Death…Life…All of It!

Happy New Year to you, Happy Birthday to me.

It seems like the wisdom is all around at this wonderful moment.  Here are five gifts I’ve received to share with you all.  Enjoy!

*   *   *

Mary is about to turn 97.  She is frail and hearing can be difficult for her.  She can be forgetful.  One morning a few weeks ago, in the middle of a conversation about something else, she suddenly says, “I’ve lived too long.  I’m bored.  All I want now is my deep rest.”  Then, just as quickly as she’d left the earlier conversation, she returned to it.  This week I found the courage to continue that minute of openness and asked her what she thought death might hold.  Were hopes or fears involved.  She looked at me somewhat quizzically.  “No!”  A slight pause, then: “No one knows what happens after we die.  If I don’t know what’s next, how can I worry about it?  Have you seen my reading glasses?  I can’t find them anywhere.”

*   *   *

And this from Charles Upton in last Spring’s issue of Parabola,

If we see no purpose in suffering, how can we maintain our courage in the face of the hardships of life?  Nothing is left for us then but to make a religion, as well as an industry, out of our need to deny reality.  But if we are able, by the Grace of God, to come to a true sense of the ultimate goal of human life–self-transcendence, and the God-given duty to stand as a sign and mirror of the Deity in this world–then our suffering will be transformed from a misfortune into a teacher, from a degradation into an ennoblement, from an incitement to hatred and self-hatred and despair into a great power in the service of love (p.79)

*   *   *

The Gassho Meditation, the Living The Reiki Prayer with Dr. Usui

Just for today, I will not worry.  (I will trust in the Divine Plan of the Universe)

Just for today, I will not be angry.  (If I do, I will take responsibility for being angry and not project it on others)

Just for today, I will give thanks for my many blessings.  (I will be grateful for what I have and for who I am)

Just for today, I will do my work honestly.  (I will be with whatever I do and make it the most important thing in this moment)

Just for today, I will honor parents and ancestors.  (I will hold the lineage of my ancestors in my heart so that it may heal)

*   *   *

From my buddy Bill, posted on Facebook after our failing to connect two days in a row for dinner–the responsibility for both failures resting squarely with me–and without knowledge that on the third day (today, in a few hours in fact)–I was/am scheduled to leave for a four-day silent retreat:

Bill Miller

Relaxing into a bodily felt sense of and as this moment, beyond the busyness of our minds is meditation, whether we are sitting, talking or dancing and while we may never fully grok it with our minds; we can feel the truth of it, in and as our bones.Who and what we are right now is all we need and nothing is missing. The objective to meditate in order to change ourselves, get beyond our suffering, our body or our world in order to understand or be at peace, at some point in future because our mind story says we need to, is a wrong view and wrong practice. We probably will do this a lot (most do) before just relaxing into and as the simplicity of bodily-based being in this moment, beyond our compulsive attachment to the mind story.

*   *   *

And, using the newest set of tools from Picasa, a snap:

As I said up top, ENJOY!

Sometimes I see better without the camera

 

Back at the beginning of the month Bobbie and I, not at all in the style or tradition of Jack Kerouac or anyone else who’s made a name for him/herself on the road, went on a road trip.  The script was simple and, for us, remarkably undramatic:

• New Jersey Transit through a both beautiful and remarkably early snow storm from Penn Station to Trenton to transfer to SEPTA (which is probably South East Pennsylvania Transit Authority) to
• Philadelphia where we rented a car right in the 30th Street Station, to drive to
• Wilmington, Delaware (As of the census of 2010, there were 70,852 people) including (step) son David who put us up in a grand hotel of an older tradition.  Then avoiding the Pennsylvania Turnpike in favor of local route 30 to
• Chambersburg PA (Total Population 20,386) and my cousins Graeme and Emily and Ezra and Ez’s girlfriend and his 2 kids and her 3 kids all under the age of maybe 8 and maybe 6 horses.  Then we passed through
• West Virginia in a minute or so down into
• Virginia, stopping for lunch at

• Continuing to Fairfield, Virginia (Total population: 1,719: Male: 849: Female: 870: Median age (years) 40.3: Total households: 692), we spent time with Bill and MaryJean and 2 horses and played Trivial Pursuit (Brag moment: Bill and I won!)
• The next day we drove through two mountain passes into the Appalachians, first stopping at our only roadside attraction
• The remarkable Natural Bridge (shown here on a remarkable souvenir mug) before arriving at

• Newport Virginia (Population 2000: 1,896 [2000 Zip Code Based Est.], Population 1990: 170,045 [1990 Census], Population Growth 1990 to 2000: -98.89%) to hang with Judy (www.judyschwab.com) whom we met in Bhutan a few years ago and her husband, Wally, who owns the biggest motorcycle either of us has ever seen and makes beautiful things from wood.  Here we got to spend some time in  the heart of Bluegrass country and particularly in

home of the Floyd Country Store where I bought two (2!) cd’s featuring Scotty Stoneman, a wonderful fiddler whom I first heard on New Year’s Eve, 1966–but that’s another story.  Next

• Front Royal Virginia (Population in July 2009: 14,573) where we had a great meal at this place

served by a sharp and delightful waitress named Rhonda (“Hi, I’m Rhonda and I hate the Beach Boys!”,)  then watched a superb documentary on Bluegrass Music on PBS in our adequate and quiet motel room.  The very next day, continued to

• Oxford, Pennsylvania (Population in July 2009: 4,712. Population change since 2000:+9.2%) to spend an evening in relaxed conversation with Bobbie’s cousin, Pat Robertson (not the one you might be thinking of), then back to
• Philadelphia (Population in July 2009: 1,547,297) to return the car and, after just missing a train and hanging for about an hour of delightful calm (Bobbie bought a sandwich, I listened to music and pretended to meditate) at the 30th Street Station

• We caught the SEPTA train to Trenton where we caught the

• NJT train to Penn Station where we caught the #3 train (which used to be known as the IRT or Interborough Rapid Transit ) to Broadway and West 72nd Street, exiting at
• West 73rd Street and walking
• Home.

But all that’s just by way of introduction.  The story I want to tell you begins and is confined to a point about 6 days into this 9 day adventure on the morning of our departure from Newport.  After breakfast and good-byes with Judy and Wally, we wound through local roads to the intersection of 42 and 460 where we stopped for gas.  It was hot enough to take off my jacket, so, taking my camera out of my jacket pocket and placing it on the roof of the car–You smile, maybe even chuckle and it occurs to me that there is no point in continuing with the details of this tale.  Suffice it to say that, 35 minutes later, when we returned to the spot where we heard a thunk on the road behind us and blew it off as our suitcase readjusting in the trunk so that I could walk for 10 minutes along the now truck laden highway until I found the first pieces of the now shattered camera with which I had so lovingly and thoroughly documented our trip…

Now here’s the remarkably cool part of all this: neither Bobbie nor I was particularly upset at losing the camera and our photos.  Sad, certainly, but with no loss of calm and no anger.  Nothing to keep us from enjoying the rest of our trip.  About thirteen camera chunks in I found the one still holding the memory card.  Of course we immediately tried it in her camera and, of course, it read out “inaccessible.”  Since returning we’ve tried it in 5 other devices and at one “professional” photo shop.  It’s now at yet another–”advanced”–tech shop where it resides still.  Whatever.  The good times with family, friends and each other are still ours, photographs or not. Realizing that has been the great and unexpected–if ultimately obvious–lesson of our road trip in Autumn.

 

 

 

Always feel the Stones

This all starts a hundred or so miles north and west of here:  The annual Western Zen Retreat at Dharma Drum Retreat Center up in Pine Bush, NY .  I’ve been attending this event for 6 or so years, despite knowing early into my first time there that it would put me through emotional changes which–in saner and more compassionate moments–I’d not wish on an enemy let alone on myself.  Still, it’s so beautiful…

Some background: the retreat is structured around continually investigating a question given to you by one of the leaders.  This means wrestling or dancing with it or simply staring at it while sitting, walking alone in the woods, working, eating, showering, exercising, dancing and shaking or even sleeping.  Most powerfully this means talking to a silent and non-responding partner about it during communication exercises.  Finally this means relating your findings to a teacher periodically so as to receive further guidance or, perhaps, to receive a new question.  Questions like:

Who am I?       What is love?       What is relaxation?       What is this?

My first question was “What is fear?”  My second, coming midway through the third day, was “What is death?” and while this second did not arise from the first question, it might well have.

Back to the changes: In the past this had always meant that at around the second afternoon–always in broad daylight–I’d panic.  Convinced that I was in way over my head, I’d make plans to run back to the dorm, pack, hitchhike into Middletown, NY and grab the next train back to NYC and the world I thought I could handle.  I’d look like this:

Then, as I’d begin clumping through the woods, the sound of the dry leaves or snapping twigs under my feet or some bird or maybe the wind would stop me cold.  “Great Doubt,” the phase I had been going through, would end!  All the muscles would relax; I’d sigh, smile and murmur “Thank You” just loud enough for God and me to hear.

That was then.  This time the changes weren’t sparked by lack of faith in my intellectual abilities or even by my inability to meditate for any appreciable length of time before my mind decided it had other–but never better–things to do.  This time it came from the body.  There proved to be no activity waking or sleeping that was without significant pain for me.  Sitting, it was the knees or the back.  Standing it was the balls of the feet.  Walking it was the hips.  Eating it was this thing called a  diverticulum and a new denture introducing itself to my gums, and sleeping it was the bladder.  I began making bets with myself as to how long I’d last in beautiful Pine Bush, NY.  Recent flooding had cut off train service home, so the means of escape were not immediately apparent.  I wasn’t about to let that stop me.  Even more devastating at this point, my body had found an ally in it’s attack.  That supremely sadistic traitor, my mind, added copious amounts of suffering to my pain, broadcasting its conclusion that I must cut short my retreat, never pass this way again, never attempt any other–even shorter–give up my half-assed attempts at meditation altogether, lose what little influence I had left on my overbearing thought processes and spend the rest of my few remaining days on the planet eagerly awaiting the horrors of death.

Here a pause to thank God for mind’s susceptibility to distraction and what the Buddhists call impermanence.  Again–and not at all anticipated–Great Doubt revealed itself, and reality replaced my thoughts about it.  Later my sister, Barbara, would write to me:

“Choose the reality that benefits you most.”

Clearly she was referring to the one which exists outside my head and not inside it.  Sister Barbara–not unlike wife Barbara–is no dummy!

*     *     *

From this point on the retreat was filled with bliss.  Each communication exercise with ever-changing partners brought new depths of clarity, of humility, empathy and actual love.  Knowingly or not we became each others’ partner in healing.  My transition from thinking about and interpreting and filtering reality into being in reality solidified when a partner of the moment, Licette, mentioned how in walking up the stone path to the Chan Meditation Hall, she could feel each stone beneath her feet.

There it was!  Follow the body rather than the mind.  Be here!  Be now!  Ideas we’ve all seen; ideas many of us have liked and attempted at various times to adopt with varying degrees of success.  Now is my time to try it again and again and again.  And each time I find myself lost up there between my ears to remember the answer is to simply step out of my mind and back into the world.  In the same email quoted above the same Sister Barbara also wrote:

Keep those good feelings you’ve come back (from retreat) with.

The understanding here is that the feelings ultimately come from my participation in reality.  And so I’m back in the continual circus of my neighborhood:

and the intensity of The Bronx…

…and the vision of artists like Emilio Sanchez…

…and the utterly deceptive appearance of solidity and tranquility at my workplace.

My real work, of course, is to always feel the stones beneath my feet.

Say Something or Not…

A few years ago I ran a write-in asking you to submit an autobiography in exactly 6 words.  About fifty folks replied.  Since then responses to requests for write-in participation have steadily and dramatically decreased.  When I asked for captions for the following drawings exactly two folks replied with captions.  One more replied with a refusal to submit captions.  Having just returned from a 5 day meditation retreat filled with a wonderful peace and equanimity , all the ideas I might have had for why so few reader contributions have flown leaving the simple reality of what did arrive in the mail.  Here it is:

” My God!  I forgot the opera tickets!”

 ”OMG–I’ve been invited to a Tea Party, and I don’t even drink tea…”

 

“About how many pancakes do I have to get to get the BIG pitcher of syrup?”

Two words seem to say it all…

 

“We all dress this way because we want to show you how unique we are…”

The door to opportunity flies open.

“What’re ya doin’ today?”  “Just hangin’…”

 

“See you after the show…”

Thanks to Jack and Nameless for their submissions.

 

Yellow Cars, Whatever…

photo by Judith Raices

Nobody cared that the car was yellow.  Hell, she thought, nobody in this place cares about anything besides their own death.  That’s what hospice is all about, isn’t it?  Everybody’s alive and getting ready to die.  Still there it was sitting at the curb outside the building’s main entrance: a bright  yellow sports car of some expensive kind or another.  Betsy couldn’t see its name or make out the logo through her tired and watery eyes.  Perhaps it was a Jaguar, she opined.  Jaguars are sports cars, aren’t they?  Or maybe one of those German cars.  She didn’t like that idea at all.  Germans had killed her mother’s grandparents–or maybe they were her grandparents–during one of those wars in the last century–which one she could no longer remember–not that it mattered.  Whatever, she drifted only to find herself suddenly smiling.

“What’s so funny, Mrs. W?” Doctor Martins stood at her door.  From her position on the bed his elongated frame appeared to fill the entire space, his legs spread wide like some macho cowboy.

“Nothing,” she began, but quickly reconsidered.  “Yes, something.”  Her face scrunched up catlike and decidedly mischievous.  “I can’t tell you though.  You’ll just label it a symptom and set about analyzing it.”

“No, I won’t.  Try me.”

She smiled broadly this time, her mouth pushing the wrinkles in the lower half of her face to either side; cheeks rising up toward glistening eyes.

“You will too,” she grinned.  “That’s your job, isn’t it?

“I’m not always on the job though.”

“You’ve still got your white coat on and that stethoscope around your neck.  What’s that for: in case I start dying in the middle of our conversation?”

“Mrs. W, take it easy on me.  I was on my way home.  I just wanted to say good night.”

“Is that your little yellow car outside,”  she asked.

“Maybe.  Why do you ask?”

“Just keeping up my end of the conversation.”

*************************************************************************************

OK, your task–if you choose to accept it-is to complete this story in a hundred words or less.  Click on “Comments” below and write!

A Felicidade e a Energia

This afternoon I spent a few hours at the Brazilian Day 2011 celebration on 6th Avenue and, of course, 46th Street.  Wow!

It looked like this:

and this:

It tasted like this:

But ah, my friends, and o, my foes, underneath it all and bursting forth from it not unlike a power samba band from the very heart of existence, the reality was this!

And here I would have you listen to Generique, the first cut on Jobim’s Black Orpheus soundtrack album.  Play it at the volume it deserves–loud!  Click:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ7F0Fkydhk

A felicidade means happiness, happiness in this case containing peace and joy and satisfaction, the wholeness of being that comes from knowing who you are.  Energia means–no surprise here–energy manifesting as excitement and movement, the very sound of life.  These, incidentally,  combine as the theme of all Brazil’s exports (like honey, samba, feijoada, beautiful and tightly underdressed  women and often shirtless men–surely dancing samba–coffee, soccer champions, cachaca, churrascaria, more samba and bolinios de bacalhau...) offer to the world.  Brazilian Day 2011 was just that perfect mixture of happiness and energy. Thousands of folks draped in Brazilian flags or wearing the yellow and green of Brazil’s national soccer team–most emblazoned with Ronaldo’s #10, faces, hair and even tongues painted in celebratory colors, the strong smells of charcoal and pig meat everywhere, and everywhere the beat of power samba drumming.

Hmm, those of you who have some familiarity with my thinking may be wondering, what does all this have to do with a Zen and Taoist understanding of existence? 

For those of you without that familiarity, it’s like this: no matter what I seem to be writing about, eventually it will come back to an Eastern mindset that over the years has so blended in with my New England/Judeo/Christian/New York thinking as to make it it’s own.  The irony is that I never plan for this to happen.  It just does.  Well…maybe not never.  Maybe sometimes I do begin with the Zen stuff and look for some clever way of slipping into it.  The truth be told, this is one of those times.  This all actually began the day before Brazilian Day 2011 with me riding the A train out to the Atlantic Ocean (yes, you can get there by subway!) while listening to Nawang Khechog’s Sounds of Peace and reading Robert Aitken’s book, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics.  His chapter entitled Dharma Assets led me to put together this (I thought at the time) free-association list:

energy

richness

abundance

fullness

emptiness

potential

dialectical understanding

blurred snapshots

hustling right here on the A train

music

reading

knitting

phoning

cross aisle conversations

musical acrobats

football team funding

pan-handling as an alternative to crime and desperation

Add to this the vague memory of some comments about qi I read back in the 1960′s  in an introduction to the Tao Te Ching.  Elizabeth Reninger, writing currently for About.com (http://taoism.about.com/od/qi/a/Qi.htm) says about qi:

Central to Taoist world-view and practice is qi (chi). Qi is life-force — that which animates the forms of the world. It is the vibratory nature of phenomena — the flow and tremoring that is happening continuously at molecular, atomic and sub-atomic levels. In Japan it is called “ki,” and in India, “prana” or “shakti.” The ancient Egyptians referred to it as “ka,” and the ancient Greeks as “pneuma.” For Native Americans it is the “Great Spirit” and for Christians, the “Holy Spirit.” In Africa it’s known as “ashe” and in Hawaii as “ha” or “mana.”

Reninger doesn’t mention it, but my guess is that the Kabbalists would call it God.  My friends Annie and Mahanta would call it music.

Back in the ’60′s the writer whose name I can’t recall (maybe R.B. Blakeney) described everything–EVERYTHING–as qi and those things we could see or otherwise identify as being temporary concentrations of qi.  Back then I thought I understood that.  What I was understanding on the A train, however, wasn’t really understanding.  It was the most remarkable if unverbalizable feeling.  Let’s take another look at the list:

energy

richness

abundance

fullness

emptiness

potential

Up to this point I was clearly in my left brained intellectual head and caught up in ideas coming from Atkins’ text.  Then along came

dialectical understanding

This one crept in on the wings of a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy training I attended a few weeks back.  A most delicious idea and one extraordinarily relevant to my work and rest-of-life, this, one best publicized by Hegel and Karl Marx, is the idea that two opposites may be synthesized to give rise to a third entity.  “Thesis and antithesis yield synthesis” is the traditional phrasing.  Somehow my mind then shifted to

blurred snapshots

You see, a lot of my favorite snaps of late have been just that: blurred.  Here’s one from Egypt: The Luxor market at night:

Snaps like these speak of energy, motion and color more than of simple shapes in space.   I’ve been making such images for quite a while, but recently I’ve grown particularly fond of them.  Back to the moment.  The list continues with the contents of the ride:

hustling right here on the A train

music

reading

knitting

phoning

cross aisle conversations

musical acrobats

football team funding

pan handling as an alternative to crime and desperation

With the train now above ground and the world rushing by on both sides, the interior of the train became awash with energy.  Sounds, colors, activities, interactions, preoccupations all blended into a sea of qi.  Things once distinct merged into each other on the train just as they would on 6th Avenue and West 46th Street: the smell of roasting pork  merging with the aroma of sweating drummers, the music of a reggae CD stand clashing and yet blending with that accompanying tango dancers on a stage half a block away.  Not harmony.  Yes, harmony!  Not separate.  Yes, separate!  Not to be understood but to be felt!

Back to my favorite word of late: WOW!

WOW!

Dark Bar

Dark Bars are a phenomenon known to very few.  I know this, because every Dark Bar I’ve ever entered and spent time in has been almost empty of customers.  Maybe one guy splitting his time between watching the TV and checking the ponies in the Daily News, all the while ignoring his beer, that last being no more than the receipt for his rental of the stool.  There’s the barmaid, of course.  Dark Bar barmaids are always beautiful, full-figured and dressed in such a way as to tell you it’s all really there and none of it’s for you.  Downtown and midtown they’re aspiring actresses and spend all their time on the phone to someone they claim is their agent.   If they don’t have the body, they do the New York Times crossword and in that way let you know that none of whatever they do have is for you.   Uptown they are tough and beautiful and full-figured, with eyebrows that could cut out your heart.  They’re usually back in the corner on the phone to their  girlfriends or babysitters (who are usually their mothers or girlfriends) to find out about who’s been doing it with whom and what’s up for the weekend and shit.  In the Spanish Language Dark Bars their only allowed English is ” Un otro?”

Bartenders don’t work the day shift in Dark Bars unless the owner or manager have better places to be during the day.  If they are there, there’s no need of additional muscle.  The owner is usually in the back, usually surrounded by paperwork.  He’ll come out periodically to look around, greet a newcomer and to make sure nobody’s drinking for free.  Owners and managers have both diplomacy and the ability to command the fear that keeps all ultimately peaceful.  They go to school for it.  If push comes to shove, they will be backed up by the porter, a small, youngish Mexican man eager to please his boss, a young man who knows what must be done and is always ready to do so.

Dark Bars, by the way, aren’t really all that dark.  When a sanitation truck pulls up, there’s always enough light to shoot a coupla games of pool for beers or even to do the crossword in the Post.   It’s just that it takes a while for your eyes to get used to the difference between the blinding light on the street and the gentle neon of the interior.  Dark Bars always feel friendly, if only because they’re quiet as well as dark.  The voice of the TV is nothing compared to the horns on the street or the voices of the women with cleavage who know what each others’ boyfriends were doing when they were supposed to be somewhere or whatever and the loud crowd in the evening between the time when everyone’s just chilling and when they’re getting really pissed off.  In Dark Bars, if you’re lucky, the TV’ll be in a language you don’t speak.  If the owner is up front, he’ll welcome you and tell the barmaid–in hushed tones that sound endearing–to get the fuck off the phone and get you a drink.

It’s only as your eyes adjust to the dark that you’ll start to see signs that peace is not the only possibility.  While it’s good to be reassured that

The drinks are bigger in my nest

it is less comforting to know that you are in a place where it must be posted that 

If you are not consuming, stay away from this business

and do you really need to be informed in writing that

The men’s room is for one person at a time

and is kept locked?

*   *   *

I went for a walk today, a hot day that left me with my armpits sliding down my sides and a thirst that wouldn’t answer to water.  I was in a part of the city I knew not, so all options looked equal.  Not really.  It’d been decades since my last entry into a Dark Bar, and there one was–visible a block away.  The sign above it simply said “Tavern.”  That was enough.  Down the block, through the newish glass door into the old brick building, out of the heat into the cool that came without the need of air conditioning and smelled like beer.  So dark I couldn’t see the bar stools, but had to find them by touch.

The friendly welcome from the owner, the creak of the chair at the dark end of the bar where the moment before I’d seen only the glow of a cellphone and the almost unheard steps of the barmaid along the catwalk to a position in front of me.

Order a beer, sit back and watch the battle between my senses adjusting to the dark and the flood of memories: the ghosts of  bars called The Annex on Avenue B between 10th and 11th in the year 1965, the Tap-a-Keg on Amsterdam Avenue between 75th and 76th in 1974, Stanley’s, Old Stanley’s, The Old Reliable, The P & G, The All State…  Images of men both dead and alive, of events that did and didn’t happen, of dreams no more than dreams pushing against the one bottle of Coors Light down the bar from me, the red glow of the Budweiser sign and the silhouettes of two men–better dressed than expected–sitting up front and not drinking.  Beyond them the light of midday August in New York City.

Not a bad place to be.

What I learned in 2 weeks in Israel

As most of you have already guessed or verified, all Israelis do not look like this:

For that matter they don’t all look like this:

or even this:

Sadly, more of them do not look like this:

or cook like this:

or have the warmth and worldview of these:

And they all don’t look like this:

All Israeli history does not look like this:

or this:

All tourists don’t act like this:

or this:

wearing tee shirts showing this:

And, quiet as it’s kept, remarkably few folks in this land surrounded by enemies live in constant fear of this:

…and that’s what I learned in two weeks in Israel!

I am not “The Bicyclist”

Judy: Are you riding these days?  Interested in joining me tomorrow?

Goldberg: I won’t be available until 2.  Does that work for you? 

Judy: Probably not but I will let you know if that changes.

*   *   *   *   *

Now that I’m finally getting older, I’m beginning to actually realize it when life lessons get handed to me on an unmistakable platter.  In the past few months I’ve been simultaneously blessed and challenged and delighted and rocked with unmistakable insights into what’s real. This is another part of that story.

And this was how this started: a simple exchange of emails between me and a bike-riding partner since maybe 1986.  The unusuality of it:  I didn’t respond with my usual and unequivocal

“Yes, yes, o yes.  We can ride.  I must ride.  Whatever…whenever…oh yes, just say when and I don’t care where and I’ll be there because (ta dum!) I am The Bicyclist!

Already something was going on.  Only I didn’t know it.  I just figured,

Hey!  I’ve got something to do around noon.  Either she waits or she doesn’t.  Either way–with her or alone–I’ll  still ride, ’cause I am The Bicyclist.

OK, so wearing my non-bike-riding civvies, I get on my beaten, blue Ross commuter bike and spin slowly up Amsterdam Avenue to 96th Street and my meditation group.  I’d not been there for three weeks now because of a trip to Israel (more about that, you can be sure, later), the land where life got handed to me several times, and I   was truly looking forward to reuniting with some remarkable folks engaged in a remarkable practice.  Still, the back of mind was filled with images of me in my bicyclist suit, sitting astride my bright red Klein road bike (bright red) riding perhaps across the George Washington Bridge, onto the road we cyclists call (incorrectly) River Road and north.  Remember, I am The Bicyclist.

 I’m not going to give you all the  intermediary details.  I hate it when people do that to me–I’m a ‘Punch Line’ kinda guy–and even if you’re one of those folks who thrives on details, I ‘m willing to risk your wrath here.  The meditation starts.  It’s the Shaking Meditation in the tradition of Ratu Bagus

http://www.ratubagus.com/English/Bio+Energy+Meditation

that I’ve mentioned in previous posts.  Loud, rhythmic music, quiet individual mantra-chanting to bring the mind back to focus whenever it drifts off to things like being The Bicyclist, some groaning and laughter and, above all, rapid full-body shaking all dedicated to whatever I can conceive of that has vastly more power than I do.  In my case that’s God.

OK, so here I am shaking and mantrasizing and suddenly–out of absolute and proverbial Nowhere–the thought leaps into my head:

Huh?

     I’m not?

          I’m not!

               What?

                                     I’m really not.  I’m just a guy who, along with doing countless other things on a regular basis,  rides a bike.  It’s not who I am.  It’s–at most–just one thing I do.  It’s not my identity, and I am certainly not somehow more worthy and successful when I ride a bike and less worthy and a failure if I don’t.  I’m just someone who sometimes rides and sometimes doesn’t.  In fact, I’ve just put a halt to receiving far too frequent emails labeling me a “Legend of the New York Cycle Club” in an effort to get me to attend a club reunion for which I’d already bought my ticket a month ago.  I’m not  him.  I’m just me.

O, flippin’ wow!

This truth realized causes the root question to arise:

What identities do I subscribe to?  How much of  how I see myself is based on trying to live up to certain stereotypes or, for the psychoscholars among us, archetypes that have been planted in my head over the years?  How much joy, misery, frustration and self-congratulation arise from my living up to or failing to live up to these sets?

And, of course, me being me, I suspect I’m not alone in this, so I turn it to you:

What identities do you subscribe to?  Who do you tell yourself you are?  What does it cost/profit you to believe it?

*     *     *     *     *

When Worlds Coalesce

This train of thought starts off Saturday morning on my way to Shaking Meditation.   As I was walking down the long 31st floor hallway to the apartment home of our Saturday morning meetings I was joined by Eleanor, a fellow shaker.  Eleanor is both an intellectual and a woman of heart.  My guess is that she’s older than I. She dresses better than I ever will, has far more energy and far more brain power than I will ever have, is originally from a German-speaking country, has an Italian surname and, guessing from the amount of traveling she does, is retired. She looks and moves like she plays tennis.

Eleanor studied philosophy.  She studied philosophy deeply enough to write a paper on Immanuel Kant.  The only thing I can remember about Kant is having read, perhaps in his Philosophy of Pure Reason, a single sentence which ran for 4 pages followed by an asterisk.  The footnote noted: “The verb ‘cannot’ in this sentence has  also been translated as  ’can.’”  Hmm… Eleanor and slouches have nothing in common.   She is courageous in ways that only the truly fearless and fearlessly true can be.  Eleanor seeks the answer to “Why?”,  pursues ultimate Truth and is not afraid to say so out loud.   I, on quite the other hand, confine my interest to how whatever I might learn may be applied on the most practical and ultimately mundane levels.   She wants to know why Shaking Meditation works.  I want to know what I can use it for?  Will it help me to sleep or ease the arthritis in my right knee or relax the tension in my addicted clients?  Will it help me to accept the aging of my body and the gradual disappearance of my memory or to master the smart phone should I ever get one?

We talk about our varying concerns, Eleanor and I, until it is time for us to join the other meditators.  In the group discussion before meditation begins, she talks of her frustration in locating a concrete spot in the body on which to center her self and her meditation.  ”Everything feels like it’s floating,” she says.  ”There is no center…no me.”  My jaw drops.  This is the mindset I have been striving for ever since learning of meditation and the Buddhist concept of no-self.  I strive and fail to get rid of my self.  She complains of having succeeded!

“Yes,” she continues.  I learned to do this when I studied Kant.  He talks of being the observer of the self rather than being that self.”  Kant said that?!  Why the hell couldn’t he have said it in a way I could have understood it.  I mean, I read his crap all the way back in 1960! Why couldn’t he have said it then?!

“But this is now,” the better part of my brain whispers.  ” Be that observer of the self rather than the participating, involved, engrossed self.”

“Yeah, right,” the usually engrossed part of my brain responds reflexively, but then, most unexpectedly follows with,   “”Maybe I can do that…maybe I can.”  So during the 45 minutes of Shaking Meditation (It really is no more than that, by the way.  You stand and shake while chanting a mantra and offering it all up to whatever you understand as greater than yourself.)  I step back from the ache-infested body, the voice chanting “Thank you” and the interaction with all things irrelevant.  I simply watch it happen.  And here there’s a bonus: occasionally I notice me praising myself for my meditational efforts or criticizing myself for getting caught up in some usually lustful distraction and–in either case–break out  into genuinely gleeful laughter.  At first it’s laughter at, then, and I have no idea of how this happens, it becomes laughter with that me I’m watching.  More often than not this leads other meditators to join in the hahas and hohos and even the heehees, and that’s just fine.    In Shaking Meditation laughter is part of it.  In fact today when we finish we are led in an introduction to Laughter Yoga (http://www.laughteryoga.org/) by Jonathan who wears tee shirts advertising Laughter Yoga.

When it’s all over Eleanor and I resume our conversation briefly. Worlds apart we are.  Each of us following our own path with no concern to convert the other.  Just mutual respect and the belief, at least on my part, that there is much to be learned from the other.   Lunch together is out because she is attending a discussion of  Theories of Meaning and Motivation being held at The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination. This being said, she notices that once the ideas in a conversation become resolved and settled, the energy of that discussion fades.

“It becomes–” she begins.

“Dead,” I interject.

“Yes,” she responds both surprised and saddened.  ”I never thought of it in that word before, but yes.”

Back on the ground from the Shaking Meditation on the 31st floor of the very proper building on the corner of Broadway and West 96th Street, back on my bicycle in the traffic of Saturday at one p.m.  Focused utterly on the streams of traffic moving to and from the West Side Highway, I head toward the bike path along the Hudson River.  No Shaking Meditation, no laughter, no Eleanor.   No center.  No me at this moment come to think of it.  Just eyes and ears and legs.  Just open spaces and closed spaces.  Just motion through the warm afternoon.

Was It Something I Wrote?

Raise your hand if you remember Jim Bouton.  According to Wickipedia:

James Alan “Jim” Bouton (English pronunciation: /ˈbaʊtn/; born March 8, 1939) is an American former Major League Baseball pitcher. He is also the author of the controversial baseball book Ball Four, which was a combination diary of his 1969 season and memoir of his years with the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and Houston Astros.

Anyhow, after a whole bunch of baseball guys got really upset behind Ball Four, Bouton wrote another book, one called I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.  For reasons that don’t really matter here or anywhere else, I always thought the second book was called, Was It Something I Said?  This was undoubtedly the result of projection on my part.  For those of  you with better things to do than know about “projection,” let’s just say projection is me not liking something about myself soooo much that, rather than believe I really believe it, I believe YOU believe it and say you are wrong.  In fact  you are more than wrong.  You are so messed up that–when the truth is finally told–what  you claim to be true about me is actually true about  you, but you are sooo unable to handle the truth that you try to pin it on me. I, of course, filled with infinite wisdom and extraordinary courage, know that you are flawed and love you anyway...maybe.

Does this sound like it’s actually leading somewhere. Yeah, well it is. 

I just checked the stats on this blog.  As it turns out almost 200 folks (197 to be exact) have taken a look at what I wrote last week. One!  One and only one made a comment.  I need feedback!  To repeat:

I need feedback.

I mean, I write serious stuff and humorous stuff and, here I really try, things to get people thinking or participating or just plain pissed, but hardly anybody drops a Comment.  Now the reason you get an email from me whenever I post a new bit of stuff is because we’ve met, I’ve heard you say whatever it is  you were saying, and I know you’ve got a brain.  I know  you’ve got something to say, even if it’s just,

“Stop writing to me.  I don’t need this (stuff) anymore.  I’m too busy worrying about the economy and planning my next vacation.”

So, okay, so I can accept that.  21 years of social work with addicts, almost 13 years of marriage, 10 years of zen and a month of Shaking Meditation (be sure I’ll write about that in the future!) have taught me acceptance.  Okay, I’ve got it: you’re all sharp but quiet.  Well, maybe you know some loudmouths.  Maybe you know some folks who just can’t help expressing “Oh  yeah’s” or “me too’s” or “You gotta be kiddin’s” or even an occasional “Hey, that’s just like the time I…” or even a “What about if…?”

If  you do know or even if you suspect you know somebody like that, please send them the link to this blog.  As I may have mentioned

I need feedback!

Hell, I’ll even take suggestions.

As for the link, it’s  http://goldberg.wordpress.com

And in the words of the actors who played the brothers who made the wine coolers,

Thanks for your support.

The Tip of the Iceberg

Like it or not–and I do not like it–there are some things that must be worried about.  Living in New York City and loving it as I do, I find myself–after a decade and a year of not doing so–finally obligated to worry about The Terrorists.  It’s  not that The Daily News and TV and (I suppose, though I really don’t read it) the NY Times haven’t tried to  spawn and nurture my concern for the safety of us all, but, frankly, it hadn’t worked until I saw this:

Frankly I can deal with the AirTrain threat.  I expect AirTrain to be a target of  The Terrorists, because The Terrorists do not ride AirTrains.  The Terrorists take taxis driven by fellow conspirators listening to music you’d not want to hear but wouldn’t ask the driver to shut off if you were his passenger and wanted to make  your plane in time to go through two hours of security because of The Terrorists.  If you’re gonna ride the AirTrain, you’ve got to be willing to take your chances, and I am willing.

For me it’s the “other targets wide open for attack” that draws me into the camp of those chanting, “Kill The Terrorists and Burn Their Babies.”  It also helps that I saw an extraordinary documentary on the dead and brilliantly angry comedian, Bill Hicks, but that’s a whole other thing.  Meanwhile you should check him out on YouTube.

Just what are those other targets and which of them would matter that much to me?  What matters so much that it would make me want to act just like those I don’t want acting in the first place? What would turn me into The Terrorists’ Terrorist?

My first thought–given there are no Meditation Terrorists or even Social Work Terrorists–is Bicycle Terrorists.  I don’t mean those officers of the local government who are now expecting people pedaling bicycles to obey laws written to govern the actions of those who drive cars, busses and trucks.  Those guys, those guys…  This weekend past an unmarked police car, six marked police cars and one police van all responded when it was alleged that a helmet-wearing bicyclist riding up Amsterdam Avenue violated a red light at the corner of  West 76th Street.  She was yelling and screaming enough to get me to a window.  It looked like they had her pinned up against the unmarked car with it’s lights flashing and her bicycle around to the other side of the unmarked car and a good sized crowd all gathered around wondering, “Is this really the best use of my tax dollars?”  I was way up on the 8th floor, so I couldn’t see if she had a gun or a knife…or…a bomb!

BICYCLE TERRORISTS, Oh My God (and I don’t usually say that or even like people who do!)!  And here I certainly don’t mean people intent on murder, mayhem and evil who ride around on bicycles looking for opportunities to wreak those things on the rest of us.  People who ride around on bikes are inevitably wonderful people, much like myself and my friends Luis and Judy and Dave and Denise and even Dmitiri although I haven’t seen him in quite a while and, with a name like Dmitri, I might not be so glowing in my mention of him if it was back during the Cold War.

I mean those deft of finger and devoid of  heart who would run an ignition wire from a bicycle lock firmly securing my faithful Ross to a disobeyed No Parking or Standing sign, along that bicycle’s blue and paint-chipped frame, wind it around a front wheel spoke and up a wheel fork and stem into the tattered handlebar bag jerry-rigged to the handlebars of that bicycle–my bicycle–with a bungee cord which some people call a sandoze because the automatic clamping device that held the bike bag to the handlebars broke that night I was on my way to computer-tutor a senior and stopped to get Japanese food for dinner, that same tattered bike bag in which they had secreted a bomb which no doubt cost far more than my old, second-hand Ross (did I mention it’s blue?) bicycle, so that, through the innocent and honest effort on my part to unlock my bicycle and continue on my various rounds, both the bike and I would surely be blown to a remarkable if never-counted number of bloody and exasperatingly small, unidentifiable before the advent of DNA pieces.  (Here’s where I’m indebted to Arlo D. Guthrie.)

Now acknowledging that such nogoodniks no doubt do exist, I’ve developed the habit of first looking into my tattered  handlebar bag for bombs before beginning the unlocking process.  And you can bet your freedom, when I see something I say something!  Like when I see those itinerant guys on the street peddling baskets of stuff they want you to buy, but you can’t see what’s underneath the stuff they want you to buy…

’cause sometimes maybe…

If You Don’t See Something,

Ya Still Gotta Say Something.

Take it from me, your friend

Richard S. Goldberg

The Past Falls Away

The past falls away.  There, I said it again.  The phrase appeared in my head yesterday while at Dinosaur, a loud rib joint filled with Columbia students kicking back and Black folks just back from church , sitting at a tall, round and little table with friend Judith and two strangers.  I like it.  Yes, it sounds like something someone wrote a while ago and so, in the face of my claims to creativity, recalls good ol’ Ecclesiastes 1:9-14,“There is nothing new under the sun.” So be it!  The past falls away captures the theme of what’s currently on my mind and sounds so much more  like “Hey, look at me, I’m a writer” than

I can’t remember anything beginning with capital letters anymore, and the computer obliviated all my poetry and rearranged the labels on all my photographs, and the only reason I’m writing this right now is because I can’t remember why I turned on the computer much less walked into this room in the first place.

Dinosaur turned out to be the end point of  a long and delightful walk along the Hudson to photograph crocuses. On that walk Judith, a friend since 1992, brought up a whole passel of memories which, in my brain, registered as no more than little signs reading “Exhibit removed.”

Much in that same vein, dinner that night with neighbors Paul and Cate further exposed another enormous stack of missing memories–like who used to live in our building and who lives here now on my floor.

Someone outside

invisible around the corner

plays sad bagpipes

in the morning rain.

Time and aging though are fine healers.  All this losing and forgetting would get me down in the past.  Not now though.  Not today.  Right now–and for reasons I can’t supply–there’s more feeling of relief, of unburdening.  There’s a strange and lovely and perhaps eerie part as well.  It’s all  remarkably similar to feelings that hit me while on a Buddhist retreat on Living and Dying and hearing Atisha’s Nine Contemplations, the first of which is, “Death is inevitable.”

Wow!

OK, I know that we all know this, that we don’t need the writings of an eleventh century Indian monk to  be reminded of it.  That being said, retreats have a way of opening me to a whole new understanding of the obvious.  Atisha’s first contemplation hit me in a way I’d never have expected: as  a cause for celebration!

If it’s inevitable, my little mind reveled, then I don’t have to worry about it!  I can just keep riding my bike in traffic and letting unseen and unknown strangers prepare my meals in restaurants.  I can accept the prevailing Westerlies and walk under the sidewalk sheds which adjoin construction sites filled with beer-drinking, reefer smoking hod carriers and continue to work joyfully in a neighborhood where those unauthorized to carry weapons do so anyway.  Better than wow: Whoopee!

But then maybe better than both.  Maybe “aahhh…”

“Write Your Creed,” He Said. “Write It!”

The call was to spell out a creed, my creed.  What are my beliefs?  Rather than get lost in an introduction which would only sound like rationalization, let me just list the points as they occur to me:

1. I believe that I was deliberately created by the Creator, by God.  (This isn’t just ego.  I was wanted.)
2. God, all powerful, all that is, loves and supports me.  (I am the boss’ son.)
3. Only I can prevent my success.  (As long as I stay out of my own way, I will flourish.)
4. My ultimate value, importance and relevance in this life is equal to that of yours and everyone else’s.  (You and me.  The whole team!)
5. I exist only as I interact with those others. I am not at all separate from them, nor, for that matter, from all that is.   (No you all=no me.)
6. That “me” to which keep I referring  is ever-changing in it’s physical, psychological, social and spiritual being.  (I call those changes “maturing” and continually work on liking it.)
7. I believe the harmony with which all interacts is God and may also be called love (when we truly understand that word.)
8. I believe at this time I am pursuing my calling, i.e., that which I cannot not do.  This is probably always true, but at this moment I can see it.  (Wow!)
9. I believe whatever happens is a learning opportunity and that it is my responsibility to learn from that experience .  (Yo, G!  Pay attention!)
10. I  believe that no matter what I do or how well I do it, I am teaching others.  (O, shit, they’re watching!)
11. I am blessed!  My greatest blessing is to know that I am blessed, to know that numbers 1-10 above are true.  (Aaahhhh…)

*   *   *

Now the call goes out to you.  Write a creed!  You don’t have to show it or share it.  If you want to post it, that’s on you.

Just do it.  Do it now!

My Meditation Monkey

Ever heard of a phenomenon called monkey mind?  It works like this: you sit to meditate but your mind quickly reveals a mind of it’s own.  Like an energetic simian in a fruit-filled tree, it jumps from here to there by way of legitimate, dubious and utterly non-existent connections.  It dazes and dazzles as you fluctuate between observing this chaos from a safe distance and getting swept  up into its channel-surfing swirl.

If there is any real help for this Buddhist understanding of Attention Deficit Disorder, I have yet to find it.  About 4 years ago I brought this to my teacher at that time.  He thought for a moment and said, “Perhaps it’s not monkey mind.”  Back then I thought this a brilliant insight, even though I was never able to use it.  More recently I came across this comment by Gaylon Ferguson:

Frequently we discover that our minds do not rest in radiant contentment for our entire meditation session. Why not? Because we have been training for years in desiring, reaching, grasping, getting, and then wanting more, and then, of course, more—all reinforcing the underlying feeling that this moment is not enough.

Ouch!  Never mind the “radiant contentment” crack.  He puts all responsibility for  this mess on me having become habituated to “more.”  He seems to be saying that I’m so greedy I can’t be sated by a mind crammed full of the awareness of my breathing or a mantra coupled with the sounds, smells, feel and visual field of my world.  I need to add heaping helpings of random pickings drawn from my history, speculation and imagination, from my collections of hope and fear,  from the whatever of whatever.

Were that true, were it all just about my unquenchable lust for the  diabolical more, then, it seems to me,  I could do a whole lot better than trying to remember who was sitting next to Phil Rizzuto in the picture of the 1955 New York Yankees.   It was probably Yogi Berra though.  Scooter and Yogi are both Italian, came up about the same time and hung out together.  I used to have a comic book about their friendship including something about one of them teaching the other a waltz step to be more graceful and efficient in picking a ball up off the ground and throwing it to first base.  Of course that could have been my comic book about Jackie Robinson and Peewee Reese.

Comic books were important to my growing up.  And bikes.  I hope to get my biking back together this spring.  That’s a hope I’ve entertained for 4 or 5 winters now only to see it dashed every time by monumental, bizarre and, I can assure you, undeserved accidents.  The most interesting was a neuroma which emerged after I slammed my foot into steps at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

I got this postcard, “Going Postal” by Kombui Olujimi there.  In the center is a 32 cent stamp featuring Alfred Hitchcock by the way.  Nowadays folks just write btw along with things like idk (I don’t know) and sy.   I just made up sy.  It stands for “sez you,” something not too many people say any more–at least not in the refined and repressed circles I inhabit.

That’s too bad.  Any word with a “Z” in it is actually sort of cool.  “X” also.  Who’d buy Xanax if it was called Danad or, even worse, Manam?  Even a “V.”  My best buddy back in the ’6o’s and ’70′s, Marvin, was very proud of the “V” in his name.  Me, I don’t have any very cool letters.  “Very cool,” btw, could be reduced to “vc.”  and using it could even work as a criterion for coolness.  Folks out of the “vc” zone would see those letters and think automatically of the Viet Cong.  All this might fit into the category of age-ism, just as sensitivity toward demographic-based “isms” denotes yet another historically based category.

Nonetheless the Viet Cong were very cool, defeating the French and the Americans and, in a more subtle and profound way, the influence of the Chinese who, at least to me, are also vc–in my proposed new meaning, of course.  Actually it’s not all that new.  It’s a ’60′s formulation, and  that was way before the concussion–another one of those accidents I mentioned a while back.   Anyhow that’s probably why I work to help folks needing recovery from addictions.

I say “addictions” and not “drugs” because  most of my clients are actually addicted not to the stuff most people think of as addictive.  Last night before going to hear a really great guitar duo, Oltman & Newman–

a delightful name pairing btw–concert at Mannes School of Music which is part of the New School University–a pretty stupid name iyam (which stands for “if you ask me”)–we overheard the “Drugs never interested me” conversation of a couple sitting next to us.  It never occurred to them that addicts are actually addicted to views of themselves and the world and, yes, God, which if I held them, would certainly lead me to drug them away.  Yeah, they would.  Actually did…away…way away…

“Away in the Manger”  might have been the first Christmas carol I learned.  Maybe “Silent Night.”  Either way it makes me think of Carol Golden and Carol Pedini and Carol Dameron.  The last one eventually became a psychotherapist but, before that, dated a psychotherapist who claimed to  have played bass on the first album made by the Australian Jazz Quartet.  The original LP cover was orange.  It had a black and white photo of a sitting kangaroo repeated four times.  The guy once bought a nickel bag of reefer from me and paid with a bum check.  I don’t know why, the name “reefer,” I mean, but could probably look it up on Google–or Bing which would just give Google’s answers if Google’s lawyers are right.

Funny thing is, lawyers are never right.  They’re just clever and convincing.  Some of them though are actually nice.  That word “nice,”  it’s just so namby pamby.  Namby pamby could be reduced to np.  If someone texted you with np in it somewhere, would you know what was meant?  I wouldn’t, but then again (ta?) this is getting out of hand (ooh???.)

Write if you get work.  Hang by your thumbs.

Who said that?

Another Invitation!

Imagine my surprise on reading the remarkably few comments and emails on the last posting,  Like a Closet in Spring (http://goldberg.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/like-a-closet-in-spring/#comments). I saw it all as one piece and constructed so as to stir up some stuff.  No one else did.  Several folks suggested that each paragraph amounted to the beginning or some other part of a short story.   Some were less complimentary.

“Hmm,” I thought.

So, in my continuing effort to get you all to have fun with words, here’s my invitation:

1. Take any part of  Like a Closet in Spring and use it as the beginning, middle or end of a fictional short story.  Let that story be no longer than 250 words.
2. Have fun!  I did when I wrote the original.
3. Get it to me no later than Valentine’s Day.
4. I’ll post it!
5. O.K.?

Like a Closet in Spring

“How campy,” she hummed almost silently and deep to  herself, never considering the growing distance between her, oats and the Cleveland man her mother thought would never marry.  Outside the third floor window, the one which faced south and had the best view of Martine’s school almost half a mile away across the now fallow field…

…clouds of spent carbon ranged high above the horizon.  Bricks were closer, heavier and more radiant now.  The sun had taught them how.

Fish filled that stretch of stream between Founder’s Point and the West 7th Street Bridge.  Dexter and Little Tuesday knew that.  Armed with real fishing rods–not the bamboo sticks and string that the O’Donald kids were using, both expected that dinner would soon be in their buckets.  They had listened to and understood the ways of nature.   Close attention to the movement of the wind, a wind which knew no recourse other than it’s own.  Martine and the O’Donalds suspected treachery around the bend, but without proof the Comanches would not offer support.

Omelets for all.

And muffins, the kind made famous by New York luncheonettes before the Greeks had taken them over to create family businesses enduring for generations; before  Koreans, now with Mexican employees, had taken over the corner groceries throughout the city, leaving the newest generation of Italians, mostly  third and fourth generation Americans, adrift in a sea of corporate corruption; while the Dominicans had ousted second and third generation Puerto Rican bodega owners and cornered the market on loose cigarettes and illicit drugs sold at street level.  The newsstands?  Indian and Pakistani, but so what?

Sure there were still selfless housewives scuttling along the outer shores of the Back Bay and it’s all-to-fancy brushwork, but no one felt there was any real threat in mainstreaming the Raster-infested bulwarks of that time after mantras and marijuana had surfaced.  Maybe Timmy saw things differently, but no one listens to your mother, they’d told him.  No one at all.

Charlie Redfinger smiled.  Severe Algonquin luggage tags hovered above the camera, each in it’s original condition but for the circular blue stick-on tags each bearing a hand drawn “44.”  Buddha in bronze, allegedly from Nepal and first seen in a glass display case along with souvenir ash trays and cigarette lighters made in China, looked down from the base of the antique desk lamp at the twice-folded green towel laid impractically atop his desk.  Slippers off, that was the credo of those saving discs and reluctantly applying hand sanitizers to the orphans crawling about the cubicle.  Nothing could save them now, risky thinking aside.

“Examine  your fingers.  Do it now!  There might be opportunities later,” Ragged Ned continued, “but there might not be later later.  There might not be any later at all.”  They looked up at his towering presence.  No one in memory had commanded the deck as did Ragged Ned.  No one had held the reigns of power as had the descendants of this crazed curmudgeon and, to be sure, no one would.  His was the saga of musical virtue gone wrong, of a duplex on a side street, a raised toilet seat in a school for only women.  Who would dare to offer explanations when there was no one present to listen?

Among the new-found party of scholastic raiders and internet henchmen there arose–or did it descend?–a partial landing of mock goodness in green.  Several planters had come forward during that late evening to sing in close harmony with the farmers and stagehands all dressed as if in a dream, as if attending a high school graduation in the American south…

…black shoes, creased navy trousers and softly colored shirts blossoming over the black belted tops of those over-sized drawers.  Compliments to all on  having carried it off with such aplomb.

Jeffrey and Carni looked at each other, each waiting for the other to speak.  Carni rose and cleared her throat the way a man might do it.  “How long will it be,” she asked.  Jeffrey could only stare down at the small red rocks which lay in no particular pattern between his yellowed boots.  Soon it would again be dawn, and no sign of trouble would be too small to notice.  Again Carni cleared her throat.  “I’m still asking,” she intoned petulantly, eager for any answer at all.

No reply.  A reply could only mean a fight.  Jeffrey had other fish to fry.

*   *   *

 

This Time It Happened Like This

OK, here’s the latest epiphany, my most recent moment of sudden clarity (dare I say grace?) to illuminate the chaos and confusion I usually muck around in.  (Imagine me here smashing the heel of my right hand into my forehead just above the right eye in a glancing upward motion, then, upon impact,  both eyes gazing heavenward and my voice uttering a loud and painful “OY!)  This peek into my world  filled with mirrors was triggered by re-re-rereading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.  Actually it came in the very first paragraph of Judith Guest’s foreword, even more actually from the motto on a plaque found in her grandmother’s attic:

Do your work as well as you can and be kind.

I’d opened this tiny volume because, a few nights earlier, a good friend of more than 25 years (and, remarkably enough named both Judith and Goldberg) told me that I am a good writer.  That made me uncomfortable, really uncomfortable.  Don’t get me wrong.  I do like what I write, but me a good writer?  All the talented and dedicated folks out there–I’m just not one of them.  Anyhow, her comment provoked the need to write something if only to escape from my knee-jerk self-doubt reaction to compliments.  You see, writing keeps me from thinking about writing.  But the mind was empty.  So I made pilgrimage to Natalie for inspiration and found it and much more in Ms. Guest’s opening.  It happened like this:

• Do my work I do.  No problem there.  Be kind, however,  kicked up the remembrance of unkindness past, of not too long ago really pissing off  another friend by trying to be helpful:

“You should_____.”

“Screw you!”

“Screw yourself!”

“I’m outta here!”

“You’re outta here?  I’m outta here!”

• This led to me reacting to her anger with my anger, thus to my participation in the death   of that friendship.

• If that weren’t enough, memory continued to wail on me  by recalling a few occasions when I’d become sarcastic and condescending toward my beloved Bobbie, most recently lambasting her with my irreproachable reasons for wanting to take a walk before sitting down to The Flying Karamazov Brothers–tickets to which were her Christmas gift to me.

• The final link came from a client who described me to me twice as “sarcastic.”  I told her:

Sarcasm is used to hurt.  I do not hurt!  I’m not even a wise-ass.  A wise-ass is someone who thinks he’s smart.  According to my wonderful wife I actually suffer from terminal cute-atude.  That means I’m just trying to get a laugh.

My client is sharp.  She didn’t buy it.

*   *   *

So what’s going on?  Is this all a byproduct of aging?  I don’t know.  Back in 6th grade Mike Freedman used to say,

Engage brain before putting mouth into gear.

The Buddha said, ask before speaking:

Is it true?  Is it necessary?  Is it kind?

In September I posted an apology for my mouth as part of my Rosh Hashonah/Yom Kippur observance (http://goldberg.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/am-i-right-or-am-i-right-oops/).  Here I am doing it again as part of my Christian New Year observation.

Frankly it doesn’t matter if causing hurt is a byproduct of age or impatience or anger or even cute-atude.  It still hurts.  And apologies do not erase the hurt.

And it certainly is true,

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

My Hero

Let me tell you about John Goldberg, my Dad.  Keep in mind he never told me a lot about himself.  He didn’t talk of his life as a kid in rural Belarus before immigrating to the US in 1913 at 9 years of age.  He never told about how and why the family found its way from Ellis Island to Hartford, Connecticut.  The little bit of family history he’d share began in Hartford and only used occasional flashbacks to round things out.

Dad was the oldest of the three kids who accompanied Osne, his mother, out of Telechan and somehow onto the ship that transported them from Rotterdam to NYC.  The folks at Ellis Island put it this way:

First name: Yonie

Last name: Goldberg

Ethnicity: Russia, Hebrew

Last place of residence: Pelechany, Russia

Date of arrival: Apr 10, 1913

Age at arrival: 10 years

Gender: Male

Marital status: single

Ship of travel: Campanello

Port of departure: Rotterdam, Holland

Manifest number: 0027

Next came Uncle Jack, listed as Jankel and one  year  younger than Dad, followed by Aunt Sarah, called Sure (pronounced Shoo-rah) in the manifest and one year younger than Jack.

Grandpa Goldberg, here photographed in 1942 and exactly as he is in my memory,

came to the US in 1906, seven years earlier, to earn enough money to send for his family.  In Belarus he’d haul lumber from the forest to the mill in a horse-drawn wagon, that was till the winter of 1906 when snow made his work impossible.  The story goes that, stuck in the snow, he cut the horses loose, walked home, told Osne to pack up the kids and move in with his folks, said his goodbyes and headed off to America and Hartford.  Why Hartford?  Almost undoubtedly because some earlier Telechanik had somehow found his way there.

Here’s a photo Grandma sent  to Grandpa around 1910 to remind him that he was a married man with children.  Dad is on the left.

Now here they are 5 years later in Deh Goldene Medina, the promised land, the golden land.  Dad’s moved over to the right in this one.

All this to explain why Grandpa with Dad in the back, drove a horse-drawn wagon, now full of newspapers, through the streets of Hartford to feed his family in it’s new location.

OK, so see Johnny, my Dad, immigrant kid with no English in the back of that newspaper wagon.  Cut to him as an 8th grade dropout.  Cut again to him at the Hartford Market, working his ass off learning the art of grooming and selling produce.  Next we have a memory contributed by Frieda Galinsky, seen here–I am sure–exactly as she appeared in my father’s dreams…

Mom told of meeting Dad at a dance in Hartford in the Autumn of maybe 1930, of how he walked her home to Front Street and then walked himself home through the swirling Autumn leaves to Earle Street or Acton Street way up in the North End.  She told of how the sound of those leaves scared the living shit out of him alone and late at night.

Dad loved Mom.  They married in 1931.  Mom wanted to move out of the ghetto and be real Americans.  Dad loved mom.  They moved to South Marshall Street so my sister and I would grow up surrounded by Irishmen, French Canadians and lotsa folks from Maine and lose any meaningful touch with Judaism.

Dad loved baseball, so, more often than not with Uncle Jack, we saw a lot of Hartford Chiefs games and, in 1950, my first New York Yankees game.  We’d always take the 8:04 a.m. New York, New Haven & Hartford train express to Grand Central Terminal, eat early lunch at the Horn & Hardart Automat, then take the Jerome Avenue & Woodlawn train to Yankee Stadium where we would always sit behind 3rd base just as we did at Bulkeley Stadium where Dad, Uncle Jack and I would cheer on the Chiefs.

Dad was a quiet man and a Democrat.  “You vote the party, not the man,” he’d say.  “Ideas and policies come from the party.”  He smoked Camels.  He didn’t have a car.  If we drove somewhere with someone who didn’t allow smoking in their car, he didn’t object.  He also didn’t ride back with them.

Dad loved history and read it when he wasn’t reading the Hartford Times.  When I became a big deal Ivy League college student and would bring a classmate home for the weekend, the classmate would inevitably fall into conversation with Dad and not  do whatever I’d brilliantly and thoughtfully planned for the evening.  I  hated that while being secretly so proud of it.

He never wrote me letters when I went away to Boy Scout camp for two-week stretches in the summer.  He never said “I love you” except for in the one letter he wrote to me while in college.  (Where is that letter???) We never talked a lot and, when I needed him most to tell me what a man’s supposed to know, he died.

His death, coming between the last day of my college classes and the first day of my final final exams, was the most important thing to happen to me to that point in my life.  It threw me off the perfectly conventional track to tedium that I’d been so diligently following and left me–without my consciously acknowledging it-terrified and alone.  It left me dropping out of graduate school (studying history, of course) 15 months later, moving to New York (no surprise here either), becoming infatuated with jazz, poetry, sex and intoxication.  It left me frequently wondering, “How did I get here…doing this…next to her?  What would Dad do?”

Now the story’s becoming about me when I don’t want it to.   I set out to write about him and how I loved him because I wanted to and not because of what happened between us.  I’ve left out a bunch of stuff: the wondrous diversity of his friends and associates, his becoming an Assistant Cub Scoutmaster, his devotion to his mother and his occasional displays of temper. Lotsa stuff. Maybe later…

Joe D’s memorial, sort of

Joseph Dankowski ws born in Camden, New Jersey on September 2, 1932.

After moving to New York City in 1958, he took up photography, working mostly in black and white reportage style, as influenced by Eugene Atget, Harry Callahan and Robert Frank.

In 1972 he received one of the first National Endowment for the Arts grants bestowed on a photographer.

Joseph moved to Shirley, Maine in 1974 where he continued to photograph, while working as a carpenter.  His work in Maine focused on the portfolio “Fall in Black and White” and a sequence of “Ice on the River” photographs.

Joseph’s (1969-71) “Manholes and Gutters” 50 print portfolio are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, the Joy of Giving Something Collection and in private collections.

He is survived by his loving sister, Stella Lizambri and Many friends.

I love The Simpsons.  I love particularly the way the first plot piece leads into the second plot piece which then leads into the actual story for that particular episode.  More and more I’m coming to see my life as working in that same mode.  If not my life, then certainly some of my blog postings.  This one for instance.  You see, I’m not going to write about Joe  D’s memorial held today.  I’m not going to write about Wesley Waites, who looks like this…

and who informed me of Joe’s death, who lives deep in my heart

• despite living in Saugerties, more than bike-riding distance away,
• despite my not having been in his presence for 10 or so years until today,
• and certainly not because, in his role of vital connection to the two bars of my New York Past, he has become the Messenger of Death in my life.

Ultimately this about Richie Velez, seen here at that memorial for Joe, the one he put together.

All of this centers around the year 1965, more specifically the autumn of that year.  I had freshly dropped out of graduate school at UCONN, conned my way out of the Vietnam War and found my way to the Lower East Side and work as a short order cook at The Annex, a bar on Avenue B between 10th and 11th in New York’s Lower-East-Side-about-to-become-East-Village.  I was 23, depressed at the death of my father, overwhelmed by New  York City and, consequently, madly in love with intoxication.  Richie was also 23 and, along with Gus Rodriguez, owned the Annex.  Richie played the congas and lived on stage.  Richie was my boss.

In November of 1965,  two months after having started my work as a short order cook at the Annex and a few weeks after the blackout when Richie gave me a baseball bat and a comfy beach chair with built-in leg extension and told me, someone he barely knew,to guard the bar against intruders while he and everyone else at The Annex went down the street to Stanley’s Bar (where they had enough sense to leave the cash register open as the power failed) to drink, I came to the realization that I had been working 9 hour days with, yes, an unlimited amount of scotch but also without a dinner break.  I decided to bring the second part of this to Richie’s attention, and, after a significant amount of that unlimited amount of scotch and with significant irate-atude, I did so.  Even now I recall the frequent appearance of the phrase, “What the (or Who the–)  fuck…” in my presentation.  Richie, never shy or reluctant to reply in kind, more than matched my vocabulary and attitude in his response.  Words led to words (and probably some gestures) before he told me I was fired and I told him I’d already quit.

I don’t remember what happened next, but no more than 20 minutes later we were sitting together at the bar.  He was buying me drinks and providing me with a list of places to look for work with  him as a reference.  All his anger of the moment before had utterly disappeared. To him I was no longer a big-mouthed, hostile employee.  I was a guy he knew who needed work.  Nothing in my New England background had prepared me for such an abrupt shift in attitude.  I come from the land of steady habits, of eternal grudgery.  With Richie, it was, “once it’s over, it’s over.  What’s next?”  Wow!

Joe Dankowski photographed the things we all see but don’t notice.  Wesley Waites lives one day at a time, coping graciously with whatever life throws him.  Richie taught me,  Once it’s over, it’s over.  What’s next?  The Buddha teaches the same things under the umbrella of mindfulness.  I now try to teach this to my clients at Samaritan Village.  Sometimes–like right now–I wonder, if I hadn’t run into the Buddha, how much would I have valued the lessons taught by Joe, Wes and Richie?

Here We Are!

Thanksgiving is past.  Canadians wearing multiple layers of ever so warm clothing are already installing themselves and their ever so fragrant evergreens:

• Douglas-fir Pseudotsuga menziesii
• Balsam Fir Abies balsamea
• Fraser Fir Abies fraseri
• Grand Fir Abies grandis
• Red Fir Abies magnifica
• White Fir Abies concolor
• Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris
• Stone Pine Pinus pinea (as small table-top trees)
• Norfolk Island Pine Araucaria heterophylla

(with thanks to Wikipedia)

on street corners throughout our city.  And soon enough this

will look like this:

then this:

and, if we’re truly lucky, eventually this:

Bobbie grew up with Christmas as the central holiday for her family.  With the Goldberg clan it was always Thanksgiving.  Now, as our lives have coalesced, Thanksgiving-to-Christmas for us has evolved into one wonderfully long Family Holiday.

The folks in the collage above are our family at this moment, the people we hold closer, the ones we’ve allowed to know us beyond the scope of just acquaintances. They are the  harvest of our lives.

Here’s hoping that this time for you is one of  gratitude for the ongoing harvest of your life and of awe at the movement of the seasons into the promise of new life to come.

 

Readers’ Gifts

It all started with this notice:

Holiday season’s icumen in!

Some of you make art.  Some teach music.   Some make jewelry and other beautiful things.  Some of you sell these things.   Please contact me with relevant information (your product or service, a website or location where work may be seen, a location where you perform your service or instruction, contact information…)  I’ll post that info on the blog just after Thanksgiving for all to see and, one hopes, for some to respond to.  I’ve had the privilege of knowing and admiring your talents.   I’d like to share that with all who read “Welcome!” Meanwhile, Happy Halloween!

Then came the responses.  Here’s  hoping you all have happy and satisfying holidays and that maybe, just maybe, you’ll find something listed here to help make them so.

1. Live  and authentic Louisiana Cajun & Zydeco bands.  Hi Richard.  I don’t know if you are including music but if you are — I’d love to be included.  The website is www.LetsZydeco.com — and I bring authentic Louisiana Cajun & Zydeco bands (and a few other styles thrown in) for great music and dance events. They are great events for people socializing and connecting, and also having an enjoyable evening.   Laura

2. Needlepoint.  http://home.roadrunner.com/~needlepointondem/ Thank you and regards,  Geo Carl Kaplan

3. Pottery.  “This is not mine,” Dorothy wrote.  ” (I actually have no talent) but this is my brother’s website. He is a very well known and respected potter in his field. His (very nice) website, if you want to include it, is: robertcomptonpottery.com.

4.  Art. Tobi Zausner: For people interested in art, there is my website,http://www.tobizausner.com

And then she wrote, “Is it OK with you if I pass your email to my sister, who does beautiful craft items?”  I said, “OK.”  Thus this:

5. Tobi’s sister’s craft kits.

She writes, “My sister said that you were looking for beautiful and unique things to be featured on your website. So I am suggesting my site,www.caringcrafts.com, which has very special products.

My business is focused on empowering creativity for less able bodied adults. My craft kits are designed for those who may have fine motor skill issues and/or cognitive concerns. They are simple and easy to make and do not have tiny parts or require precision.
tel 215-476-1340 & 1-888-246-1104″

6. Backpackinging and camping with kids.  I would like to add two of my books to your gift list. The books should be available at Amazon and other major book stores. For more information about the books, go to my blog,www.goldiesilverman.com, and click on Pages. Thank you for this opportunity to promote my books.

7. Shaker Music Boxes. These are just two samples of Shaker music boxes by Marvin Blaustein.  Contact him at Marvin.Blaustein@touro.edul

 

 

8. Jewelry, jewelry boxes, note cards all based on Japanese kimono designs.

TEXTILE GEMS (http://www.textilegems.com) announces a HOLIDAY TRUNK SHOW
at the Shop of the Brooklyn Museum,  on Saturday evening, December 4th, from 5-10PM.

- Offering our popular Kimono Gems and other jewelry and adornments for you
and your home, including one-of-a- kind pillows, wall art & greeting cards.

-  Come to also enjoy the museum’s Free Target First Saturday performances & open galleries.    (Bklyn Museum/ Eastern Pkwy stop on #2 or 3 train) from 5PM -11PM
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/visit/first_saturdays.php

9. Andy Pastorino, drummer and drum teacher extraordinaire.

ANDY PASTORINO, musician and drumming instructor, invites potential new students of all
ages to contact him for information about drum lessons in Manhattan or the Bronx.
For a “listen” and contact info, see: http://www.andypastorinoondrums.com/AboutAndy.htmlteacher

*   *   *

OK, folks, there you  have it.  Please keep in mind–especially those of  you in the legal profession or related to someone so employed–that I’m making no claims for these creators, offering no endorsements of their work or promptness.  Your dealings with them, should you choose to do so, are all, all about you and them with no addition of me.  Meanwhile

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

 

You’d Think I’d Know Better…

This is really stupid, but I want to write something and, even more than that, I want to show you what’s been my favorite cartoon since November of 2003.  What follows really is stupid, so, if  you want,  you can skip down to the cartoon and the reminder at the end.  I won’t be offended.  Hell, I won’t even know unless you leave a comment in the Comments box at the very end exposing  your skipatude.  Either way, it helps me work on acceptance.

This morning it was waffles for the breakfast that morphed into brunch.  There was just no reason to get out of bed.  Since Bobbie is the Waffle Queen, I become the King of Table Setting, Beverage Making, Pill Pouring and Plate Garnishing.  It is this last responsibility that bears directly on what is to come.  Prominently displayed in our refrigerator this morning was three quarters of a delicious apple.  Having eaten the other quarter yesterday as part of my morning cereal, I could well testify that it was–you’re already ahead of me, aren’t you?–a delicious delicious apple.  I ventured it.  Bobbie accepted it.  I diced and placed the dicings equally on our two breakfast plates.

Clearly this would have been the appropriate time to direct my thoughts elsewhere, but no.  For reasons that might be revealed only in an autopsy, my brain continued stuck in the world of that three-quarter apple and a love of fifth grade math.

Just how much apple did each of us receive to accompany our  waffles?

I did the math.  Half of three quarters is three eights.  OK, again time to leave the whole thing alone and go on to worrying about terrorists and the people who chase after them or the fates of Mariano Rivera and Derrick Jeter or even where to get the best view of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.  But again no!  She gets three eighths.  I get three eighths.  That makes six eighths and leaves two eighths.  But yesterday, nestled into my mixture of Cheerios and Rice Krispies and walnuts and banana-blended–into-non-fat-milk was the other third of the delicious delicious apple.  Three eighths, thus making the total nine eighths which clearly cannot be.  No apple, no matter how…tasty…can add up to more than eight eighths.  What was going on here?

Again, another opportunity to shrug it all off and eat my waffles and apple with coffee and an assortment of  vitamins and supplements.  Not me!  Was there a compulsion to reveal my mental malfunctions to the outside world?  Apparently, ‘cuz  I sez to Bobbie–and here you can fill in the blanks.  She eats and listens, eats and listens, then just listens, then slowly turns in my direction and gives me that look.  You know, THAT look!  The one that says,

OK, I’m waiting patiently for you to exhaust  your stupidity quotient and redeem  yourself with something at least not stupid.

I thought of this cartoon.  It’s been hanging on our refrigerator for seven years now, hence the color.

And now for the reminder…

A while ago I sent out an invitation to all of you who make gift-potential things or offer nifty services to let me list them on the blog as sources of potential holiday giving.  So far I’ve gotten responses from the host of  Cajun/Zydeco events, an artist, a potter, a maker of craft kits for the less dexterous, shaker music boxes and needlepoint.  Now I know there are more of  you who do such stuff.  There are guitar teachers and drum teachers and bracelet, cuff link, jewelry box and note card makers who also teach drumming.  There are more painters and the owner of an incredible gift shop–known to me only thru the net–in a place called Oregon.  I want to hear from you!  More than that, I want to hear soon. A brief description, a link, a picture, some way for others to contact you.

Originally I was going to wait till after Thanksgiving to publish the list–my small effort to  keep Halloween, Veterans Day and Thanksgiving from being reduced to Pre-Christmas distractions.  Then it occurred to me that the crafts folk might need that time to actually make and ship stuff.  So the submission date is hereby moved up to November 12th, and  I’ll post whatever I’ve got by that time on the 13th.

Pachel, Tinker, Archie & Debbie: Let’s have some fun!

This one started this morning.  After a night of coughing and wheezing I decided that a hot tub might be just the thing to loosen up the congestion.  Not wanting it to appear solely medicinal and me feel like a victim, I set a different scene by lighting a candle and putting on some Pachelbel Canons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNQLJ1_HQ0.)  Anyhow, my mind being the strange device it is, Pachelbel led me to think of Tinkerbell and, being sufficiently stuck in the ’60′s, to Archie Bell and the Drells (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n7C1AyU-9Q).  Then  Debbie Bell, a bicycle-riding-buddy around 20 years ago, whom I’ve not seen in years. You see,  she fell in love, moved to  Nyack, and now it’s Christmas cards at most.  Life’s like that.

Anyhow, the Bell thing continued.  Liberty appeared.   Taco appeared.  Then it occurred to that same mind mentioned earlier, the one that doesn’t stay in the same place all that long any more and is totally selective–without consulting me–as to what it chooses to remember:

Why me do all the work?  Let them (you, that is) extend the Bell list.

OK, simple enough.  Submit a comment mentioning your favorite Bell or bel or Belle.  You might even want to stretch it out into a belly.  Whatever, it’s all on you.

For extra credit: Is she listening to Pachel or Archie?

Is there Zen in This?

You decide!

Fire and Rain

First some words  from James Taylor:

I’ve seen fire and  I’ve seen rain.

I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.

I’ve seen lonely days when I could not find a friend,

But I always thought that I’d see you again.

Maybe it’s no more than that time of life when these things happen, but tonight, biking home from work along the Hudson River with the sun low  enough to the horizon to make me squint, I discovered myself thinking about Alvin Perry.  Here’s Al at the old  Tap-a-Keg where I used to play 8 ball afternoons with sanitation workers for tequila shots.  Probably ’66 or even ’67.

Al and I worked nights at a bar called The Annex on Avenue B between 10th and 11th back in the fall of 1965.  Al was a bartender and I, right there at the end of the bar, was the short order cook.  And short the order was: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fried chicken and french fries.  You want something else?  Go somewhere else!

I had been listening to jazz for maybe 10 years by that time.  Al brought me to it live and with persons.  Al came up to New York from Philly at about the same time as John Coltrane and Lee Morgan and McCoy Tyner and the Heath Brothers and Hank Mobley and Stanley Clarke and Wilbur Ware and that whole, utterly incredible host of forefront musicians who set us on fire.  He knew them, so I met them and, of course, cooked burgers and chicken for them.  And there was Ellen Powell (http://tiberinomuseum.org), not that much later Ellen Powell Tiberino, but even then committed to Joe Tiberino, another artist.   She the Philly artist who let me know that art, like jazz, was made by people.

Here’s one of Ellen’s school days drawings.  She wasn’t that long out of school, and it was all I could afford at the time.

And Harold Feinstein (http://www.haroldfeinstein.com), my first photography teacher.  Al introduced me to him and, now that I think of it, to photography.  Al was my guide, my guru, my ambassador.  Somewhere around the time I left the Lower East Side for the Upper West side he left too, moving to the Southwest.  I don’t remember where.  I surely missed the man, but life was busy, and I was growing so full of myself that there was no need for a guru.  Still I always thought that I’d cross paths with Al Perry again.

Imagine two old men sitting over drinks trying to remember various women’s names and the ASAs of Tri-X, Plus-X and Panatomic-X.

That is until I got a call from Wesley.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I love Wes.  Even though we haven’t seen each other in maybe a decade and even though Wes’ role in my life has been twice  to inform me of demise.   (http://goldberg.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/one-more-storied-bar-falls-victim-to-rising-rents)

Anyhow (and as you’ve undoubtedly guessed by my digression)–and right now I can’t recall how many years ago–it came in a phone call from Wesley that Al “may have passed.”

“May have passed?!  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Well…”

“C’mon man!  Is he gone or what?”

“Take it easy, Goldie.  I’m just tellin’ you what I heard.”

Now I realize Wes put it that way for fear that pronouncing him actually dead would make it so.  Keeping it as a rumor would leave space for his reappearance.  Now I appreciate that.

Maybe this fall I’ll get up to Saugerties to see Wes.

*   *   *

So here we are–you and me–with a bike ride home along the Hudson on a clear late Summer day and an equally clear set of memories from what now is closing in on half a century ago.  This from a man who’s right knee bends only under protest who loses the names of people he’s been working with for 15 years.

Go figure…

Am I right or am I right? (Oops!)

This from Viktor E. Frankl, who taught that human life is motivated not by sex or power or wealth or even safety, but by an ongoing search for meaning:

Freedom, however, is not the last word.  Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.  Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness.  In fact freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.  that is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

I buy this.

Yesterday, 9/11/2010, while a great number of people gathered at the site of the World Trade Center to mourn the loss nine years ago of those 2752 killed in the attack, several other groups of Americans rallied at that same location to push political and religious agendas.  Each group believed unshakably in it’s own rightness.  Each group believed unshakably that it was appropriate to use this day and place of national mourning to further it’s own beliefs and desires without regard for the space and moment in which it was doing so.  Appropriateness hell!  It had the right!

During the weeks before all this various folks of my acquaintance had demanded–yes! demanded–that I take a stand for or against the building of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan.  Some required I be true to the memory of those lost at the World Trade Center; some that I be true to the Constitution.  Each clearly had decided what my answer should have been, and each was ready to argue until I agreed with him or her should I have dared not to do so from the outset.  For me to say I hadn’t chosen sides yet or that I didn’t care wouldn’t cut it.  I had to be with ‘em or I was agin’ ‘em.

Church and state may be legally separated in the United States.  Not so with religion and politics.  There is a sadness for me in what is happening right now around this mix.  As a Jew I  am too well aware of the stereotyping and book burnings used by the Nazis to feed anti-Semitism before rounding up my people and sending them off to the concentration camps and crematoria.  (Frankl, quoted above, was a survivor of three years so imprisoned.  His family did not survive.)  Being old enough to have participated in the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960′s and to hold a clear memory of what came before and after, I  have seen a great many political attitudes labeled “right,” only to be replaced regularly with something even “righter.”

So long as I’ve the right to [fill in the blank], then I’ve got that right to do it.

This is America, and I’ve got the right to [fill in the blank.]

If I don’t have a right to [fill in the blank], but I know it is the right thing, then I do have the right to do it.

I know who’s right! and I’ll be damned well happy to let  you know just who that someone is!

Perhaps the problem is ultimately with the concept of being right.  9/11/2010 falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the period when the Jews traditionally come to grips with our misbehaviors over the last twelve months.  This provides an opportunity make appropriate apologies to those we’ve offended and to learn more about ourselves.  this increases our chances of getting into heaven and doing better in the future.  I’ve discovered that–not unlike others–I am at my most offensive and obnoxious and, yes, hurtful, when convinced that I am right. Perhaps noticing and keeping this attitude in check will restrict such behavior in the future, but for right now:

To all I have  bullied or offended or hurt, I apologize.

–Goldberg

Who do you love?

First from the pen of Bo Diddley:

 

 

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire,

Used a cobra snake for a necktie.

I got a brand new house on the roadside

Made outta rattlesnake hide.

I got a brand new chimley up on top

Made outta some human skulls.

So take a little walk with me Arlene

And tell me who do ya love.

(Get ready!  Here comes the relevant part:)

Who do you love?  Who do you love?

Who do you love?  Who do you love?

Back on the 15th of this month I was blessed to be present at the 25th wedding anniversary of these folks, Walter & Iris.

Bobbie & I…

spent the weekend in Hartford as guests of these folks, April & Lew…

…and also visited these folks, Ron & Connie.

It was a phone call with this man several days later, the one above with the unstoppable grin–in fact it was the grin!–that inspired this post.  The heart of our exchange went like this:

Him: “You want to know why I’m grinning?”

Me: “Tell me.”

Him: “Look who I’m holding onto!”

In the past I’ve asked you to write a six word autobiography and to write a poem of  a dozen words or less.  Now I want to know who do you love. It could be a significant other, a child, a parent or sibling or a friend.  Maybe  an aunt or uncle or grandparent.  It could be the one who listens to you without interrupting or using the time to figure out what they’ll say when you finally shut up.   Whoever it is, it must be a human being, though.  Perhaps in the future I’ll get nosy about your favorite pet or Disney-beast favorite renaissance poet or shortstop, but not this time.

Use the”Leave a Comment” or “Comments”gizmo at the end of this to tell me  who the lucky person or people might be.  After a while I’ll post a little something to alert you to check out all the comments.

Thanks for playing!

A Buddhist and a Junkie Walk into a Bar…

Every day is a lesson.

Some days the teacher is stricter than on others.  Some days the student is just stupid.  Some days you find that the only thing you can do well is to lie perfectly still and have no idea of why.  Despite all the efforts of those who’ve sought to preserve my sanity while I’ve been doing all I can to lose it, today’s been that kind of day.  A list of my screw-ups, however, would be petty and boring,  so rather than either be thought of or actually recognized as such, I’ll not print that document here.  Instead I’d like to escape (Escape, remember that word) into my head to bring you all up to date on what’s been happening in there.  Not that the random banging of my neurotransmitters is all that interesting, but enough self-deprecation.  Let’s go to the content!

This is all background:

For the past 50 or so years I’ve been thinking about drug addiction and Buddhism.  Both of which have played and, actually, continue to play major parts in my life.  The first has evolved from the condition I exhibited to the one I now treat in others.  The second has moved from an intellectual preoccupation to a daily life practice.  For the most part neither has made a great deal of sense to me in the conventional understanding of sense, but both have been powerful–make that overwhelmingly powerful– determinants of the way I’ve lived and live.

Originally I sought the same thing from both: a happier accommodation with life.  It’s not that my life was ever a bad place or even a difficult one.   There was always enough of everything and so what if I wasn’t a great athlete.   Mom and dad both loved me, didn’t beat me and only wanted “the best” for me.  As it turns out, it was their deaths that brought me to the respite of alcohol, then marijuana, then–if only until Cousin Jon and I proved that all it did was make us want more–cocaine.  Buddhism began to invade my thought when I was struggling to accept my intellectual mediocrity while in college.  Every-so-often  and without really knowing how I’d try meditation, only to give up after less than 3 minutes.  Eventually this became a once-every-five-years attempt, never reaching even the five minute mark until 2001.  It’s consequence in the interim: one more failure and hence one more reason for self-discontent.

Whatever…that was all then.  Now I no longer practice active addiction to what we in the field call  ”chemical substances.”  I do practice daily meditation in a Buddhist tradition.   I read Buddhist texts and discuss them with folks who know vastly more than I do and apply them as guides to my daily living.

If I  haven’t yelled at you over nothing in a while, this is why.   If I have, well, I’m still working on it.

What most concerns me is  how to bring the ideas and meditation, the actual practice, to my clients.   Meditation puts them to sleep.  Buddhist thought places suffering at the center of life just as my clients do, so the fit seems natural.  With the proper understanding, it goes on to say, suffering is no more than a creation of the mind.  It goes on to say that in (capital R) Reality there is no suffering.  Just as that proper understanding of  Reality eluded me for so many years and continues to escape me every once in a while, it is well outside what my guys are ready for.  So my question: How to reframe or rephrase or re-present it in a way they can use?

To sum it all up:

Whether things are real or not, whether our perceptions are accurate or not

They cause suffering which, to the sufferer, is absolutely real.

To know they are unreal is, at first, an intellectual achievement

One that holds little sway over the emotions.

Only to demonstrate it,  to make it experiential (OUCH!)

Is to make it indisputably real.

Pehaps this is why my clients so believe in their drugs:

     They wish to escape from their internal reality,

          They drug,

               They’ve escaped.

I’ll take any and all suggestions.

A Love Letter…

Sunday afternoon…Bobbie’s up in Connecticut visiting two of her kids: Mike who’s not long back from a year in Iraq with the US Army and Kim who’s in her fourth year of being the mother of twins among other things.  Me, I’m in my 69th year and missing this woman like a 16 year old in the middle of a doowop tune from when I actually was 16, first met her and was too shy to even speak to her.

*   *   *

Have  you heard John Coltrane’s Stardust?  I’ve been a Coltrane fan since 1963 when Randy and Janie gave me My Favorite Things for my 21st birthday–a debt I can never repay.  The Stardust album is like a French impressionist painting: novel enough to be exciting and occasionally challenging, familiar enough to give you a piece of solid ground from which to launch into the new then safely return.  Ultimately it loves it’s subject and is beautiful beyond any words used in the past.

*   *   *

And two poems, one by Ryokan, a 19th century Zen hemit monk, and Mary Lou Kownacki, a contemporary Roman Catholic nun.  First his:

Time passes,

Thre is no way

We can hold it back–

Why, then, do thoughts linger on,

Long after everything else is gone?

Then hers:

Time

Stands

Still.

There

Is

No

Way

We

Can

Push

It

Forward–

I

Still

Live

In

The

Moment

You

Left

Me.

*   *   *

And, even better, she’ll be home tomorrow!