Yearly Archives 2023

Give 10 seconds to wailing and gnashing of teeth and cursing such absence of mind.

On 11th second, turn face up to sun.

Initiate multiple voluntary deep breaths.

Turn attention to coffee and cantaloupe slice you DID remember to remove from car.

Reach for phone to catch at least home page of New York Times.

Experience familiar exasperation of reading news shoved into hellishly cramped space that used to be your morning newspaper.

Think better of reading; cast face back to sun.

Espy actual, hard copy local weekly newspaper lying about on next bench.

Note cover story on aging.  (Synchronicity!) Decide to read it.

Note disappointment with story’s shallowness.

Vow to write something deep about aging one day.

Quickly acknowledge this will not be that day.

Climb on bike, which, unlike laptop, you had removed mindfully from rack at rear of ca...

One an observant, mystically inclined Jew, born to wealthy, pedigreed parents outside Montreal, a poet by training and temperament, handsome, charismatic and refined, who drifts down to New York City in his early 30s to shore up a wobbly career by throwing himself into songwriting.

The other from rural Alabama, the son of uncultured, unmoneyed teenage parents whose loud and bitter fighting drives the pudgy and awkward boy to his room, where he teaches himself electric guitar in order to drown out the noise and his own rage and sorrow.

One born in 1934, full of questions, indignation and ardor for a God he doubts as a profession of faith, even as so much of his music probes the places God may be hiding.

The other born 35 years later, seeking escape from the dark gods of domestic hell and hoping he’s found it in rock & roll, only to be felled by its all-too-common underbelly: a wretched excess of drink...

“We have no control over what happens to us; we have enormous control over what happens to us. I’ll spend the rest of my life better understanding and better accepting that paradox, which I understand and accept better today than I did before October, 2017, before that first day of incomprehensible blur, before an education in neuro-ophthalmology that became an education in so much more.”

That sentence near the end of “New York Times” columnist-turned-college-professor Frank Bruni’s 2022 memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” underpins most all the reflections on his ongoing experience of a rare stroke that robs him of vision in one eye and forces him to live under a portentous cloud of possibility that his other eye may suffer the same fate. It could happen at any time for the rest of his life, his doctors tell him, and it would leave him functionally blind.

Or if his luck holds, it may not happen at all.

It...

  VLADIMIR PUTIN INVADES MY DREAMS

                                        By Andrew Hidas

Fresh off the shingles vaccine,
arm sore, body leaden,
spirit damp and porous,
Vladimir Putin invades my dreams
through a long night I long to repel.

I want him out! gone! no more of
those lizard eyes and pursed lips
bearing down on my weakened
defenses, looking to run
roughshod over all I hold dear.

Groaning to a barely wakened state,
I lapse again, the nightmare resuming,
the assault relentless, Putin throwing
all he owns (and he owns everything)
into a fire of his own making
as lives all around us burn.

Names cross my consciousness
like some Ticker of Times Square,
Navalny…Yashin…Kara-Murza,
dissidents facing the unspeakable
of poisonings and prison,
their courage inconceivable
under Putin’s soulless gaze.

Dawn looms and the thrashings of night
only intensify, pleas from the gloaming
to find ...

In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a picture of an aardvark off to the left. Can’t say that I know or have ever thought much about aardvarks in my life, though the oddity of their physical appearance—halfway between a pig and an anteater, it seems to me—makes them worthy of at least some note.

But “aardvark” is important here for an entirely different reason: As the first actual word in the English dictionary, it stood as a kind of gateway drug from which civil rights icon Malcolm X commenced, with an insatiable, addictive lust, one feverishly ingested word at a time, to devour the majesty of language and the reading, writing, thinking and speaking that are its constituent parts.

A  slave boy laden with bread, which he uses as currency to purchase literacy lessons from poor, under-nourished, ‘free’ white boys? We see Douglass here again soaring to visionary heights of perspective, while also swi...