I Was Gonna Write You a Letter But I Wanted To Be More Clever

Holidays and funerals.  That's when middle age hits me.  All the empty seats at the table.

If we're lucky each of us has a twin to get us through this one and only life.  Sometimes it is the great love of your life, your soulmate; sometimes it's someone who has known you as long as you've known yourself, a sibling.  Mine is my older brother, Nick, who among other things is a savant of American music.  What I know of John Lee Hooker, Yusuf Lateef, McCoy, DeeDee Bridgewater, Gary Bartz I first learned from him.  So when, on a beautiful springlike Friday, I had my office door open and I caught a whiff of a song I thought I knew, but if I didn't damn sure wish I did, I ran upstairs and borrowed my niece's keyboard and with what is left of my years of piano lessons plucked out the first few bars of the chorus and before my voice could get too flat (talk about not being able to carry a tune if someone put it in a bag for me) I called Nick and sang the notes to him.  In seconds he says:  Tevin Campbell.  Can We Talk?

Now, let me go, he says, you interrupted my Hawkeyes game. You owe me one. I do, indeed.

Hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as ours.  Cheers to the NY Misfits, Jing Ma and Li Xiaxi, Hill, Helene and Baby James.

Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (excerpt)

Yes, it has been a while since I've written.  I've been carried away by the beauty of sentence such as the following:  f'(x) = the limit as h goes to 0 of f(x +h) minus f(x) all over h.  See what I mean?  Sheer poetry, eh?

If not.  Here is some:

  

At each day's end we convened

to pack our mouths with food.

Daily we came to be replenished.

Daily we came to wound.

Mother's anger subsumed our spite

as the language we hurled

made the food that was served,

bile.

My brother,

blessed with firstborn's love,

free as any boy who

comes in late

and knows he's safe,

he jumped the cat but missed the tread.

(The precious carpet fibers slicked.)

He fell.  She laughed.

He smacked the floor.

She laughed again.

He knocked her beer off the baluster

sullen, ready for war.

There's dinner, she said

you're late.

Who put that fuckin' thing there?

It's always in the way!

Who needs this fuckin' beer?

She looked at him.

He, at her.

I looked for shelter in my plate.

The baby chewed her corn.

There were no words for what

my father did not say.

She jerked the hose

and sucked her teeth.

Clean it up, she said.

My brother snorted when

Mother stepped down.

Clean it up.  Now.

Without Irony: Somebody Think of the Children

In our age of moral ambiguity (which age hasn't been an age of ambiguity?) we welcome an event, even a tragic one, that presents a bright, clear demarcation of Right vs. Wrong.  We can express our outrage without looking over our shoulder fearing that we've offended someone else's balkanized state of mind.  We can be sure; be right.

For a time the soul-searching aftermath of September 11th provided that moral relief.  Now it is the Penn State rape (not sex abuse, for chrissakes) scandal.  I cannot, and I'm not alone in this by any means, stop reading about it.  Sportswriters, clergy, common people young and old, mental health professionals, fathers and mothers, athletes pro and amateur, all speak to it.  I've read commentary from atheists who long, just for once, to believe in hell; and from the doubting faithful who are one step closer to letting go of God.

What I will add is that I am grateful that I am part of a culture that is still horrified by adults who have sex (whether by violent force or seductive coercion) with children.  I've been to or know of places where that is not so.

And, too:  I predict Joe Paterno will be dead within a year.

A supplementary commentary by Claire Potter, on her blog Tenured Radical.

And this, by ESPN.com's Howard Bryant, Penn State's failure of power.