arms and legs, and they lose their teeth and hair, their sight and hearing get weak, they just wear out."

At that point, I started laughing uncontrollably, said Mac, couldn't stop, and pretty soon the whole room joined me.  A couple of burly security guards approached from both sides, and escorted me and this cowboy out the door. We didn't eat there that evening.

Mac then asked me about Stalin and I told him that no,  Vissarionovich Jugashvili wasn't Russian, and that his army was called the Red Army, a detail that Mac forgot . This led to the second story.

Mac is an independent man for hire, a handyman, music teacher (he's a keyboard player) or whatever comes along.  One recent job that he picked up was driving cars and merchandise from the city of South San Francisco to Los Angeles, then returning in the truck of the second driver.   It didn't take long for him to realize that he was transporting stolen goods for loading on ships headed to the Far East or South America.  He politely resigned without giving any hints that he would notify the authorities, but it turned out that once you're in, it's not easy to get out.   The head honcho of the operation, the fence, made some threats.

It came to him in a dream the previous night. He and his brother were Red Army soldiers  during the war, and a man who looked like this fence approached somewhere in the trenches, demanding something.  He was in civilian clothes, like a secret police officer.  Not getting what he wanted he threatened Mac that he would shoot his brother, and eventually did, shooting a hole in his heart.  Mac's brother, who is a fireman in another state, was born with a hole in his heart. 

My story? It's not even a story.  There is a dour looking man living at the very end of my street, where after a gentle 15 degree turn it merges with the street that until then ran parallel to the north, so that his house may even have that other street's address, he drives an old brown Nissan 240Z, which is parked in front of the house and has blue handicapped registration plates, a sports car with handicapped plates,  though the owner, like many others with such plates, looks perfectly able, this man, who's been there for decades, could be anywhere between 40 and 70 years old, always dresses the same, in guerrilla chic,  not in an obviously military uniform, but a somewhat discrete, ready for the revolution getup, head covered by a canvas cap which he always wears that looks like a museum piece from a century ago, World War I period, brown or dark green, and when it wears out he buys a another somewhere, an identical one, his newest is for the first time bright red,  perhaps the revolution is expected soon, this man has a goatee beard that together with the cap makes him look like Lenin, and I've wondered for ages if he considers himself a Lenin heir, a Lenin double, a Leninist, or something of the sort, nothing unusual in this town,  but what am I going to do, approach him and ask, "Excuse me, Comrade Lenin, I presume?" ?

Adams Meets Eve

I'll tell you how we came to hire Eve.  I don't know if you've ever played the role of a hiring manager, but it is a crap shoot, a bet, and we, my partner Jack and I did not like doing it.  But we had to do it quite frequently.  The bar we ran did not have professional staff, no 60 year old waitresses named Mildred.  Only the chef, and he wasn't a gourmet cook, stayed with us for an extended period of time.   All the others came and went, starving students, starving artists, moving on to better things, graduating from college, all of them young and most of them good workers.

Eve walked in the place one slow afternoon, when Jack, the bartender and myself were cleaning the place.  She was a tall, thin young woman with mounds of dirty blonde hair that she seemed to have trouble managing,  sharp face features, long nose, high cheeks,  not bad looking, but in her own eyes she must have thought herself below average.  She said she wanted to talk to us about something, and before telling us what it was, asked directions to the bathroom, to wash her hands.  We watched her walked across the room, and when she was out of sight, Jack said "She moves like mama panther," "Or a zebra," I added, lacking a better comparison. Jack shook his head at me, but we both knew that whatever her business was we were buying.

She came out of the bathroom, shook our hands and said they had been sticky because she had been eating ice cream.  There was no ice cream shop for a mile from our place, and I asked her if she lived in the neighbourhood. No.  Her business was asking for work as a waitress.  She was a student, graduating next summer, had no work experience of any kind, other than running a lemonade stand when she was ten, and without much ado we hired her.

We always liked situations such as the one with Eve, when we knew from the start whether to hire the person or not. First impressions, you know.   Asking probing questions, interrogating people was not our style. I didn't like doing it to others any more than I liked when others, government bureaucrats or bar customers did it to me.  And so, what I told you about Eve's past here, came from here voluntarily, not through our  questions.  And the people we interviewed knew fairly soon in the process without our saying so that they had the job.  Or in some cases were confused by our lackadaisical interview style.

We trained Eve, and she proved to be a good worker, reliable, courteous, efficient.  And that hair, man.  She didn't like it and didn't know what to do with it, but she wouldn't cut it short.  She would dye parts of it, pink or purple,  this was the time when rock punks were starting to do such things.

There was a regular customer at the bar named Hermann Adams.  He was an engineer of some kind, construction, or ventilation, oh yes, he designed air duct systems for office buildings.   And he was known as an ardent atheist, getting in discussions with other customers who often teased him, mocked him, but he put up with everything like a good sport, or like somebody who did not understand the jokes.

I was away on vacation then, when Adams talked Jack into allowing him to bring a movie projector into the bar one afternoon to show a film titled "The Atheism Alternative".  I don't know how Jack had agreed to it, he later apologized, our rule at the bar was no religion, no politics from the owners and staff.  The safe route chosen by most businesses of this type.  But the showing of the film happened.

Adams promised Jack to bring along a crowd of customers for the showing, and indeed, 20 to 25 people showed up, none of them seen previously at the bar, some wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and one fellow looking like Lenin himself, with the beard and a cap that revolutionaries of Lenin's era wore.  The projection was setup in our overflow room which we called Le Deluge Room, and which was seldom used during afternoons.  Drinks and sandwiches were served to the customers, who didn't order very much, but after the film started and she saw what it was about, Eve, with tears in her eyes, refused to continue serving this crowd.  Jack took over, though there was hardly anything to do any more.  After the film ended, Hermann approached Eve and asked her what was the matter. She threw a glass of Calvados in his face.  He demanded that Jack fire her, Jack refused and we never saw Mr Hermann Adams again.

Mr Matthews' Cul de Sac

He didn't remember me. We passed each other in the shampoo and hair color isle, neither one of us shopping for anything stocked there,  when recognizing instantly  his face older by decades since I last had seen it,  his posture slightly stooped now, I said, "Hello, Mr Matthews!". He stopped, I stopped, gazed at me for ten seconds before saying, "You must be one of my students."  I was, I had been. I took two classes from him, drawing and the next semester after that painting, and I would have taken more if he had taught them, and if my college major had been, as it should have been in art, and I wasn't just fulfilling some liberal arts requirement.  Decades later we know for certain what we should have done instead.

Mr Matthews was an art teacher, but he was primarily a full time artist with regular showings at galleries, and a cartoonist whose work was printed in the New Yorker, Playboy and other magazines.  He was now long retired, but still active in art, still submitting and receiving rejections from the New Yorker, he informed me laughingly. He was surprised at how close to his age I seemed to be now, and I had to explain that I wasn't 18 in his class like all his other students. "We could both use these products now", I said, pointing to the shelf filled with hair dyes, "What's your pleasure?"  "I have to remember this", he replied chuckling, and "Oh yes, now I recall, you are the one who gave me a lot of cartoon ideas".  I had never heard that before, and I doubt it was 'a lot', but it must have been a few, when we exchanged jokes, puns and bon mots, bending cliches and twisting common sayings, so much so during those times in class, that I wonder how I ever  managed to do any drawing or painting.

Mr Matthews invited me to his house for coffee, about two blocks away up the street,  and we drove there in my car, after making our purchases.  "I walked here," he told me, "my housekeeper says I need more exercise."   We stepped inside, Mr Matthews made us two espressos from his Italian machine,  sprinkled some brandy into them, we sat down at the window of his living room overlooking the street below us going straight down in the Western direction  from his house all the way across the residential section of the city toward the railroad tracks and the freeway running North - South  along the Western edge of the city.  He pulled a notepad and wrote down what he promised himself to write down while we were conversing inside the drugstore.  He would continue to jot down ideas while we talked.

Now, the street and the house. His house was at the end of the street where my house stands about a mile and a quarter away Westward down the gentle hill.   I know the approximate distance, because years ago I measured it using the odometer of my car when the odometers were still analog, those little turning wheels, like some gears, and included tenths of a mile, so that you knew when to start and stop measuring.  Nowadays, with computer technology, the odometers could probably measure distance down to a hundredth of a mile, and yet the ones that I have seen measure it only by a full mile, making such distance calculations practically impossible.

And so, the distance from my house to the edge of the shopping center was exactly one mile, from there to Mr Matthews house at the end of this street, I would estimate is almost a quarter mile.   Going the other way, from my house downward to the end of my street is another quarter mile.  And so the street is about a mile and a half long. It has two 15 degrees turns, one halfway down in the southern direction, and an eight of a mile before it ends in the northern direction.  At its West end, that is below my house, it merges into the parallel street to the North of it, which after another eighth of a mile merges into the parallel street that ran to the South of my street, which then goes for another half mile to end at the road running alongside the freeway.   This is an unusual funnel topography for East West streets in this city, no other streets merge this way, although, interestingly enough,  some North South streets do merge, or split up, and all of them just beyond the borders of this town.

In a modern metropolis of course, one city turns into another invisibly, before you notice it, and I for example, living as I am not far from the Northern border of the city don't know where it ends exactly and where the next city starts.  And there have been houses build on parcels that cross city borders.  Only the tax collector knows, and maybe not even he, since he collects real estate taxes for the entire county.

But let's get back to Mr Matthews' house.  My street ends as I said at his house, though it doesn't really dead end, because you can turn left or right from it on the cross street which goes on at least a mile in each direction. And so, Mr Matthews's house is you could say the center top point of a 'T' shape of two streets that meet in front of it. Here is where the story gets interesting.   It wasn't always this way, Mr Matthews told me.   My street crossed the present cross street, which wasn't yet developed or even paved, and continued for almost another 35 yards where a steeper hill started. A house stood on each side of it, and another house at the end facing the street down from a cul de sac.   That house still stands and is occupied by Mr Matthews' tenants.  He owns it.

The man who built that house later bought the two other houses on the dead end of the street, demolished them, tore down the street between them and built the present big house where Mr Matthews and I were sitting.  And after that he wanted to keep the street address of this house, and his old house behind it with the old street name.  But the house he built became part of a new street, that forms the roof of the 'T', and the city resisted.  The man fought the city hall, Mr Matthews thinks he didn't like the name of the new street, the last name of a patriot general, and he lost the battle.   There is still a plaque above the front door, which Mr Matthews showed me,  with the name of my street on it and a house number that doesn't exist in city or county records, and the post office won't recognize. A fantasy number.  The builder eventually sold the property to Mr Matthews' parents.