Into the room the elephants come and go remembering Michelangelo (I always wanted to do that) giving advice over coffee cups and dirty spoons, speaking words of love as if in the alley of recently uncrated targets and teddy bears, that are props in the carnival of our lives, a zoo of our own making fading away under the weight of black and white dreams never to be repeated. A kiss is still a kiss, so too the abyss. The elephants know that memory is a two edged sword. Memory is indifferent to itself and its use, on account of the past is always past. Even when it is never really past, (Bill Faulkner said that, I think).

The zoo is always open. Until it isn’t.

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“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” ~ Norman Maclean

Hope that this isn’t a mistake to make contact… there are no unknown dangling promises here, and nothing needs to break but I want you to know that in the hard hours under tonight’s uncertain skies, I go to my zoo, I ask the elephants what to do and the answer I find is; tell yourself no more lies. But where you are concerned, I never learned to ask; what can I do to ease things for you? I can tell you though that after I lost my way, broken by the deluge of pain, I found no sweet kindness in my refuge of rage. Please make no mistake, there is no repair here I can offer that will make your hill easier to climb but I’m troubled to know that I let you go because I could never offer you the key to what you wanted from me.

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Restless night last night so I picked up Genesis and got as far as the part where God says to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”

Naturally Abe says, “No, you got to be kidding me.”

God says “Word!”

Abe goes home. Sarah asks, “How was your day?”

He tells her…. She says, “Oh, my”…. Abe shrugs and says, “Waddayagonnado?”

I ain’t them but I woke up thinking dark thoughts about what’s been happening and the whole thing made sense to me at 3 AM. With apologies to Bob Dylan, I gave up making lists of who has checked in and who has checked out. I slept better after that. Waddayagonnado? Indeed!
 
RIP Phil Savath, December 28th, 1946 – November 3rd, 2004.

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Home at last, arm in a sling. The ablation procedure went so well that the docs had a clear view of some other stuff: “so how about we put in a pacemaker… for long-term success?”

I’m all about long-term these days I said with way more calm than I actually felt. Not too long after that, my new sling and I emerged from the electro-physio lab and home we went walking with a steady step and enjoying the fine companionship of my brother-in-law Jerry Adler and my sister Beth Lebowitz. I might add that my heartbeat was and is steady today. When we got there, I hit the couch, held tight to my unexpected tears and watched while Jerry and Beth put together beef stew and vegetables for the days ahead while I recover.

My little house was alive with family, laughter and food.

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Why should not old men be mad?
William Butler Yeats

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

WB Yeats said all that.

I came into my office this morning and sat down at my desk only to discover there was a dirty sock on the right corner of the desk “sleeping” on top of the unopened mail. In my old days this might not have struck me as unusual but these days I rarely find articles of clothing lying around the house and office where they should not be. I decided not to take a picture of it and realized that I am not yet socially media literate,  meaning that I would still like to write a thousand words that are worth a picture. I have been trying to write something for a few days now about what’s going on but it has not been easy going as I have been finding it difficult to connect my thoughts with my words; as is often the case the blank page finally wins.

I have been looking at this picture below and thinking about why I find it so appealing. I like the texture of the reeds. The action on the water awakens my sense of a storm coming in and my hope that the reeds will survive the worst of the storm and that they will be here when I come back again … whenever that may be.

There is no guarantee of my returning to this place that I may renew my acquaintance with these reeds. In truth it may never happen. Not because of some personally fatal occurrence but because the running event that would bring me back to this particular lake has been canceled for the foreseeable future. Unlike the reeds, the event itself eventually broke down as a storm of demands were made and something of value came to an end except as memory and stories to tell in the places where absent friends gather. There is something in the reflection that I find appealing almost as if discovering a secret harbor, refuge in a Kingdom of distance and dreams. The reflection itself is dislocating because it is so close to the surface of the water as if the sky and water had finally merged. I find it peaceful with the ruffled surface of the water under the cloud disappearing into the reeds I shot it in a quiet moment during a very active day and so when I look at it now , I remember the peace of that moment made up as it was of stolen time and the drifting memory of someone I loved who was no longer there.

I took the sock off the desk and tossed it into the laundry basket and so today began.

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