Phone Book

Mom was hard of hearing,
so she took up psychoanalysis
to figure out what was going on.

Because she couldn't listen
to your words,
she'd look through you

and look at your
expressions
and body language.

I heard someone say that
you could read
from a phone book

and people would get
what it was
you wanted to say.

Is that what JC
meant when he said
that he spoke in parables

so that those
ready
would hear him?

It may not be the story,
but the subtext
that carries the message.

There are 6000+ languages
on our small planet,
yet we all have similar

hopes,
doubts,
frustrations,

and we may know
what others think about,
even without their words,

that are
often so
extraneous.

Opinions

When I taught art to
first and second graders
they would often

ask me to compliment
their work.
I almost always told

them that it was great,
even if it was crud.
But they knew the truth,

and if it wasn't a masterpiece,
they'd simply tear it up
and start over.

Adults are not as quick
to know the truth,
and don't yearn to find it.

Our egos seem
unduly invested in
what we do

(or how much we earn),
believing that what we are
and do are one in the same.

Even "how are you doing"
isn't really meant to be
answered honestly.

One woman, at dinner,
did, and almost everyone
lost their supper.

Sometimes we ask,
"do you really want to
know (the truth)?"

but even that
doesn't cover
all the bases.

Traditions

The rabbi in jeans
spoke of matzah,
not the matzah

in the grocery store,
but the matzah
that was eaten by

the Jews many years ago,
that was cooked
a little less than hummus,

and symbolized
that Jews,
being on the run,

were not able
to wait
for their bread to rise,

even before rabbis,
he said, when the sages
were called something different.

And I worry about
whether I have
any rich traditions,

born to skeptic parents
who looked to the future
rather than the past.

Yesterday I asked
what were her traditions
and she said

if she was having
trouble falling asleep,
she'd say goodnight to

the people she'd seen that day.
And I, frightened to be
swept away by any tradition,

embrace no traditions
one day, and (a little)
of all, the next.

Frontal Lobomy

We make mistakes.
We say things
we shouldn't have.

We do
things
we shouldn't have.

We make things
that either
don't work or poison us

like polluted wheat gluten dog bones
for our beloved pets.
Even the Nobel Prize

is sometimes given
erroneously, as in 1949
for the frontal lobotomy.

I was three then,
and one of the most avid
proponents lived in St. Louis

and used an ice pick,
according to his son,
to go in above the eye

and dissemble
our emotions
from our reason,

as Socrates
so wished for
when he took the hemlock,

but unfortunately we don't know
how well it worked for him,
and fortunately,

most other philosophers
do not stand in line
for their turn

with the ice pick
or even
the hemlock.

Accidents

When Arlo was seven
he wanted to dunk a basketball
so he put a stool next to the basket

(must have been quite a stool)
and fell backwards
and broke his wrist.

Now a few years older,
he broke his arm (in two places)
on a skateboard.

On Wed. the 14th of March,
a man in Roma
died on a bicycle.

I did not know the man,
though I was with someone
who had been with someone

who saw it happen
I wonder about that man,
where was he riding to,

and did he know that,
riding a bike in Rome,
was living on borrowed time?

And brave Mark in the U.S.,
gets a motorcycle
and on the 24th of March,

has a bad fall and
came home a few days later
for a lot of healing.

Or my sister, and her then boyfriend,
hit on a motorcycle on the SF Bay Bridge,
and lived to tell about it.

Or Craig, inventor of the Vetter Fairing,
now in a wheel chair
because his passion was racing.

Or
or
or.

Isn't life dangerous enough
without the added risk
of the thrill of

flying through the
air unprotected
from the cruel pull

of gravity, who
keeps us earthbound,
even to the point

of giving us
fractures,
and (much) worse?

Wanting to be Meek

I wanted
to be a poor kid.
I had everything I wanted.

My mom would
buy me any book,
and any tools I asked for,

and I could have lived
in the most plush
dormitory in college.

My heros
were my misconceptions
of Thoreau,

who lived (for a year) at
Walden Pond on almost nothing,
as an "experiment,"

and Siddhartha,
who shun his riches,
so that he could understand life.

And Gandhi, who
burned his British clothes,
and spun his own.

I used to tell my students
it is better to appreciate
a crack in a sidewalk

than to own a yacht.
Some believe that
anyone with wealth

and/or power is evil,
and the poor are blessed.
and will "inherit the Earth"

and though we sometimes buy
that hook, line, and sinker,
most don't put the

meek into their wills,
and most with money
may live with a better quality

of life than those without.
Privilege, as some call it.
Using one's resources to

fulfill one's goals is certainly
a laudable goal,
and squandering one's resources,

including health, money, and time
is certainly
not commendable.

Orphan

I imagined when
my parents died
I'd be an orphan.

Kind of like Kipling's
Kim or Huck Finn.
But no luck!

I was always asking
my parents for advice,
though I'm not sure

if I ever took it.
Now they are
gone from the planet

but not from my life.
I think of them often
and see them everywhere.

Unlike Castaneda's Don Juan
who gave up his last name,
and became his own person,

I realize what I am is
the combination of where
I was and where I am going.

Waiting for Death

When my parents
retired 27 years ago,
I imagined that they would

be waiting for death
to come for them and
I was surprised to discover

that their third stage was (much)
more like a honeymoon
than a funeral.

They weren't in a state of denial and
their life was full of new challenges,
discoveries, and contributions.

They got their affairs in order,
financial, spiritual,
and personal.

They made new friends
in a new city,
as if they had come from outer space.

They though and examined
every choice they made,
and made the best of every moment.

They analyzed every dream they
had, and whether they would
be more productive if they

took a nap in the afternoon.
They kept an accurate accounting
of what they spent,

and how the stock market
was treating them.
They spoke of their life

as being in heaven, and
considered joining the
Hemlock Society,

vowing to only continue residing
on Earth if they could
be healthy and independent.

Taxes

All weekend I worked
on taxes, between blogging,
that is.

Actually I hired someone
to help because it
takes me forever to

do jobs I hate.
Did you know that we work
almost half of the year for Uncle Sam?

Then he/she takes our money
and spends it
as he/she sees fit.

Ideally the money is
well-spent, uprooting
social injustices and

creating a safe and efficient
country for all.
It is amazing to me,

with the amount of expenditures
Uncle Sam makes, that
we aren't all in a soup line.

Not that I don't like soup,
but could the billions that
are being spent to wipe out

a middle eastern culture be
better spent returned
to our citizens?

Having said that,
as the expression goes,
it is easy to take shots

from the peanut gallery.
Ideally we learn as much
as we can about a situation,

and still we can't know all.
Perhaps the way to world peace
is to methodically eradicate the

world's population. Perhaps
the government knows best
what I should eat for breakfast.

And perhaps, when we say grace tonight,
we should thank Uncle Sam
for the food we have

on our table,
and the roof we have,
over our heads.

April 1

I asked my wife
if the refrigerator was running
(hoping I could say,

"better catch it. April fools!")
but she knew that one,
and simple said, is it April 1?

I probably should have thought of
something better, like we
got a call from the zoo

and Mrs. Lion would like
to see her tomorrow,
or any of the other myriad classics.

On this one day we can
be kids again, and live in
that special world where

we try to fool
the other guy, just for fun.
As a kid, my friend and I

used to tell each other
stupendous stories about
something that recently

may have happened to us. The
goal was to get the other
to believe our stories.

Here's some timely ones
for this
April 1:

The war in Iraq ended today.
George Bush announced he'll
support Hillary for president,

God is proved dead,
Walmart decides to double wages,
and Social Security finds

a large stash of money so they
will never go broke.
Oh, the IRS closes down,

CEO salaries will be limited by law
to 1.5x that of the lowest employee in their company,
and only same sex marriages will

be sanctioned
by congress.
April Fools!

An Alternative to Waiting

We wait
for this
and that.

We leave the present
and live
in the future.

Siddhartha learned to wait, saying
"the greatest prayer
is patience."

Did he learn to be so mindful
of the present
that the future did not matter?

My job soon changes
from working for someone else
to working for myself.

And then,
in a number of days/months/years,
I will sit in a rocking chair

creaking as it rocks,
and wonder when
eternal sleep will knock at my door.

We wait for a semester to start,
for a class to begin,
for a class to end.

We wait in line
at the grocery store,
imagining

that someone else is
stealing our precious life
from ourselves.

When's dinner,
we ask?
wondering how we can

shorten that time,
until our perceived needs
(or wants?) are fulfilled.

An alternative, you ask?
The water will boil
whether or not

we watch
the pot.
What could we do

in the meantime
so we are living,
rather than waiting?

When Parents Leave...

Eyes follow
hands point
tears fall

we distract congole
dissuade accomodate
"Let's look out the window"

"Let's play on the floor"
ba ba ba boom
now he's alone on the floor

tears, we say
"you're a big boy
let's walk around

what else is in the room?"
aaannn aann an
"did you see this...

on the other side?"
Oscar and his mom come around,
waiting for his sitter to go to the park.

And we take Jasper for a
very long walk and the big boy
sleeps happily in his stroller.

Cheap

Cheap is a touchy subject but
other words are more positive,
like thrifty or economical.

When I was a kid, cheap
was from China (no longer
the case, of course) .

Cheap is poor quality, or
a behavior some disdain,
and some appauld.

My grandpa carried
discount gasoline and day-old bread
in the trunk of his car.

That was cheap! But he
would put a deserving stranger
through college.

That was not cheap!
Sometimes seemingly
cheap people are,

like gramps--
mixed bags. Others
are always stingy,

not able to give
to (or of) themselves.

Some places charge
more than a dollar
for a cup of tea,

yet a cup of hot H2O
is often free.
Is it cheap or

thrifty to carry
one's own teabays
around for that free

cup of hot H2O?
How about taking
those mini shampoo

and lotion bottles
from a hotel?
Hey, that cheap,

you say, but suppose
you give them to
the homeless?

Well, that's different.
Certain ethic groups
are thought to be cheap

but if you dare say
to someone that they
are cheap because

of who they are
you'll be thrown
out in the street.

Noam Chomsky and William Glasser

Chomsky regretted writing
the intro for a book
denying the Holocaust,

not because he didn't believe
in freedom of speech,
but because certain subjects

are so hot that people can't
be reasonable about them.
There are a host of those subjects,

from mentioning the KKK
to a southerner, to, geeze (definition #4),
I better not say any more.

William Glasser said that
we know how to get along
with our friends
but not our family.

He said we don't criticize
our friends because then
they wouldn't like us.

I wonder
if we also don't mention
all those sacred cows as well,

like how much money they lost
on bad investments, whether they
believe in the best God,

and whether they
really follow each of the
ten commandments.

A Good Book (Culture Shock)

At the Chagall exhibit in Rome,
a docent was lecturing to
a group of Italian kids,

who couldn't get close enough
or eat more of the words
from her energetic mouth.

Some religiously jotted
notes as she enthusiastically
talked about the masterpiece.

Plop, a few days later,
I land in the Atlanta airport, walking
by an impassioned print by Howard Finster

but soon am (sadly) assaulted by
a noisy/smelly world of fast food and
sickly and puffy looking young and old

and CNN comes on about
the 250 lb 7 year old that might
be taken away from his mom

because she's not feeding
him
right,

and I am overwhelmed (and depressed)
by how far we are from
educating our youth

and I talk to my wife (and daughter)
about starting a school for infants
(and their parents)

and then I see one shimmer
of hope, one young, good looking kid,
oblivious to the noise/smell,

CNN on the 250 lb 7 year old
and how Anne Nicole Smith
died,

a kid who has escaped a 2007
"wasteland" into the throws
of a good book.

Over Virginia

Flying over Virginia
from Rome to Atlanta
at 36000 feet

from my seat in the middle
of the plane
I look out the window

and see only a portion
of a silver wing, a bit of a blue sky
and a few lonesome white clouds.

Turning my head,
I see highways
on the movie screen

as we hone in on
our destination.
Lots of noise from

conversations and
a roaring engine and
pungent smells from the

pizza with pesto
and the overused toilet
(just) a few feet away.

Many are now standing
with their toothbrushes
and combs

in line at the toilet
getting ready
for their plane's descent.

Soon they'll embrace thelr
loved ones, or noone—
but their cat or dog or turtle,

or they'll transfer to another
plane & postpone their homecoming
for a few more hours.

Drivel

(Note: After trying to read the Financial Times Magazine flying from Rome to St. Louis)

Countless drivel fills
magazine racks &
trash containers.

Drivel this and that,
using the most imaginable
pedestrian language

to describe
ideas, events,
discoveries and inventions.

But rarely is the subject
itself the cause
for the drivel

rather it is the treatment
and presentation of the same
that causes me such distress.

Ordinary reporters
never go
beyond the Five Ws (and one H),

while the gifted poet
makes the everyday
heavenly.

Rubics and Logic

I've been very suspicious of
rubrics and logic,
who may be first cousins.

Both are useful enough
when their powers are limited,
but neither gives us the truth.

We don't make
a lot of decisions
based on logic.

We are creatures
of subjective impressions
(is that redundant?).

We are drawn
to and from objects
for unknown reasons.

We conduct many (if not all)
facets of our lives
as if guided by a powerful spirit.

Our decisions are often
directed by a strong "intuition"
rather a large bag

of empirical evidence.
Rubrics are equally faulty
as a determinant of quality.

Yes, they make it easy
to give a low grade
on a student's paper

because the essay contained
four spelling errors,
included five grammatical errors,

lacked a topic sentence,
and more. But the rubric
didn't address whether

the author made the reader
"think and feel, and hopefully,
[took them] to a place

they hadn't been
(a definition of art from
one of the curators at MOMA).

Recently a teacher
gave a student a better grade
than their work deserved

because, even though
the student had fulfilled
the requirements of the rubric,

they had not understood
the content
of the course.

Ode to the Lovely One

It is always amazing to me
how good things
happen.

A job opens up, and someone
is lucky to
get an interview.

And when he goes for inspection,
he gives a talk, and in the front row,
is the lovely one.

And he gets the job
and they marry and she is the perfect
compliment, companion, compatriot for him.

And then is born the perfect prince with golden locks,
who knows exactly what he wants
and what he doesn't want.

And she and him, are perfect parents,
each with an extraordinary gift
to make beautiful stuff "from nothing."

They made the prince, not from
nothing, but from the lovely one,
who knows just what to do and just what to say,

and from him, who listens and records,
as if he is a siphon, taking in everything
around him in such a gentle way.

Advice to Marc Chagall

Coming back from a large Marc Chagall
exhibit in Roma, my son and I agreed
that Marc was not a great painter.

Surely, I said, he blows Norman Rockwell,
or Andrew Wyeth out of the water. My son
could not argue that point. But he said

that Marc just drew, and then filled in
his drawings with blue and red,
except for this one wall of beautiful colleges

that he did in 1970.
I said he was a great lyricist
and that even though painters

wouldn't look up to him for inspiration
a lyricist would.
I then imagined what

I might say to Marc,
should he, one dreary day,
be in a despondent mood about his art,

and decide to telephone me.
"What's wrong with my art?"
he would say

and I'd tell him that he should get
a new manager who doesn't want him
to illustrate so many bible stories

and that he should mix up his colors a bit,
and take the advice of one of my teachers
that every area in a painting should

include a little bit of every other color in the painting,
or a friend who said, always look at the
whole when you are working on the parts.

Or maybe I'd give him the
gold toothbrush of advice,
that one should "listen to everyone and believe no one."

But then I started wondering, what if
Marc really did take my advice,
then we wouldn't have

his spirit and paintings that
are so unique and so compelling,
especially he,

having lived through countless
wars and turmoil,
taught us such priceless lessons

about joy and love
and just doing something crazy
because it feels so good!