City Lights

I stopped in at City Lights bookstore, as I usually do on trips to San Francisco. City Lights fills me with wonderful feelings of literary history and pride in America's independent publishing houses. This is one great bookstore. The store itself has expanded a bit and remade itself over the years, but it is still essentially the same warehouse it was when in opened on Columbus Avenue in North Beach back in 1953. Founder, owner and renowned Beat generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti still works here, although, despite my many visits, I have never seen him. That is, until this time.

I was upstairs at City Lights. The upper floor is a loft of sorts with walled offices to the front that look over the main floor below and a small oddly shaped room to the rear filled with books of poetry. I had the room to myself on this visit. I picked up a copy of “City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology” and browsed through it. The air was warm and musty. The light dim, despite the incandescent lamps and a window that looked out on dead space in an alleyway.

The quiet of the moment was broken by a sharp ratcheting of a door latch opening and closing. I looked over and saw an old man, gray hair and beard, wrestle with the hook on one of those “store personnel only beyond this point” chains. The man was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There are vintage photographs of Ferlinghetti everywhere in City Lights bookstore. No mistaking him.

Ferlinghetti walked right past as if he didn’t see me. In fairness, I purposely made myself small and stood out of the way. I briefly considered asking him to sign the anthology book I intended to purchase, but I am always wary of such invasions of privacy. They just seem wrong to me. Instead, I watched as Ferlinghetti shuffled slowly past. He is 88 years old now (I looked this up later) and impressively robust. Near the top of the steps, Ferlinghetti stopped and rearranged some postcards in the literary postcard rack. A few more steps and he stopped again to pick up a book that was lying backwards and upside down on the shelf. Did I do that? Before putting it back, Ferlinghetti, opened the book and read from its pages. It is amazing to me that this remarkable man, the last great Beat poet, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, friend and publisher to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Bob Dylan, was also a simple store clerk. Business is business after all.

Satisfied that everything was in order, Ferlinghetti walked slowly down the stairs. I listened as his feet made contact with each creaky wooden step. At the bottom of the staircase he stopped. There was a click. To save electricity, he turned the lights off for the upper floor. He turned the lights out on me! Before that thought could fully register in my mind, there was another click and the lights came back on. Ahh, so he had seen me, and remembered that I was up there. For one brief moment, Lawrence Ferlinghetti thought of me – only me and my need for light. Pretty cool. After that, I suspect, his thoughts turned to lunch.

On Union Square

The view is spectacular
from my hotel room

33 floors up

in this city that

randomly

quakes


The bay at dawn

Alcatraz shrouded in fog

33 floors down

I am awake early

San Andreas

sleeps

Uppity uppers

These old shoelaces go too easily untied
Failing even my best double knots
Oh Lord, believe me I've tried
Every trick in the book we were issued as tots.
So see here lace-ups, give me a listen
I'll take no more insolence from you
Shape up this instant or I'm switchin'
To a steadfast and tasseled slip on shoe.

These dreams

Just so you know, I’m dreaming right now. That you’re reading this while I sleep has to do with my new dream-to-blog technology which allows me to transcribe my dreams real-time onto my blog. Pretty cool, huh? Oh, there are the electrodes to deal with. The fire wire. The cranial wifi router. It only hurts a little.

Bob Marley is here with me. He says that I'm stressing too much in my day life and it's affecting my sleep cycle. He can tell from all the tossing and turning I have been doing, the teeth grinding, the nearly indecipherable rambling on in my sleep about time lines and deliverables. Marley has pulled up a chair and is seated next to me. I am rubbing my eyes. Not to wipe away the sleep, but to clear out the smoke that has wafted over from his big fat cigar. He takes a hit and exhales. Funny, it doesn't smell like cigar smoke. Now he is singing to me. This is what he has to say:

Don't worry about a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be alright.

That’s really nice, Bob. Thanks for dropping by tonight.

Singin' don't worry about a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be alright.

I appreciate the concern, Bob. I'm going to work on reducing the stress. Hold on...what's this? There are three little birds on Marley's shoulder, swaying to the music. Cute little things. In unison they come in for the refrain of his song:

This is my message to you-ou-ou.

Such beautiful voices. Beautiful plumage, too. I applaud. Perhaps too vigorously because I’ve startled the birds. They've taken flight. One of them has crapped on my bedspread. But that’s okay. This is a dream. There’s nothing to clean up in a dream, right?

Bob Marley looks like he is getting ready to sing again. Here it comes:

Ooh, yeah! All right! We're jammin': I wanna jam it wid you

Yeah, mon. And I want to jam it wid you, too, Bob. Really I do! What exactly does that mean?

Bob Marley laughs. Apparently, I am amusing him. He reaches over and pats me on the shoulder. He tamps out what remains of his funny-smelling cigar on the nightstand. In reality that's going to leave a burn mark, but not in a dream! Marley is looking around for his three birds. They have perched on top of a book shelf. “We gonna go,” he says to them.

On his command, the birds are in the air again, flying low and fast circles across my bedroom, singing:

We're jammin', we're jammin', we're jammin', we're jammin...hope you like jammin' too.

Then they fly right through the wall and are gone. Bob Marley vanishes with them.

And just like that I am alone again in my dreams. Not for long, though. Someone's coming. Is that… Yes, it is. It’s Groucho Marx. Groucho Marx has come to visit me in my dreams.

Come in, Groucho. Have a seat.

Groucho? What is this? Some kind of joke? I am Dr. Abbott your freshman calculus teacher. This is your final exam. Why are you naked?

Oh dear God.

uphill both ways

you need to have grown up in the mountains
the poor mountains of Appalachia
on a steep street, a crumbly street,
a place where stone walls didn't stand up long
where dinner plates slid off the table
all by themselves, unless you held on tightly –
when I say steep, I mean steep!

the school was up at the top of the hill, of course
crane your neck from the porch and you could see it
if the snow piles weren't too high
(fact: it doesn't snow like that any more)
back then the schools didn't close for any reason
you were expected to get your bare feet
into the classroom and on time, or else –
nuns with rulers, need I say more?

dad was insane, understandable for the times,
all that coal dust, the lucky strikes and bathtub gin
door hinges didn't grow on trees, he would say
imploring us to use the front door and back door
alternately, so as to wear the hinges evenly
and don't slam either door, or so help me god!

mornings we used the front door on our way to school
all twelve of us, the tall ones up front to serve as beacons
for the little ones whose heads were barely above the snow
it was straight up and steep, you already know that,
but it was a long way, too, requiring that we embark
before dawn, short on sleep, our pancake breakfast
a distant memory from the weekend

after school we were to come home through the back door
on the rickety downhill side of the house
there was only one way to get there
from school, that meant a detour around the open pit mine
across the railroad yard and down to the tough part of town
so low and narrow that the sun didn't touch those streets all winter
giving those who lived there a tinge of blue in their skin
and an irritability that frightened even the junkyard dogs

then it was uphill again with the help of the rope pull
that Mr. Stanowitz installed when his ninety year old mother could no
longer make it home along the path from church six days a week
beyond there we had only to cross the frigid but wadable creek
and then sneak through the PCB factory grounds
(our little shortcut)

finally, we'd sprint up, up, up the two hundred forty step wooden staircase –
two hundred sixty-eight if you counted the rotten ones you couldn't
walk on or you'd fall right through – before reaching our gate (phew!)
frozen, rusted; no matter, we had to climb it

there mother stood waiting, her trademark upside down smile,
ready to greet us with fresh-baked cookies
assuming they didn't slide off the flimsy paper plate
onto the rocky outcrop that was the back yard
in which case the goat got them

Now showing on GOLTV

I have a pet peeve about my son's disposition to talk with his mouth full. I have corrected him nearly a million times already in his twelve years of existence and, sadly, I suspect it will take about a million more.

Today when I got home from work, Conor was watching some soccer on television. "Who's playing?" I asked. Unfortunately he had just taken a big bite of a carrot.

What came out in response was "leverkusenversusfcbayernfromthebundesliga."

"Could you repeat that?" I asked, "after you have finished chewing?"

Conor held up a finger indicating I should wait while he swallowed what was left in his mouth. Then he very clearly enunciated the following: "Leverkusen versus FC Bayern from the Bundesliga."

"What?" I asked again.

My son smiled. "It didn't matter that my mouth was full," he said. "you were never going to understand that."

I have to admit that he had me there. He gets a pass this time. Not so, the next time he tells me about his day with a mouthful of chewed up spaghetti.

Humor's wide stance

The cover of this week's New Yorker is brilliantly funny. But you don't want to explain it to your children. Nope. Nope. Nope.