A Resonance of Emerald

I took a stroll outside the office today to burn off some mental energy. Although it was in the low 80s, the humidity made it feel a dozen degrees warmer. The air was dense and intrusive. It was like breathing through thick cotton gauze. The city was coming out of its curl as people navigated their way through the miasmatic morning, cardboard coffee cups guiding their every step. Across the way, a pair of daredevils were cleaning the windows on the 10th floor of a 30-story building with the casual ease of a couple of retirees enjoying a lazy game of chess in the park. Cigarette butts and ATM receipts rollicked and swirled against the curve of the curb as clumps of middle-aged women graciously collided at the double doors while complaining that their respective weekends were "too short."

I spent that time just kicking along, contemplating everything and nothing at all. Sometimes, just trying to come up with something to think about is laborious - especially when you go back into the office and realize that you just wasted a perfectly good time-wasting opportunity. And at that moment, something on the ground caught my eye. It was something that made me look twice and I stared at it while my brain flipped through my mental Rolo-Dex until I found a close match. It was a shimmering emerald color, but I could see it subtly expand and contract - and then twitch! My mind was still processing this new data when my mouth grabbed the reins and I blurted out, "It's a hummingbird!"

Have you ever seen a hummingbird in person? It's quite a vision. Emily Dickinson once described it as a "resonance of emerald/a rush of cochineal" - and I think that explains it nicely. Watch one of those little suckers hip-hop from one flower to another, wings motoring in a blinding buzz so fast that it appears to levitate. At first glance, it looks like a large bug, and indeed, it is no bigger than a cicada, though not nearly as menacing. When you do spot one, it's inevitable that you call, "Honey, come here, you gotta see this!" without once taking your eye off of it for fear that you will look back and your special little moment has taken wing elsewhere, leaving you with a bubble of enchantment lodged in your throat. Seeing a hummingbird will crease a smile on the coldest of faces.

This little fellow was just sitting on the asphalt, seemingly oblivious to the concrete and steel garden of the city. He was a chubby little bird about the size of a cotton ball, with wings splayed yet drooping to the ground. He looked like a character out of some children's book. Something along the lines of "Herbie the Hummingbird Goes to the Big City," his face cocking this way and that as if he saw something new with each twitch. I couldn't tell if he was injured or just taking five, but he would waddle an inch or two, quiver his wings a bit, tick-tock his head, and repeat this every now and again. He was well out of the path of walking traffic, so there was no chance of being accidentally stepped upon. I bid myself adieu and went back into the office.

Lunch time rolled around and I decided to go visit my new little friend. He was in the grass now, but seemed to be foundering. Still, I couldn't see any visible signs of injury. I'm not an animal expert, but he looked in good health - just winded, like he flew into a window and needed a while to shake off the cobwebs. I spent some time with him before going of to get a sandwich. I met a co-worker on the way back and my attention was diverted until I was sitting back at my desk and realized I never checked on my little buddy. I decided to go visit him later that afternoon and jack-knifed myself back into my work.

At about 3 PM I took the elevator down to check in on our little visitor. He wasn't there. I looked all over, making sure to watch my every step. His feathers had blended coolly into the green of the grass and he never made a peep the entire time I had known him. I thought that maybe a cat had seen him and snatched him up without even breaking stride. Maybe he tried to do too much too fast and fell into the sewer grate. I couldn't bear to think of my little buddy, helpless and alone in the dark, with all that is nasty and loathsome in the recesses of the underground. This happy, plucky little bird, shimmering and precious possibly being set upon by beings it would not understand. A true innocent.

But, part of me wants to believe that my tiny friend marshaled his energy and burst into the air, wings hammering into the humidity, hovering for a moment and then zipping along - ever mindful of navigating his way out of the city with his needle-like bill guiding his every move. I'll still go by that spot where I met my little friend and remember with a smile the brief moments we had together. I hope that I can see him again tomorrow.

But, even more so, I hope I do not.

A Matter of Convenience

I woke up today with a keen sense of nothing. I had the day all set out in front of me like a freshly stocked wedding buffet - before the bride's drunk uncle started picking through the bacon weiners. I had nothing to do and all day to do it. So, I threw myself out bed and started running. I decided to just hop in the car and let the day come to me. After grabbing a paper at the news stand and a slow death of a breakfast at a franchise restaurant, I decided to mosey on over to the regional convenience store.

Now, I'm not talking about 7-11 stores - I'm talking about those regional convenience stores that make out-of-towners question incredulously , "You mean you don't have a/an where you live?" Kind of makes you feel like you should apologize or plan a family vacation around it next year just so you can scratch it off the "Places I Need To Visit" list currently yellowing and curling under the "Hang in there, baby" cat magnet on your refrigerator. These are the same people who would ask if you've had a REAL beef tongue sandwich because "you haven't tasted real beef tongue until you've had some of OUR beef tongue - Texas style!" Personally, being french-kissed by my entree would appeal to me as much as slow dancing with my proctologist before being put under. That ain't sexy.

But, I digress.

I am an iced tea fiend. No, I don't have to register with local authorities when I move into your neighborhood - well, at least not yet, but my obsession with Arizona Iced Tea borders on the sexual. If I have less than 10 bottles in my fridge, I get the night sweats. I noticed that the good people at Arizona make many different types of iced tea: Ginseng, Sweet Tea, Green Tea, etc. I can understand that, but then they go too far. Orange tea? Peppermint tea? Coffee-flavored tea? Who drinks this superfluous nonsense? I only drink the lemon-flavored tea, yet, whenever I go to a convenience store, inevitably all of that fringe tea is clogging up the shelf space and my beloved lemon tea is out of stock. I am not a violent man, but at moments like that I would gladly teach the laws of supply and demand at gunpoint to the store manager.

So, I go into the local convenience store for my iced tea. I buy four bottles for $5.96. The cashier says, "That'll be $5.97, hon." I stall just long enough to give her one of those "Still working on that GED, aren't you?" looks. I give her a $10 bill and she gives me four singles and five pennies back. I felt like I stepped into some sort of parallel universe where Spock has a beard and I'm half expecting Candid Camera's Allen Funt to come bounding out of the display of tortilla chips saying, "We'd thought it'd be funny if..."

Ever have that one store you always go to as if you cannot avoid going in there? There's always that one person working the register that you hope you never get. It's either that leering borderline sex offender who tries to sniff the ladies and asks if they have a boyfriend, or it's the heavily-painted, turbo-smoking, good ol' gal who is so starved for romance that she just has to drop some sort of quasi-sexual comment every time she rings you up. Then, she'll erupt into a wheezing, semi-asthmatic trailer park backfire of a cough. She'll hand you your change with that "Call me sometime" desperate look in her eyes while you're high-stepping it out of there like a drum major on fire.

I would really hate skipping that store, though, because they have everything. There's a deli, iced coffee, and even a place to get hot dinners. Hell, I heard that next year they are putting in a mosh pit, birthing center and Cirque Du Soleil. In the future, you'll walk in the door and through some sort of laser membrane that will determine that you need cough drops, dry dog food and a jelly donut - and, magically, those items will be waiting for you at the cash register. Smoker? Marlboros waiting for you. Caffeine addict? Piping hot cup of joe. Man who still lives in his mom's basement? Wrestling magazine. Full service at full scale. Yet, I know I would have one question while visiting that convenience store of the future:

Why wouldn't I ever have condoms waiting for me at the register?

She Blinded Me With Science Fiction!

I always wanted to write a really super-terrific science fiction story. Something with cool weapons, freakishly grotesque aliens, and a protagonist who saves the universe from some tragic demise at the last second. Oh yeah, and he gets to bang some gorgeous extraterrestrial Vargas Girl on the hood of her Astro-Glider. Ahem.

The biggest obstacle with writing a science fiction story, besides the fact I have zero scientific knowledge of anything in the known universe, is that I can't stand science fiction. Everything seems to hinge on the word "somehow" - as in:

"Somehow the space-time continuum morphed into a cosmic boomerang. We are exactly one second in the past. Everything is deja vu."

"Somehow, when we passed through that anti-matter membrane, I became a Republican"

"Somehow, the Glorks are able to curve natural light but they panic when they see themselves in the phosphorous lights in the bathroom mirror."

Those are some pretty major plot lines pivoting on the whimsy of a conditional "somehow." Need a way to see through the hyper-structure of a fortress made from Orionum? No sweat, invent an alien that specializes in seeing through cosmic polymers. Want to bathe your dashing hero in his boldest aura? Have him battle a thousand Wonks with nothing but a Gravity Staff and good old American know-how. He has to be American. Even if he is from some far-flung galaxy, he will exhibit all the fine noble qualities of the idealized American hero that probably has never existed. All this of course happens while having a brunette borne of a thousand Frank Frazetta wet dreams clutching helplessly to his leg or hiding behind a boulder ready to whack a baddie on the head with her space sandal and then complaining that she broke a nail. Women not named Sigourney Weaver generally are in science fiction for the purpose of comic relief and showing their jugs when they slide into the hydro-therapy tank clutching a glass of creamy mint-green gloop.

My Dad is a big time science fiction addict, as is my older brother. Having to sit through Star Trek every evening in the early to mid-1970s listening to Captain Kirk's Morse code delivery and having to look at a Vulcan who looked like the love child of Moe Howard and Count Dracula was enough to convince me that the world of science fiction could do without me, thankyouverymuch. Still, science fiction does pretty much provide a writer with a canvas much broader than he deserves.

I sure hope the future isn't as cold, metallic, and antiseptic as science fiction depicts. Whatever happened to blue jeans? Ain't nothing more comfy than a pair of 501s. If cotton no longer existed, you would think that some egghead would have invented some sort of synthetic replacement. Makes sense that if a crew consisting of a stoic captain, renegade pilot, bureaucratic hanger-on, ice queen science officer, wise-cracking mechanics and some sort of alien mascot are setting the controls for the heart of the sun that they could at least have some buttonflys in the cargo hold. That's what the future needs, trucker wallets, tube tops and Chuck Taylors instead of the shimmering metallic jump suits, gravity boots and facial jewelry.

Now, you may paint me as a hypocrite for saying I enjoyed Star Wars. When it was released, it was like nothing ever seen on the big screen and yet it was so very familiar. For those who do not remember when Star Wars came out, you just do not understand the angle here. Star Wars worked because the story was straight out of the loins of Akira Kurosawa and John Ford. It was an old fashioned cowboy movie in a galaxy far, far away. It didn't rely on overly-contrived ideas that the actors themselves were probably secretly loathing:

"Dear diary. We shot the space delegation meeting scene today. Must fire agent. All sense of self-respect vanishing. Hope they have muffins at the food service table tomorrow..."

Still, I'd like to try my hand at writing a good science fiction story. I know I have it in me. I just have to make it happen.

Somehow.

The Green Bowl

Ever go through your life knowing someone without REALLY knowing who they are? It happens. Sometimes it happens without you knowing about it. Other times, you try and try and try, but you never really break through. And, sadly, sometimes, it is too late.

I had a dream the other night about my grandmother. Don’t ask me what it was about, but I have been having Grandma dreams recently. A few nights ago, I found myself leading a group of people through a gauntlet of woods, underbrush, and treacherous rock-hopping when we happened upon my grandmother’s house, which was mysteriously set up in the woods. Mysterious because my grandparents lived in Chester, Pennsylvania, which is a blue-collar foothill of Philadelphia. The only thing that would have even closely resembled woods in that neighborhood was an old gnarled tree that had blasted its way through the brick sidewalk and stood sentry in front of their house like some giant mutant broccoli. I remember the bark on that tree used to flake off rather easily, like a hard-boiled egg shell. Hey, when you are a 10-year-old kid at your grandparents’ house for the weekend, you take the fun where you can get it.

Anyway, when me and my band of merry men and women arrived at this mysterious house in the woods, the place was overgrown with vines inside and out. I remember thinking, as I was standing alone in the cramped little kitchen, that I really missed my grandmother.

My grandmother was named Adeline, or "Addie" as my grandfather would call her. She came over on the boat with her family and eventually met my grandfather. They married, had two kids and lived a nice middle-class lifestyle. She had bad eyesight and used to wear these big round glasses that looked like telephoto lenses. I put them on once, looked up and I could swear that I could see Neptune. Those glasses were so thick and powerful that I feared for my grandma’s life when she went out in the sun. I think I have a logical answer to all those spontaneous combustion cases: check the glasses and their proximity to an ambient light source.

Anyway, in the early 1980’s, my grandfather passed away. It was sad. No, it was devastating. He was the first grandparent to pass away and I didn’t take it well. I also noticed something. I noticed that I didn’t REALLY know who he was. Sure, holidays, cookouts, and family get-togethers provide the opportunity, but sadly, most of the memories of my grandfather have come second-hand or in a scurrying fashion after he had a stroke a little while before he passed. One particular moment I recall was when I was at my Aunt and Uncle’s house after my grandfather had his stroke. I had witnessed a man close to my grandfather’s age die right in front of me in a parking lot that summer, so I was ripe with the realities of mortality. My grandfather and I were in the kitchen alone talking about baseball. Then, he reached down to tie his shoes. He couldn’t. He tried again. And again. And again, to no avail. Finally, he looked up at me and said, his eyes moist with frustration, "I know HOW to tie my shoelaces, but my hands just won’t DO it." That shook me then and it shakes me know. His mind was functioning, but his motor skills were now stripped. It left him feeling helpless. It left me feeling helpless as well.

My grandmother kept on keeping on. She was a dynamo. You could never be in her kitchen. She was the maestro, an artiste, a simple woman with a cooking IQ of 300. She never complained about making you whatever you wanted at whatever time of day or night as long as you finished what you ordered. To this day, I have no idea how an 80-pound kid like me was able to inhale three steak sandwiches in one sitting - after dinner, no less, while she was playing Keno with the neighbors.

While she could whip up obscure Italian dishes with odd-sounding names, the holidays are where she REALLY shined. In many Italian families, Christmas Eve Dinner is almost as big as Christmas Dinner. We ate well. Very well. Everything was homemade and perfect. I would help her make raviolis in the basement. I’d mix the ricotta (the secret ingredient was cinnamon) and knead the dough. We’d run it through the press until the pasta was thin enough for raviolis and then scoop the ricotta, fold the dough over and crimp them with the crimper. She was always patient with me and never measured a thing. She was a culinary black belt.

I could go on and on about the wonderful memories of my grandmother. Like, how she turned off the Nat King Cole and let us put our new Kiss records on the hi-fi and then dance with us in the living room. Well, as long as Grandpop was not in the house. How we would weed her garden and go to lunch together. How she would teach me obscure card games and play until late. How scary that house was at night….

I remember always eating from this ceramic green cereal bowl. It was just a regular bowl, mind you, but it was my favorite. It was always in the cabinet to the left of the sink. Second shelf. If there was one object in that house that I would identify with my grandmother, it was her bringing me a bowl of pre-sweetened cereal in that bowl and letting me fill it up as often as I liked and at any time of the day or night. I can still hear the spoon clanking off the rim of the bowl when I was done. It rang like a fire bell.

In that dream I had the other night, I was in the kitchen while everyone else was parading throughout the rest of the house. Someone appeared next to me and asked what I was looking for. I didn’t know what to tell him because I didn’t really know. But, I was positioned to the left of the sink and looking on the second shelf for something that was no longer there. I now know what it was.

It was that green cereal bowl.

I miss you, Grandma.

Writer's Blog

I can't say that writing is difficult for me, but having the inspiration to write can sometimes be analogous to making yourself hungry while watching an auto mechanic make sausage or trying to catch some sleep after doing a dozen beer bongs of espresso. Now, before the Meatmakers Mechanics local union comes blitzkreiging to my door and flipping over the economy cars on my street, let me qualify it by saying that said sausage-making would be before the Lava soap scrubbing. Now that I've over-explained myself, I just wanted to say that my muse has been AWOL for the past six weeks. To the sarcastic Earthlings among us, they might say that my muse is Godot and I'm confusing a good scratch for inspiration and naivete for talent.

Good point.

A person much groovier than me once said "Just write!" and everything will take care of itself. I have taken my own advice and produced spectacular works of nonsense. Once the writing starts, my mind just ejaculates all over the page and I'm left exhausted, hungry, and slightly ashamed. Half of the time, I'm agonizing on whether to use the word "occasion" because I don't know whether there is one "s" or two, and I'm too damned ignorant to look it up. I have rewritten entire stories because of a phantom "s". It's like the mailman hiring out a hang glider to deliver the mail to a house because of a "Beware of Dog" sign. By the time I've finished, I feel like someone asked me how the weather is outside and I ended up explaining the Doppler Effect, isobars, and the best conditions for planting winter wheat. Sometimes, "It's a bit warm," suffices nicely.

I was an English major in college and a world-class fraud of an English major at that. Never one to put effort into anything in those days, I cut every corner, skimmed every surface, and took every shortcut available. But, I did it the right way: In my Shakespeare class, I found that the newly-refurbished library just so happened to have every Bard play on videotape - courtesy of PBS - and "The Taming of the Shrew" is much more enjoyable when you can watch John Cleese playing Petruchio instead of reading the 20-lb. Pelican Edition of Shakespeare's works that was so big you could iron a shirt with it. I always sat in the front row, asked a lot of questions early on, and basically hung in there for the first month until I was able to get the rhythm of my professors and know what kinds of questions they would be prone to ask on quizzes and exams (hey, it really worked). Then, I would study pretty much only what I expected would be on the tests. Worked like a charm. However, the most effective tool in this most effective tool's tool bag was ego. I always found that if you went to visit your professors during their office hours, called them up about an assignment, invited them out for nachos and beer with the other schemers like myself, then a C became a B and a B became an A rather quickly. Does it work for all professors? Hell no; however, when you are taking Nordic Saga and Myth and Great Irish Writers, there is an excellent chance that the professor is ecstatic anyone is taking more than a passing interest in something that, at that age, generally remained only a passing interest.

In my Shakespeare class, a particularly worthless girl ratted me out to the professor when she saw me watching "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the media room of the library instead of reading it. Quickly summoning all the cleverness the Dark Lord had bestowed upon me, I explained to the professor that I was using the video to augment my studying since there was no stage direction in the textbook and I could not tell whom was addressing whom (yeah, that's probably not correct). I told him that we should have a night, each week, where the class could get together at the library and watch Sir Laurence Olivier on the fields of Agincourt or Bob Hoskins' Iago prance around in unsightly tights. Everyone loved the idea, including the professor, well, everyone except the worthless girl, who refused to stoop to my level. Then again, she doth protest too much. Go ahead and work out the tense and conjugation on your own time.

It was said that William Shakespeare never once "struck a word." In other words, he never once edited himself, which is quite an accomplishment since I'm reaching for an eraser halfway through a grocery list. Of course, we cannot prove that any more than we can prove that Siddhartha didn't make underarm fart noises while sitting under the Bodhi Tree or that Jesus came up with a kick-ass barbecue sauce in his mid-20s. It's just one of those things that has passed into legend without the bothersome burden of something silly - like proof, for instance. There are those who insist that Shakespeare wrote the King James Bible. Nice work, if you can get it. I am sure competition existed between writers of that era:

Wm. Shakespeare: "I say, Mr. Donne, how are you keeping on these days?"

John Donne: "Oh, splendid! Splendid! Just finished up a wonderful masterpiece of metaphysical poetry. It's called "The Flea" It should keep lazy college students busy many centuries from now. And what, pray tell, have YOU done lately, William?"

WS: "Um, er, I wrote the new bible."

JD: "Oh."

WS: "Well, it's been nice, John. There's a sale on neck ruffles and they so rarely carry my size. Toodles." (walks away)

JD: "Oh, yeah, well...of course." (Shouting after him) "William be not proud!"

Is it any surprise that the names Shakespeare and Superman both begin with the letter "S"? Then again, there are those who say that William Shakespeare, The Writer, never even existed, that he was just a struggling actor/playwright who had all of these magnificent works accredited to him. The Playwright and the Pauper, if you will - and even if you won't. Could you imagine a young William Shakespeare being pulled aside by a trench-ruffled stranger and handed "The Two Gentlemen of Verona":

WS: "What would this be, kind sir?"

Trench-Ruffled Stranger: "Oh, just a little something I threw together. I'll keep supplying you with plays and such and you can keep the fame, fortune, and adulation throughout eternity."

WS: "To what do I owe this honor?"

TRS: "You owe it to the fact that I am a complete and total idiot. Here, stuff these in your pockets, too."

WS: "What are these?"

TRS: "Sonnets. 14 lines. Iambic pentameter, A-B-A-B scheme...yadda, yadda, yadda. Look, you've got to be an idiot to pass this up."

WS: "...or not to be. When will you have another play for me?"

TRS: "I'm going to be busy for a while. Helping this guy with something called "The Flea". I'll contact you when I'm finished. Deal?"

WS: "As you like it."

Centuries later, we salute and curse that chance meeting. So, here's to you, Mister Trench-Ruffled Stranger. It's because of you that we have Commedia Dell'Arte imitating life, keep Kenneth Branagh from being on the dole, and learned how to use the pause button on our VCRs and DVD players to see a young Olivia Hussey's teenaged breasts in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

Hey, nudity in the classics is worthy of any occasion.

Well, I guess I was able to hang glide around my writer's block. Now, I'm exhausted, hungry, and a bit ashamed.