Shirts Made of Nylon

The ways of human memory are mysterious. Why do I remember some distant events and not others? We usually remember traumatic, dramatic events.  But not all, as it turns out. The one inch long scar on my left wrist, how did it get there?  I have to strain a bit to recall.  I was reminded of a surgery I once underwent, how could I have forgotten it?!  I had to remind my friend J. of an adventure we once experienced. He had forgotten it.  My friend P. reminded me of a misadventure I once had that he witnessed and that all our mutual friends remember.  I recall visiting my then friend, a Bolivian Indian who told us his name was Johnny Pacheco, the same as a band leader (though we were never certain that he was called that) at his apartment house's rooftop swimming pool.   But I don't remember anything of Johnny's apartment, which I would have had to enter first before going up to the roof.  Did it really happen, or am I making this memory up?

And so on.  Still, once you are reminded of something you remember it for all days.   My friend K. reminded me how we once teased a mutual friend of ours (whom I have completely forgotten) over his preference for nylon shirts.  Evidently, I initiated this at times cruel game.  Ten years later after that episode (of teasing), and not remembering any of it, I noticed and wondered about my boss' habit of wearing nylon shirts.   He was OK otherwise, drove a Porsche 911, gave me a break when no one else would , was a super guy, but these shirts!  Did I have a phobia about nylon shirts?  If I did, the change of fashion trends has apparently cured it.

Lucky Charms!

Last night, actually, early this morning, I found myself inside a parked city bus, which started rolling slowly toward the cross street, the driver nowhere to be seen, on his seat a large box of breakfast cereal.   I walked forward following another tall fellow (the shifting of bus' center of gravity might have been the cause of the roll), squeezed into the driver's seat pushing the cereal box aside, and looked for the hand brake, while the bus was already entering the cross street. Not finding a hand brake I pressed the left pedal which I assumed to be the brake and the bus stopped.  The other fellow was already outside, standing in front of the bus.  I then released the brake and the bus rolled backwards a few yards, its cabin resting against the wall.  I got up, leaving the cereal box behind me on the driver seat.

That Damn Cake

Jimmy Webb posted on Facebook a link to an old video of himself playing and singing his most infamous composition "MacArthur Park", about a park in Los Angeles.  Why infamous?  Because of the lyric line which reads:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

... and is sung operatically by perhaps everyone who's recorded it, starting with actor Richard Harris on his album produced by Webb titled " A Tramp Shining".  During that time, biggest  radio and jukebox hits were recorded by artists of other genres, and "MacArthur Park" was recorded and made into niche hits by the Four Tops and Waylon Jennings (shame on him!), who, if memory serves, garnered for it some award from the country music establishment.  Harris' recording was one of the longest AM radio hits, over seven minutes, and if I remember correctly was issued as a single on a 33RPM record, B/W "Didn't We".

But about that notorious cake in the rain. Webb is fully aware of the notoriety of this lyric and in his Facebook post today mentions rain falling in New York, where he's performing, and adds: "Leave your cakes outside!"

The lyric has puzzled listeners and critics ever since it appeared in 1968, and I don't believe Jimmy Webb has ever explained it.  It has been the source of endless puns, jokes, and parodies, not to mention criticisms as something that makes no sense.

Well, this is what caught my attention, the criticisms and the responses to them.   The responses which diss the critics for failing to understand the supposedly lofty metaphor.  I have seen it before many times, and noted it, the defense of a dense phrase or lyric, defense  that relies on dismissing the critic as someone who fails to get it.   But as usual,  just what he fails to "get" is never stated, and in this story the cake left in the rain remains as mysterious as it was when Richard Harris sang it on an otherwise beautifully arranged and performed recording. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHS8hj4TdT8

Windows

I was watching on my computer a low key television program which consisted of one-on-one interviews with writers and philosophers.  They discussed books, ideas. The interviews took place in a city cafe somewhere,  with the two principals sitting on stools at a tall table near the cafe window, sipping coffee or mineral water.   Little of the cafe was seen, no other customers or staff members, except for an occasional reflection in the window, but outside that window, or windows as the two men sat in a corner, so that we saw through two windows, outside that window a busy city square, with cars, buses, streetcars, coming and going from three direction, and of course pedestrians right outside the cafe, who only occasionally noticed the camera and briefly stopped to gaze inside.

Since the scene inside was static - two men conversing, what was most interesting visually was the scene outside, the busy city, people's faces, clothes, manners.  Very few seemed to be in a hurry.  For some reason or another, I expected or hoped to see a familiar face to appear, even though I am far from there, and don't know anyone.

Now I wonder if the producers of this program realized what they were creating.   I suspect they did, otherwise they'd conduct these interviews where such interviews are usually conducted, in a stagey television studio.

I sit and read books in a brightly lit cafe with large windows at a busy city corner, and while my back is usually to the window, I frequently turn and watch the city scene.   Someone's recommended reading in public, and I've found some benefits to doing it.

A Man From the South

A story strangely familiar, or, if you prefer the usual cliché, eerily familiar.

A man from the South arrives in New York City planning to marry his sweetheart who lives there, and to move there or thereabout.  It is October 2001. For the time being he is staying with his somewhat quarrelsome relatives, who don't look too kindly on his relationship, and one of whom has known his sweetheart for some time.

He sees her daily, they plan their future life, and they begin looking for a place to live.   A month passes and the woman breaks up the relationship without an explanation.   Devastated, he returns South, where his friends who had once prayed for his success are surprised to see him back.  He falls into a deep depression, starts drinking heavily, thinks suicidal thoughts.

After some time, he is led to a doctor who prescribes powerful tranquilizers.   His condition improves.  He continues thinking of the time in New York, still unable to understand what happened and why.  Was it his relatives who sabotaged the relationship? Was it the woman's relatives? Her priest? The Tarot cards that she sometimes consulted despite being religious?  Was it something he said, did?  He doesn't know, cannot conclude anything.

Years pass.  Four years after the disastrous affair, he watches on television  an interview with a film director who is making a film about 9/11, the event which took place less than a month before his arrival in New York.   The director, who lives in New York City, relates how deeply 9/11 had affected him.  And he tells the interviewer about his family doctor who recently asked him what happened to his family that it's been having health problems in the past four years.  Not serious health problems, but problems that the family had not experienced earlier.  And the film director realized that it was 9/11 that affected him and his family so strongly that it affected their physical well being.

Our man now thought that he finally got a clue about the events in his own life four years earlier in New York.   Perhaps it was 9/11, which did not affect him as powerfully at the time, as he was busy planning the new stage of his  life, perhaps it was what affected his then sweetheart.  Perhaps.

The Menu

Coming out of a downtown cafe this evening a few minutes  after 6, I passed a man holding a mobile phone and asking someone on the other end: "Do you have on your menu a macaroni and cheese dish?"

Evelyn of Sahara

At one o'clock this warm and sunny afternoon I walked home from the Saturday farmer's market at a shopping center's parking lot, where I bought fresh Italian pasta for $8 from an old tie-dyed hippie and a thick bunch of pesto for $1 from Cambodian farmers. A mile and a half, maybe two mile walk.  Crossing a commercial district I bought three heads of garlic for the pesto ($1.27) from a small Chinese grocery that's been there for ages and where I usually ventured in the past whenever I needed dried mushrooms for soup, and that's going out of business any day now, the owner doesn't know when, only that he's trying sell his stock.   The place consisting of two adjacent stores is for rent.

The street runs one block away parallel to the subway line, which at that point runs over ground, as the cities lacked political muscle to force it underground when it was built.  I passed hundreds of single family homes, a couple of small apartment buildings, a whole gamut of architectures, some very beautiful houses, front yards, most of them well taken care of, many with flowers and tropical flora, narrow straight street lined with cars on both sides, I crossed the borders of three cities, and while the street name, Evelyn Avenue, doesn't change, the numbering system probably does (I forgot to check.)

And during all this walk, which took altogether 45 minutes, I saw only one person in the front yard, his back to me, watering his plants.  A car or two passed me, in the distant a bicyclist rode on a cross street and a young man wearing a yarmulka, also at a cross street, was returning home from a temple. A desert in the middle of the day.  Luckily or wisely I had purchased a drink named Honest Tea at the shopping center's drugstore before starting the journey.  I'm finishing it now.

When I finally turned left from Evelyn to catch a shortcut, about where the subway submerges underground, and reached the path that travels along the tracks, a woman appeared behind me engaged in a conversation on her mobile phone, a person who wasn't quite there either.