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”

The Haircut and the CIA

After supper, Father, my little brother Howie, and I march over to Uncle Larry’s for our haircuts. Uncle Larry bought a pair of electric clippers about a year ago and has been giving us all haircuts ever since. Well, not exactly giving—he charges us each a dollar.

    Uncle Larry and his family live just down the highway on the other side. The orchards behind his two-story farmhouse run all the way to the Puerto Rican migrant-labor camp that houses the workers who come in the summer to pick crops on the farms here about.

    I am the first in the chair on the concrete slab behind the back kitchen door. Uncle Larry starts in on me. He is unusually talkative this night. “Just about finished my bomb shelter, Henry.”

    “I can see,” I say, but I really can’t tell this hole in the backyard is going to be a bomb shelter. It is about eight feet deep and ten feet across. Uncle Larry wants me to share his vision of an elaborate shelter able to sustain lives for up to three months.

    “We had an air-raid drill in school today,” I proclaim. I know he will be interested in that.

    “That’s good for when the Russians drop the big one on us,” says Uncle Larry.

    “Drop and cover against an interior wall—that’s what Mrs. Warner made us do,” I say, trying to sound like the official government brochure we read. “Oh, yeah. All the major cities have a ring of Nike bases around them. So the chances of  the Reds’ missiles ever getting through is pretty slight.”

    “Well now there’s the rub, Henry. The commies are wily, and they can count. They know that they only need to get a few missiles through our defenses to take out Washington, New York, maybe Los Angeles and Chicago, just for starters. They’ll throw hundreds at us, maybe thousands, figuring we can’t knock them all down. And that’s why I have this bomb shelter.”

    Uncle Larry must have noticed the surprised look on my face each time he calls this hole his bomb shelter. “Well, I know there’s some finishing work to be done,” he says.

    Just then a dark car out on the highway slows down. “See that car, Henry?” Uncle Larry says in a hushed tone.

    “Yup, they’re curious about your open-air barber shop. You might have some new customers, Uncle Larry,” I kid him.

    “Curious like hell,” says Uncle Larry. His voice becomes gravelly and his demeanor turns dark. “Those two are CIA looking for me. Or maybe FBI.”

    I can’t see two people in the car. I can’t see anybody because Uncle Larry’s house sits too far down a lane to tell how many people are in the car. It drives off.

    “Oh yea, CIA, I think.” Uncle Larry goes on. “They’re still pissed about Korea. It wasn’t my fault. They know that.”

Later at home I ask Father. “What did Uncle Larry do in Korea during the war there?”

    Father says. “He never went to Korea. He was in the Coast Guard right here in New Jersey. What did he tell you?”

    “When I was getting my haircut, a dark car drove by slowly. He said CIA agents were inside looking for him. It had to do with something he did in Korea.”

    “Oh boy, he’s talking that way again. The last time he got this way he started digging his bomb shelter. Just don’t pay any attention. He’s confused.”

    Later in the summer I heard Father tell Mama that Larry would have shock treatments in the hospital where he has been sent. It sounds like the electric chair. I hope it doesn’t kill him.

a river of silence

grows wider every night—

cold sliver of moon

Walt Fields

He manhandles the polishing machine at the back of my father’s little lamp factory. A felt disk as wide as a hubcap whines at tremendous rpm. A human should not get anywhere near it. But Walt does, as his strong hands and hairy arms guide brass lamps, candlesticks and the like against the disk. A glossy finish is coaxed out of the surface of the metal.                                                                                        

    Walt regularly glances at his image in the greasy paned window. He shakes loose his shaggy locks of dark hair like Elvis. He doesn’t see the three-day beard, dangling Camel cigarette, or wragged plaid shirt missing two buttons. He sees the king of rock-n-roll on the Ed Sullivan Show. He wiles away the polishing hours belting the hits, “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Jail-house Rock,” and the list goes on. His fellow workers yell, “Knock off that bellowing,” but for the most part they tolerate his show, maybe even enjoy it.              

    And Walt loves the chippies. Saturday night he calls and tells Father—the closest he’ll come to having a real father—that the band at Lakeview Inn is  having him sit in with his guitar. By the time Father gets there, Walt is nowhere to be found. Monday morning he claims one of the groupie girls got real cozy and took him out to the band truck.       

    At 19 he’s four years older but still badgers me to set him up with girls that I go to school with. He describes his sexual escapades, some may even be real. I am intimidated and pretend to understand. Years ago he stops going to school, somehow avoids the Vietnam War. And dies a decade or two later from lung cancer.

dark forboding— 

pitty of the 

workshop milieu

My Sister Ellie

—a poem by George Parks, Grade 5, 1957

Little Mongol idiot*

Locks herself in the bathroom again.

Mother, “no business having babies in her forties,”

Says our neighbor;

Unhinges the door.

Sixty-four crayolas litter the floor—

On the bathroom wall 

Blue sky and green grass

With a swath of white between.

“That where we live,”

Says the little Peter Pan.

She will never grow up.

She-will-never-grow-up.

“A space between the earth and sky for us to live.”

—a thought ill-formed and unspoken by Eleanor Parks, Thursday, March 21, 1957.

*(the offensive and derogatory term often used in  the 50s to describe children and adults with Down syndrome)

The Cock Fights

Mama says, “Hector is different than we are – he’s Puerto Rican. They’re dark and dirty and carry knives.”      “Hector doesn’t carry a knife,” I say to her. “Besides he’s only half Puerto Rican.”      Hector Murphy lives near the migrant-labor camp. He is a year older, skinny with lots of pimples, and barely passed Mr. Grady’s sixth grade. I see him smoking cigarettes along the school’s back fence at lunchtime. I think I might try cigarettes when I get to sixth grade. After school lets out for the summer, I hang out with him around the picking fields once in a while, where he speaks Spanish with some of the younger pickers.      One Saturday Hector and I camp out in his backyard, but later sneak off for the migrant camp, a cluster of low, whitewashed blockhouses where the laborers live during the picking season. Just outside the glow of a campfire, we hunker down and peer through the tall grass. The camp swells to over a hundred men. We know most of them by daylight, but at night it is “no gringos allowed” – that means me and half of Hector. indigo shadows the coolness of the woods       By eleven an almost-full moon rises to reveal shadowy figures at the edge of the compound unloading crates of chickens from the backs of several trucks – mangy cocks with tufts of feathers missing and many scars where their bare skin is showing. The moonlight reflects in silvery streaks from the broken razor blades strapped to the cocks’ ankles. A tight circle of men crowd in for the gore and betting.      Cash, gold chains, crucifixes, and the like are laid down. Betting runs heavy for a red-topped bird twice the size of its opponent and a lot meaner. The owners face off with their birds and let them have at it. The heftier bird barely hits the ground before it leaps back up twirling in mid-air with its spurs extended. One spur slashes across the smaller bird’s eyes and the other cuts its throat. The match is over in a matter of seconds.      The next bouts are better matched. Round after round, birds flail at each other with their razor-clad ankles. Feathers and blood fly. One gush splatters our two faces back in the shadows. A young migrant, Jesus, glances our way, his eyes following the spray. He squints once but then looks away.     Midmorning on Monday, Hector and I wander over to the fields. The migrants are taking a break. “Hola!” Hector calls to Jesus. “Que tal?”      The space between Jesus’ dark brows narrow. “I saw you,” he says in a barely audible tone but in English, so that I can understand. The pickers scramble back to work, Hector and I are left to trudge home.      After Labor Day, school starts back up – I sit in Mr. Grady’s class, and Hector moves up to the junior- high wing of our school building. He starts seeing girls and riding in older guys’ cars. We lose our passion for the picking fields and never meet there again. gathering clouds footprints in the sand  to the future to the past

Babe

1957—At his lathe, Babe guides the tool over the surface of the spinning brass disc. The tool—a solid steel rod a foot long and an inch thick with a baseball bat-sized handle. The brass fluidly conforms to the shape of a wooden mold. Trading for a second tool, he trims excess from the rim of the brass. Ribbons of metal fireworks fly. Babe opens the lathe, releases the font-shaped sculpture—the base for an oil lamp.

     Craftsman, artist, metal spinner, gentle hulk like the blue ox. His demeanor and rural tongue belie the dangerous work. Split second of inattentiveness and the spinning buzzsaw can fly off the lathe and open a man’s arm from wrist to elbow. In over four decades, Babe had one mishap—took 38 stitches to close it up. 

the workshop window’s

greasy glass grid—

shards of summer sun

The Death of Two Negroes

That year of sorrow, 1968, saw Dr. King brutally struck down. As today, the country erupted with racial turmoil and the thought "Black Lives Matter" was pushed into yet another era. 

                           turtle crossing--

                    blows back every time 

                        the big truck roars past 

    In Vietnam the Tet offensive, proportionately taking more Black lives than white, left us reeling. I was stationed at an air force base in southern Georgia, in a community where we asked Black boys to die in the rice paddies of Vietnam but not go to school with us or use the same bathrooms, restaurants, and hotels. The week following Dr. King’s assassination, I was assigned yet another military burial detail for a soldier sent back. This one in a poor Black neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida. Nineteen-year-old body, full military regalia, pallbearers, honor guard, and bugler. 
     During “Taps,” it was my job to fold the flag that draped the coffin into a tight triangle and present it to the mother. Handing it to her, I delivered the little speech that ended with “a symbol of a grateful nation.” She looked at me with tears and disdain and said in her soft voice, “Sergeant, this is not a grateful nation. Thank you anyway.”

A grandson lingers— 

Snowflakes light on the long black wall, 

                             melt and run down 

A Three-Dollar Bill

When I was in junior high back in the 50s, Father had an antique business among other things. And Ray and Phil would come in from Atlantic City at least one Saturday a month to pick up items for their collections. . .

    About mid-morning Ray pulls his van off the highway and into our drive. He opens the door on his driver’s side, and a tarnished silver candelabra falls out. He sits it back awkwardly on an old captain’s trunk behind his seat. 

    “Careful there, you clumsy old fart,” says Phil, kidding his pal as he climbs out the passenger side. “That piece of hardware is going to pay next month’s rent if you don’t dent it up too much before we get home.”

    “You mean get it home to that rich, old, widow lady you’ve been schmoozin’ down the shore.” Ray retorts. The van is already half full of more old stuff. Ray and Phil are in the middle of their Saturday buying trip. They visit auctions, estate sales, and suppliers like Father. They are in good moods and enjoying their Saturday.

    Inside they haggle with Father over some decoys and fancy wood turnings to mend broken legs on other furniture. After settling on their choices and the prices, I begin loading their purchases through the back door of the van. Ray and Phil are by the passenger door and think that I cannot see them, but I can through the sideview mirror. Then Phil does a strange thing. He leans over, touches Ray’s shoulder and gently kisses him on the lips. Imagine that, two bald men with pot bellies kissing. It is a tender kiss. Not a kiss like I see in some movies with a lot of grabbing between the man and woman. I never see my parents kiss this way. Their kisses are more like good-morning pecks, a formality. In fact Ray and Phil show more affection for each other than I ever see from my parents. 

    The two men hold it until they see me staring. Then Ray rushes around to the driver’s side and hops in. I slam the back door shut. “All loaded.” I mumble, and they drive off. 

    I go back into Dad’s shop to finish sweeping up. As I come through the door, Dad looks at me with a knowing expression on his face. “Just like three-dollar bills,” he says.

    “I don’t get it,” I say.

    “Those two, son. They’re as queer as a three-dollar bill,” he says.

    On Monday in the schoolyard, I tell my friend about the kissing men. He brushes it off and tackles another one of our pals in a game we call “smear the queer.”

migrating geese fly on

one old and dieing stays back—

its mate abides