September 12

Shingles under the arms, face broken out, insomnia, stomach tightness, irritability, the desire to run away from farm, wife, child, Canada.  Moments of tenderness and intense communication.  Tears close.

Jonah’s crying interrupts my 10 p.m. reverie.  He is shaking in fright, counting “4,5,6,7, 8,10 Mummy, mummy.” Janet is in bed with the flu.  He wants her.  Her involvement with “A Taste of Honey” has been consuming.  For days he’s been shuffled around.  Neither of us have time for him. And he’s just starting kindergarten, a world of rules and crimes and older kids and bullies and beautiful powerful girls and a friendly but harassed authority, and another not so friendly authority. He’s just back from Denver, where his grandparents provided the life he wants.  Today in the car he said he prefers Vancouver to Lund and Denver to Vancouver.  He wanted to hear Lise’s letter and Henry’s story written for him last spring.

The child has such a tie with his grandparents.  If I could be more like them he and they would like me better.  They give lots of support—as long as there is enough money and some professional status.  I fear their loss.  Henry is 70, Lise 66.  I fear them dying.

Autumn blues; the fear is descending. Perhaps with my first week of classes, the first film, it will pass. Or perhaps not, until the play is over.  The potential is here for the order we seek.  The time for each other and our creative pursuits.  Will it come?

September 13

Indian summer has deserted us.  It’s grey and blowing hard this morning.  I sigh with anxiety…and yet exaggerate.  Jan is under greater pressure and she sleeps.  I fear the chill. I wish to placate and propitiate. When is the day of atonement?

A coffee break between loads of dishes
Evening sun through a gash in the clouds
Goats moving in the rain
Grass green grows lush like June.
Cat Stevens scratchy record.
Jan and Joe iron initials on his new school bag.
Tomorrow the first day.

The summer after the second grade (1948), we moved from Inwood to Riverdale, and my grandmother moved into our old apartment on Arden Street. The neighborhood was getting rougher: Irish and Italian blue collar families were moving up the street from Nagel Avenue, and the German-Jewish rising middle class were heading for the suburbs. My father was getting a raise, and my parents felt that I needed my own room and wide-open space to roam in. But I missed the old block terribly: the solid row of four story houses and stoops, the street that belonged more to children and dogs than to cars, the people screaming out the window, marble season in the gutter, open hydrants in the summer, mountains of snow and garbage in the winter, Abe’s candy store on the corner.

And I missed the old building: 28 Arden, a walkup with three apartments on a landing, their front doors adjoining each other. My closest friends lived right upstairs–Frankie Pershep and Ralphie Rieda. My more distant playmates lived on the top floor and in the basement. But most of all I missed the cramped three room apartment on the second floor, old 2H. Behind its sheet metal coated front door, painted to look like wood grain, was a dark, narrow entry containing a painted linen chest, a full length mirror, an umbrella stand, with a bear carved on it, a small closet and a huge door to a dumbwaiter which took the trash out every morning. The kitchen had two features which nothing in the new apartment could match: a clothes drier over the stove that could be raised or lowered with a rope and pully, and a door under the window that opened into a little cave for storing potatoes and onions. (more…)

Hey, let’s go down to Chinatown
And get a bit of Lichee
You say that you’re allergic
And it makes your elbows itchy?
Well, that’s no serious problem
I know just what you should do:
Mash ginger root with ginseng root
And get a sticky goo
Mix it up with some rice vermicelli
That you’ve dipped in a little grass Jelly
Then rub it gently around on your belly
And wipe it off when it starts to go smelly.
Do this and your elbows will never get itchy
Though you’ve eaten your fill of delitchious lichee.

(Written for the Lund Theatre Troupe’s Production of Free to Be You and Me)

Tester’s Testament

This is the last time that I’ll sit
Slowly leafing through this log
Searching for a contact’s spark
To pierce my boredom’s lonely fog.

There’s hours when working in the mill
Seems like punishment for crime.
You’ve got a home and family
For that you’ve got to do your time.

It takes the strength of a serious man
To work on shift both day and night.
There’s character and dignity
In holding a job and doing it right.

But my time’s up, my Winter’s passed.
Though I hate to leave that steady pay
Spring’s lecherous tickling in my blood
Wont let me stay another day.

I take with me just a little money
But maybe more important still
I take a feeling of comradeship
With the men who remain and work at the Mill.

There isn’t much I can leave behind
As a legacy to share–
Just some contacts for a spark
To light the long nights in this chair.

The Answer

1. Significator (the questioner): 2 of Pentacles

A man weighing or juggling two alternatives having to do with money

2. Cover and Cross (opposed forces now): 6 of Pentacles and Page of Swords

The just official giving money to the deserving poor [Unemployment insurance]

The young romantic knight of pain and truth [The Mill quest]

3. Crowning(outcome of conflict): King of Swords

The knight matured and sober

4. Beneath (background of present situation): 3 of Wands

Merchant watching ships embark (money-making schemes)

5. Behind (immediate past): Page of Pentacles

Youthful aesthete contemplating artistic beauty

6. Ahead: Emperor

King of Swords aged further, a land owner

7. Yourself: 2 of Swords

Stalemate, staying on the fence

8. House: The Hermit

Introspection, solitude, desiring a new direction

9. Hopes and Fears: The Fool

Letting Go, Abandon, Beginning

10. The Answer: 5 of Pentacles

Winter’s utter desolation, poverty, madness, cripples cut off from warmth, light and beauty
***
Another Tarot reading, two years earlier.

Tarot Question

Shall I stay?
Shall I go?
Which will make
The spirit flow?
Do Graveyard’s skull
And bones disguise
God’s holy light
In bleary eyes?
If I remain
By my free will
Will Spring transform
This Wintry Mill?