SOMEWHERE OVER THE…DIRTY BOULEVARD
first published in Saranac Review
My mother, may she rest in peace, could not listen to much criticism of this country from her youngest child. Her childhood in gloomy anti-Semitic southern Poland had devolved into adolescence in a frigid Siberian forced labor refugee camp. She lost much of her family in Auschwitz and buried her own disease-ridden father in an unmarked field somewhere in what we now know as Kazakhstan. America was indeed the bright lights, the beacon, the shining city on the hill, the epitome of dreams, of longing, of freedom, and it was all relief and hope when she arrived here in the winter of 1946.
Her favorite song, the one I would hear her singing in a lilting soprano or humming over laundry folds from time to time, was Somewhere Over the Rainbow. She chose well, along with millions over the past eighty years who consider it one of the best songs ever written, named in 2001 the Number One Song of the 20th Century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Harold Arlen wrote the music, Yip Harburg nee Isidore Hochberg the lyrics, and it garnered a 1940 Oscar for Best Original Song for The Wizard of Oz. Many similarly feel that the musical adaptation of writer L. Frank Baum’s and illustrator W. W. Denslow’s 1900 novel is the best movie ever made.
Keep on reading SOMEWHERE OVER THE…DIRTY BOULEVARD
ONE FINE EVENING
first published in Kelsey Review
This was back in the day, way back, a half century ago, a memory that seems at once both distant and fresh. It is the kind of memory that teases, a snapshot with faded colors and creased edges, making you feel for just a moment that you can somehow really get back there before the mortgage payments, the back pain and the sleepwalking trips to the bathroom. Before all the mistakes you and everyone else you know are going to make. Before time slips away because that is all time has ever done.
Before you learn that everything will be alright anyway but only if you let it be.
Keep on reading ONE FINE EVENING
LEAVING EARLY
first published in South Florida Poetry Journal
It is the first year of a new century and I have taken my 10 year-old to the only place in the Bronx I want to take my son in the year 2000. I am no fan of the Yankees. Neither is my son but we both love this place. The old Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruth Built, and all the majesty and history that come with it. It is the 5th inning when he brings up the subject of leaving. He has devoured two hot dogs, an ice cream, two pretzels, and a 20-ounce soda in a souvenir cup. He has lost interest in keeping score in the Yankees program purchased at the entrance gate. His team for the day, the Phillies, is comfortably ahead and the boobirds are out in force. The grounds crew dancing to YMCA gets his blood moving again and pizza has him declaring we should stay through the 7th Inning Stretch.
Rise, stretch, sing, and leave.
Keep on reading LEAVING EARLY
PLAY IT AGAIN, SHAM—-The Bad, the Ugly (and the Good) of Rock Hits Gone Commercial
first published in Medium
Somewhere, deep in the heart of the American marketing machine, there are individuals charged with the responsibility of pushing more automobiles, cereal and pills out the door than the next guy. When clever copy, gorgeous young men and women, subliminal messaging, cutesy animals and animations, and catchy original jingles prove inadequate, they increasingly flash cash on advertising’s secret weapon —the once popular, and often formerly beautiful, hit song. Keep on reading
grass springs eternal
first published in the Black Fork Review
If I close my eyes, I can see him clearly. He is wearing one of his Fruit of the Loom A-shirts with small holes of frugality in too many places. Plaid shorts, dark socks, too-small baseball cap promoting a motor oil company. The sun burns high in the sky and reddens his unprotected skin. He is sweating, beads of glistening perspiration starting in his thinning brown scalp, cascading down, wiped away by occasional rubs of his right forearm. He is no fashion statement, my father Herman, not that cutting a suburban lawn on summer Saturday afternoons was ever intended as frolic down a Seventh Avenue runway. Keep on reading
THE GREAT WALL OF TIGERS IN THE NASSAU INN TAP ROOM
first published in the Princeton Echo
This is a story about a wall, not the one neither Mexico nor Congress wants to pay for, that billion-dollar dream of keeping America’s reality imprisoned inside Stephen Miller’s fantasy. It’s not about Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album either, that lyric opera of a man’s isolation from a society he views as relentlessly repressive in the name of conformity, profit, and war. Not the holy site in Jerusalem nor the crumbled divider of postwar Germany. And certainly not any of the sorrowful testimonials to human horror and courage in the Holocaust, Vietnam, and 9/11 memorials found in New York and Washington. No, this is simply about a wall of photographs of Princeton University alumni, black-and-white yearbook portraits mostly, framed and aligned in the heart of Princeton not long before I arrived here decades ago... Read more →
IRREGULAR
first published in The Monarch Review
It is a great deal of pressure to be a regular. Maybe more than it’s worth.
It is nice to be recognized though. To stroll into familiar environs and be greeted by your first name with a plucky alliterative adjective in front (Pistol Pete, Fast Freddie, Rockin’ Ricky), your last name with a cute add-on (Hey, Jones-y, how’s it going? Murph-man what’s up? Cohen-y-boy, que pasa dude?), your school (the Yalie’s arrived, the Terrapin is in the house, oh-oh here comes Miami Man), your job (You ever have to fire that thing? How goes the plumbing biz? Free anyone from Death Row lately?). Read more →
CLASSIC APOLOGIES
first published in the Sacramento News
I know what you’re expecting. Sorry I wasn’t much better than my own father, probably worse. Sorry I didn’t warn you that my generation’s sending so many jobs and bombs overseas would make it harder for you to find work. Sorry about telling you not to act foolish; who knew there was so much money in it?!
Let’s save those for another day. This is all about the music.
It was the 1990s when you grew up and before long you were telling me excitedly that Weezer and Incubus and Nirvana and Modest Mouse were the greatest bands ever. I was laughing. I pointed you to the albums in the basement and the broken turntable. I was hitting forty when you were hitting six and I was holding onto the Eagles and the Allmans and Led Zeppelin with all the ferocity that Classic Rock stations that played nothing else afforded me. Get the Led Out, Breakfast with the Beatles, Best of Bruce.
Kid, your Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jet never had a chance with me back then. I remembered hitchhiking to see the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City and taking the subway to see Emerson, Lake & Palmer at Gaelic Park. I remembered when Jimi Hendrix and CSNY took over my life for Freda Payne and Herman’s Hermits, when WNEW-FM displaced WINS-AM and WABC-AM. Yeah, that’s right, before all the bad news and talking gibberish on the AM dial, there was music, happy, bopping single tunes in Monaural. I remembered 45s and my first stereo and my second and my giant speakers and my 8-track and making my own cassette tapes and passing on that Quad sound they were pushing. I remembered Jonathan Schwartz and Scott Muni, and the Nightbird Allison Steele and the wonderful Pete Fornatale, may they rest in peace.
You grew angry but I stood my ground. I had principles and wouldn’t placate my own son. Forty sucks, son, and fifty sucks ten years more, so excuse me if I was fixated on trying to remember all those nights of trying to get lucky to Earth, Wind & Fire’s Reasons.
But here’s the thing. You’re gone, off making a life for yourself, hopefully getting lucky to Pearl Jam and Green Day, and I’m still here, almost sixty. I’ve got this Pandora thing on my desktop and all your songs are playing randomly and guess what…they’re fabulous. They’re melodic, I know them all thanks to you and your friends running around this place a decade ago, and they’re….absolutely, positively….classic! Each and every one of them. Drive by Incubus, Machinehead by Bush, Rooster by Alice in Chains, Lightning Crashes by Live, Shine by Collective Soul. These are all great, and helping me get through the day.
My sincere, heartfelt classic apologies! I wish you were here, and it was fifteen years ago. I miss you and I am proud of the young man you are---sensitive, intelligent, not foolish, and with an absolutely great taste in great music. Thanks for leaving me this music and these new memories, thoughts about you and all the joy you and your sister have brought me.
Sure beats all those lonely nights in my twenties, driving home frustrated and alone to Earth, Wind & Fire’s Reasons.
You see, that’s the other thing about aging. The memories do fade a bit but they somehow manage to be so much more honest.