Today is Victoria’s birthday. My mission was to write a birthday poem using words Love, Beauty, and Truth. I spent fun, odd time working on acrostic arrangements thereof, but came to feel that simple and ungimmicky would be best. Here, then, is
To Victoria on Her Birthday
In LOVE we find both Hope and Fear.
The tragic BEAUTY of a tear
Reveals the TRUTH as something felt:
We want, we need, we give, we melt.
Happy birthday, dear, dear Victoria!
My incredibly word-adept poet friend Victoria H. has a birthday coming up. I texted her to ask for three words to use in a poem for the occasion. She answered “love beauty truth.” I then asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She answered “world peace and clean water . . .” I answered, “By the power vested in me as a child of the Universe, I give you Europa, a world at peace and with clean water. Congrats.”
But what I will really give her is the best poem I can do. I’m working on it . . .
I did a butterfly for Beauty, two adult humans embracing for Love, and the profound phenomenon of the Earth-Moon system revolving around the Sun for Truth. May or may not show up in the poem. Stay tuned for Part 2!
She saw my Erika card and said “I want one.” Your wish is my command, dear Maria!
Panhandler #1 was standing by the Circle K on 44th Street and Washington. His spiel began with “I hate to bother you, but . . .” and then he would ask for “just like a dime to help me out.” So I got on his radar and when he said “I hate to bother you . . .” I said, “No problem, as long as I can bother you back.”
“Okay . . .”
“I read somewhere that people who do nothing more than ask people for money for a living average about $20.00 an hour. Right now I’m making $9.50 an hour. What’s your take on that?”
The panhandler got a bit flustered, then expressed some pessimism, recounting being under a bridge all one day and “only getting like $25.00.” He also mentioned that many of his colleagues misuse their takings on drugs and drink. “I don’t drink and I don’t drug.” And he did look clear-eyed and healthy, though with his ultra-fair skin and coppery hair he looked vulnerable in the bright sunshine.
I was asking him about his take during the holidays when the Circle K manager came out and told the panhandler he couldn’t be out here asking for money. “Hey,” I said, “we’re just having a conversation.” But the conversation continued off the Circle K lot, the panhandler telling me this was a temporary thing, brought on by his girlfriend leaving him for parts unknown and taking his savings and possessions with her.
I wished him well, expressed hope that he’d find a better long-range place, encouraged him to keep punching and trying for something bettter, acknowledged that inertia was tough to overcome, and gave him a cough drop. “God bless you, sir,” he said as we shook hands.
Later I told my brother Brian, who’d lived on the street for several years, about the encounter. Brian thought the girlfriend story could well be true, but the under-the-bridge story might have been anecdotal deflection. There are a lot of ways to get by. Knowing store schedules, for instance Circle K “super-inspection” days, creates opportunities to trade grunt labor for food or cash. Some pizza places have lots to give away at the end of the day, and it’s not unknown for a soft-hearted management to do a fresh pizza out of kindness.
I conclude that Brian was better at street living than the fellow at the Circle K. Perhaps time will bring more savvy, or perhaps the guy will get back off the street. I hope so.
“The Panhandler” was a comic-book character I created to be a sidekick for “Crystal Katharine,” the superheroine I based on my daughter in a short-lived comic book I did to entertain and (try to) inspire my child. His superpower was a magic pan, which could stop bullets and death-rays. It also packed a superhuman punch.
And in a few hours I’ll be reporting for my $9.50/hr job at Matt’s Big Breakfast, standing at a podium to do my hosting. Affixed to the podium is a gigantic skillet–as one diner called it, “One Big-Assed Pan.”
Numbers do a lot in defining us and our world. Age, height, weight, number of children, annual income, FICO score, T-Bill yield, T-cell count–the sheer NUMBER of numbers to track is staggering.
For years I’ve been going to a special scale at ChrisTown Spectrum Mall. It’s at the GNC Nutrition place, and for a dollar it gives you height, weight, BMI, and body-fat percentage, printing for you a date-stamped receipt. I know through using it that my weight maxed out at 253-plus pounds about six years ago. Yesterday I weighed a cool 179.0–but I took off my shoes and belt and my wonderful daughter Kate put the contents of my pockets in one of the Harkins souvenir cups we were taking to the movies. So it is a truer height and a less-baggage-encumbered weight than my usual.
But I HAD to get to a flat 179, because that was the exact reading I got on the Aim-Safe (family business) company freight scale on one of the most fateful days of my life. It was the 4th of July, 1983, and I’d struggled into my jeans shorts that morning and noted with alarm the muffin-top spillage of love-handle fat over the top of the jeans. Drama queen that I was and am, I did a Scarlett O’Hara “As God is my witness. . .” number, vowing that for a minimum of one year, I would run a minimum of one mile a day without fail, at a pace of nine minutes per mile or faster. I then–foolishly! idiotically!–punished my chubby frame with a 15-mile walk up and down the canal banks, from 19th Ave and Glenrosa to 40th Street and Van Buren and back, without benefit of sunscreen. (Left the canal bank and cut across for the last stretch.) After taking a several-hours nap, and waking up feeling two weeks dead, I went to the corner of 19th and Indian School for my very first daily mile, stopwatch (“chronometer”) in hand. Reached Camelback and turned the corner to run the equivalent of crossing the street, and the stopwatch clicked in at 8:56:17 or so. And at the very moment I turned back to head for my apartment, downtown Phoenix started celebrating the Glorious 4th with a fireworks show–a sign from Heaven if ever I needed one.
Over the interval between the 4th and my birthday, August 30, my weight went from 179 to 155 and my running mileage went from 7.5/week to 25/week and more. In October I ran the MetroChallenge 10K in less than 54 minutes, and in April of 1984 I ran my fastest-ever 10K, 45:49. That August 19th I and 10,000 others finished the San Francisco Marathon; my finishing time was 4 hours, 8 minutes and change–but it had taken me a minute and a half after the gun (or was it an airhorn? don’t remember) went off just to get to the starting line.
So 179 is a number to conjure with. I hope to be 150, which I consider my ideal latter-life weight, by my 62nd birthday. As illustrated by the slips above, slow and steady WILL win the race, if tempered by sensibility and determination.
Seems silly, doesn’t it, the obsession with numbers? But empires rise and fall by them–the movie THE BIG SHORT is a marvelous demonstration of that.
Best of luck with your own numbers, Friends!
jade is a color
a stone
an exotic name
and a transitive verb meaning make increasingly worldly-weary
time jades us:
the first heartbreak may almost kill us . . .
the dozen dozenth may seem more like punching a time clock
even to the extent of it being a 30-minute break instead of a clockout
puppies no longer delight when we realize that that little fella
is destined to create a volume of byproduct that would fill a dumpster
the while making more of himself to do the same
unless some well-meaning soul atrocitizes his reproductive system
over years we get ragged crisscross psyche-surface scarring
and inside that spheroid of self there are honeycombs of emptiness
here is one of an illusion revealed
here is another of ugliness found in the mirror, or, worse, in despicable actions
and that psyche at the end of the day of the life may well resemble a peppercorn
dry and hardened, brittle, acrid on the tongue
awaiting a grinding into condimental oblivion
or sweeping with the other jetsam into the dustpan
there is a cure for jadedness
and that is the stepping outside of oneself
the ignoring of oneself and the acquisition of a caring for another
some conditions apply but uncondition is transcendent
One with Clay, Image and Text 