Birthday Wish

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me ...?"



According to this card in the year of my birth
the transistor was invented, making possible
a radio with no vaccuum tubes. Chuck Yeager flew
faster than sound in a rocket propelled airplane,
and the Dumont Television Network inauguerated
broadcast news from Washington, D.C.
If you had gone to the ball park all the players
except Jackie Robinson would have been white.

Before this year you could not clean your sink
with Ajax or mix a batch of orange juice
from a tiny frozen can because those things
did not yet exist. The Department of War became
the Department of Defense, anticipating
the Newspeak of George Orwell who had not yet
published 1984. Princess Elizabeth got married.

The Atomic Energy Commission was formed
in an attempt to keep the lid on Pandora's Box,
the Marshall Plan began to rebuild Europe
while Radio Free Europe broadcasted to the East
and President Truman asked Congress for funds
to fight what he called "the Cold War."

So it was all set in stone, the story
of my life, beginning with the boom
of babies they could never build
enough schools for, continuing through
the years of Conelrad and bomb tests,
clouds of strontium-90 settling over
Mid-West cow pastures and seeping
into the wholesomeness of our milk,
of air raid drills, hiding under our desks,
the Sunday afternoon sirens, the missle gap,
the arms race, the space race, the moon race,
The Korean War, the Berlin wall, Cuba,
and Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam --
the entire agony of Communist hysteria
that mutated into Peace and Love
through a purple haze of electric
guitar music, then collapsed into a stupor
of sated Capitalist moneygrubbing,
Internet boom and bust, as we squandered
what was supposed to be the "peace dividend"
awarded to us as the righteous victors
by mortgaging our homes and building
an army so intent on finding a new enemy
that it did at last exactly that.

Now here I am, supposedly old enough to
know better, studying the accumulation
of my retirement funds and estimating when
the final payment will be made on my house,
wondering, if that day ever comes, how much
longer I will have to live. All around me
the world spins in confusion, lurching
from one disaster to the next like a drunk
wondering when he'll finally hit his bottom --
from which point there is only UP to go,
from where Salvation can be found,
and where life, as with the coming
of grandchildren, may reveal, finally,
its rewards.

Feline Dreams

A visit from an old friend ...

My cat who died last year came to me in a dream. Since he left he'd been looking for me everywhere and had finally found me. "Hi, Steve," he said in his small voice. He sounded a bit like our grandchildren.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear him speak. He'd always done his best to communicate, approximating multi-syllable words like "hungry." I picked him up and stroked his fur. It was all smoothed down, almost as if wet, because he'd been swimming through the dark beyond. His eyes were wild with what he'd seen, or what he'd been unable to see. I petted him and called him "my kitty" and "old fuzzyhead" the way I used to.

All I could think of was how I'd been mourning the recent loss of my other cat, the last one, and how I'd been feeling alone. "How could I think that when I'll always have you?" I asked him.

On waking I took him with me, a small warm presence who will always be at my side. Once I wrote this about him:

Feline Dreams

My cat has nightmares. This I know by how
he lifts his head from slumber, turns it side
to side while blinking, body still supine
as if still sleeping from the neck on down.

I know it by the way he issues forth
a plaintive call as if say where am I?
or to bring me to his side the way
a child beckons parents in the fearsome

dark. I know it, too, by how he likes
to be picked up, embraces me, and rests
his head upon my shoulder, softly purrs
as if to say it all was just a dream.

What could so strain a feline mind is likely
something I will never know. I wonder,
does he see his sister's death, the shining
chrome that knocked the life from out her head
the way a flame, when blown, departs the candle?

Or is it just some rival beast, a dog
perhaps, or nasty tom, who plagues his rest?
His brain, all cerebellum, no cerebrum,
lacks the convolution needed for
such pondering. He seeks alone the comfort
I provide, then lies content, far more
at peace than you or I will ever be.

Cadillac Lady

Like two ships passing in broad daylight ...

I first spotted her when I began taking the train to work, which meant I had to walk the last few blocks to my office. I only  noticed because she was parked in a big black Cadillac, shiny and new, with the engine running. So that first impression symbolized American wealth and extravagance, idling a big V8 engine just to keep the sole occupant of the car comfortable in the heat.

As time went on I realized I was seeing her almost every day, parked in the same spot. It was right in front of a big picture framing store, so she might have been a wealthy patron having some of her art collection framed. But not even a museum would have enough work to keep her there day after day, and always so early in the morning.

It didn't take long for my writer's instincts to kick in. Part detective, part fantasist, that side of me filled in a picture. It had to be her store, her business, that she was keeping an eye on. Maybe her husband used to run it, but he's dead now, and she's in her old age, hanging on to what she has left. Naturally that means making sure the employees are on the job and not stealing from her, that the manager gets there and opens up on time.

She also has an obsession with protecting her parking lot. She's in a neighborhood with scarce public parking and numerous restaurants and night spots. Some business owners might hire a guy to rent out spaces at night, but she puts chains across the driveways and posts WILL TOW signs. When the chains are broken or taken down, she has thicker ones installed, with padlocks. When someone runs into them she has them painted yellow. When the posts are knocked down, a crew is at work the next day installing new ones.

I know the parking lot because I cut through it to save a few steps. At least I used to, before she had additional chains put up to seal off the pedestrian-sized openings that not even a motorcycle could have squeezed through.

Were those chains directed at me? Has she been watching me through the glass of her tinted windows, through a glass darkly, seeing me as a threat? I could jump the chains easily, but I don't. She'd only put up taller ones, like an athletic competition raising the high jump bar till only one person could clear it.

Instead I respect her boundaries, the territory of her own space that she guards so jealously, hands clutching the motionless steering wheel, driving nowhere, eyes behind sunglasses, a cigarette held in her lipsticked mouth as she gives herself a light and fills the hermetically sealed car with a cloud of her own smoke.

When I took her picture this morning, she silently drove away.