Thirst

A cold glass of lemonade when you mouth is dry is bliss. My mother's lemonade had a splash of orange juice, which I have tried to reproduce and have failed at consistently. There's much to be said about how worthless our memories of childhood are, or perhaps just inaccurately recorded by the mind, or the sense remembrances of our tongues, our eyes, our fingers, our organs. I remember charging into the kitchen on a hot day between kickball games in the street, Agatha Drive, Bethpage, Long Island, sweating and parched and scraped, my heart pounding; to drink a full quart of Frigidaire-frigid whole milk in a bottle was the height of pleasure, thirst and its fulfillment at one and the same time. The condensation on the bottle and the sweat on my fingers swam together in my fist holding the bottle neck. I could never die at that moment, the powerfully beating milk-life streaming through me was, momentarily, eternal. It was my summer kickball elixir. 

Cold lemonade is a better solution to yearning than gin, or beer, or white wine, although every summer day I take some convincing. My soul says "martini," my stubborn thoughts visualizing the red and black letters on the gin bottle. But my tongue, my veins, my palate are doubtful. Please. What do they know about alcohol consumption, compulsive misconceptions, the adult privilege of independent choice, and how I relate to green olives and dry vermouth? All they know about is thirst, and the body's right to satisfy thirst, at one and the same time. They don't even recognize my soul or that it could be thirsty too, nor recognize my humanity, my frailty. What they seem to understand is bliss, and are undeniably capable of discerning  if a lemon is of just the right sunshine and softness for perfect lemonade and thirst's fulfillment.

woodstock

Dirty Lies                                                           

For years

I claimed

to be

at Woodstock

and I was

but I left early

before Jimi

although for years

I described

how fine he was

thought I remembered

seeing Janice

on Saturday night but

I’m sure

I left Saturday afternoon

lines too long

to the port-o-potty

left wet

with the girlfriend

with the clinging breath

her miserable lips

on my chin

Replacement

In our neighborhood you get to know your mail carrier. Ours is named Heather, cool and friendly, uncomplaining and blond. It was always right to acknowledge your respect and gratitude and admiration at Christmas time by finding out your mail carrier's name and writing a religiously-correct holiday card with a check for a small but grateful amount. "Dear Heather, thanks for a great year." All we ever hear is how many billions of dollars the US Postal Service is costing us, us taxpayers. (I must say that when I've paid my taxes in April, I've never thought of the US Postal Service in a bad way. I've thought of my creepy accountant who never tells me what he really feels about me, and my income, and my declarations of monies but manages to send judgmental vibes all the same, every damn year. I've thought of Big Brother, whom I've fortunately never met but still am afraid of. I've thought of how little I know about money. But never once about the US Postal Service, or specifically the stalwart Heather, at tax-paying time.)

Heather, and Jeanne, her predecessor, and the fellow with the beard before that, are all grand. They are well-trained, courageous, unpretentious deliverers of my mail. And the poor souls, they don't even get to deliver much good stuff any more. My wife has packages delivered via UPS. I don't have one friend who writes a real letter any more. My son recently convinced me to pay my bills on line, it's better, dad, easier and saves paper (which translates to, you're old and stupid if you write checks and send them back in the mail with a stamp. I love stamps, their colors and shapes and surprising themes. John Wayne. Mid-20th century painters. Clipper ships. Obscure poets. Brave fighters for black freedom.)

I'm always aware when my regular carrier has taken a vacation day, or a vacation week. I lose track of the time of the day. Suddenly at 11 a.m. the mail will have already have been delivered, and I didn't see by whom. Or late in the afternoon, a skin-headed man in a light blue shirt will be visible through the screen door, a vacation replacement with no solid connection that I know of to my sidewalk, my lawn, my neighbors, my mail. But still, a worthy deliverer, a yeoman, cool and friendly, uncomplaining and bald. He moves on to my next-door neighbor's, and I loudly lift the top of my metal mailbox; he doesn't look back but I just know he knows I'm grateful.

Indian Ladder

When I moved to Albany 33 years ago in 1980, I wrote to my friends back in the City that I could drive ten minutes and see a cow, many cows; a horse farm run by our nutritionist was 3 miles from our Albany city row house. There were vegetable farms not far, too. A farm called Kleinke's was nestled in a suburb called Delmar; maybe Mr. Kleinke's farming ancestors owned all the land of Delmar, and smartly parceled it off and watched smart houses nestle together and grow warm and green in manicured, self-contained mini-yards. The ancestors must have gotten comfortably rich, because their children and grandchildren don't really remember how to grow lush produce; it looks like a farm, they have a llama, and a rooster, and mean goats for children to feed. But the tomatoes in August are fair, the MacIntosh apples in September not quite crisp, roughly picked and mean looking, a bit tastier than the grocery store's, and the modern family members are glum and resentful.

But drive twenty minutes from home and you find Altamont in the shadow of the Helderberg Escarpment where lovers go to hike and desperate locals leap to their deaths. Indian Ladder Farm I understand will celebrate its 100 anniversary in two years, and every year in September  it celebrates its importance as an apple-picking festival center. The main building sells truly tasty farm produce, as well as fruit accoutrement, jellies and cider donuts and cider, and country gift items, household items and odd country jewelry, candles and lotions. There's a modest barn with rabbits and hens and penned in farm animals; in the woods out of sight are converted chicken coops where the migrant workers stay.

Apple picking is fun with small children, in small segments of time. But twenty years ago I came upon the July raspberry harvest, and then later, the September harvest. I was selling something, a traveling seller of something, and I found a traveling excuse to be in Altamont, dressed in a salesman's suit and a wrinkled shirt and a good tie, and scuffed black shoes. It was July and the wooden sign outside Indian Ladder's parking lot said "Raspberries," with an arrow. Raspberry picking is sublime, not fun with small children, a time when you lose all sense of time. It's over only when you've filled two soft quart pails with ripe berries. For many years working, selling, I would manage to find myself in Altamont in July, and drive alone up a dirt road hundreds of yards from the main road, loosening my tie and removing my suit jacket in the car.

Today, retired from selling anything but my odd drawings now and then, I head with a purpose to Altamont. 

I know, after years of focused harvesting, that some raspberries don't want to be picked; they'd rather fall to the ground than allow capturing in your soft pail. On a Wednesday, or a Thursday during September harvest, you find yourself alone, away from the July precious mother teaching her out-of-school preteens the perfect technique in her loud voice, the teens wishing they were instead at the Elm Avenue pool. Alone in September, today, the only noises are the bees who work near me, seeking the flowers and leaving me the fruit. Far off you can hear a tractor, I'm vaguely aware of it; when I look up to the sky I see the cliff, the Helderberg, high up and away. Some days, but not today, I hear crows, or even geese, confused by an early cool day.

But mostly I'm looking down or crouching and seeking perfection; often the best berries are clumped together under brambles near to the ground, and when I find a group of four or five hanging together, each perfectly berry-colored, less red than crimson, I look at them with love, and I thank them, truly, for sliding so smoothly into my fingers, one by one. Under the wide sky, they are my only friends.

Old yard

This backyard

I remember smoking a cigar in this backyard.

My father hadn’t been here yet.

Don’t think my mother was ever here.

She would have choked on the smoke.

Now I don’t remember my father ever in this backyard.

Only cigars, I remember so many cigars, each one.

I remember ice skating and smoke rings.

I remember when I tried a vegetable garden

And the tomatoes all died, or at least never turned red.

I remember chasing one of my sons,

I was so angry and everyone watched silently

And his face was tomato red running away.

My mother would have been uncomfortable

In this backyard, without ever saying anything.

My father once sat in the front yard,

with my acting teacher Joe.

My father looked small in a yard chair.

Perhaps I was happiest

smoking cigars in the backyard after 9 p.m.

Before I had forgotten how to set up

an outside light, a beam from the attic,

when the white of the smoke

tinged with blue,

smoke rings that lived like fish,

Like haloes, like thick chicken fat

Bobbing in the night, fat and

unsinkable, and the chicken fat was

mine, my backyard’s, not my mother’s

or my grandmother’s in jars on Coney Island,

my yard,

yellow and blue and fat and bobbing

and the grass so weedy yellow green.

My father never there, my backyard,

lush and brown, and green, with no red tomatoes.

Tavern

"WT" stands for Washington Tavern. I first associate Washington Tavern with Marilyn L., the face of a tortured Catholic Italian American girl from the fall of 1968; I was trying to get her to love me, be in love with me, and then expose her freshman breasts to sophomore me, and she was trying to get me to Church on Sunday (I closed my eyes and compromised on the Lutheran church across from the WT; it was a damp place with no passionate corners). We each gave up on our hopes and she mostly ignored me until a year and a half later, when during a rehearsal for Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real," she had an actor's motivation to slap me and so then almost broke my jaw. Afterwards, she took up with another acting student, they were fornicating, and during that relationship, in the middle of the winter, she fled from him downtown, under the influence of his drugs and his alcohol, and wandered off like a blind woman, groping the frigid air, first onto Western Avenue, "She's near the WT!," someone said, and later to be found on the uptown campus five miles west, where she had walked and fallen, frozen, into the student snack bar. A group of downtown friends had searched for her, all drunk and screaming her name, in front of the WT, waking the townies to anger, "Marilyn! Marilyn!"

Today, the WT is owned by an Irishman named Mike, an Albany restaurant entrepreneur, with high white hair and sly lips and thick eyeglasses. For years it was a half-towny, half-college-boy drinking bar, the bartender a locally regarded beat poet: grime on the bar, grime on the bar floor, grime on the stools, grime on the ceilings. The bartender's long gone, with a nice obit in the local Times Union some 10 years ago, and a few years back Mike bought the next-door lot and added a fashionable street patio and a "dining room," a room adjacent to the bar, cleaner, with photos of Irish poets, sepia, like soft paintings. The old bar is kept grimy deliberately, for the college crowd, the dining room is for older folk. 

My friend Mike--not the entrepreneur but the poet and the dreamer--and I re-unite once a year, or once every other year, when he chances up north from his southern retirement retreat in search of answers and home in one of his past worlds. He comes to this world, the world where I live, where the WT is still serving decent drafts and heavy food. We sit in the old section among the grime, at a two-person table with a backgammon set drawn on it, and we sing old songs of tennis matches, poetry workshops, yearnings, relationships, and Albany. We can't put our fingers on it, but together again we find something unspeakable, touching, reassuring, in the cracks in the table and the grease on the ceiling, and we reintroduce ourselves to the best of our human achievement.

Stones

Adeline, my solid, watchful emergency room nurse, was clearly biting her tongue. She had endured sharing time in my room with the earnest but fumbly 4th-year medical student Norman, trying to get my history of present illness while he was practicing his own HPI questioning skills, their questions ping-ponging off each side of my head, later needing to have blood drawn and an IV set up in my hand, only to find Norman had somewhat surreptitiously tried it on his own--he closed my door and I wondered at the time if he was afraid someone would hear my yelps--and I had watched him with some trepidation as he fiddled with the needles and the arm clamp and my veins into which he dug several unsuccessful holes without ever finding the passageway to flowing blood. Then when it was finally time to be checked out Adeline brought in Dr. Waxman, my ED doctor, who I'm sure has a soul somewhere but not one visible in his eyes nor discernible in his voice, and she nodded behind his back in the doorway as he blandly gave me his diagnoses and suggestions for treatment and follow-up. Afterwards, when she was unhooking my IV and apologizing for the tape she was ripping off my hairy right arm, she said to me with her voice downward, with disdain, "This is all you need to do, drink a lot of water, and don't drink alcohol, and you'll still have some blood as the stone passes through, and if you can catch the stone when you're going to the bathroom fine, otherwise, don't worry about it." She band-aided my IV puncture and patted my hand and said, "I've enjoyed taking care of you today," and then waved goodbye when a few minutes later I passed her in the hallway; outside waiting for my ride, it was raining buckets, and I thought of Adeline's sturdy eyes wishing me well, and wondered if she knew it was raining and what the weather would be when her 12 hour shift was over late that night.