See Ya Real Soon

  

      

         As cute as a bug's ear, Suzanne was never a Mouseketeer, as far as I know, but could have played one on TV. Maybe not Annette – who could pull that off – but certainly Doreen, Sharon or Sherry. There's something so atavistic and perfectly nostalgic about her old school picture that I was drawn to it immediately and have kept the rumpled snapshot close to hand for twenty-five years. Perfectly coiffed and starched, beaming out from the bygone, every unseen seam is straight, each skirt-pleat sharp, each sandal polished, the snow-white Bobby socks turned down exactly half an inch. Only that iconic, black and bulbous tiara is missing, together with the casting call that might have brought her beyond my own devotion and into the hearts and imaginations of a generation of adoring fans.

   One long-gone Saturday afternoon my brother and I are prone before the Zenith, soaking up the last of the Mouse Club in the fading, filtered sunlight of my father's study. The ebullient Jimmie and the vaguely threatening Roy are leading the gang into the celebrated finale and we're singing along, belting out “See ya real soon” at the top of our lungs and ignoring Dad's demands from across the room that we pipe down and shut that damned thing off. He's on the phone with Pan Am, trying to book a flight above the din, and none of us is aware of the wrench old Mickey's thrown in the works in the madness of that moment as my father impatiently spells his name out for the agent on the other end of the line. “M. A.C”, he bellows, “F. A. D” - so far, so good -  “M.O.U.S.E!” He roars into the receiver as we reach the crescendo in a shrieking tangle of nuggies, knees and elbows on the study floor.

   “Makes no difference who you are,” the clerk at the airport might have said to my father some days later. “This seat is booked for a Mr. MacFadmouse and, unless you are Mr. MacFadmouse, Sir, this ticket is not for you.” We can only imagine the scene -  and by today's standards he'd have been hauled off and flown to Guantanamo instead of Cincinnati -  but no amount of apoplectic threat or patient explanation would budge the minor functionary at the desk. Was he forced to buy another ticket at the gate? Did he miss his flight? The details of the denouement are lost, but it's a safe bet that we were barred from the tube-glow for at least a week, a standard consequence for the times that had little effect as we were already banned from the box on weeknights.

   Recently I woke in the wee hours to the familiar, green and blinking glow of some electronic device at the far corner of the bedroom. As the fog of sleep abated I found myself counting the regulated intervals between flashes and slowly came to the realization that there were, in fact, no electronics in the room. Step out into the living room or kitchen and the place is lit up in the neon rainbow of electroluminescence we've all come to take for granted, but I had nothing charging in the bedroom, no phone or clock or screen in stand-by mode. Could I have plugged something in over there earlier in the day and completely forgotten? Whatever it was, it certainly hadn't been there the night before. I got out of bed and slowly crossed the room in the pitch dark, aided by the coruscating, chartreuse flicker. As I neared the corner the light went out; I groped about for a device, confused, and turned away, only to see the steady flash begin anew. I turned again and, standing stock-still, naked in the night, the glow appeared at the center of my chest now, just below the sternum, in perfect cadence with the beating of my heart. Turning on the overhead at last, the harsh light revealed a tiny firefly at rest in the hollow of my chest. I haven't seen a firefly in years.

  

Safe & Lock

         If it hadn't been the odd feel of the key in the lock or the ten-inch, Sabatier carver out of place on a kitchen stool in my periphery, the sight of the florid and engorged, hot pink double dildo standing proudly out amidst the chaotic jumble of the ransacked living room would finally penetrate the veil of denial that had befallen me as soon as I'd turned the knob of the front door. I'd only been gone a few minutes; down the six flights, to the corner and back for a pack of smokes, and up again the endless stairs. Had I heard a scuff or shuffle from above as I passed the third or fourth landing?  Something was strange about the door – not quite closed, the lock cylinder rough to the key, a new divot or two in the battered metal sheathing. Had I left that knife there? Disoriented, I picked the blade up and moved slowly through the kitchen towards the studio, all the little hairs on my neck and scalp now atingle as I struggled to process the scurry I might have heard at the back of the loft, the sensation that everything was just a little off, a bit askew. The slam and bang of the back door, the feet pounding down the stairs broke the spell. Dropping the knife I stumbled for the gloomy bank of windows overlooking the canyon of 21^st Street, tripped on an overturned credenza and landed in a tangle of Sapphic sex-toys the color and consistency of a heap of massive gummy-worms.

    This spectacular Chelsea beauty-loft, the latest in a string of short-term sublets, belonged to a pair of performance artists notable for daubing their otherwise naked bodies with mud and twigs and posing mutely for hours on the corner of Prince and West Broadway while the passing hordes affected jaded, downtown attitudes and steadfastly ignored them. I don't think we'd been there for two of our six weeks when the robbery occurred and had no way of knowing what the thieves may have made off with in that crazy, ten minute whirlwind of destruction and defilement other than the few items of our own that turned up missing: a tenor sax, a camera, a set of expensive studio lights. Book cases had been pulled down, closets tossed, cushions slashed; the very personal adornments of these two lives strewn about the place like so much flotsam at the wrack-line of a beach. And there in the middle of the mess, shining through the gloom like a beacon bearing witness to this creepy violation, a pile of perky, high-gloss erotica illuminating an intimacy we'd just as soon not have been forced to imagine.

    Two patrolmen arrived to survey the scene and fill out a report. We'd left the place ahoo for their appraisal and they were naturally drawn immediately to the turgid paraphernalia, indulging in a feast of ribald innuendo, hoisting some of the more complex examples aloft and asking for a demonstration. “Which of you guys is the pussy?” the fat one might have asked. Righting a few chairs and ottomans, we all sat at the coffee table to fill out the report as, still snorting and chortling at their own wit, the skinny cop distractedly swept away the pot seeds littering the table top which were popping chads in his paperwork. We took pictures of the scene and sent them off to our landladies together with the police report and a note begging their forgiveness should they return to find their stuff somewhat rearranged. The saxophone turned up at the pawnshop down on Seventh Avenue where the cops had said we'd likely find it, brought in that very day by the three kids the cops said had likely stolen it, according to the Shylock behind the bulletproof glass. Three kids who'd been hanging out on the street and watching my every move for the last two weeks.

    Years before, when I'd lived in Providence above the locksmith on North Main, I'd awoken one early winter morning to a trail of bootprints in the snow across the rooftop to the window by my pillow. Someone had been standing there, close as a lover - nothing more between us but a pane of glass - peering in at me for minutes, maybe hours in the night. Some days later I was at a pawnshop downtown with my friend John who was looking for an amplifier. The minute we walked in, John pointed to a shelf and said, “Hey, that's my clarinet!”

    “Can't be,” I said. “ You lent me your clarinet; it's back at the house....” The pawnbroker sidled over, “Nice horn, couple of kids brought it in this morning.” Confused, unable to imagine how John's clarinet had found its way downtown, I raced back to North Main and up the tiny alleyway beside the locksmith to find the door ajar, the rambling old house tossed from stem to stern. And the unsettling feeling of knowing someone had been watching my every move.

Chop Suey

        

     We lived around the corner from the Chop Suey joint on Third Avenue immortalized by Edward Hopper in 1929.  What it was still doing there in 1962 is a mystery, but as with the ice-man and knife-grinder who still plied the block by pushcart, change across those decades came at a snail's pace in most of the old neighborhoods. It's possible that the man in the black satin toque who served Mr Hopper that afternoon as he sketched from a corner table was the father of the man who served us, and it's safe to say that the meal itself hadn't changed a bit. American Chop Suey and Chow Mein, the house specialties, were bland interpretations of their namesakes, based on what was often referred to as “hamburg” and dressed up with spaghetti and a bit of flaccid bean-sprout. On special occasions – after selling a painting; before a matinee - my mother would take us up the gloomy staircase tucked between the shoe-man and the saloon for an exotic plateful of the stuff, slurped up with abandon beneath the floating dust-motes caught in the window-shafts of sunlight.

   Mediocre might just be too grand a term for this fare but we loved it nearly as much as what we'd find behind the complicated little doors at Mom's alternative haunt, the Horn and Hardart's across town on 57^th. Pie was the thing at the Automat and although I'm sure we must have had other items from time to time – dry, curling bologna sandwich points, desiccated pickles and stale, rancid chips – it was the colloidal Boston Cream and glutinous berry pies, together with the complex mechanics of the coin-fed little cubbies that drew us in. The extra frisson served up by the ordinary, urban slice of life habituating this vast eatery seemed exciting and vaguely threatening, too, and it wasn't entirely unusual to find the seedy gentleman at the next table bent-up-double, dozing in his entre.

   At home, my mother began trying out some of the newer novelties: boxed, component pizza kits, Sara Lee cakes, pressurized cheese and cream and TV dinners. These were exciting if tasteless alternatives to the usual Sunday night, fast-food options of chipped beef or tuna fish, rice and peas and the fact that you had to push, pull or prod at the newfangled plastic packaging or process only added to the thrill. Often on these rushed and busy evenings Dad would order a pizza from Eduardo's over on Second Avenue by the bridge and there was nothing run-of-the-mill about these pies. Although I secretly preferred a Velveeta melt with a side of Sara Lee, walking through the dusky cacophony with my brother and father and waiting by the bar while Eduardo – a masterful, old-school fingersmith – deftly removed our belts, rings and wallets was pretty cool. That he'd present these purloined items, to our perpetual astonishment, together with the hot and steaming pizza was nearly as big a deal as a Swanson's.

   Just as the 1950's ushered in America's celebration of the ordinary, the 1960's, at least until we let our hair down, gave us all the opportunity to revel in mediocrity and save a bit of time in the kitchen that might better be devoted to sitting before the telly chortling at Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio between bites of processed cheese food, mock apple pie and turkey from a tube.

My Grand Tour

 

     “Neckties, ascots or cravats, gentlemen, as well as jackets, are required in the dining room of Brown's Hotel.” My brother and I, bringing up the rear of the family contingent passing into the dining room, had been stopped in mid stride by the maitre d'hotel with an index finger planted firmly in each sternum. Tastefully clad in Harris tweed jackets atop new Merino sweaters over crisp Oxford collars open at the throat, we'd somehow neglected neck-wear, assuming, as we might have the world over, that sweaters trumped the need for further cervical adornment. The family had been ushered off amidst much pomp and fuss to a far table by the kitchen where my father could be heard inquiring about the pedigree of the gin while our smarmy tormentor led us aside to a small alcove. There, at the epicenter of the land of the Liberty Print, he reached into a closet and produced two ties of such vibrant and chaotic polychrome as to be best described as Vintage Jackass. These we dutifully slipped on, and, centering the knots carefully, tucking the rest beneath our sweaters, we presented with just a touch of eye-roll. “ Just so,” he deftly slid a forefinger beneath each knot and flipped the ties back out atop our sweaters. Turning back towards his guests, he offered as a parting shot, “ … a pair of hairnets or barrettes, should you find it perhaps more comfortable to bind your flowing locks.”

   We were on the final three-day leg of the Grand Tour which had begun a week earlier at daVinci Airport under the watchful gaze of hundreds of Carabinieri armed to the teeth as a hedge against the current fashion for airline hijacking. Dad had pulled out all the stops for this trip and we were met by a man with a sign that might have read “ McFaggio” and whisked away at high speed to the Hotel d'Inghilterra. While my brother and I drifted about the Via del Corso hounded by three-note shepherd pipers and mimes, my father badgered room-service for such American staples as Scotch Tape and construction paper with which to assemble an elaborate Christmas tree he then taped to the vintage wallpaper of their suite. That night we dined at Alfredo where my father immediately asked to see Alfredo himself. The waiter produced an elderly gentleman who may or may not have been Alfredo but nonetheless made a fairly convincing show of remembering my father dining there while awaiting the birth of his eldest son some nineteen years earlier. It was at Ristorante Alfredo that we established the tortuous gustatory regimen that would follow us through three cities and render my father nearly apoplectic at every meal: I, as a vegetarian, would scan the menu for any entre that might be meatless – in this case the eponymous Fettuccine - entirely forgoing the specialties offered by Europe's finest eateries; my brother would inevitably order an assortment of the most expensive items and my sister would demand Ketchup, get three bites into her dinner and announce that she felt sick and needed to throw up. Between tremulous meals we stood beneath a balcony near the Tiber and gazed up at the apartment my parents lived in when my brother was born, hit the Colosseum and the Catacombs, went to St Peter's to catch the Pope, checked out the Duomi at Sienna and San Gimignano and, as quickly as we'd arrived, boarded the night train for Paris, pockets stuffed with palmieri and bitter oranges.

   I had every intention of enjoying Paris and particularly looked forward to locating Numero 10, Place d'Italie, the address I knew from years of French class belonged to Marie Thibaut, her Papa, Mamon, frère, chien and chat. Years later, on another trip, I did find the place – which turned out to be a dusty storefront devoted to the wholesaling of pin-ball machines and not the grand, fin-de-ciecle residence I'd imagined – but on this occasion I had the dubious good fortune to run into my old friend, Bumper, within hours of arriving at the hotel. Bumper swept me away on an empty stomach for an evening that started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff, progressing through warm Scotch, Absinthe and Algerian hash. There might have been an omelet in there somewhere, too. My three days in Paris were spent crawling back and forth from my fetid bed to the fetid toilet and weakly barring entry to the frustrated, daily maid service in a hotel room I'd have absolutely no recollection of returning to in the wee, wee hours following that initial, debauched ramble. Someone scooped me up eventually and put me on the Boat-train for London and the enduring memory of our humiliation at the hands of a petty tyrant.

  

Fish Wars

 

         Long before Clancy came out to shoot the dogs the Fish Wars had been escalating at a pretty rapid clip. What had started as a simple case of bald-faced trespassing had grown ugly over the past few summers with a touch of class-warfare, a few thinly disguised physical threats and at least one nasty screed nailed to the door suggesting in its nearly indecipherable illiteracy that the place might just come ablaze if I didn't back off. For months now the low rumble of trucks coming down the long, dirt road at dusk – different in pitch from the lobstermen and trawlers beating their way around the Point – signaled the arrival of the motley caravan of bait-fishermen heading to the beach below the Bluff for a night spent swilling coffee brandy and checking the viability of a half drowned eel, hooked through its leathery lips and tethered to a twelve ounce sinker ten yards out past the breaking surf. Gates had been dismantled, cables had been cut, signage ripped from trees and posts and cast into the roadway in an unavoidable, personal rebuke.

   Some nights I'd trudge up there in futility to confront them; winding my way through the fleet of rusted Rams and F-150's, the panel-vans and box-trucks flagrantly bearing the logos of local seafood wholesalers pulled off the roadside in a jumble and crushing whole swaths of rugosa and bayberry, lichen, lady-slippers and tiger-lilies. I'd shuffle my feet and stare off at the sun-red western horizon while hot rage crept up my neck as one or another of these guys would offer up a feeble excuse or belligerent retort. At the time there was a ban on commercial fishing and a one fish limit on these mammoth bass, but this seedy crowd were gut-hooking fish on live eels, keeping everything and, rumor had it, shipping fish to Fulton Street under flats of haddock and flounder.

   Fishing the rocks and beaches by our place had been a major draw for the summer tenants who rented the cottages and the notion that the best spots had been hammered away at all night long could be pretty discouraging to someone on a week's vacation who'd made the effort to rise before dawn and slip away to the Bluff at sunrise armed with little more than high hopes and a plastic lure. Indeed, most mornings you could follow the trail of quarter-sized fish-scales down through the gorse to your favorite spot to find the eviscerated remains of foot-long eels entangled in a mass of discarded monofilament as thick around as a pencil, designed for catching sharks and tuna. On one such August morning a guest woke me well before dawn with news that there was a drunken man sitting atop a mountain of beer cans shooting at bluefish in the cut below the Bluff with a revolver. As this appeared to be a confrontation I could not avoid, I pulled on my boots and slicker and set out through a warm, gentle rain before the fog of sleep had lifted sufficiently for me to wonder what I might say to an armed and surly inebriate. 

   As I topped the Bluff I could see the birds still working furiously over the fish seething below a man in chest-waders, splayed out on the barnacles and crushed Pabst cans. I could hear the click of the empty chambers as he pulled the trigger and tried not to flinch when he waved the gun in my direction. He told me he'd go where he wanted and do as he pleased. I told him he had half an hour to pick up his mess and clear out or I'd call the cops. He told me he was a cop, in Bath, and that his father, Clancy, Senior, was the town Constable. I turned my back and started home, muttering something about calling the State Police. Clancy, Junior muttered something about somebody getting hurt.

   I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised a few days later to find my mother and sister, pale and shaken, after Constable Clancy's unexpected appearance. Mom liked to fish on occasion but preferred her filet atop a bed of watercress, under a blanket of champagne sauce to the mild violence inherent in actually hooking, landing and cleaning the beast. My sister was a vegetarian with no interest in angling and, as a consequence, neither had any idea what Clancy's visit was in regard to. He had simply come all the way down that mile-long, dirt road to the back of beyond to pick a fight with me and, finding me absent, cast about before the perplexed women for some trumped up violation that might serve as vengeance. Eying the aging dogs, he informed my mother that, as they were off the leash and technically within the confines of the Town of Phippsburg, he had every right - nay, obligation – as Constable to shoot them. While my sister pulled and prodded the two flatulent labs back in to the kitchen, Mom must have shamed old Clancy, as I'm told he rode off in a huff without firing a shot.

   One bright and lovely, early morning after the beach and air had been scrubbed clean by a heavy passing storm, the dogs and I set out for the Bluff. Cresting the rocks a few yards ahead of me Sam and Gus suddenly began mewling and barking frantically, breaking away and bounding down the blueberry path towards the beach below. The tide was low and incoming beneath a cloudless sky and a thick, vaguely chilly mist had just begun to lift above the vast expanse. At first I couldn't quite make out what had set the dogs off and, laying down my rod and gear I hurried after them, fearing it might have been the ubiquitous porcupine or skunk. In a second I stopped short as the rising mist revealed a pair of legs, encased in waders, jutting straight and stiff and lifeless from the sand. I scrambled down the rocks and weed in a panic, shouting at the dogs to stop as they began to dig. Creeping slowly towards this horrific scene I mustered up the courage to touch one swollen, rigid thigh before dropping to my knees and joining the dogs at their work. The last person I'd seen wearing waders just like these was Clancy the younger and he'd been sprawled out on those rocks not thirty feet away. It wouldn't have taken much of a wave to fill those waders, sweep Clancy off his perch and pummel him up for a few days before thrusting him from the waist up into the beach.

   Alas, no such luck. What we'd come upon was indeed a pair of waders, packed with sand but entirely devoid of Clancy. They might have been his; they could have belonged to anyone and I made no effort to hide my disappointment from the dogs who must have felt the same way as they began a tug-of-war that had soon ripped the things to shreds. They might have been his, and he might still be out there; I never saw either Clancy again. As the fishing diminished under such round-the-clock pressure and the economy began to improve, the Yard hired half these guys back on the night-shift, the trucks gradually stopped coming and the interlopers became more manageable and respectful. Some years later I read in the Times Record that the elder Clancy had been caught with a young boy, buns-up-kneeling in the bushes along a notorious stretch of the park and had absconded to Florida. No one has ever been able to tell me what became of Junior.

The Tangled Web

   Before dawn I'd awaken to a faint and tinny pitch for National Speedway or Playland in Far Rockaway and slide the tiny plastic wheel to “Off”. Pulling the battery from its harness, I'd swab the acrid anodes lavishly with my tongue, convinced that this would breathe a bit of life into the dying nine-volt. The transistor radio tucked under my pillow, tuned to Cousin Brucie and lulling me to sleep with “Sweet Talkin' Guy” or “Mr Lonely” had doubtless come from the duty-free shop at the airport in St Thomas where men like my father lined up to buy primitive electronics and cases of booze. We'd visit for a week or so each Spring, loaded down with Noxzema, Sea & Ski and bags of cheap, colorful plastic gadgets Dad had picked up on Canal Street to distribute as baksheesh to the bell-hops and cabana-boys he'd encounter along the way. Assuming the Islanders were out of touch with current, mainland technology, these bags of swag might contain flashlight fountain-pens, watches with alarms and timers, compasses, egg-timers, coin-sorters and imitation Swiss Army knives. To complete the import-export circle, he'd load up on duty-free Mount Gay and Old Grandad as well as the latest in solid-state from Bell & Howell, Zenith, Kodak and Polaroid. Later, Dad would spend hours squinting at complex diagrams and unintelligible instructions, feeding bits of tape or film through Sprocket A and Loop B in an exercise of futility and frustration that often ended in a tangle and a tantrum. If operating these contraptions was supposed to get easier with the advent of the Super-8, the 8-track and the Land camera, this simplicity was lost on Dad, who finally backed away from flashy electronics around the time the answering machine became ubiquitous and steadfastly refused to accept a VCR, Walkman or Naugahyde-swaddled camcorder no matter how desperate we might have been for a Christmas gift. He never lost the mortifying urge to dole out colorful gizmos to the locals, long after such trinkets had been eclipsed by the mundanity of a pervasive, global advance.

    A few of my classmates in those early days had fathers at the forefront of technology, and whereas receiving as a party-favor a scrap of quilted textile destined for the Apollo spacesuit was interesting enough, having Mr Morita-San hand me a presentation-boxed, Sony radio-pen after a birthday party for his son was pretty spectacular. No one I knew had ever heard of such a thing beyond the wild imaginings of Dick Tracy, and most of us had our pens confiscated almost immediately as one classroom after another erupted in sudden bursts of muffled radio static during somber recitations of the Lord's Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the early 1960's, when we were all poised atop the cusp of an unimaginable future, a mason jar of severed snake-tail rattles and a shoe-box full of Spanish moss and squirrel hides from a sojourn in the South could still sway the crowd at Show and Tell.

   With the advent of component stereos, digital watches and the Radar Range – spectacular in their excessive complexities and priced accordingly – the cascade of innovative technologies began in earnest just as we were heading off to Art School. With one foot planted in the dim and dusty world of Maroger medium, rabbit-skin glue and lead-white, those of us who still regarded Frank Stella and Mark Rothko with suspicion were totally unprepared for the future unfolding around us. In a matter of months we attended incomprehensible workshops on Holography, struggled to fathom the appearance of truncated dodecahedrons limned by lasers in the night sky and rushed to sign up for time on the first-of-its-kind color Xerox, which was so precious and expensive to use that it was monitored night and day by a testy adjunct. Now, of course, the virtual realities promised by Holography have been overtaken by the GameBoy, the laser is a toy used to blind drivers from the overpass and the color Xerox has fallen to the emergence of the twenty-five dollar printer from Costco.

   I recently came across and ad in SkyMall Magazine for a manual typewriter that, among other virtues, “recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence of yesteryear.” Without considering the availability of such anachronistic necessities as white-out or ribbons, the machine retails for nearly $200, despite the fact that the dump-shacks, thrift-stores and yard-sales are choked with Coronas and Olivettis any vendor would be happy to get a few bucks for. For a guy who could never grasp the complexities of the F-stop, the Fractal or anything whatsoever to do with the Cloud, the fact that people seem to want to surround themselves with vinyl records and manual typewriters is welcome news. Later this week I'll have to drag the flat-screen back out to the cottage for the summer tenants and begin the arduous, annual task of untangling the mare’s-nest of cables and wires devoted to affording wireless internet access and cable TV to a handful of guests who once upon a time were delighted to relax for a week on the rocky coast devoid of such technologies and now seem unable to relax without them. This process will involve endless hours on hold awaiting the cheerful aid of a voice from Bangalore, one or more trips to the Comcast office in Brunswick and the very real prospect of ending the day in a tangle and a tantrum.

What's My Line?

     

        There's an ad running about the airwaves offering a device or an app that would allow you to discover that you've plagiarized before your professor does. This strikes me as just another bit of unnecessary, cyber- nonsense, as it would seem almost as unlikely that you'd forget you'd plagiarized as that you'd forget whether or not you'd actually been shot down in a helicopter over Tikrit or taken fire over Sarajevo. Indeed, some among our current crop of leaders and role-models seem to have forgotten whether they'd ever lifted someone else's words, served in the military, or even whether or not their family had emigrated calmly to the United States in advance of Batista's fall or fled Castro's Cuba in an overcrowded, open boat. Why people under public scrutiny continue to imagine these indiscretions will go undiscovered, particularly in the age of the microchip, is a mystery.

   On the other hand, I'm quite sure I was a serial plagiarizer in High School and yet have absolutely no recollection of doing so. Faced with having to write a paper on “Siddhartha” or “The Rainbow” -  let alone actually reading such dreary tomes in the first place  -  I'm sure I would have opted for an easy out. With so many other more interesting and less taxing options available for a sunny afternoon, I don't doubt that a few forays into the library's dustier, less traveled stacks may have produced just the right bit of purloined prose to flesh out an otherwise worthless treatise on Christ-figures in Anglo-European literature. After all, once I'd rummaged through my tattered bag of  Wherefores, Therefores, Howevers and Notwithstandings, there would still be pages to fill with something a bit pithier than what I might have been able to glean from a Classics Comic. In the pre-PC era, of course, plagiary actually took time and effort and I doubt it ever occurred to me that I might have properly fulfilled an assignment in the hours or days it took to wing it. Over time the lies we tell ourselves and others acquire a ring of truth and fade into the fog of memory to the point where we may not be quite sure if they were real truths, slightly embellished, or made entirely of whole cloth. So, if I can't recall a specific incident of plagiarism on my part, I'm sure I'd know it if I saw it and instantly remember the event as the hot flush of mortified chagrin crept up my neck.

   Just the other day, my old friend Nick sent me a copy of a poem he'd shared with me once some forty years ago. Written by the occasional poet Cord Meyer, the verse is titled “Beauty” and begins: “Beauty she wears carelessly like a bright gown, lent for the night by some indulgent guest...” I've never forgotten this line; or, rather, I've never forgotten what I'd always remembered as this line. Reading it just once, I've imagined it as: “ Beauty she wore like a gown, left behind by some indulgent dinner guest...”. Setting aside the fact that my version makes absolutely no sense, that this snippet has been rattling about my brain for nearly half a century, kicking and screaming for release without once convincing me to drag it out, breath in some life and parade it about as my own must say something about the boundaries I've set for myself. All the self-indulgent love-letters and odes to the unrequited I've written across those decades could only have been improved by such a lovely spot of doggerel. And yet I stifled the urge to tread on what I, at least, had always known to be another's legacy. Not that I haven't been tempted, just as I'd been tempted by the obscure love poems of Kenneth Patchen or Sullivan Ballou's immortal letter to Sarah on the eve of Bull Run.

   There's little question that anything I might have written upon Cord Meyer's “faulty” foundation would have been entirely my own. Almost. And if I'd taken the plunge years ago and composed atop the line some tender verse in a futile effort to win that unrequited heart, I know it would have surfaced last week as an e-mail attachment or social-media post.