Once Upon a Time by Constantine Gochis

The Djinn's preface:  My father had a complex relationship with his parents, oft expressed in the pronouncement, "My parents were peasants". This may seem harsh, but what little I can glean from the sparse stories of his childood as the second of 7 surviving children, his father was a bit of a brute. At age ninety something, he dead for many decades, my Aunt Georgia expressed a lingering fear as if somehow he could still reach her with his disapproval. He died before I was born. My mother and father married secretly in about 1946. My mother failed the test of ethnicity. She was not Greek. In fact, she was full blooded, first generation, Irish.  This was anathema to my grandfather, although his own wife was first generation Italian. While the marriage remained a secret, my grandfather had an entire dinner in which he sought to introduce a nice Greek girl to Dad who painstakingly served them. When the marriage became a matter of family publicity, and Dad introduced her to the paterfamlias, she was given a mitigation because she wore an outfit that covered her charms from head to toe. Thus, at least, she was a "good girl". But my father had even less affection for his mother, though he always behaved in an honorable fashion toward her. She died in old age. One of his stories related to her was how she chased his younger sibling, Tony, around with a kitchen knife, when he committed some child's mischief. She was pregnant at the time. 

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Mr. Randolph was one of my father's favorite customers.  It was not that he was a big spender. In fact, he was one of Papa's elite clientele whose nature was never to carry cash, or anything heavy. "Put it on my account and have the boy bring it up," was the usual interaction.  In my preteen years, I was the "boy".

Mr. Randolph was a person who exuded elegance, although somewhat worn.  He was carefully attired. He carried a can and wore a felt hat, tan in color. This was an accessory he wore constantly, regardless of the sartorial conflict.  To my younth eyes he himself seemed somewhat worn, and probably not one of the affluent denizens of the neighborhood.

He was friendly, and garrulous, and whether or not he bought something, he frequently became engaged in philosophical discuss wion my father.  Papa addressed him as Professor Randolph, although he was, in fact, of more pedestrian accomplishments. My father applied his own value to degrees of accomplishment. "Professor" was not a title of reverence to him.  It was a challenge, an invitation to a joust. He felt sure that only the vagaries of early deprivation separated him from the heights of learning.

I suspect that it was Mr. Randolph who introduced my father to an aphorism he often employed, one that varied slightly in syntax, "Stay on your feet and limitations" or "Lay on your feet and limitations." In either version, it became his paradigm of universal application. 

When he was confronted by the logic of an adversary, he resorted to a store of illustrative fables.  His most pointed rebuttal lay in the story of a man who was sitting on the breanch of a tree and sawing it from the inside. A "Professor" who was passing cautions him that if he continues in this fashion, he will surely fall. The man, who always responds with pique, responds, "Professor, if you are so smart, tell me when I am going to die." I do not mean to disparage my father, but I temporize.

It seems that in one of the many dissertations with Randolph, the subject of a magic substance, called "Ergosterol" was revealed to him. Ergosterol is an enzyme that humans possess beneath the skin that produces Vitamin D, but only when exposed to the sun. This particular revelation had evil consequences of some severity for me.

On the next day after the epiphany, he directed Mr. Hagiopolis, his employee, to take me to Long Beach for a sunbath.  I was, consquently, severely burned and blistered. My mother, not as yet instructed in the salutary benefits of Ergosterol, opined that the event was caused by the "matia", the evil eye cast upon me by her sisters in law.

The patriarch, my father, inspected the areas of the holocaust on my body and was pleased with the results. He was of the philosophy that medicine that tastes bad is good; the discomfort of minor burns had to be equally beneficial. 

He directed Mr. Hagiopolis to bring me back to Long Beach the next day.

The Melting Pot by Constantine Gochis

As I have noted before, I never entirely know how much of the "old" stories of Dad's family are fully true. I know they have some truth, for example, because I know that before the Depression, the family had a house in the Bronx. I have seen the picture of most, though not all, of the children in the backyard, which in the photo, at least, looks more lush than my father describes in this story when it was purchased. My uncle Steve is not in the picture because he was not yet born, and my Aunt Georgia, the eldest, is not in the picture because she hid from her husband that she was older than he, and the rest of her siblings. That she hid this is confirmed by the photos, including this one in the back yard, in which she is cut out, or rather, she cut herself out. Perhaps somewhere there is a negative, though I doubt it, this many years on. We are talking the 1920s. My father is about five in the picture, wearing a sailor suit. They were more prosperous then, though not rich. The Depression would take that away and I believe it was before 1931, the date in which my father says this father in law came to live with them. I do not think that Nikkos is a real character, if only because, my father's mother was not Greek. She was Italian, though first generation, born on Mulberry Street somewhere around 1890 ish. But I suspect there is some hard kernal of truth in this tale. I actually thought I had posted it long ago, but turns out I had not, or I never noted it in my list of now over 100 stories I have published on this blog written by my father. I regret that he never became a known writer. He had a great talent. He always wanted to do something creative as a vocation. It didn't work out that way. Still he was a man of deep thoughts and educated tastes as all these stories demonstrate. And of course, a master of cynicism.

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THE MELTING POT

The old man came to live with us in 1931, I am sure. It was the year Papa bought an eleven room house in the Bronx to shelter his growing family.  I was the eldest at six.  There were already four children.  Papa left no doubt about his itention to sire many more.  There was little more than a year between my brothers and sisters in age. 

Nikkos, the old man, did not get along with his son-in-law, who was married to my mother, his daughter. He regarded Papa as a turncoat Greek, who had sold is glorious Hellenic birthright for a mess of American pottage. Papa attended "corrupt Americani" night schools.  He became a citizen.  He allowed his wife to bob her hair.  He was not a true Greek.

Nor had he attended the wedding of his daughter, though it was celebrated in the great cathedral on Forty-Seven Stree, the "Holy Trinity" or "Hagia Triada".  

A mitigating circumstance was the ten dollars a week that he contributed to the hearth. The Great Depression was upon us.

He was, for the times, affluent.  His income came from the Government insurance policy which was compensating him for the loss of his son, Nikkos, Jr. who was killed in France on November 4, 1918, seven days before the armistice.

He was wont to curse, beneath his breath, at his son's picture, before which a candle burned perpetually, in a flickering red cup, on our piano.

Nikkos begged his son not to enlist to fight for this "barbarian" country.  Nikkos, Jr. embodied all his aspirations, his immortality, his fortress against assimilation into this mongrel society he had grown to hate. He had sold his flesh to Mammon.

He had three more children, all girls, before his peasant wife sickened, as silent and obliging as she lived, died quietly.

There ensued the inevitable.  He was a desultory parent. He never noticed his authority has weakened.  The eldest girl led the insurrection. She married an Italian contractor and fled to Chicago. My mother's selection did not please him even though my father was Greek.  There was, of course, the violence.  He beat his first daughter severely, but she had him arrested and roundly chastised into restraint by the robed men with pince-nez glasses and ascetic nostrils.  The hated Americani.

When the only other daughter married a diamond dealer from Salonika, of a prominent Jewish family, his soul hardened and with the death of his son in France, he lapsed into monastic resignation.

I knew nothing of this history until much later.  From the outset, there was friendship between us.  I was not yet seasoned to the antagonisms of adult behavior.  I liked the old man. On the Fourth of July, he would stuff a five-dollar bill into my pocket and say, "Go maka somma noise!" I supposed he made allowances for this American day of liberation since it was, conincidentally, his birthday.

One of my few childhood memories is the shock of separation somehow engendered by our sudden move into our new house.  I remember looking out of a window into strange, undeveloped, weed-encumbered lots. I turned to find Grandpa standing behind me, curious, peering to determine the source of my interest.

I did not tell him. I had no words for the feeling.  There was nothing out there, but loneliness.  Still, I felt a warmth in his unexpected presence, a feeling of comfort, companionship. He was offering friendship and I needed a friend.

We were neighbors. My room was separated from his by a flimsy wall that sllowed the sounds of his evening peregrinations to filter through.  I could hear the scraping sounds of an obstructed urination, followed by the anathemas he hurled the the Icons on his wall. He cursed each in turn, by name, excoriating them, blaming them for leading him to this desert of brick and stone, where his dreams took no seed.

Every once in a while, he would chant one of those Ottoman "Amanes" or plaints of his village, wailing songs of despair and rejection.

I believe I was his only companion.  My fatgher ignored him.  My siblings were in various states of maturation. There was a coldness between him and my mother, and silence from his other daughters from whom he never heard.

We had no age difference between us. We played together as equals. He was trim and agile, gray eyed, with carefully cropped hair.  He had an array of pipes which he alternated daily.  I bought his "Prince Albert" tobacco when he ran out. I was fascinated. I knew he liked me, and to a child this is the measure of all need.

I helped tend the gardens he created out of the barren half-acre of our property.  I learned to plow, sow the seed, water the fragile shoots, hammer support into the ground for the fast growing tomato plants.  He would watch, approvingly, stopping occasionally to throw a rock at an offending cat, adding a sharp curse to give impetus to the projectile.

Sometimes, in midsummer, when the sounds of crickets protested the hot weather and the fireflies lit the darkness under his grape arbor, he would try to convey his longing for his abandoned country. I saw what he was seeing. His sky, deep and blue, the vines heavy with grape clusters, the gnarled olive trees silhouetted against a reddening, darkening sky at sunset.  I travelled with him, in his dream to the "Kafeneon" of his forsaken village, the coffeehouse where his friends gathered to sip the thick sweet coffee in the little cups.  I could hear the songs of the heroes of 1821 who descended from Mount Ossa with their long sabres to slay the hated Ottoman.

Sometimes, he would break into a mournful dirge.  "Manna mou, manna mou, pou eeseh?" "Mother, mother, where are you?

Nikkos died when I was twelve.  It was as if he decided to leave. He gave me his watch with the gold case that opened to disclose a face of Roman numerals.  He did not protest when I fingered his collection of pipes. He pressed a five dollar bill into my palm and said, "No tella your mother."

I got his room with the Byzantine Ikons on the wall and his four poster bed, the one he died in. Usually fearful of the metaphysical, I was not afraid. If his spirit were given to wandering, it would not, I knew, harm me.  I was not so sure about his children and my father.

Papa said what he told me about the old country was "skata", a Greek word for "shit".  I don't know why he wanted to tell me his truths--perhaps some inner guilt of his own, some failure, some genetic adhesion to a sacred code of behavior that he might have violated. There was too much vehemence in what he said. 

"There was no lush garden," he said.  "The grapes were withered on the vine when he left. The olives had to be pressed, and pressed again, before his family could have any olive oil."

I don't know.  I did not care then and I don't care now. I hope he is sitting in a familiar "Kafeneon" sipping his little cup, under lush verdant vines, where resin win flows in gentle streams and the quarter tone Moorish songs of heroes echo deep within the soul. His battle was more fearful than the Ottoman hordes. A pitiless crucible, a melton pot that engulfs, sears and destroys the old so that the new may live.

"Xaire, Farewell, Rest."

They Are All Good and Honorable Men by Constantine Gochis

I haven't quickly posted this story, and I am not sure if it is a real reminiscence, of my father's. It does however reflect his deep cynicism about humanity, and is among the explanations for his resistance to faith---that God would bother to create such people, that this could not possibly be the action of a good God to allow the vagaries of human banality or worse, cruelty. It was pointless to attempt to remind him that the villain was not God, but the wilfulness of the creation. Order was thrown into disorder, not by God, but by a pride born of Pelagianism, the idea that man does not need God, that there can be no original sin and man can perfect himself. It happened in Eden; it continues now, the only difference is that after Redemption, the second chance at choice is a purely individual one. It will save or condemn each of us based on the choice, rather than lead to a collective salvation or condemnation as the choice of Adam and Eve very nearly caused. 

Man causes the mess. He blames God. He excises God. And remains clueless about the mess of his own making. 

Sin is a choice. The people in this story are fictional (or real) examples of it of varying degrees. Wasn't Harvey Weinstein considered a good and honorable man even though all his "friends" also good and honorable men (and women) knew otherwise? And whose fault is that?

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They Are All Good and Honorable Men

Prologue

There is a scene in the movie, Zorba the Greek, in which the Cretan, Mavrandoni, cuts the throat of the town's beautiful widow.  The townspeople, assembled for the execution, approve. It was an act of honor. Mavrandoni wipes his knife and stands before the populace, proud, unashamed. He is, after all, "Kalos kai agathos," good and noble. He has avenged a mortal assault on his honor.

What was the offense?  The widow rejected the attentions of his son, an infatuated juvenile. The boy commits suicide. And worse, she had given her favors elsewhere. 

There are cerebral processs that have mystified me throughout my life.  I began to notice certain startling aberrations of the cognitive mind early in my youth.

The movie I had just watched reminded me of some people I have known, all I am sure, thought to possess the qualities of the good and honorable which they brought with them from the "Patrida" the fatherland, the old country, in the early years of the 20th Century in a small piece of New York.

There was never a day when some one of my father's townsmen did not make an appearance at his store.  

They came out of loneliness for an occasional glass of ouzo, a favorite Greek potable, or a loan, to tide one over, or some feta with retsina wine and the discussion of the latest crisis in the homeland.  Several came for no visible reason at all.

Since, as a pre-teenager, I was required to do service in the store--one was never too young to learn about work--I got to know each of the visitors intimately.

There was Mr. Stelyn. Not only was he a visitor on a social basis, he was a supplier to my father's stores of glazed fruits, in those cellophane wrapped, beribboned packages of gift or steamer "Bon Voyage" baskets purchased by the elite for the elite.

Mr. Stelyn was a Church goer, an entrepreneur of status.  Papa considered him a person of the highest "Kalos kai agathos", good and noble, an opinion he had, in retrospect, about all his peripetatic friends.

One day when I was alone in the front of the store making childish drawings, Mr. Stelyn approached me.

He looked down at my artistic endeavor and smiled, disclosing two gold capped canines, and said, "Nice, nice picture," and drew close to my left side. He continued in his thick accent.

"Make, make nice picture."

I was not too young to recognize his member, erect within his trousers, impacting a point near my waist.

The contact was quickly and abruptly aborted when my father came into the store. There was the usual exchange of salutations. Mr. Stelyn returned his salutation with a wide smile enhancing the two golden crowns, framed in a very white face.

"Kala eemeh, kala eemeh, Yoryee."  "I am well, George," which was my father's name.

In retrospect, it is well I did not report the incident to my father. He was predictably capable of killing Mr. Stelyn or more likely, slapping me for uttering such an accusation against his countryman.

Mr. Peter Booloukos was one of three brothers, each notable for inclusion in my pantheon of worthy men.

He spoke little English.  In one of our rare dialogues--the elder tutoring the younger--he lectured me on the linguistic dependence of English on Greek. I remember only one word of his dissertation. "Aeer, aeer!" I took this to mean "Air". His profundity had discovered the similarity thus between the English and Greek languages.

I was in great need of that substance "air", to mitigate the strong oor of ouzo in our confined atmosphere.

I was afraid of this man. There was something sinister about his appearance. He wore black exclusively. An also black slouch hat topped the rest of his macabre ensemble. My fears were well founded. Pete never entered or exited from the front door of his apartment. I knew of the circuitous route he took beause I was in his home on an errand for my father.

Pete controlled the space allocated to the peddlers of frankfurters, chestnuts and other street business from Fifty-Ninth Stree and Broadway to One Hundreth and Tenth Street. If a recalcitrant peddlar refused him cash tribute, his wagon would be overturned or worse.

Pete had been married. When he susptected that his wife was unfaithful, he chained her to her bed. She broke loose and jumped from the third story window. She did not die. He had her repatriated. 

I do not remember the name of the middle Booloukos. My brother, Tony, who had a a distinct talent to characterize someone with a word, called him the "Hook". I suppose this was inspired by the fact that this Booloukos was a man of huge build, but with one withered arm and hand that was permanently affixed at his waist level.  

The third Booloukos was Aristotle.  He had a beautiful daughter in love with someone they called "O Americanos", the "American". 

The brothers discouraged this relationship. I overheard their rendition of their application of interdiction in the time worn tradition of their village of origin.

The other men nodded in approval of the Homeric account.

Two of the brothers held the young man while the "Hook" applied convincing physical chastisement. He disappeared.

The daughter, named Chrysoula," a name suggesting a quality of gold, disappeared in a way. She walked into space from the roof of her house.

There was one man I knew nothing of except what might be called externals.  He was a perpetual visitor to my father's store, coming in those brief hours of respite from his job as a dishwasher. He had taken the job on the day he left steerage of a magnificent ocean liner, one of the Cunard leviathans. He had never left that job. He was a youngish man, with a full head of black hair and a perpetual half-smile in the fashion of the comedian Stan Laurel.

His perpetual expression and unique taciturnity intrigued me.  He spoke to me only once in perhaps ten years of his comings and goings. His name was Christos, aptly named if one considers kindness and patience. Alas, he was also a man of limited cerebral capability. He was, one day, the only extraneous visitor of the motley crew that usually made its appearance. He had his usual half-smile but it had the quality of distress about it. I asked what ailed him in Greek, not sure that in pronouncing his name, I was correct in using the "dative" declension rather than the "vocative". I was learning Greei.

"Echo ponos," he said, pointing to his stomach. Pain.

I remembered a nostrum I had recently learned in the science portion of the "Book of Knowledge". It called for two glasses, one filled with lemon juice and the other a solution of bicarbonate of soda and water.  I prepared the potion, while Christos observed. Cynicism seemed to alter his expression, slightly. His eyes opened when I poured one glass into the other and produced a marvelous foam.

I gave it to him to drink, which he did, like an obedient child.

There was an enormous burp, and a look of surprised, unexpected pleasure.

"Make me 'nother one, boy," was the second complete sentence I heard from him, in the same day.

Sunday May Be a Good Time for Penitence by Constantine Gochis

 This rumination by my father requires a backstory. He attached the article, by one Fred Narvey, sometime in the 1990s in the magazine/paper Jewish Currents. The publication appears still to be in existence.

Basically two men meet, one, religious, is on the way to the synagogue on the Sabbath, and the other, who denominates himself a "secular" Jew advises he is on the way to a peace march. The conversation focuses on the secular Jew's and religious Jew's respect for each other's position on how to be Jewish, their definitions of God (Is God only a philosophy or something more) and spirituality, what books can or should be read by a Jew or non-Jew (like Sholem Aleichem), and what groups, literary and otherwise, a secular Jew or non-Jew or both, can or should join. 

They do not resolve their academic (and as we know a very real) dispute. And they go there separate ways with the farewell of "Shalom".

This was also written at a time (and it was always thus) that my father was struggling with belief, or lack thereof. While I remain pleased that he ultimately decided to join the Catholic Church, I do not think that struggle abated. But as a good man worried about where a sole daughter would bury her father, I concluded from one of his statements, "I want to make it easier for you", that there had been no Damascus moment and only a practical consideration.  But few have Damascus moments.  He did it. And he came to Mass every Sunday without fail from 2003 until 2008 when he died at age 90. He acted on his conversion in a very real way. He did not have to.

So here is his reverie on the article which reflects, in my view, his struggle.

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It is the Paschal Season.  Normally the imminence of Passover and Easter has no special impact on me.  In this matter, I am in philosophic sympathy with the musings of one Fred Narvey, in his article, Two Jews on One Shabbos.  I am not as definitive as he is on the non-efficacy of prayer.  Like him I derive some "spirituality" from reading a story by Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Simon Dubnow, Chaim too, that is Chaim Zhitowski, and I raise him an I.J. Singer, and his brother A.J., who, by the way, had he not died early would have been a better writer. During these reflections I fear greatly hearing a thunderous voice from the sky admonishing me, as he did Job, with a wrathful, "Where were you when I created the universe?"

Now, do not take me as a rank believer.  But it does seem there is something a little more spiritual in the contemplation of an unimaginable infinity, where a point of light takes five billion years to reach us, something indeed a little more spiritual than the musings of Tevye, and his fiddler, who teeters on the roof of a house, in a Shtetyl, in a country, in a world that is but a speck in the universe.

Forgive me the outburst.  In conscience I was suffused with a sudden desire for an onion roll, the long one, as I walked along Fairfax Avenue.  But, the bread counters were overcrowded with the faithful, impatiently clamoring  for enough bread and cookies to fortify against the coming seven days of privation and the inflexible Matzoth, and maybe the thought that there is among them many who go to synagogue for reasons other than those of Fred Narvey--he attending services at weddings and funerals out of respect for friends and not this demanding God.

But then, as Fred says, "God is a separate question. . .a philosophical term."  He is a concept, embodied only in truth, justice and compassion for our fellow man. He is not God, that is, an omnipotent being in space who sits in judgment of us mortals. "I do not believe," he says at base. 

He may be right. He is so assured, so confident. He goes to peace marches, even on the Shabbos. He is host of a literary group known as, "Mama Loshen". He cannot be tagged with some current, convenient name. He is, by his own admission, a "pedestrian". This is almost godlike omniscience and omnipotence to those of us less gifted.

I am more fearful that there IS a God, call Him a philosophical term if you like, that He exists outside, and that he might not have any interest in us at all, or our futile peregrinations, our endless peace marches over the millenia. Fred knows there is no God, or if He is, He is man made. What is his proof that God is not?

Easter Sunday is approaching.  Perhaps I will join my friends and family members at Easter Mass in the Cathedral.  It's only an hour, and a wonderful ceremonial rite. What could I lose? 

The Odds are. . .Against by Constantine Gochis

 This is another of Dad's stories related to his life back in the 1990s near and around Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. This one he did not title so I did it for him.

Think of the certainty of the solar systm.  We have just witnessed the last solar eclipse that will not happen again for centuries. I have concluded, after a spate of years, that I am not attuned to the meticulously ordered universe.

I cite the astronomical trivia because the orbital  exactitude is so predictable and so orderly and I am so out of sync with it.

I cite two examples.  One is the buses I continue to miss, a fact that does violence to the psyche.

You know, if one tosses a penny into the air one hundred times, it will come up heads about fifty percent of the time, I don't want to exaggerate, but if you were to place the odds on MY chances of catching the elusive bus at zero, you would be a winner.

Take today, Friday the 13th. There are three northbound and southbound lines on Fairfax Avenue any one of which can serve my purposes when I am about my errands. I watched as all three reached and departed the bus stop while I was a half a block away. In desperation I signaled a cab

He affected not to see me until I took out a pen and made scratches on an envelope I was carrying. "You look for a cab? I do not see you right away," he apologized.

I retaliated by paying him in Cityride coupons and did not include a tip. Cabbies will take dollars or rubles but they hate the coupons.

I was on my way to "Staples" to consult with their computer guru on the matter of some non-functioning hardware I had purchased. 

The expert was bored and impatient, a condition only possible in times of low unemployment.

Another customer tried to interpose his beef.  "When I am finished with this customer," said the imperious chief which dispatched the customer due to his tonal severity. Managers have rights.

The manager finished me off with equal celerity. "We don't stock the part, you have to call the company." 

All right. My luck seemed to be taking a turn for the better. I caught the home bound Wilshire Bus immediately. 

When I got to Fairfax Avenue, the 99 Cents shop, loomed invitingly. The odds looked promising if I got off, and went to the store. As I said, there are ample lines on Fairfax Avuenue.  "Take a shot," I said to myself.

There was only one guy in front of me on the check out line. Lady luck turned. The guy ran his credit card through the slide. It did not work. He tried several sides of the reluctant plastic without result. The clerk took the card and repeated his steps without better results. She demonstrated several innovative gyrations, wiping the offending card against her forearm, her sleeve, and once even on her protective apron. I watched through the window as two buses arrived and departed.

The clerk and the customer repaired to another counter and repeated the ritual. I dropped my items on the counter and left. Happily, the 217 was approaching.  But it did not stop. The legend above the windshield read, "Out of Service". 

After a long intermission, another loomed, approached slowly at first, and when the light turned green sped past us bulging with passengers from its last pick-up point.

A little old lady shook her cane at the offending vehicle with great vigor, and she spewed forth a thesaurus of invective, including four letter words, both instructive and satisfying to me.

I decided to walk. 

Do You Want to Live Forever? by Constantine Gochis

 I am not referring by this title to the Queen song, but rather one of the many stories my father wrote in his retirement, mostly. The one that follows was written in the 1990s, and to me, it reflects the area we both lived in then from a personal and historical point of view. Lots has changed in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, and not all of it for the better. This story was well before the hip kids who overtook the traditional vegetable and bakery stores, and the family oriented Orthodox Jews, with sneaker pop ups, and the like, exhaling their weed smoke--as smoking is perfectly fine as long as it isn't tobacco. I realize how much I have inherited my father's cynicism, although it is less that I have become cynical I think than that the society has derailed in the 18 years since my father's death. He predicted it and while I believed him, I did not think it was coming in my lifetime. He did. 

Things were starting to deteriorate when Dad wrote this short one and the one that will follow in another entry, hopefully today.

Do You Want to Live Forever?

The 217 bus, going south, stops at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.  It is a sorry example of city transport, despite the protestations of the LA City Council. It is infrequent in its arrivals, unsupervised so that schedules are meaningless, graffiti emblazoned with shattered looking windows, and characteried by the odor of stale urine wafting from the well of the rear exit. Neverthelss, it never lacks for riders, usually the aged and the infirm and uncharacterizable individuals. 

Inevitably, take today for example, three fully loaded buses ignore our stop to a chorus of vituperataion.  A voice speaks to me in Yiddish.

"Do you speak Yiddish?"

"A bissel," I reply. My linguistic ability is a residual of my Bronx heritage.

He then proceeds to speak to me in English now that he has probed to establish my ethnicity.

"The month is my birthday," he says.

"Mazeltov," I reply continuing the imposture. 

"I am seventy-seven this month." 

I shake my head in acknowledgement. In my head I compute the difference in our ages, only three months.

He continues as if he needs no response.

"I have a cancer," he says blithely, "but it's out the doctor says. I'm cured!"

He adds the details, a prostatectomy, three years ago.

"The doctor catches it in time. How do I look?" he questions. Then, without waiting for a reply again, 

"They say some people live to be one hundred and twenty; there's a woman in France I hear of. . ."

"There are stories of great longevity, some villages in Russia," I encourage.

"A lot of crap," he retorts, "they don't keep birth certificates."

I begin to wear.  I suggest the testimony in the Torah of startling life spans. He ignores my reference.

"No kidding, how do I look? The doctor says if I take care of myself, I've got a long time. Some doctors are phony bastards but I believe Levenson. What do you think? How old do I look if you have to estiate in years. Ok how many do you say?"

"Conservatively," I lie, "a minimum of thirty."

His expression indicates he is assured. Clearly, he has asked this question many times.

The bus arrives. I decide to walk. 

Punctuation on the Passage of Time

I don't know if it is my imagination, but since the Covid lockdown and its aftermath, time simply seems to be passing at a fearsome speed. 

I can't tell you how many people I have known have passed away in these last years. Yes, some were of a "good age", but some were not. Of late, loss appears to be the order of the day. In less than two years, five of those who were companions on the road at my local Catholic Church, St. Victor, have died and one or two outside of St. Victor. Two from St. Victor died just a month apart. 

Each of these people were integral parts of my life, before I moved to and from the time I moved to Los Angeles, and re-upped as a Catholic at St. Victor, before I was even 30 years old. Three were nonogenerians. The most recent died on April 16. Two were octogenarians (one was the only non-St. Victor friend and she knew one of those who died). Three were "young" in that their time came too soon (one on the East Coast).

I think I really FEEL John Donne's words in his poem For Whom the Bell Tolls:  "Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.  Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

I am pared down. And even before these six years of near constant loss, there were people who should be here (in my selfish view) taken, and none of a great age. 

Threads of my life's tapestry are being pulled out. At the same time, my earnestness about preparing for my own demise has increased. My nature being what it is, although many have never seen it (several poor souls have), I have always been aware of death and in truth afraid--hence my long period of teenage hypochondria, and far too long night terrors (those alas ended mysteriously in my late fifties or sixties). 

But this period, the last chapter, and yes no amount of cheery rhetoric can change that, has been challenging, as well as an opportunity to orient my life toward the Eternal in Whom I believe not merely intellectually, but Whom I am seeking at the core of my being. I trip up on the road regularly. And though I pray for trust in the Lord, a lot, I am too often filled with the anxiety born of distrust. 

Today I went to the cemetery mortuary to arrange for the latest funeral. I have gone there so often, I don't need to ask where the restrooms are! I visited my father who is ensconced in a columbarium across the way from the mortuary. The wall is nearly filled as it was not when Dad's cremains were laid to rest there in 2008. I have my space next to him. Odd to be standing outside now of the place where I will be in the blink of an eye. Oh please do not see this as morbid. I have been given already a great deal of time. More is devoutly to be wished, but simply is not of statistically long length even at its best.

The time is now. The time to get it all together emotionally and spiritually. I have known this. I too often fail to implement my knowledge. It is just one of the many consequences of the Fall. And though Redemption has been achieved through Christ, salvation requires a conscious choice, a "Yes" before the bell tolls for me. 

What small thing generated this entry? I went to my local Gelson's to pick up a salad and my ginger beer. As I returned my cart to its collection place, I saw a very elderly woman, elegant, and familiar, but bent more than a bit, struggling to get into her high end car. It was a short exchange. I did not want to intrude, but I also did not want to let the moment go by without an acknowledgement of her distant, but still significant part in my life's tapestry. So, I said, "You're terrific!"  She did not immediately realize that it was she I was speaking to. And so I said it again. She smiled. She was still trying to complete getting into the car and closing its door when I pulled away. 

In 1966, I lived in the Bronx.  My bedroom window faced another large brick building separated from mine by a long horizontal alley. It was a one bedroom apartment. I had the bedroom. My parents slept in a Castro Convertible in the living room. I have a distinct memory of one Saturday night, around 9 p.m. As I was, for some reason, kneeling on my bed, and looking out the window, my parents had tuned in to a show that was becoming popular. An anonymous hand I knew was lighting a fuse at the beginning, and the music of Lalo Schifrin met my 12 year old ears. Mission Impossible. Of course, I went to the living room immediately, feeling oddly secure that the three of us shared a common enjoyment of this show (as we did the Avengers; the Monkees my parents bore with a paradoxical sarcastic stoicism). Barbara Bain (aka Cinnamon Carter), was 35 years old. 

And now, across a continent and time, there she was in the Gelson's parking lot with this former Bronx child, me age 72 and she age 94. 

That moment I remember was just yesterday. All the moments with the people I have known in greater or lesser ways were just yesterday.