Thursday

27 April 2097

— and another late April morning of heavy frost

Good Morning All,

Just before 6:00 this morning, I completed my crossword puzzle, put the book and red pen down in their usual place on the corner of the bathtub, completed other attendant business, and found I was now in possession of an empty cardboard toilet-paper spool.

The white plastic wastebasket was under the sink, slightly over five feet away (5 feet 3 inches, as I later discovered), between the radiator and a tall red fire-extinguisher.

Why I was keeping the fire extinguisher in the bathroom, I was not sure. My brother-in-law Joe used to say that a decent Indian curry needed to be hot enough so that you could sit on the can at 2:00 in the morning and read the newspaper by the glow of your backside. But it was impossible to get such a curry here in Denmark.

I shifted the toilet-paper spool to my other hand, and it was at this point I heard the unmistakable voice of Johnny Most, the Celtics’ legendary announcer, whispering hoarsely somewhere above me, “Well, fans, there’s utter silence now here in the Garden. Seventh game, Lakers and Celts all tied up. Time has expired and Pierce is at the line for his second foul shot. 

"Not Paul Pierce, that is, but Bheka Pierce, who has suited up for every game since 1958, but had never been called in off the bench until just five minutes ago, when he swished those two quick three-pointers, then got fouled as time ran out, made the first shot to tie the game up. And now, here we are. He makes the second shot, the Celts win #17. He misses and we go into overtime, although Bird, Parrish, and Kevin have all fouled it.”

I take a deep breath, realizing that from where I am positioned, I will have to make the shot both underhand and backhanded, high enough to clear the rim, but low enough not to bounce the spool off the front of the sink. 

As if I am not nervous enough, it now also occurs to me if I make this shot, I will get to live until I am 85, the customary mortal-coil moment for members of the Pierce family, but if I miss I will have a major coronary thrombosis in the process of getting up to grab the toilet spool wherever it landed and rip it apart .

I take a moment to steady myself. I look up and see way above me in the nose-bleed balcony of the Garden fifteen nuns in the front row all furiously doing their beads. Down behind the Celtics’ bench, President Kennedy is holding little John-John on his lap. Little John-John has his eyes squeezed shut and his hands pressed together in a prayerful attitude.

Bobby and Teddy sit on either side of JFK. Behind them, Good Lord, sit Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson, all wearing my team jersey, number 159. And, yikes, there is J.D. Salinger, right behind them, all the way down from New Hampshire, wearing a red hunting cap on backwards.

With my forehead now doing an excellent imitation of Niagara falls, I take one more deep breath and let go my shot. The spool in slow motion spins end-over-end, too high, too high!, then dips, slips to the left, bounces off the radiator, squeezes behind the drainage pipe, kisses off the fire-extinguisher handle, and falls into the very center of the basket. 

I actually feel faint, but elated, of course, not to mention relieved, and the next thing I know my bathroom seems filled with Red Auerbach’s cigar smoke.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

Wednesday

26 April 2017

— My hopping blackbird is back.

Good Morning All,

I have a bird-feeder pole in the rose garden. From its top, six hooked wires fan out and arc down like the ribs of an umbrella. From two of the hooks hang green nets in each of which is a ball of seeds and hard fat mixed together. From two other hooks hang green nets filled with shelled, uncooked peanuts. From the last two hooks are suspended half coconuts filled with that same seed/fat mix. Each of these items hangs about two feet off the ground.

Enter my enterprising blackbird. He likes to get under one of the coconuts, then jump/flutter up to stab with his golden beak at the fat, after which he searches around on the ground for whatever he has managed to loose. He’s been at it a half hour now, God love him!

I recently wrote my very first Amazon review. It was for a book by Ruth Rouff, the younger sister of a university friend. She’s written a few books for the Townsend Press's Young Readers’ Series, including Great Moments in Sports and a biography of Ida B. Wells, a courageous newspaper editor, suffragist, and one of the founders of the NAACP.

But Ruth is also a poet and a diarist/journalist whose work has been published in a great many of the more literary quarterlies and regional magazines. Last year, a publishing house in California collected some of her poetry and stories/journals into Pagan Heaven.

Of course I bought a copy ($7.99) since how can you not buy a copy of your friend’s kid-sister’s book? I was not expecting too much … and then … and then, I was very impressed!

Stephen, her brother, tells me she’d decided early in life to become a writer, but unlike virtually all of the rest of us who make that same decision, including me, she remained true to that dream and that desire. While writing and honing her craft, she’s taught in tough Camden schools, done educational editing and writing, worked in K-Marts, and who knows what else to pay the bills while she writes. 

I probably have not seen Ruthie since she was eight or nine, but she sure as hell has my respect.

Anyway, here’s my review:  Here in Denmark, it was my lucky day to come across Ruth Rouff’s Pagan Heaven. Slow reader though I am, I read it in one sitting, and the next day read it again, enjoying nuances I’d missed the first time, as well as trying to decide which I liked better, the spare lines of her poetry or her prose cut to the absolute bone. Her topics are the seemingly common occurrences of her (and your and my) daily life, coming to terms with the death of her parents, a vacation that did not succeed, siblings and social relationships, working at a K-mart, but--because she speaks with that rare courage of the gifted writer holding nothing back—those events and moments shimmer with vitality. With subtle humor and the sharpest of eyes, she does what an artist does: she does not reproduce what we see, but lets us see.

If any of you more suspicious types think I’m attempting to sell you a book, well, yes, I guess I am, but I do so strictly under the aegis of you’d be doing yourself a favor. Pagan Heaven. Ruth Rouff. You can get a hard copy or a Kindle copy from Amazon for under ten bucks. The Kindle version will arrive in under a minute.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

Tuesday
25 April 2017

— so early the wood-doves are yet asleep in the upper branches.

Good Morning All,

I am early today because I have to take my car in for inspection at 10:00 a.m. According to a letter dated February 2015, I am somewhat overdue. Just my luck the constabulary will catch me on the way. They will pull me over, snip off my license plates, write me a hefty ticket, and advise me to call a tow truck. I suppose I could try saying, “Gee, officer, what’s a couple years among friends?” But I suspect that wouldn’t work.

It must be time I sent a poem, not least because the little blighters have been piling up.

First comes the poem itself, and then after that—if this sort of thing interests you—where it came from. But really, only if it interests you. If it does not, don’t read what comes after the poem, since it may diminish the poem for you.

Red Leaf on the Wing
Bheka Pierce

Call me nuts if you like, you’ll not be the first;
I’ll still bet you a buck the very last leaf
On our tallest maple waited in the sharp
Light of this October morn for me to put on
My hat and jacket, waited for my wife to
Follow me out onto our porch to fiddle
With my collar and swipe a bit of shaving
Foam from my ear so that we could together
Witness it bird-like taking flight and falling,
Enjoy its flutter and glide, caught in the sunlight,
Applaud its float and flip and slide, wind whirled,
Wind lifted, spectacularly—if briefly—triumphant
Before--I swear to God—it sailed into the safe
And entirely kindred harbor of my wife’s red hair.

This poem comes from three places:

1. When I was eight or nine, a walk to my grammar school during which I saw a woman follow her husband out onto their front porch, adjust his collar, and then kiss him right on the lips right out there in public view. Shocked was I to the bottoms of my yankee sneakers.
2. A day in college when I looked out a morning window and saw a last leaf let go and enjoy its brief swan song. (I did write a poem about that, but it was one of those visual affairs such as a poem about the Eiffel Tower looking on the page like the Eiffel Tower. My poem was shaped like a tree and/or a leaf slipping through the branches. Like most of those visual efforts, it looked still-born.)
3. A late October day walking in a wood with Britta when a red leaf did wonderful—very nearly spellbinding—things.

So, the poem is not fiction, but an amalgamation of my history. 

I hope you liked it. If you didn’t, that’s okay. I would be the first to admit it is not Stopping by the Woods on a Snow in the Suburbs Evening.

But if you have gotten this far, I can’t help asking if you now wish you didn’t know from whence it came. 

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

Monday

24 April 2017

— a full dozen wood-doves pecking up the seeds in the interstices between our patio bricks

Good Morning All,

I subscribe to the e-version of the Boston Globe. One of the fringe benefits therein includes the invitation to post a response to any of the articles, excluding the obituaries. I sometimes read these postings, which are often wonderfully entertaining in their wackiness. And there are always one or two good ones that either extend or provide further insight into the article’s topic.

But I have also discovered that a good half of the people posting comments do not seem to have read the same article as I. Granted, there is probably among the posters a larger proportion of nut-cases and cockamaimies than in the general population, but the apparent misreadings are still of concern to me.

And not least because occasionally one or two of you respond to one of these Day Book ruminations in surprising ways. I ask myself: Is that what he thought I wrote? Or: How can she possibly think I meant that?” I tell myself: Jeeze, I guess people just do not know how to read, any more. 

But then, when I go back, and look and am slightly more honest with myself, I usually see where I haven't been clear or precise enough.

Now, nearing the end of April, four months along, I have come to appreciate that written communication—or at least my attempts at it—is fraught with far more unintended ambiguity than I’d ever realized.

And, presumably, oral communication would be the same. Such that, to what extent did my students of thirty odd years hear what I said the way I hoped they’d hear it?

Such questions, surely, are enough to give me pause.

That said, my humble apologies to one of you (and quite possibly to more than one of you!) for “disemboweling" Hardy’s Snow in the Suburbs. Honest, that was not my intention! I like the poem a lot. I did not like it when I first met it within the panicky atmosphere of that midyear exam. But I do now. That’s all I was trying to say.

And that said, thanks for letting me know you were not pleased, not to mention your wonderfully succinct observation: “The poem means what you feel.” 

So, now I am saying: “Okay, Bheka, will readers conclude you are just griping and calling them a bunch of cockamaimies?” I hope not. I don’t think I am. (Which is not to say, necessarily, that you are not a bunch of cockamaimies.)

I’m only trying to say that in the course of putting together these Day Book entries, I’m actually learning more about the complexities and subtleties involved in writing and successful communication. It’s one of the reasons I’m having such a good time doing them.

Plus getting to share the poems and the quotes and the photos—the two of which today being particularly pleasing.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

23 April

Sunday

23 April 2017

— my weeping birch tree fat with bud

Good Morning All,

I’m not entirely sure my legs and I are on speaking terms at the moment, but I had a good time at the Copenhagen version of the March for Science. The Copenhagen International School was well represented by the English and Humanities Departments, namely my colleagues Lorenz and Becca, as well as Becca’s husband Bent and daughter Freja, plus a most pleasant history teacher named John and his two days’ overdue wife Louisa, with—a very rough estimate—two to three thousand less important people. 

From 1:00 to 2:00 we listened to speeches, or—I should say—listened to random sounds coming from a pathetic sound system, and then set off from the front yard of the Niels Bohr Institute, heading for the Danish Stock Exchange, a distance of 2.5 kilometres, just over a mile an a half. I got to walk much of the way with Bent, who is an entirely charming fellow. Since he is a dentist, I asked if he provided Novocaine for his patients or asked them to rely on transcendental medication. Becca had already reminded me to remind him about the patient who asked his dentist if he could recommend anything for yellow teeth, the dentist replying, “Well, what about a brown tie?”

The signs were okay, although they lacked panache. Becca’s was certainly direct: Fuck off, Trump. She tried to get Freja to carry it for a while, but Freja politely declined, as I suspect would have I, much as I loathe the man. My sign, if I’d been able to locate in the garage the box with the construction paper, was to have been: Donald Trump Has His Head Up His Climate Change. As usual with me, of course, too damned wordy, and Becca was of the opinion it lacked the directness for which she’d been aiming. In our group, John had the best sign, a large circle labeled A Quark and a miniescule circle labeled Trump’s Brain.

None of the other signs were as good as two from a March Washington Max, Stephen, and I attended when Nixon and Kissinger were murdering all those Cambodians. One of the signs was mine: a Washington Post facsimile, with the headline: Extra! Extra! Mad Bomber Loose in City. A fair number of people, including journalists, were photographing it until a guy showed up with the sign: Whose Dick Is It?

I am happy to tell you I did not once seek refuge on one of the hundreds of tempting sidewalk benches enroute. I am also happy to tell you it felt good to be congratulating myself again for getting off my butt and marching for something. And of course it was good to be with old friends again, not least at the thirst emporium after the march where we knocked back the odd schnapps, ate open-faced sandwiches, and shot the merry breezes for a good hour and some.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

Saturday

22 April 2017

— sunny weather predicted for this the March for Science Day!

Good Morning All,

If this is sunny, then I am a monkey’s uncle. (Gee, it was fun saying that! I do not think I have uttered together the words monkey’s uncle in half a century.) 

These gray clouds and gusts of wind notwithstanding, I shall be marching myself! Science is a good thing. Without it, Donald Trump and  Vladimir Putin would not now be in the position to end the world as we know it. 

I am meeting up with colleagues from school outside the Niels Bohr Institute, where--as luck would have it--Johs and Holly were lucky enough to get an hour-long guided tour three weeks ago. We shall march to somewhere, and then—more importantly—we shall enter a thirst emporium where science will afford us nothing but the very best in reviving beverages.

But on to more crucial topics: I have begun to suspect my silence vis-a-vis the blessed book list may have lulled you all into a false sense of security. You may have begun thinking: “He has not nagged us about that damn thing in weeks, so maybe we are now in the clear.”

If only it were so! 

But, my fellow friends and neighbors, I now stand here, hat in hand, humbly submitting  I need from you just a little, tiny bit more help.

Thanks to quite a few of you sending in suggestions, along with quite a few suggestions from my old students, I have not only reached my goal of triple-nickels (555 titles), but have considerably exceeded it, to the tune of … well, the list now stands at a rollicking 968

So, what the heck, why not press on to some nice round number, such as, say, 1001. 

That’s only 33 more titles. But my problem is, I have entirely exhausted my brain pan, my memory (what may be left of it), and my reading history. 

So, it has to be up to you! Please, please, take a look at the attached list. It runs alphabetically by author and then genre. (If you have Microsoft Excel, of course, you can tweek it anyway you like.) 

Here—once more with feeling—are the criteria:

1. Only one title in each genre by any given author.

2. The genre are: drama, non-fiction, novel, novella, poetry, and short story.

3. The works have to have literary merit, much as I would like to list, say, The Joy of Cooking.

It should be a matter of only a minute or so to see if  I have your favorite author listed or not. 

I do know I have missed authors/poets, deserving authors/poets. 

Send me someone! I will take anyone other than Ayn Rand.

Jesus will thank you, and so will I!

Go Well and Stay Well, 

Bhekaron

P.S. Yes, of course, you should feel free to chastize me for flagrant omissions. That’s part of the fun. But I do think the list is pretty good now.

Friday

21 April 2017

— Under low hanging, leaden skies the birds are queueing up at the feeders

Good Morning All,

I probably should have mentioned sometime ago I was as much a card-carrying poetry-phobe as any other red-blooded, egg-head hating, American male. I was proud of it. I shared the commonly held belief that poets were contrary and subversive types who pretended to give us, unasked, Secret-of-Life messages, but did so in language so convoluted and highfaluting normal people could never understand it.

Despite good old Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost, two exceptions that proved the rule, I pretty much held this view right up to and through the English 101 mid-term exam freshman year at college. The sadist who concocted the exam slapped in a Thomas Hardy poem upon which we were asked to make extensive comment as to poetic devices used and thematic concerns addressed. Here’s the poem:

Snow in the Suburbs, Thomas Hardy

Every branch big with it, 
Bent every twig with it; 
Every fork like a white web-foot; 
Every street and pavement mute: 
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again. 
The palings are glued together like a wall, 
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall. 

A sparrow enters the tree, 
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes, 
And overturns him, 
And near inurns him, 
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush. 

The steps are a blanched slope, 
Up which, with feeble hope, 
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin; 
And we take him in.   

I can remember looking at that sucker in sheer panic and for a few long seconds being unable—as though gazing at Arabic—to make any sense of it all. Then, after two or three run-throughs: Okay, it snowed, big deal. What’s it really about? What’s a paling? What the heck does inurns mean?  How come it’s a sparrow and not, say, a black-capped chickadee? Or why not a yellow-bellied seersucker? Or a great horned owl? What’s the significance of that? Why does some of the snow head back up again? Is that supposed to be some sort of return-to-the-womb image, like Mr. McQuade is always saying? Is that supposed to be nether or neither? A misspelling, maybe?  Not to mention what about that damned cat? Is that maybe the prodigal son all these poet types like T.S. Bleeding Eliot are always going on about? And why a cat? Why not, say, a “wide-eyed and thin skunk?" Or better yet, a frigging moose? And most of all, why did Thomas Dick-nose Hardy ever have to be born, other than to cause me all this grief just before Christmas?

I vaguely remember scribbling something about the existential angst caused by living in suburbia, as symbolized by the cold anonymity of the snow erasing the borders and identifiable signposts upon which we all rely. I compared it to several other poems including Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Milton’s On His Blinds, Longfellow’s Midnight Ride, and just to be on the safe side Stopping by Woods on a Suicidal Evening.

I think Mr. McQuade gave me a D-, but that was only because he had designs on seducing me once the second semester began.

And now? Having spent for the past two years a couple of hours nearly every day reading around in poetry. Getting used to it? No longer feeling threatened by it? Basking in it!

Well, as I said, back then: “It snowed, big deal.” Except now I say it without the irony. It did snow, and it was a big deal, which Hardy renders with such delicate and precise imagery you can’t help but be looking out the same window with him. Well, if you can relax, anyway. 

Today, were you to ask me, I’d say it’s mostly nothing more nor less than a shared-moment poem, which are my favorite kind. And then on top of that there is the lovely surprise of that last stanza when the black cat against the white snow shows up, and for some reason that probably has to do with the beauty and transforming grace of the snow—we let him in. Whoever we are. 

So the theme, if any, might have to do with the old romantic idea of the redemptive quality of nature. Even in the suburbs.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron