said Enrique, our nimble tour guide,

and who would argue with him, telling us

Spanish olive oil ranked Number One too,

much of it carted to Italy so Italianos

can slap their red-white-and-green label on it.

The Spanish speak four different languages,

each incomprehensible from the other,

making it burdensome for a tour leader

to move around easily and convey knowledge.

But it’s easy to see why the Spaniard lives

so long – he and she walk!  Walk briskly,

everywhere, striding like marathoners,

thinking while ambulatory, only good thoughts,

for frowns are rare, perhaps even forbidden.

The Catholic Church finally gave up

its Inquisitional ways long ago, and cathedrals

are everywhere, offering mass every hour

some days, the godly on strudy bent knees,

defying the church’s supplication to give it

more children, the godly more interested in

the fun part of sex rather than the reproductive.

We did see one rather young fellow in a

mechanized wheelchair, though he seemed

more interested in speed rather than recovery,

probably one of Spain’s many NASCAR nuts.

There is little fault about Spain and the Spanish -

the streets are pristine clean, the highways

uncrowded, maneuverable, the food in great

variety and tasty, the women slim and

fashionable, the men….who gives a shit?

But one fault:  few, very few, speak English.

Imagine that:  we go all the way over there,

toss our dollars at them, and they don’t speak

our language.  Makes you wonder, eh?

Note:  Irene and I are recently back from Spain – Madrid, Toledo, Avila, Salamanca, Zaragoza, Laguardia, Bilbao, and Barcelona – loving every minute of it.  Spain is clean, underpopulated, proud, polite, p0lished, and healthy, both in mind and body.  Immigrants are welcome, to do the unpleasant jobs the natives prefer to hire out.  Think about that a minute.  Their life expectancy is something like 88 years.  So, what’s wrong with us?  Nothing really, and it’s always good to return home, even after a two quick weeks.  We stayed abroad nearly ten weeks once, and I came home, kissed the ground at the airport, immediately went off for a juicy cheeseburger.  Did about the same this time, too.

my mother would ruin

a perfectly good slice of cantaloupe

by dousing it with pepper

until the flesh turned black.

That was then, this is now.

Now, with age, I’ve added pepper

to my repertoire, always fresh-

ground, to season a salad,

crust a grilled steak, flavor pasta

coated with tomato-based sauce,

sprinkle liberally on fried eggs

and the side of grits, even dust

lightly the peanut butter I smear

on my toast – it adds a little s0mething!

Ah, yes, you guessed it – I have

also graduated to grinding pepper

over cantaloupe slices, till

the natural color turns charcoal.

I am, after all, my mother’s child.

(Published, I believe, in 2008 in the wonderful online magazine, Slow Trains)

Note:  My mother rained pepper on almost everything she ate, to the point where it seemed all she would taste was the pepper.  I’ve followed somewhat closely in her gustatory misstep with pepper, though not to the point of killing off all other flavor.  Funny that….don’t know if my sisters and brothers have done the same or not.  Our breakfast growing up often was a big plate of freshly cooked rice, topped with crumbled up bacon and a generous slab of butter.  Lots of salt and pepper, of course, too.  Might have been the Oklahoma (from whence my mother cameth) equivalent to cereal, the poor person’s oatmeal.  For quite a long spell there I was sure we were part Chinese.

Or Coppola made the first film,

We’d often eat with Don Corlene,

Or someone who did a heckuva good

Imitation of him, at Mary’s

On Bleeker Street in The Village.

He’d be there Sundays at a table by himself

In a dark corner, two lookout guys

Alert at a table near the front door

When my wife and I walked in.

The bodyguards did a fast frisk of us

With their beady eyes, then nodded

To wide-eyed, grandmotherly Mary

That it was okay for us to come in, sit.

The Don rarely looked up from his plate

Of sizzling shrimp swimming in garlic butter

Or steaming pasta with vongole sauce

Or pan-fried steak that Patsy,

Mary’s husband, pan seared in the kitchen

Just off the dining area with seven tables.

The thought of dining with a Mafioso

Did something to heighten our appetite.

After we read the book and saw the films,

It dawned on us that we could be

Wearing cement shoes and swimming

With the fishes in some river

Instead of calling Domino’s for a pizza

Out here in the boonies where we now live.

(This poem, or one like it, was published in some hard-print magazine but I’ve lost track of when and where)

Note:  Mary’s delightful Italian restaurant was two and a half blocks around the corner from where we lived in 1961 in The Village in a brownstone, 65 Perry Street.  Mary’s was in a walk-up brownstone, very small but fabulous eatery, the building perhaps the one where Coppola filmed his second Godfather epic, when DeNiro played the Don as a young man struggling to exist, feed his family.  Some of the finest Italian meals in memory at Mary’s.  Alas, we went back, many years later after moving to Colorado, found Mary and Patsy gone, the restaurant becoming a much larger (two floors), upscale eatery, not nearly as good – nor as atmospheric – as we remembered it.  And no, the Don, was no longer seated in a dark corner (no dark corners!), protected by his two goons.   Ah, so it goes…

for three squares a day

and didn’t hurry back,

afraid they’d be eaten.

No, we couldnt even afford a stray cat.

We dressed in each other’s

hand-me-down clothes – threads

by the time they got to me.

My best friend was a skinny cockroach,

too weak to crawl to the neighbors.

We told each other bedtime tales -

his about crumbs, mine about delusions.

A teacher threatened to send me home

one day when I fell asleep in her class.

She relented when I told her my folks

had sent me off as their only hope.

I was so thin I fit in the pencil sharpener,

couldn’t slap chalk from the board erasers.

Then, the miracle meat Spam was discovered.

A cure?  If only we’d owned a can opener.

(Published in the Fall 2005 issue of the Parnassus Literary Journal)

Note:  Hyperbole?  Of course.  Or was it?  We were poor, but in those days, the late Thirties and early Forties, almost everyone was poor.  We just didn’t know we were, all of us pretty much lookalikes in the neighborhood.  One advantage I and my siblings had over most:  we ate well each day, our mother a wonderful cook, Dad the provider.  Our days often started with a huge mound of boiled rice, topped with butter, salt, pepper and crunchy bacon rolled into bits with our hands.  An Oklahoma luxury, we were told.  Got us going in the morning, sustained us throughout school hours.  Oh, yes, we did befriend the cockroaches and mice, all non-paying boarders in Mom’s boarding house.  Seemed to go with the territory there in D.C.  All of us survived tough times, mice and roaches included.

painted so carelessly with sticky chocolate

from a candy bar or ice cream on a stick.

You want me and everyone passing by

to notice you.  I do and chuckle at

the sensation you’ve made of your sweet face.

Soon enough, little girl, you’ll grow up and

put on real lipstick – shocking pink or mouth-

watering red, maybe bittersweet brown -

applied with precision, provoking passersby

to notice you and your moist, puckered lips,

ready for a whispered secret, even a kiss.

Then soon enough you’ll advance to an age

where those precious lips will tell quite

another tale, mouth crinkled and again

smeared with chocolate, quivering,

perhaps repeating a long-ago endearment.

May God bless your sweet chocolate lips.

(This poem was published somewhere, sometime, somehow, but who knows where and when?)

The inspiration for this poem is the image of so many kids, girls and boys, who eat chocolate, or any sweet for that matter, with gusto, carefree of the aftermath of their indulgence.  Life should be carefree for the young.  Well, to an extent.  Can’t believe the incredible freedom I enjoyed growing up in Georgetown, D.C., during the Second World War.  Wouldn’t doubt that my face was always smudged with some sort of candy remnant, though our choices were far fewer.  How far we’ve come, how little we’ve changed.  So be it.

that you could have a French meal

for seventy-five cents, dollar-and -a-

quarter tops if you chose lamb ragout.

The seventy-five center was lentils and

spicy sausage, always my favorite at

Chez Odette on Wisconsin Avenue,

a tiny darkened room with seating for

twenty or so diners at five tables and

three booths with lumpy, cracked seats.

I had breakfast there every morning

before my Physical Chem class at A.U.

Always three fried eggs, white toast and

French roast coffee, as much as I wanted.

Also seventy-five cents and who knows

how much cholesterol over a year’s span.

How delicious, how atmospheric, how

unbelievable to think that a buck – I

always left a quarter tip! – could buy

so much savory pleasure and inner peace.

Jack and Jackie Kennedy must have

though so too:  we, my bride-to-be and I,

joined them every Wednesday evening

for dinner at Odette’s where Jackie also

preferred the lentil dish, Jack usually

springing for the pricier ragout of lamb.

We didn’t exactly eat with them, just

near enough by to nod when they came in

or left, their schedule a bit more erratic

than ours in those halcyon days of yore.

But who would believe such a tale, that

you could get a French meal for seventy-

five cents?  And in such good company!

(Published in a 2006 online issue of Slow Trains Magazine)

Note:  Growing up in and hanging around Washington D.C. from the Thirties to the Fifties, I’d see all sorts of people – celebrities,  the great, the gross and all the in-betweeners.  It was the great part of my education in human nature, to watch people, study them, analyze why they did what they did.  Jack and Jackie were obviously very much in love when they sat across from one another in cramped Chez Odette, holding hands across the table, looking deep into one another’s eyes, talking softly.  Pretty much like Irene and me, I guess.  Wonderful carefree days when we were both getting educated at American University, thinking our world was nearly perfect, nothing to change.  Ah, the changes indeed came.  After JFK was elected, then assassinated, with assassinations of MLK, RFK and John Lennon to follow, the world changed drastically and forever.  No longer were famous people so easy to spot on the street, in a corner of a restaurant.  And the world is still changing.  Alas, too often not for the better, but that’s the opinion of a nostalgia freak.