Flat Bagels

(Did someone say "Flat Bagels"? The other day someone mentioned them and I remembered the taste and the smell of them baking. I also remembered that I had written something about them-I found it and here it is.)

I thought I had figured out how long it takes for poppy seeds to make their way through my alimentary canal. Thirty-six hours. I ate a flat bagel as I walked through Grand Central and sat on the four o’clock train on Friday afternoon. It did occur to me that there were a lot of seeds on that thing but it wasn’t until this morning that I got the report. A visual inspection of my bowel movement confirmed uncountable numbers of tiny, black, pits and so I said “Ahh Haa!” Thirty-six hours plus or minus. I happened to mention it to Liz. “I know how long it takes poppy seeds to make their way through me…” She didn’t even look up from the Sunday paper. “How do you know?” “I checked. I ate a flat bagel Friday afternoon and the seeds have evidenced themselves just now. Thirty six hours!” I poured a second coffee for myself and got her cup and made one for her as well. “What about the cookies you ate last night? Poppy seed Humentashen!” I detected a hint of superiority in her voice (damn the carb counters of the world) but her grasp of the obvious flaw in my theory could not be denied.

I love flat bagels. It is one of my great weaknesses. One could attribute it to how tired I am when I am heading for the afternoon train. One could say that I deserve it as a small reward for the sacrifice I make all day. I do not delude myself at all. It is just a tactile weakness not better or worse than a heroin addiction or a craving for chocolate, or cocaine or whiskey. I crave the salty mix of seeds and spice and the crunchy, chewy feeling in my mouth. No matter that I promise myself that I will not buy one (they are overpriced), that I do not need the calories (I am not overweight but my physique is not properly balanced), that I must save my self for Liz’s home-cooked dinner (I am not a sexual cheat -my indiscretions are purely dietary), I buy one anyway.

I have been known to stand out front of the bakery for fifteen minutes and debate all the points but in the end I almost always end up in line. “Flat bagel, please. Yes, everything. Wait, I think I have correct change.” I even go so far as to promise myself that I will not take a bite until I have found a seat on the train, gotten my ticket pinned to my lapel and taken out my reading materiel or Sony Walkman and earphones. Would you believe that I cannot even keep that simple promise to myself. I cannot stop myself—as I stride through the huge terminal I cannot help reaching into the bag and ripping off a small bit of the crust. Then another and another. I become ashamed of myself. By the time I finally find my seat the bagel is nearly half gone and I have forgotten my pledge to myself, my embarrassment, my initial resolve to not buy it in the first place. By the time I am done I always wish I had bought a bottle of water and my mouth is full of bits of seeds.

The latest round of diet fads has not helped my sense of guilt. All carbohydrates are bad, I am told. Dinner has been distilled down to meat with a side dish of salad or a vegetable (some vegetables are considered unacceptable on these “low-carb” diets as well though I cannot figure out why. Carrots used to be good for me but no more.) Lunch consists of a sandwich without the bread—there is really nothing on the lunch menu that appeals to me at all. Unless I were to eat the same thing I know we will be having for dinner but then dinner would be a boring disappointment. Breakfast? Eggs. They used to be bad for me, didn’t they? Now they are good. Of course if you want them to be really good they must be yolk-less, food-colored, egg “substitutes”, the ones that come in a milk carton. You whip some of those up and make an omelet with onions and peppers and top the whole thing off with a fistful of low-fat cheese. This is eaten without toast (you may have a slice of “whole wheat, sliced thin, diet bread” but once you taste it you will never be tempted to include it in your breakfast again. It is not worthy.) To truly make this breakfast grand you will want to include a couple of slices of turkey bacon and a cup of coffee with skim milk and sugar substitute. I tried this breakfast. I reverted to raisin bran (with extra raisins) and banana sliced over it. I used to consider this a good, guilt-free breakfast—now I am fraught with over-eaters remorse as I pour the one percent milk over the cereal. But this guilt is nothing compared to the self-flagellation I wish I could inflict about three times a week when I succumb to a flat-bagel urge.

Many people, lately, have become soldiers in the low-carb army. They knot in tiny clusters around the buffet table at parties and critique the selection of food. It is not unusual that there is absolutely nothing for them to eat. It is becoming more usual for there to be a platter of acceptable vegetables and low-fat cheeses for them to munch while they observe the gluttons amongst us eating the miniature quiche and batter-fried shrimp. “It’s amazing…it’s always the fat ones who eat that stuff” they will whisper to one another just loud enough to be heard over the crunching of celery. They will sip their wine while the unobservant will swig a beer. They will not touch the baked potato or the breadsticks or the wedding cake. They will tell each other they can’t wait to get home to a big bowl full of diet Jell-O and artificial whipped cream. On a decadent night watching TV they might eat exactly twenty pistachio nuts. I will make the rounds of the party looking—as I always do at these functions—for signs of intelligent and interesting conversations. “I lost twenty-two pounds and I’m never hungry…” “Have you tried the eggplant casserole? No breading!…” “No thanks, those kind of nuts are very high in carbs.” People used to talk about their cars and their stock portfolios. Remember when there was debate over your choice of Mac or PC? No more. It’s all about diets now. Low carb diets. And here I am addicted to flat bagels.

Morning Mirror

In the morning mirror

the flesh of an old man

climbed my bones

and hung on me

like an old coat

draped over the rung

of a ladder.

I touched a place

below my heart-

a spot I crossed

and swore to die-

a place I touched

when I talked to the flag-

with the old man's hands

that climbed my bones,

ribs like a ladder

leaning on my chest.

In the dark

I am a young man

I am a small man

tough and supple

compact and slim.

When I close may eyes

I am a gripping fist

and a jaw and a hip

and brown in the sun

unstretched

standing slack

without pain

untouchable and clean.

but in the morning mirror

I clearly see

the door

the darkness

the sun struggling

with the dark

to make one more day.

I Know That Guy

I Know That Guy

I knew that guy. I mean I didn’t really know him I just knew what he was all about from a momentary glimpse of him –him looking at me through the side window of his car and me looking back at him through mine. I knew him all right. And he knew I knew. We were standing between two mirrors. Me looking at him looking at me at him at me.

I was in the passenger side seat of my wife’s car. The windows were rolled up. It was hot and the A/C was on. Sick and tried of traveling. Tired of sitting in the passengers side seat of this piss ant little Japanese piece of shit on the New Jersey turnpike. Mile after mile of dodge’m cars and nothing scenery and numb conversation but mostly silence and boredom. In my own car, driving it might not have been so bad but in a tinny Jap car with the grinding road noise coming up through the floor and the tinny stereo speakers making music (when we turned it on) sound like crap it was bad. Bad.

My youngest boy was in the back seat breathing on the moon—snoring—exhausted from two hours on his skateboard in one of the worlds great skating parks. Not that you would know that it was all so great from looking at it. Built under an overpass near the stadium in extreme South Philly. Beer bottles and trash all over the place and graffiti on every non-breathing surface. But I can understand why that is just part of the deal—what makes it so great. The trash is a statement. My wife told me “ give me a couple of hours. If I lived near here and brought him here a lot I would form a committee to clean this place up. Hell," she said, " I could clean it up myself!" And she could too! But she missed the whole point. Clean has nothing to do with it. Clean is what she wants not what they want. In fact if she cleaned it up they would prolly stop coming to the goddamned place. Definitely, if you cleaned up the spray paint off the walls, you might as well put a hostess at a chain link gate and hand out Mickey Mouse ears at the door. The kids wouldn’t come any more. I felt like an asshole even being there with him. Especially with the god damned video camera in my hand. Now what ever possessed me to take that thing out of the car? Oh yeah! I did it so the kid could have some pictures of himself to show his buddies of him at this place. Like a legend –this place is—or something.

So he was in the back seat snoozing away and she is at the wheel and I might as well have had my hand in my pants pulling my pud for all the fun I was having. Just getting from here to there is all I was doing when the beat up old piece of shit liver colored sedan pulls up on the right of us. The traffic was crawling now—we’d hit the traffic trying to get back form the Jersey shore—and this beat piece of crap pulls up next to us. In the front seat are two kids—prolly about twenty years old each. One—the passenger—has a black baseball cap on backwards and his head is bobbing up and down to some music I can’t hear or maybe isn’t even there. Who knows? The driver needs a shave and has a long black greasy ponytail and a filthy white tee shirt. He’s driving hunched over and got his bottom lip pushed out and eyes straight ahead focused on the road like he’s doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour. He’s not rocking at all so I wonder if there really is any music. I was going to roll down the window just to see if the music was real but something told me not to bother. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing in that car mattered. Just then I caught a look at the occupant of the rear seat. Hadda be their old man.

He hunched forward so the bill of the passenger’s baseball cap was right under his nose. When he turned his head to look out of the driver’s side window at me he had a look that spoke a hundred pages to me. We coulda sat down next to each other in a bar and told each other’s story without any problem. Easy as pie.

I figure his car was broken down some where. Was prolly broken down for a while and he had wiggled like a worm on hot asphalt for a couple of weeks trying to get it fixed. NO luck. He walked to the bus stop to get to work. The kids were in the back bed room sleeping. Some times they were there when he got home. They would be fresh from a shower and ready to go out for the evening. One of them was in junior college and had been for three and a half years. All set to get his two-year degree in a couple of months if he got one more physical Ed class. The other one worked at the K-mart as a stock boy. Never gave two shits about school and was perfectly happy to go in to the air-conditioned K-mart for his shift as long as the two hundred and forty four dollars a week kept coming and his mom kept on doing his laundry. He knew the old man was going to get on his case every couple of weeks or so and he would for sure get kicked out one of these days but o.k. till then, right?

Last night the old man was sleeping on the couch when they came home. They had a few burgers out on the kitchen table thawing and they were debating on whether they should fry up a bunch of potatoes to have with the salad left over from their mom and dad’s dinner. He came into the kitchen rubbing the sleep from his eyes and was standing there watching them plunder a bag of chips when his wife came down the stairs. She got into the middle of everything started to season the burgers and took the gallon of milk out of the refrigerator to pour into two huge glasses.

I gotta get a ride to the auto parts store tomorrow, he said out loud after thinking about saying it for a full five minutes. He had trouble believing these two man-child things living with him couldn’t read his mind and offer to do things for the household. Been a problem for a long time. Just couldn’t figure out that with all the “up-bringing” he and his wife had given them that they couldn’t just somehow do things…like making their beds and taking out the trash. It bothered him so that sometimes he got really depressed. Really depressed. And when he got depressed it made him mad and when he got mad he would open up like a howitzer and scream and say things that were on his mind—not necessarily logical, but on his mind none the less –and in the end everyone would be starring at him not knowing how to deal with this madman ( the truest description of him at this point was “mad man”) and everyone would be embarrassed ( especially him…).

So, there is this beat up sedan with these three guys siting in there and the one in the back is looking at me and I’m looking at him and I‘m thinking—I know that guy! Sure as I am bored to death out here on the New Jersey Turnpike and headed for my home, I know that guy. Sure as I am headed for my home where my oldest son is prolly still asleep or cooking himself a meal of steak and baked potatoes I know that guy. And he is looking back and forth from me to the back of his son’s head with the baseball cap and he’s wondering what ever happened to the baby he held in his arms. And he’s wondering what ever happened—what’s gonna happen to the boy who he taught to drive and told about condoms while the boy blushed and squirmed…What’s gonna happen to him? And he looked so old in the back seat of that crappy car. This used to be my car, he thought. I bought it new and babied it with oil changes and washed it and waxed it and took the whole family out for picnics in it and parked it out at the end of the parking lot at the shopping center cause I didn’t want to have it get all dinged up. Now it’s rusting and falling apart. No one ever replaces anything on it now that I gave it to them to use. There is no handle on the passenger side door. You gotta open up the window and reach outside to open that door. Who’s checking the oil? I don’t know. And here I am begging a ride to the Pep Boys so I can get a couple of parts to repair my own car and I feel like a beggar getting a ride in the car that used to be mine…

I know that guy. I might not be just like him but I’m enough like him that I know why he looked at me the way he did. We are in the same club. I used to think I couldn’t ever be like that. That my boys were different—Ha! That’s just the way it is my friend. I mean it’s not like they poke your eyes out and steal your girl but it’s damned close! That’s just the way it is!

I had to look away from that beat-up car. At just the same time he looked away from me. Up in the sky there was a DC-3 at about five thousand feet. How do I know it was a DC-3? I don't know. I just did. Last night I watched a big sleek jet coming in for a landing at Philadelphia international airport. I have no idea what kind of a jet it was. Just big and long and sleek like a greyhound dog with wings. But I know that was a DC-3 up there over the New Jersey Turnpike. Just like I know that guy in that beat up old car. I just know.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

I dedicate the following poems to all the people who think I am morbid, depressed, misaligned, transfixed by (the inevitability of) death, hopelessly negative and violent. I am not.

The “Happy Poem” is dedicated to my friend “Dan” (not real name. He knows who he is) and the “Faye Wray” poem is dedicated to everyone else in the world because we all think we are alone, we were all conceived in a vacuum, and exist through some fluke of biology. This is especially true of all the anti-porn folks out there (you know who you are too!) who refuse to believe their conception was not aided by Playboy, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang and bootleg copies of Popeye’s and Olive Oyl’s ribald adventures (or some other imaginative sexual aid).

By the way…“In the cartoons, she (Olive Oyl) helps take care of a baby named Swee'Pea; it is not made clear if Swee'Pea is Olive Oyl's own son or an adopted foundling. In the comics, Swee'Pea is a foundling under Popeye's care. Later sources (mostly in the cartoon series) say that Swee'Pea is Olive Oyl's cousin or nephew that she has to take care of from time to time. “* Yeah! Right! We all know that Popeye is poppin’ a lot more than cans of spinach!

*Wikipedia Reference

A happy poem.

Indoor plumbing

Fuel efficient cars

A virus free computer

Life on Mars

A friend who sends me

Humorous e-mails

A youth spent exploring

Numerous females

A good night’s sleep

A good day’s work

A nap, a snack, a jack

(When it’s flat)

Good whiskey good food

Good shows on the tube

Time for bed

And you’re both

In the mood

A warm bed and

All the equipment is humming

Morning after coffee

And indoor plumbing.

Fay Ray’s Nipples

Grand Dad went to the matinee
To watch King Kong fondle Fay Ray
In his leathery hand the beauty lay
Wearing nothing but a satin negligee
My Daddy was born nine months to the day
After that fateful matinee
All because of Fay Ray’s nipples
Daddy was born in Phil-a-del-phi-aaa
All because of Fay Ray’s nipples

Flesh begets flesh
In the usual way
Daddy’s only here because of Fay Ray.

Daddy had an album
Of photos from the war
Snapshots taken of Okinawan whores
Dressed in sarongs like Dorothy Lamour
For a nickel they’d drop the dress on the floor
And happily pose in front of the camera
With fruit on their head
Like Carmen Miranda
I was born nine months to the day
After Daddy got back to the USA
Because of little native women
Dressed like Dorothy Lamour
Dressed in sarongs like Dorothy Lamour

Flesh begets flesh
In the usual way
I am only here because of Fay Ray.

Women are more than baby machines
More than naked pictures in magazines
I’m no prude
Don’t get me wrong
If you don’t want kids
Don’t watch King Kong
Flesh begets flesh
In the usual way
We’re all here because of Fay Ray.

Saving the World (part 2)

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Happy New Years? S*#t.

I am not in a good mood. I am never in a good mood when the weather is below 10 degrees and the wind is howling up to 40mph. When the monthly cable bill is approximately what my first mortgage was. When my medical insurance monthly bill is what a family of four in Laos lives on for a year and a half. When I know that people continue to f$*k and have ten children and wallow in dirt and squalor because they think that is what G-d wants them to do. I just don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do things just the way I want them done, because I know just what the world needs to do!

Details-points of illustration.

People with big cars and SUV’s should have them taken away. They should be given English Fords (1960 specifications with added catalytic convertor to slow them down just a bit) and bicycles (even if we need to set up new production facilities to make enough of them. Every existing Explorer could be turned into six English Fords with enough metal and rubber left over to make six bicycles). Tractor trailers should have governors on them that will only allow them to reach speeds of 40 mph and new laws should be written to allow them on the road only between the hours of 9pm and 5am. Penalty for driving a tractor trailer at the wrong time of day would be death. Oh, and also, they should stay in the right lane so the English Fords can easily pass them. Pick-up trucks should be sold only to construction companies. You should be able to borrow a truck to deliver your purchases from Lowes and Home Depot. Aside from that there would be no pick-ups on the road. Illegally driving a pick-up truck, of course, would be punishable by death. Likewise, tailgating, driving with your high beams on or tinting your windows would be punishable by death.

Life insurance, health insurance and home owner’s insurance would be banned. First I recommend we round up all the insurance executives, agents, actuaries, and risk analysts and shoot them so that there will be no temptation for them to try to re-establish the false sense of security and permanence they have led the population to believe exists in the world. When you die you die. When your house is built on the beach and the waves and wind wash it away it is not good to ‘spread the risk/pain’ to those who have built on rock, inland, safely. Tough s*#t! It’s gone! You had your pretty view while it existed, now clean up your mess and move on—on your own dime! Same goes for mud slides, forest fires and tornados. Suck it up!

As for automobile insurance, English Fords don’t move very fast so there is a possibility that you will survive a crash. But…they did not have seat belts so you could put some in for yourself. That’s your insurance. If you get in an accident and kill or maim someone you should try to get away from the scene as soon as you can. If you are not too badly hurt you should run to the church or synagogue of your choice and thank G-d. If you are lucky enough to be hurt but still conscious you could pull out your gun and take a shot at the guy trying to get away. That is also part of the new insurance plan. No more false claims of whiplash or messy pointing of fingers and courts battles to try to collect huge sums of cash for injuries. Get it over with then and there. The cops should only be at the scene to direct the tow trucks and put kitty litter on the oil slick. The cops, of course would be unarmed!!! They should not interfere with the true justice taking place at the accident scene and should stay in their car (English Ford) until the final shot has been fired.

As long as I am straightening out the insurance industry, we should have a few words about the doctors, dentists and other health care professionals. They have been too long shackled by the burgeoning insurance industry and government oversight (FDA, CDC, etc) Most doctor’s offices have become, not places of healing, but paper mills manned by clerks who process bills and do the bidding of the insurance industry. No more! When you pull up to a doctor’s office from now on (in your English Ford) you better have gobs of cash in your pants. If you find someone you trust to drain that boil you will fork over some real money before you leave. That, or make a proper deal to deliver chickens, okra or services acceptable to both parties (you and the doctor) to seal the deal. He/she will write you a prescription which you will pay for with similar specie at the drugstore and you will be healed. He/she will do a good job or else (I think we all know what the ‘or else’ is by now!) With all due respect, doctors go through a lot of training and deserve to live a little high on the hog. Where your health is concerned you should expect to pay plenty to preserve it. I don’t think insurance company CEO’s studied all that hard in the frat house or give a lot of comfort and relief to the sick and dying so fuck ‘em! I think it only fitting and proper that we retrain prospective insurance company executives to be tractor trailer repair persons and doctors should have new English Fords every two years so they can start making house calls again!

Well I am tired now but I hope I have begun to straighten out this whole mess. The World, I mean. If you would like to help me (and I suggest that you do, because when they start handing out the English Fords you want to be in the right line, right?) just give things a little thought and drop me a line. I’ll tell you if you’re on the right track or not. Let’s hope you are.

One Kind Favor

"One kind favor I ask of you.

One kind favor I ask of you.

One kind favor I ask of you...

Won't you see that my grave is kept clean."

One Kind Favor

Herb brought the single edged razor blade down smoothly and straight down the front of the suit jacket. From the shoulder to the bottom of the jacket, over and over until the garment hung in thin ribbons on the hanger. There were bits of thread and one button lying on the floor of the closet beneath the jacket. He then pushed the hanger over to the side and he began on the next one. Slice, slice, slice. In fifteen minutes he had shredded all three of his suits and his only sport jacket, even though the jacket didn’t fit him any more he wasn’t taking any chances. After the jackets he began on the pants. These he had more of so it took him a lot longer—half an hour—but soon those too were ribbons on hangers. Almost an hour’s work. He sat down on the edge of the bed in order to try to get some of his strength back. He looked out the window and did a mental inventory of his wardrobe just to see if maybe he had missed anything. Outside the dark season was sneaking in on the back of the fall. It was taking the color out of the leaves on the trees by the lake and the dark green summer algae was sinking to the bottom leaving the cold, clear, gray water ready to ice over in a month or so. Herb hated, and loved this season of change. It had always scared him but it also awed him with its beauty and relentlessness.

Rested, he got up and went over to the closet once more. He picked a pair of faded Wrangler jeans off the shelf and took a wine colored fleece sweatshirt off a plastic hanger. He folded each of the garments into quarters and set them on the bed. The jeans had a couple of white threads hanging from the cuffless bottoms of the legs. He made a note to trim the loose threads off and then he went to the dresser where his underwear and socks were kept. Taking one pair of his favorite knit socks and one perfect, clean white pair of jockey shorts he opened the top drawer and looked for his small pair of scissors to trim off the threads of his jeans.

His top drawer was like a museum. He thought of all the men in the world and all the top drawers that they must each have and what kind of junk would be found in each of them. What would Hitler have had in his top drawer? And Martin Luther King? What an idea, thought Herb, a coffee table book with a photo of the top dresser drawers of the most famous men in the world. Perhaps an inventory would accompany the photo. Or a short essay describing the contents, in the words of the owner himself!

Of his own drawer there would be listed:

1. note books, various, journals, sketches, bad poetry

2. knives, various including switchblade found in grandfather-in-laws work shop in Germany, small lock-back bought from John Fallon in 1973 (blade broken and reground twice) etc.

3. a pair of reading glasses—too weak. a pair of Foster Grant black sunglasses—scratched.

4. oak box constructed out of boredom 1982 full of pennies and foreign coins of no value.

5. paycheck stubs from the last year

6. back up computer disks of journals, bad poetry etc

7. keys-untagged and otherwise unidentifiable. Not discardable due to deep uncertainty of future value.

8. dry cell batteries including 4- D cells, 2- C cells. 11- double A’s. 4- triple A’s. and 1- 9-volt.

9. three yarmukas

10. two wristwatches

11. two magnifiers-including 1-10x loupe and 1- 3x in plastic frame

12. political pin-on buttons-various

13. other miscellany

Herb began to mentally sum up the contents in some philosophical context but it was a losing battle. The contents described the disconnected and random matter of his life and that was all. There was no message contained in there. He could only hope that the president of the United States and the other leaders of the nations of the world took more pride in their top drawers and that the contents were more significant.

He could not find the scissors. Instead he took out one of the pocketknives and carefully trimmed the loose threads off the cuff of his jeans. He then took the pants, shirt, underwear, socks and a pair of scuffed tan boat shoes that he had picked up off the floor of the closet, and put them all into a red nylon gym bag. He had found the bag years ago on the job before he began the demolition of a floor of offices in a building on Fifty-second Street. In white letters on the side of the bag it said “ABC Sports”. He had used it as an over night bag on trips he had taken to Canada and Florida and up to the mountains to visit his friend Stuart. It was just his style. Lost. Found. Used to within an inch of its life.

He put the un-zipped bag on the bed and he sat down next to it once more to rest. He was becoming more easily fatigued each day. What was he forgetting to put into the bag?

He had made up his mind as he lay in bed this morning that he would take the time needed today to insure that he would travel through eternity in the manner to which he had all his life become accustomed. He had actually made the decision to do something like this several weeks ago but had not settled on all the details until this morning.

He had collided quite accidentally into the reality of his own life and death. It was when Dan and Shirley and Lou and he were in the City Last month. They had had time to kill before their dinner reservations. Herb had said, “Follow me. I have someplace really fun to go to. We’ll get out of the wind and kill some time.” He refused to tell them where they were going but led them across Fifth Avenue and Broadway to a shop on Twenty-first Street that dealt in costumes and masks and all the things that belong to the Halloween season of witches and ghouls. Fake blood and spider webs. Rubber bats and iron masks with spikes in the eye sockets. Herb stopped short in front of a display of coffins. Rough hemlock boards crudely nailed into the classic coffin shape. People streamed past the display but Herb just stood there, jostled by the crowd, grimly imagining an eternity encased in one of these coffins. He imagined himself dressed by someone else in his best suit and shoes, arms crossed, facing forever, looking up at the rough plank top of a coffin covered with black, black earth. After several minutes Dan came up behind him. “Hey, what cha doing? Come on the girls are bored and it’s almost time for our reservations. You okay?” “Sure. Yeah. Sure.” said Herb but all the way to the restaurant he kept humming a song that would not leave him alone. “One kind favor I ask of you…One kind favor I ask of you…”

They ate like pigs and after went for a subway ride down to The Village where they walked off the meal. Herb felt vague and disconnected as they looked into the lighted storefront windows and walked down shadowy alleyways. At the intersection of Houston and Sullivan streets another song came back to him from his youth and he began to hum it quietly as he walked. “In a pad without heat, down on Sullivan street the last of the hipsters lay a-dyin’. He wore his shades so no one would know whether or not he’d been flyin’.” All the way home that tune ran through his head and he began to wonder what he would wear into eternity. The train full of weekend revelers streaked through the cool fall night towards the suburbs. The last game of the World Series crackled on a tinny transistor radio but before Croton station the Marlins had taken the Yankee crown home to Miami. Disappointed Yankee fans disembarked at Croton and Cortlandt and finally Herb and Lou and Dan and Shirley got out at Peekskill. By that time It was clear to Herb that he could not rest in his grave in a dress suit and a tie. He had to make up his mind what he would wear.

It took a month before it became obvious that he wanted to rest in that coffin in the clothing that he had felt comfortable in all his life. He got out of bed this morning and put his plan into action. When his suits had been shredded and his kit packed with his favorite clothes he sat before a blank piece of paper on his desk top. He wrote:

“These are the clothes

I want to wear

when they lower me into my grave.

No fancy suit

or expensive silk tie

no slick hair do or shave.

I know what you’re thinking

I’m off of my rocker

and I’ve finally gone over the brink

but I’ve thought this thing through

and I hope you will do

what I ask you to do

regardless of what you think.

I love my old jeans

and my scruffy old shoes

and jockey shorts and socks.

just wash my face

and comb my hair

and lower me into my box… and...

‘Bury me in my shades, boys

Bury me in my shades.

Burn my guitar

down in Washington Square,

but bury me in my shades.’”

He folded the paper into quarters and pinned it to the outside of his red gym bag. Before he put it on the floor of his closet (he was sure that it would be found when they went looking for one of his suits to dress him in) he searched through the pile of belongings in his top drawer one more time. When he finally found what he was looking for he placed the pair of thick, black, plastic Foster Grant sunglasses on top of the contents of the bag. He was sure they would never put them on him. He put them in the bag anyway.

Cold, Cold, Cold, Cold Ground

Look out that window

Or step right outside

There is snow as high as your knees.

Wind is whipping the dark north wind and

Winter’s come like a disease.

Some people love it

Some people don’t

I’m one of the latter kind.

I’m here to say “that if winter’s come

Than spring is way behind”.

No tooth paste no propane

No latkas no cocaine

No cruises to Zanzibar

No VW cars

No deodorant bars

No donations to NPR…

I’ll leave all my collections

And all my connections

That paycheck I busted my ass for

My delicate feelings

All my squawking and squealing

When I’m standing in front of the master.

I can do without all the worldly goods

I can weather the eternal storm.

Just one thing I ask

I’m a southern boy

Plant me some place warm.

Somewhere the Trade winds are blowing

Somewhere the sun’s beating down

When my time has come

Bury me not

In the cold cold cold cold ground.

Don’t pack pinochle cards

Or Hershey bars

Where I’m going I won’t need ‘em.

James Joyce’s tomes

Or Wordsworth’s poems

‘Cause there won’t be no light to read ‘em.

Just dress me up warmly

With two pair of socks

When they lay me into the ditch

Long Johns and boots

And flannel lined jeans

From Abercrobe and Fitch.

Somewhere the Trade winds are blowing

Somewhere the sun’s beating down

When my time has come

Bury me not

In the cold cold cold cold ground.

[“Bury Me In My Shades” by the song writing genius—Mr. Shel Silverstein (1930-1999). I hope his eternal soul will not be displeased with my use of his verse nor my own poor rhymes.]

[“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” adapted and performed by Mr. Bob Dylan (still alive as hell)]

[“Snow” by Jesse Winchester-a quote or two used with admiration and reverence.(I think still alive and mean as hell)]