Mike

We met in junior high. I couldn’t stomach the daily insulin needles he plunged into his thigh. We were great pals until we weren’t. Something silly like the way he embarrassingly yelled to me, “Hey Bomber” as he galloped down the field at jv football practice, his knee pads and shoulder pads flapping and falling out of his too-large uniform. 

After his father’s car was run over by a train at a poorly marked crossing, he and his mother and sister moved back to Florida near family. 

Decades later I googled to find him, to catch up, to apologize for growing apart. Too late, I learned Mike attended Stetson University and went on to teach English there, becoming their distinguished teacher of the year many times. He married, had children and died from progressive diabetes.  

hobbling onto his desk

no legs to jump nor sight to see

 in praise of good writing

 Dignity

tea ceremony

peaceful and forgiving

bitter taste of regret

The end of Roy Kaneshiki’s life was socially distanced and later quarantined. Much like the first four years of his life at Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert. 

dry inland sea

small figures search

seashells in the sun

Regardless, later as a young man Roy enlisted in the U.S. army, and always wanted a military funeral with a real bugle "Taps" (not one of those recorded versions). None of that was possible.

evening news report:

quarantined boy plays “Taps” each sunset; 

maybe Roy can hear.

See Walt Run

Momma finishes her guitar lesson with Walt. They play and sing all Elvis, all session, and laugh a lot, too. Father and Momma never laugh. Walt works for Father in his lamp factory and belts Elvis throughout the workday. When Momma fell in love with Elvis, Father asked Walt to teach her guitar, not noticing Walt’s crusty similarity to Big E.

After the weekly lesson, Momma often asks Walt to stay over for supper with us, my parents and me and my little brother.  And our little mongrel dog Spot who whines all the time ever since he was clipped by a truck out on the highway. Today, when Momma routinely asks Father if it is o.k. to have Walt stay, he grunts “maybe once more” with a little look of enlightened apprehension on his face. 

Throughout supper Spot whines outside the backdoor. Finally Father pushes away from the table, strides to his shop next door and gets his German Luger from the back of his desk drawer—he brought it back from the war. He grabs Spot by his collar and drags him around back of the shop. 

We hear a single pop and a squeal and silence. Walt lets out a little squeal, too. He gets up from the table, walks out the back door and keeps going—guitar lessons are over.  

from a 50’s primer—

see Spot run

see Walt run, too  

Laura and Harry

Laura Norcross and Harry Baum grew up on almost adjoining homesteads along New Brooklyn Road—a rural community just outside of Williamstown, New Jersey. In the garden county of the garden state, with a fame for tomatoes unchallenged. There was a bond, born out of proximity. 

The Norcross family had been around for decades by the turn of the last century—maybe centuries according to some legends. And with current internet ancestry can be traced back in Britain to the Battle of Hastings, and by some accounts to the Holy Land b.c.e. People of prominence seem to take good stock of themselves over the eons.

On the other hand, there’s Harry. Father Johanne and mother Caroline deposited on the migrant docks along the Delaware River in Philadelphia in 1883. The middle-est of all middle children, Harry was probably conceived in the middle of the Atlantic. Newly pregnant Caroline had four urchins in tow at the landing, and four more born in South Jersey after Harry. 

The Baums settled into a small German enclave in Williamstown, even started a German-speaking Lutheran Church there. Johanne refused to learn English, and got by in his small world. Actually, he never really wanted to come, and broke down at the docks in Hamburg, blaming "Jewish money lenders" for taking his small farm. When the U.S. entered the Great War, Harry’s youngest brother, named Johanne after their father, went off to the trenches. It probably nearly killed Johanne senior for the junior to fight against the “Faderland.” 

Thus, we have the “roots” of the Baum tree in America—a name that actually means tree. 

both dark and bright

attitudes crossed the sea—

some homegrown here 

The Friday Night Fights in Black and White

 I spend many Friday nights with my PopPop watching the “Gillette Friday Night Fights” on his little black and white television. The “Look sharp, feel  sharp, be sharp” theme song and the Gillette parrot flitting across the screen. 

After several weeks, I am sure I have all the rooting rules down. Negro versus Negro: “may the best boogie win.” A white boxer and a Negro: “kill the boogie.” White on white: “root for the Irish.”

Well, in 1957 the big Swede Ingemar Johansson is defending his world heavyweight crown against the American Negro challenger Floyd Patterson, from whom he had taken the crown the year before. Throughout the bout I notice PopPop becoming more and more enthusiastic for Patterson. It turns my boxing world upside down. I challenge him, “PopPop, why are your rooting for the boogie.” 

“Well Bobby,” he explains with puzzled, hurt eyes, “he’s our boogie.” Simple as black and white—well, sort of.

when everything seems dead

a fern sprouts from the soil--

a dark shadow passes

 Transition

at the church with the rainbow banner, Lee 

pulls his 10-year-old Honda Civic off the road, 

parks at the back of the lot

40 minutes before the morning service.

only the most deligent choir members mill about.

still in the driver’s seat

he slips off his jeans and khaki shirt,

 throws a green print dress 

over his head and pulls it down,

 kicks off his sneaks, 

and dons a pair of low-healed pumps. 

she retrieves a bob-cut black wig 

from the glove box,

 long out of style,

positions it just so. 

make up, 

overly done 

in an adolescent way. 

this one hour a week

Lea is welcome—

 it will do for now. 

jazz cacophony

juxtaposition of notes— 

someone’s music    

Earl

I learn to read with the "See Dick run, see Sally run, see Spot run" reading program. Earl, the only "Negro" in my first-grade class, learns that way, too, and much more. 

see colored boy color

see colored boy look confused—

see pink crayon labeled “flesh”