Poetic interlude #4

Suing God

By Michael P. Amram

They shot their mouths off waving bibles,

flags and guns

They missed the money slot on the

run with them

They stayed to pray in pantomimes

and exist

sealed in a conservative world

swearing to

save every life that God created

with trickles

and pennies from heaven, with all that

prayer can do

when a child is born with disability

unable to work

or seek restitution from their

creator

and cuts find SSDI,

they're in frequent

churches to lead consciences to where

Christ's blood shed

They shot their knees off praying to

savor life

in theory every one matters by

things Jesus said

Prosaic (Mosaic) Interlude #10

A National Trust

My name was used against me. I thought because of the Arab sound and my dark Minnesota tan, I only was given a week's visa in Israel. Everyone else on our bus from Egypt was given two or three. I did not really care. After a day's trip up the Sinai Peninsula with assorted American tourists, Brits and sweaty Egyptians in week-worn Galhebeas, stinky toe-jammed sandals, a week of another culture was all I wanted. I did feel targeted, although by then it was not such a infringement (see “The Cheeky Lad” in Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation and my blog post of 5-15-17 “Shuffling Through London.”) In hindsight, targeting gets easier to ignore each time it happens. The question is, is it something reversible, something over which you have say or control. In this case I really did not. Objection may have been costly. City hall is hard to fight, and the Mid-East is not the place to learn how.

I arrive in a cab, in a torrential rain. In back of me, down glistening moonlit streets, shadowy sniffing mongrel dogs, I see the Mediterranean tossing white-capped giants, each one threatening to consume Tel Aviv. I'd come from where Moses had crossed, led these generations past into Canaan, where he saw the bush burn and emerged with his tabulations, his percipient calculations for an honest man. I give the cabby the last of my green currency and make his night. A matron welcomes me to a youth hostel's terrace. I swing my duffel bag down heavy, producing a thud that breaks through the pats of roofless rain.

“Welcome to the Tel Aviv Hostel. I show you to your bed.”

We start walking down the hall. I see green walls and a frosted door window. Around a small red table some guys drink beer and talk loudly in German. I have a working knowledge of the language, but this is fast and likely quite idiomatic. Elvis plays on a old faded 8-track player behind a well-lit bar tended by a burly Belgian who looks like a young Pavarotti. He sings, but not nearly as well. “From where do you come?”

“USA, Minnesota. Ever been there?”

“America, really.” She looks at me surprised, suspicious. “I thought you were from a South American country, Venezuela possibly.

“No, certainly not. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota,” I say, a bit insulted. “So how about you, where do you call home.”

“I was born here in Tel Aviv,” she says quickly, as a footnote to our conversation. The implication I take away is that my nationality is of major importance, a talking point. Her's is not. Just like it was to the Israeli border guards earlier today. “Here it is, four bunks to a room,” she measures as we poke our heads in a plywood room with a lone light bulb hung in the middle. The bunks are two to a wall. Each has about four feet between the upper and lower bunk. It is meager conditions and reminds me of a POW barrack. I can't expect much for one Shekel a night. I nod, unimpressed, throw my bags on an empty bunk, and go back to the little hostel bar. The Germans raise their beer mugs, signaling me to join them. I try to follow the German and quickly lose interest. I notice the red head at the adjoining table. She has her sandaled feet up on the next chair and shouts flirtatious words to the Belgian behind the bar.

“Man, who is that, she's beautiful.”

“That's Marina.”

“Where is she from?”

“New Jersey.”

“She got something going with the bartender?”

“He wishes.”

“So she's fair game for a fellow American?”

“I think she is hoping for something more exotic. . .and erotic,” they laugh, that loud gut-propelling German laugh.

“You think I'd have a shot with Marina?”

“You, you're just a boy. No, a woman like that would chew you up, spit you out, and build a better man.”

I am right out of college, 24, and ready to get down to business. This trip is like my last taste of the world before I sell my soul to corporate America.

“Yeah, you're right. Dumkopft, what was I thinking,” I say, smacking my forehead.

Marina smokes and looks sexy doing so. A little ash misses her ashtray and I follow them to the floor.

“Hi,” she says matter-of-factually.

“Hello. Enjoying your trip?”

“It's alright. How 'bout you.”

“Just got in,” I say like a cowboy, a drifter, a bad-ass cool loner who blows into town and blows out before the dust clouds let you know him. “Came up from the Red Sea area, Sharm El Sheikh. Did some diving, saw some chariot wheels.”

“Where are you from?” She asks me with no particular curiosity. She is warm with a playful happiness that makes me trust she won't question my name or my nationality. We are countrymen though, kindred patriots, and our world just got smaller. Well, mine did anyways.

Congenial-speak #26

Winning Time for Motions

All the wars fought since the American Revolution began in 1775 cost over 1.1 million in lives. They were uniformed lives in service to our country. For want of a equitable motive, some rationale for carnage, they stepped up to thwart our enemies. At times they interceded to quell atrocities, injustices, even genocide. For this I salute them. I remember the today, I think of them in the back of my mind everyday.

Many Americans have just accepted that there are “evil doers” in the world and feel war is a necessary means of life. It is a means to some end. A peaceful world would be nice, but you have people like Vladimir Putin and young Moe Howard in North Korea stirring things up, threatening nukes, using Syria's innocents as bargaining chips.

The other day I was faced with the proposition that every single war has been unnecessarily fought, that war in concept never finds a winner. The speculation was that, in the very long run, no one profits from war. Certainly there is a chain of causation, a manufacturing of fate to the wars. One can choose to be simple minded and unversed in history and say something like the Civil War could have been avoided. That it was not necessary, that 620,000 soldiers died in vain. Or they could pay attention in school, know their history and realize that Lincoln, his cabinet, coalition in the North and South did not go to war over night. I don't know of a more volatile issue than the color of a man's skin, his place in society and, and that time, if anyone be allowed to profit from it. My god, 152 years later a Civil War shrunk to scale is playing out with every shooting or beating from Rodney King to Philando Castile.

I grew up during the most volatile years of our time in Vietnam. I was born in February of 1965 when LBJ was seeking approval for Operation Rolling Thunder, his first sustained bombing raid over North Vietnam. For the next three years napalm burned everything over there and America's anti-war movement grew. Thousands of men, younger than those in each world war, went to fight, many against their will. Many objected, stating religious reasons. Some simply weighed the morality of, the motives, the foresight their government had, and refused to go. They burned their draft cards. Many were prosecuted by the Selective Service. Many lived out the war in Canada.

When Nixon vowed, in 1970, to hit North Vietnam harder than Johnson ever dared I was five. Early the following winter I was struck by a car, suffering a “rather serious cerebral trauma.” From that moment on, my chances of being drafted to fight in any war were off the table. As thousands were flown to the other side of the globe to be disabled, I was disabled right in front of my house. My future though, my service in any military capacity, was rendered moot. When I was eighteen I registered with the Selective Service because a law said I had to, and for the purposes of voting. I remember a day in high school. I came home and got a call from an army recruiter. My first thought was what's going on in the world. We were gearing up for an invasion of Grenada. Reagan wanted to send 2,000 troops there. I thought, the Caribbean, the island I visited on a cruise when I was four. My second thought was I'm disabled, why am I on the list. I heard the guy out, I had been taught to “give democracy its day in court.” The questions led though a rabbit hole, standard issue, but leading to a seemingly pre-determinded breaker. I intimated that I had a disability that would make it very difficult for me to be a soldier in any capacity. That said, the conversation abruptly ended. At various times following that call I have a vague recollection of other branches of the military contacting me. It is a mixed bag of reactions. Most of me loathed having to talk with them, going through standard questions to arrive at disabled. I had a curiosity, taunting them out of some vindictive sense for equal opportunity, to see if I could get past and show up for a physical. Then these great hucksters would have to look me in the eye and tell me why I could not be Radar O'Reily, why I could not sling hash on a tray or be quartermaster. Part of me resented being discriminated against, basically told I was useless in any job the military had to offer. It's nice to be asked sometimes. Given America's history at that point, with all the government's lies, duplicity, cover-ups and ulterior motives, I see WWII as the last war to which I'd have lent my service. But I wasn't alive and if I had been, disabled, I am quite certain that no one would have any use for me. I'd have been lucky to even have received the considerate—if not mandated—Selective Service call—and if grandma had wheels she'd be a trolley car.

For most of my life, fighting, running, dodging bullets, having the dexterity to march in or tote the weight of a weapon and field armor, having a fair chance of over-powering an enemy aiming a gun at me, has been lost for me, not in any picture, totally incongruous to who I am. But, as I wrote in my memoir Ten years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, there was once a time when I could, if only for peer pressure's sake, picture myself that way. Amid all the liberal teachings of my home environment, I added the paragraph to be honest, to reflect the world I knew as a kid:

“Buried deep in the deadened days of my first childhood, peeking culpably from the veils of jack-o-lantern plants, shuffled in the antitheses of boxes of DFL literature, cowering behind trash cans set on the small rocks of our back alley, there was gun play. When there were no roads to grade, new earth to taste or pretend Star Trek beam ups, I heard the sputters of “Tommy guns” as I or my comrades fell. I was the indulgent disciple of the older kid next door. For me then, majority ruled. My best friend joined their army and I was a peering face in the cross-fire...”

It was me then, when I was four or five. I was coordinated, quick, and might have, in some universe,made a good military man. I was though, if unprovoked, a pretty peaceful kid. I'm more peace oriented as an adult perhaps because I can't even conceive of that world, a world in which I could be included in any kind of military action

Each Memorial Day I think about all who have answered the call to arms, for whatever reason, even if it was just because they took and oath (something I will credit them more now for doing than their commander in chief). I am a fair liberal and truly believe war is rarely the answer to anything. Dylan sang “the loser now will be later to win.” I am skeptical of the notion that anyone truly wins in the long-run from war. Vietnam was a losing proposition from about 1959. Fifteen years later, hours after the last helicopter left the US embassy, the NVA raised its flag above the Independence Palace. South Vietnam's president Duong Van Minh surrendered to the Communists. The US had invested billions of dollars and 361,864 dead or wounded lives to buy South Vietnam a few hours of freedom. No one won, but in the long run, no one really lost. Yes, every war has a loser, and in this case it was the US and its allies, the Vietnamese, north and south. Yes, surrenderers lose in the books. Lee to Grant, Hitler to Ike. Slaves were free, a nation reconstructed. The Third Reich was put to rest, Jews were liberated from death camps. Life goes on, victory's assets get better and worse.

To all those past and current fighting men and women I say, with maybe a little envy or resentment that I never had that option, thank you.

Congenial-speak #25

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prosaic interlude #9

Two Atmospheres to Silence

I see my dept gauge move as though it is possessed. I am getting deeper by the beat of my heart, to the time of luminous apparitions of my bubbles ascending. A vertiginous sixth sense apprises me. It consumes me until I make sense of where I am, what is happening, and what the potential for danger is. I realize then that I am exponentially shrinking to it.

It was my third dive. As three log books attest, the experience was not enough to sway me from the sport. In June of 1980 my dad and I were in the area of open-pit mines, many of which had been allowed to fill filled with water, stocked, and opened for SCUBA diving. Some had names, some were simply Pits left for the diver to name. This was on the Cyuna Iron Range in Ironton, Minnesota. It was called Pit #6 and remained at and undetermined depth. Our objective was to have fun, not to fathom the mine for the DNR.

We arrive, coming in down a long red road hidden in tall grass. The growth, the weed and ferns, make a smacking and then surreptitiously squeaking sound as they hit the windows. They are open cracks and I see mosquitoes fly in and out. I think of suiting up on the tailgate in the 87º heat, getting stained red and continuously getting bit. I flash on the preponderance of doubt, whether the dive justifies the prep-time. It always is a somewhat humbled yes. It is what divers do. They are adventurers, explorers of bodies of water. He parks the car on the only access to the pit. There I see foot prints from past diver booties buried in growing grass. The conditions are good for diving. The sun is high and glints off the brimming water of the pit at 1 p.m.

After surveying the lay of the land, the flow of the water, my dad begins the dive ritual. He goes back to the suburban and returns with a “little playmate” cooler. He takes out an 8 oz. Can of tomato juice and a tablet of sudafed. He swallows it and I watch murky orange drops on his mustache move as he speaks.

“Want some, helps clear your ears. I have no idea how deep we could get today.”

I rarely take sudafed, relying on simple squeezing of the nose, on the dive masks rubber sheath like on Batman's head gear, to equalize pressure as I descend. It it not fool proof. I challenge everything, even physiology. I feel that clammy moist sweaty feel peppering with feasting mosquitoes. It sticks like wax paper to the bulge of fat in the small of my back. It is that last trickle of insecure sweat, of discomfort to be justified, equalized by the dive. I feel it no more after I pull the hanging farmer-john wet-suit up over my torso.

We submerge at 2:35 into a labyrinthine coffin. Descending quickly, crossing the low thresholds of the thermocline, I feel a rush of stinging cold. My mind fleets past the impulses to ascend and get my wetsiut top. I am tough, and enduring cold and the security of the pressure around me builds character. Hovering at 30' we fin through 30' visibility. When we're free fro the mine's periphery, out past the steep grades and shallow ledges, out from the swaying trees and hanging carpets of curtain-like hedges, there is an abyss. We flutter weightless, vertical, pressing our power inflators on our BC vests to “compensate” for lost buoyancy due to physical laws. We exchange an “OK” sign. My dad has wisely worn mittens, and I return the sign slowly making a circle with my shriveled, pasty thumb and forefinger. In the atmospheres of silence the articulation of the smallest joints are audible. The dive began with a tank full to 2,900 PSI and now we expel that air we just added to our vests in order to descend. It is a concerted effort. I hold one hand on y BC's power inflator, the other on the Batman-like nose of my mask, gently squeezing at intermittent levels. The pops are heard and felt. They are like dulling, interminably numbing ear aches rigidly timed, hopefully rationed to the maximum depth.

I find my way through a labyrinth. Through a peripheral window of my mask, trickling with water at the pressure of 65', I see my dad's fins flutter above me. I guess. I am disoriented, and fear the worst. A subtle rip current has weaned us away from the abyss, from the free and clear void of up and down recognition. My mind flashes on the present, past and future. I think of my situation and my training. The power inflator. In the past, in a emergency, a CO2 cartridge was tucked in the folds of a horse-collar BC to be pulled and punctured to jettison the diver to the surface. I press the power inflator, a button on the end of a hose connected to my tank. I press for moments and don't rise an inch. I press more. Nothing. Alright, stay calm I tell myself. I know the 2,900 PSI is being sucked fast and panic will only incline me to need more compressed air. The for-bearers of this mine, the ones who worked it back in the 30s and 40s, I'm sure sometimes did not walk out. I imagine the equipment they abandoned, the cars and trucks and mining tools.

I consider a remote possibility that I will be found someday, like they were, only intact and petrified in an image of a fifteen-year-old diver. A novice who, well within sport diving depths succumbed to the natural elements of pit #6. It would be alright. I had a feeling deep as the abyss.

I had hung weightless before the cracks. I had drifted to the ledged side tracks of the mine. Something pulls at my legs and I power air into my BC to no end. The ambient pressure is to great I deduce. The vest is finite. There is no fight left, no sink or swim response, no buoyancy to compensate for. I reach my right arm up in the path of my bubbles, they are mushroom shapes bursting in compressed air, silent pockets, benchmarks. And then I feel a mitted hand tickle my burning winkled hand. I knew I was OK.

We surface at 3:15 p.m. I have 1,200 PSI remaining. I'm thinking of the positive, what I can take away from this brush with fate at 65'. It was only my third dive. I consumed 1,700 PSI during a 40 minute dive on which I had reason to suck air like it was my last breath. My dad, like any diver buddy, very well saved my life. However, in three log books, Pit #6 is never mentioned again.

Congenial-speak #24

Looking for that timing

There really was a distinction. It looked and sounded different. The opportunities found a copius disproportion. I was still me, but how I was seen, and how I saw the Thems in the world, on my my new faster street, even in my yard, was a different story. My second childhood began—or as I say in my memoir Ten Years and Change—“was due to begin” six weeks from January 8, 1971. The kids on my first residential street were due to grow estranged. They proved, at least twice, that “going home again” in any tangential sense can't be accomplished—ever. I came home from the hospital in March of that year. With the exception of the belated sixth birthday party I detail in the book, I have few remembrances of any interaction with those friends before we moved in 1972. I was busy adapting to Michael Dowling school where, besides going through (again) K then grades 1-3, I received therapies. I excelled there in a pool that was dedicated by FDR. I was rehabbing at the U of M and walking with my dad. I was pushed, I needed to be motivated. For years as an adult getting into the gym was second nature to me. I attribute that to my past. The coaching by my dad and numerous therapists gave me that drive, the determination that it took do do something like competitive bodybuilding (“Exercising Demons” Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation).

The kid, four years younger than me, two doors down, became the first friend I made on our new street. He seemed genuine enough, and it did not begin as a lopsided friendship (something that seems to result, and come out as the bitter truth with many “friendships”). He needed me like I needed him. But then he had three older sisters and a house politically divided. The women were all Republicans, leaving him and his dad to harvest their liberal lawn signs. He spent a lot of time out of he house. It wasn't like, obviously, when I was still able to catch or hit a ball (actually this kid's father, a coach, threw one of the only baseballs to me that I caught in a glove) could run, ride on two wheels or skate on blades or wheels. It's like I slowed down and, on Lyndale Avenue, grew into a world hat would slow down for me. Those kids on Aldrich had their timers set. They remembered the mike Amram that could do all those things, tings I fondly remember in the memoir Ten Years and Change. We were both young. Their lives went on in their time as I was gone from that picture for a little over a month.

Cars went by faster, much faster, on Lyndale. I was slower, much slower, as the new kid on the block. But some, the first being the kid I mentioned, made it work. Then came the mainstreaming. The relatively new program of assimilating kids with extraordinary needs back into the “regular” public school system (today the whole concept is pretty much moot). I returned with a crutch or two on my sleeves to Central Elementary. Near the fall of 1973, with only one occupational therapist there being strongly in favor of my leaving, I moved on from Michael Dowling. I must then have begun the 1974 school year. I was in fourth grade. It was hell (“My Day of Reckoning” in Finding me—and Them). Mid-way through the year I finally made a friend—sort of—destined to be lopsided. Forced friendships are haunted by limping ghosts like Quasi Moto. They find you in time, waiting to ring with their jaded bongs. I don't remember if I heard it said to someone else, or if he said it right to me. It turned out that, after months of slow-paced revelry, the teacher had told him to be my friend. I had friends, a core group that including him, through high school. I never forgot that though, that friend on consignment. That how the current had to go, I guess, back in the mainstream.

Poetic interlude #3

A River Penché

By Michael P. Amram

All those years ago

I danced

on top of the world

all the years ago

I danced

for my face in the crowd

I danced

along the bluffs that

panned the Mississippi

when wind

rhythms and soft

waists were all I needed

I viewed

habor lights from my

youth in ignominity

from my

bosomed cradle of

esteemed security

I danced

when slow songs in sad

eyes were things I needed

to see

to look inside my soul

for my best to free

and in time we peed

in drunken sinks

when urinals were full

or girls gathered

to go in twos to stalls

like Noah's kind

(heh) some drunk mime

always fronted lines

he hopped

and danced, he crossed

his legs to meet

music's beat in time

we were queued eight balls

staring at heads

imagining dancing on

the tops of what led

to my world

for that moment