Coming and Going

Blessed shall you be coming in and going out....Deut. 28:6

"London isn't what it used to be."

"Oh my word, no. People are afraid of each other," said the husband, his monstrous camera hanging from his neck. "It's wonderful here in America. Nancy and I love Cape Cod, don't we duck? I even got a good shot of a great white shark. Just the dorsal fin, of course."

Marjorie recalled that the sign had said the waters off Herring Cove were shark infested. The sharks preyed on the seals. She and Peter had seen the seals swimming parallel to the shore, very close in. They must be skittish, she thought. Like English people riding the tube late at night hemmed in by the residue of empire. She remembered how they had walked in the great city, near Piccadilly, trying to identify the languages spoken by women in saris, turbaned men talking into their phones. Urdu, Bengali, their alphabets decorative, each letter its own universe. London was like an animated atlas, the original sound cloud.

Here, at the beach, all they heard were gulls overhead, the slapping of the surf. It was such an immense space. Not a space really, more like an expanse. Behind them, the scrub and rose hips. Under, to each side and in front of them, the sand dotted with shells, salmon-colored, pale green, mother-of-pearl. Facing them, the sea, stretching to the horizon, beyond which people in pubs, black, brown and white, were drinking their pints. The sky above was the color of cornflowers, the October sun resilient and proud of itself.

Marjorie thought of the offhand remark of the English woman, casually dropping snarky social commentary into the otherwise perfect afternoon, like a pebble disturbing the glassy surface of a lake. Fear. Fear will do that. She remembered an earlier trip to Europe, before she had even met Peter. She had only just arrived from New York, her city-girl instinct for self-preservation still fine-tuned. It was early December. Traveling alone on the train from Stockholm to Uppsala, she picked up a magazine and a container of coffee and settled down in an unoccupied compartment. Doing the continental, sitting behind the closed door of a railway compartment watching the flat Swedish scenery out of the smudged window. Marjorie leaned back into a vintage movie fantasy, something Cary Grant-ish. Then the door opened and a man entered the little room. He wore a dull brown wool jacket. He was gray, not his hair which was straw-colored, but his actual lined and pocked skin. Two watery blue eyes made fleeting contact with hers. The man was carrying a brown paper bag, maybe a bottle of aquavit. Marjorie buried her head in her magazine and took a sip of coffee. After a few minutes, she felt his hand grazing her knee. The unexpected touch rampaged through her like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, and spilled the scalding coffee all over her skirt.

"Pepparkakor?," he asked, taking his hand out of the bag and offering her a ginger snap, traditionally served during the Christmas season in Sweden.

"I hate fucking tourists," Peter said, brushing the crumbs out of his beard from the sweet potato trutas they had picked up at the Portuguese Bakery. "They're the real sharks. The real invasive species."

"Look," Marjorie pointed. "There's another seal." She wondered if they would flipper up onto the beach if she and Peter weren't there, sprawled on the sand with their Kindles and their water bottles. Someone is always moving in on someone else's turf, re-defining the rules of the road.

Marjorie thought if you took the long view, all of human history, not to mention the sorry saga of our activity in nature, could be boiled down to people pushing ahead on line, elbowing each other out of the way. It was either people from somewhere else with less money moving into the neighborhood, looking dangerously different and depressing real estate values, or, alternatively, people with more money, waltzing up the produce aisle in country-weekend designer clothes, making an ordinary head of lettuce a major investment. It was either pesticides going after bees and butterflies or deer showing up in suburban supermarket parking lots.

"We're all just passing through. We're all migrants," Marjorie offered in her standard fortune cookie style. This was the wide angle lens she tended to use when considering the larger questions.

"Not me," Peter said, lying back on the towel they had lifted years ago from a hotel in the Caribbean and zooming in on the moment. "I've got my ass on the beach and my face in the sun and I'm not going anywhere."

......This story was originally read at the open mic, IWOW, in the fall of 2015. I was developing another piece on the archetype of arrivals and departures when I consulted my files and noticed that I already had a piece entitled Coming and Going. This must mean something.

......For more on migrations of individuals, species and peoples I strongly recommend Mohsin Hamid's brilliant new novel, Exit West. mohsinhamid.com

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Paleolithic Father's Day

My mother and father slept in separate beds. Between them, a stack of detective novels and crossword puzzle books teetered on the night table. In the morning, my father would sit on the edge of his bed, fish around for his slippers and shuffle into the kitchen where my mother was boiling water for the instant Maxwell House, mixing the Minute Maid and tearing apart English muffins. Never cut an English muffin. Once he settled in at the grey formica table, he added the non-dairy creamer and the saccharine to his coffee and turned on the crackly transistor radio. He had gone all the way with Adlai back in '52, but most Americans liked Ike and some even had a soft spot for Joe McCarthy. It was best to keep your head down, go to the shop, come home from the shop, eat your dinner and watch Father Knows Best, though he could hardly identify with the cleanshaven, suburban protagonist and certainly not with the sentiment conveyed by the title. When I think about my father, the pendulum of my memories swings from affection to discomfort and back again. He was a decent man, but his animal nature, his essential wildness was somehow attenuated, left behind in a remote corner of a prehistoric past life.

While he listened to the news, my mother would lay out his clothes - boxers, sleeveless undershirt, trousers, belt, shirt freshly pressed at the Chinese laundry, tie and tie clip, sports jacket, socks and cordovans. She bought and dispensed all of his clothes. He did not say "I feel like wearing the green tie today." She managed his wardrobe like a pitching rotation, varying only in the event of injury, a
spot of pot roast gravy on the scheduled tie. In the wall-to-wall mid-century malaise of the apartment on upper Broadway, there was no room for Daddy. Everything had its place. Dinner at 6.

My father didn't drive. A few times a year on a Sunday holiday - could be Father's Day - Uncle Jerry or Uncle Leo would chauffeur us in a two-tone Chevy and head north and west, crossing the George Washington bridge into the untamed wilderness of Englewood or Nyack where people had basketball hoops attached to the sides of their garages and barbecues for roasting marshmallows and kosher hot dogs. In the kitchens, resplendent with breakfast nooks and the glossy patina of waxed linoleum, the women would arrange bowls of potato salad and dishes of pickles while in the backyards the children swatted at mosquitoes and the men tended the fire. You could see my father, eyes watering from some combination of smoke and wistfulness, staring into the blaze like Paleolithic man the day he first discovered the sorcery of rubbing two sticks together. Pinochle games would come and go. Someone would have a second drink and tell a very bad old joke, salacious enough to induce smirking, but obscure enough to leave the children bewildered. Someone else would make a thinly veiled racist remark. And still my father would be staring at the fire.

His fixed gaze left you wondering what he was looking at in there. Some vision of the hunt, a large carnivorous animal tramping around in the brush while he, Sidney Rosenberg, stands behind a leafy tree, waiting for just the right moment to hurl a rock that fells his prey and provides the family dinner. There he is in Bergen County with his hands clasped behind him, rocking back and forth on his heels, the blood in his veins mingling with the dimly remembered blood of a creature he would eat, the smell of the flesh rising to his nostrils with the grilling Hebrew National franks. He sees his haunches draped in the skins of some previously slaughtered beast. He is close to them, the animals, eating them, wearing them. Always on the look-out, his vision and hearing sharp, penetrating the deep silence of the forest, not overwhelmed by the wailing of sirens on the Avenue, the constant burbling of the television. After all, the survival of the family depends on his acuity, his speed and strength. He is his most authentic self singeing his eyebrows in front of the fire. But then, with regret, as the light begins to fade in some cousin's backyard, my father drags himself away from the embers and submits to Manhattan, a short man engulfed by tall buildings.

https://orionmagazine.org/judges-citation-becoming-animal-by-david-abram/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abram

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.