daily special

Irony

It's a museum, an anathema in Memphis. The fire extinguisher, the first response, before the hoses are needed, hangs around the corner. A wreath hangs on the rail in front of the lime green door to room #306. It is the lodge, time, economic disparity and racial disproportion has shrunk. In 1945 it was called the Marquette Hotel. That year it was was purchased by Walter Bailey who named it for his wife Loree. The hotel has its roots in the song “Sweet Lorrine,” made popular by Nat King Cole.

In the 50s and early 60s, Lorraine catered to a large black clientele. The upscale hotel on Mulberry Street was often the only bed in town for the likes of Areth Franklin, Ray Charles or Ottis Redding. Lorraine's traded hands, more than once. In a city that draws people by hundreds to the mansion of a white singer who “sounded black,” the hotel for blacks was renamed a motel. Bailey had added a second level, a swimming pool and drive-up access to additional rooms on the south side of the building. Evidently this structural amendment designated the building a motel which, to me, has a diminishing connotation.

After April 4, 1968, after a “shot rang out in the Memphis sky” and Jesse Jackson says he felt the blood of King on his shirt, rooms 306 and 307 were closed in memorandum. I can't hazard a guess of how the general white population felt then, how the gesture of the rooms' closings were looked upon by them, by those who the Movement was intended to thwart, the ones who had their white knuckles on the hydrant's spigot, those who held the leashes a let the dogs rein in slack to taunt and recoil. How did they feel then about the logistics, the exactness, the precise location of the killing of a black man in a part of the country where so many had been killed before. How was it viewed in all Lorraine's many manifestations through the years?

Should I say it? Can I say it? Is it politically correct, or is that PC fad arcane, an abutment to seeing and identifying the real issue? Okay, do some black lives matter more than any other. How is Lorraine's legacy looked upon today? How is it looked upon when an unarmed black man can be shot at a hair trigger response and his assailant goes free? Well, Lorraine's reached Smithsonian status. In 2016 the museum was honored as a “Smithsonian Affiliate.”

Interesting footnote, when the Lorraine was slated to close in 1988 a housekeeper—and last resident—named Jacqueline Smith (no angel) protested. Smith had lived and worked there since 1973 and was finally forcibly removed by sheriff's deputies. She objected to the thousands being spent to commemorate King and the Civil Rights Movement. She argued MLK would take issue with the grand expense for him when so many, like Smith, were in need of low-income housing. Come to think of it, in 1988—the Reagan era—HUD was a four-letter word, or at least far from the top of the agenda. Ironically, following the assassination, the hotel did become a low-income dwelling. My guess is that King would have seen Smith's point.

Congenial-speak #13

Musing on the subtext of my May bound political memoir, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

A Reform Passover in Richfield

The candle-holders stand ready, sprouting their offerings to God. The 11” candles show their wicks with opulence, breathing in flamed, smoke-plumed abated blush, waiting to shade the faces of the blessers, the confessors who shield their eyes from centuries of waxed remembers. In the middle of the table, in the center of yellow-clothed varnished oak-filled lengths of ten arms, was a Seder plate. Copper sinks into a yellow sea, clear so far of surrounding crumbs. None has yet tried to break free from the small wells, the five individual indents in the plate. All was in order; lamb shank, parsley, horseradish, haroset, egg. In the center of the plate is a small glass dish filled with salt water. I waits steeped in tepidly growing religious mystery, its symbolism will be explained in the questions everyone is glad I ask. In a basket matzo is stacked under an orange cloth napkin. At six place settings are haggadot that tell the tale, the timeless story of the Exodus from Egypt, the enslavement of Israelites, the ten plagues God brought to pharaoh and the milky honeyed motivated Red Sea escape. A goblet is pewter and reflects its many years decants, fighting tarnishes of replenishment, soon to be a closely surveilled vessel, is placed next to the matzo for Elijah. The biblical prophet is the undisputed champion of the oppressed and downtrodden, the very people each Passover is geared to celebrate, to honor the theme of freedom and rid the world of tyranny, injustice and need for perennial homage.

The order is tall. My dad sits at the end, the last arm of oak whee the cloth hangs to tousle any heads of dogs, or facilitate shields of slight in hand that corroborate godded trickery. He leans to the left on a pillow in a swiveling desk chair. At his side are all his props for any eventuality, anything he made need, any embellishment to the haggadotal story. He has his wine, his own bottle, his chance to be decanter. He has his readings, the books , the prayers and stories beyond the order of the day. He has his yarmulkes, his various coverings, the humbled nods to God. They are navy and khaki, white and black. He shows one that's purple velvet with gold trim spidering from its center like creases of sunlight. As it says, after some formalities, my dad reads, “welcome to our Seder!”

I am the youngest and read four questions. The leader answers them, one at a time, They are questions that build on one another, like “why is this night different from all other nights?” which leads to why we dip parsley in salt water, why horseradish, or why is it one person gets to lean on a pillow. No one is that impressed. They're whelmed. It is, to anyone who is remotely familiar with Judaism, a faith in which nearly everything is done for a reason. There is symbolism and tradition in most things.

Reading goes around the table, responsively reacting and reciting the story, culminating in many, many glasses of wine. Our guests spoke their piece. Randomly, sporadically, in between the tramplings of vineyard wine decantations, they read what they'd prepared with us in mind. Some are quotes, parts of speeches, paraphrases of Gandhi, either Kennedy or Malcolm X. Mine is, each year, the same paraphrase. Stains of purple dry to a pink like color, the hue of pink lamb cook correctly is, surround the most meaningful words of King's speech. The one in which he spoke of a dream, where people are not judged by the color of their skin but the contents of their character, when little white boys join hands with little white girls and sing the old songs. They are imminent to be free and, by the end of our Seder they are free. I read a biography on Martin Luther King, Jr., a small selection for kids, in preparation.

My mom has a pot of matzo ball soup whose rolling simmers catch the silences, the breaks when something thoughtful is said, or sad, like the mention of the Holocaust. It is a note to her, and she politely excuses herself to tend to dinner. The meal is a pot roast, a string torn spectacle of beef allowed to baste in its gravy, in a silver pressure cooker. From the table I watch the subtle movements of the nob on top and note the wisps of steam. Our appetizer is sweet. We've eaten the maror, the symbolic emollients of pyramids and treasure houses built for Pharaoh. The horseradish is harsh, stiff, and burns my nose. My dad tells how his father had him bite into the root. I don't believe him, thinking if I did this it would kill me. Now, we eat the sweetness, the haroset, twixt matzo. As my mom is putting the final touches on dinner, as kibitz, a brain-teaser, my dad reads a aside, a footnote. He tells about the Earl of sandwich and how the concept of putting food between two slices for leavened (or unleavened) bread came to be.

My mom brings the soup, steaming with mealy balls floating, displacing yellow broth. Tiny carrot pieces swim around the balls' suspension freely. I coral them with my spoon, saving the matzo ball for the last thing to eat, when they sit alone in a drained white bowl. It is the “good” dishes that most nights wait in a wooden “buffet” behind the table. Some of the bowls, as do the dishes, have black pin-stripe designs. Only one.

We talk—they talk—I listen and really meet our guests. If they are well-known, time-tested friends, they catch us up on their progress, their children's, who may or may not be in attendance. My mom, or one of the guests (sometimes the man) collects the soup bowls. Shortly thereafter, the pot roast is served. It is tender and usually requires only a fork to eat. People pour nondescript wine and eat unmitigated matzo sandwiches. Dinner ends, it kibitzes out, blending purposeless conversation to responsive reading with a apparent fluidity only a communications professor (my dad) can handle. He leans back harder, to the left, somehow still not crushing the upper-most matzo. Toward the beginning of the Seder he broke the top matzo in the stack (there is a sorted tale to this in itself too) in half, wrapped it in a cloth napkin, and tucked it incidentally under his pillow. My sister and I know this will disappear at some point. It is still there when dinner ends. If we take our yes off it, it is gone. (A few years back this might have been a lesson teasing object permanence.) The matzo half is the dessert. We give up, tire of watching. We are big kids of 8 and 10 and are not willing subjects of trickery.

It disappears! Somewhere in our 2,200 square foot house an orange napkin has our names on it. We, and any other kids there, go to find the dessert, the afikoman. It is always in the surrounding area though, behind a couch, in an empty waste basket, even in the buffet. There is a finder's fee, a prize, a throw-away-the-next-day toy, a reddish yellow puzzle with loose white tiles with room enough for one to move. My dad gives his mellow-dramatic sigh that the matzo was found. He reads a speech about how this practice teaches thievery although rewards honesty.

We love reciting the “Number” Madrigal of which there are 13. My dad asks “Who knows the answer to one?” I pitch in to create a buzz, pique some interest, show how it is done. “I know the answer to one, one alone is our God, in heaven and on earth. It builds, and tossed into the fray is everything from the month in childbirth (guess how many) to the attributes of God. My dad, with a table of six, makes sure everyone reads two, leaving the 13^th for himself to read in dramatic flare. With even more of a potential for street dinner theater is Had Gadya. It is another story, mounting in intensity, incrementally worthy of drama and inflection. It laments “an only kid” (lamb) a father evidently buys for his son (although I think it is really him). Tragedies befall the man-child beginning with a cat and ending with the Holy one. It is for the children, to keep us amused, like watching the afikoman and the goblet for Elijah, for whom the door has been open since dinner's end.

My dad, a Holocaust refugee, came here in 1939. He tells of his families first Seder in America that took place 22 April, 1940, how his mother, conditioned, asked his father not to sing so loudly for fear that some anti-Semites would here them. My Opa (grandpa) said proudly that he would sing as loudly as he wanted; they were in America now! In the part of the Haggada which mentions a few of the camps, my dad tells in which one members of his family were murdered. I think of what he has to live with, what he found out when he was about my age. This is at the end, four hours in, when freedom and the love of liberty is reiterated. It is 1973 and the war has had false stops and start and has long since became a sadistic political game, a bargaining chip. We adjourn our Seder by singing the 4^th verse of America, the one that speaks of “freedom's holy light.” Candles have lasted, down to their holders, just like I trace the incredible capacity waiting, somewhere, for all in the world to feel freedom.

Poetic Interlude #2

A Hand That Needs You

Never to be real like climate

change, like apes reciprocate

their giving,

in curling folds of yellowing

photos of comrades sharing

pains together,

for a day to equal its feeling

not bested by quiet's reins

not clouded for sun's shine

not weary of anyone's dignity

not fearful for favors' requisites

nor meek lapses in borrowed time,

for wills to deserve equality?

the depths we went for gesture

and feigns that bent to you

how you helped me indeed

how you helped me in deed

masks you wore as the ranger

I never got to thank

the one I didn't need to thank

the best buddy always happy

willing to pull rank to make

my life better

candid blue livers thrive

drinkers of their bar-stool

merry-andrew that hides

inside the roles we played,

lame games, arm in arm

cross thresholds to dodge dives,

I sat perched with promise

with a sorted face through

my mug's best features

were amplified—they

dulled—they distorted to swim

as you watched tanned foam

touch my nose like

you never could

you were always there

with you coat on

ready to take

falls for me

never leaving the ball

in my court

for free

Congenial-speak #12

Along for Harried Reunions

Space is my ground, after 11 hours and change, in the air, across the Atlantic, licked by Aurora's melts. Oslo is buzzing with a tiny-town efficiency on a dense scale. Our troop has been asked to wear—I suppose for collective purposes—maroon colored wind-breakers. However we are in uniform as we come into the terminal like invading descendants. (I'd guess 98% of our troop has Norse ancestry.) The cooler, older scouts—which now includes me—immediately locates a restroom to doff the uniform for non-mandated clothes, even though the windbreaker covers them. I don't recall being so vain.

We bus to the Immie Hotel. It is a four-story hotel in the left of center Oslo. Its height dwarfs its stars. The rooms are like Ikea shows, virtual catalogs. Our maid is named Hydra and has hairy legs. The younger scouts believe she enjoys being asked for ice and towels and soaps. There are vicious towel fights, wet, whipping sounds break through stale, woody air of Ikea rooms, drawing blood in some circumstances.

A game is at kiosks. It is a glass encased labyrinth a ball runs through for some prize or pellet. It acts as a Skinner box for the young scouts. They are amused by the money, the Kroner and Øre, the Krone coins with holes in the middle. The latter we place in slots at the top of the case and hit, like the flippers on a pinball machine. It is a game of chance.

I joined troop 262 in 1979. In those days, in the Beartooth mountains in Montana, or to get to camp sites off trails, I required help. I was driven as the others hiked, or simply hung back usually in some compensatory fashion. By 1983, when I was told we would be hiking—with full pack—through flat clean city streets my eyes lit up. This was it, my time to shine, to hike like the rest. I had my Eagle badge and this trip was my coda. I could go out with a long-awaited equity. Before we went over a father, just looking out for me, had rigged up some contraption on two wheels on which to pull my pack. I said no thanks.

Walking, smiling, sunny peopled city streets indulge us. They clear for us and we are the Israelites led from America, from the hairy-legged obscurities of the Immie Hotel by at least four Mosaic fathers. We were laughing and joking, acting brash, assimilating to culture class. We were horn-dogs at the Norse smorgasbord. Flirtations impeded our progress. Twenty marooned mice break pipers' wind. A few people think we are a break-dance troupe and the young punks bust a few moves. They spin on the pavement and rock on their heads like the pros. The natives are fooled and we're hallowed, we're revered until they find it's just a horny scout in a maroon shell. Onward, and upward, hire to conspire, church steeples rain down. We curtail our hormones and walk the pews, soaking culture and Anglicized history as we leave Oslo.

We cross Sognefjord via ferry to Balestrand on its northern shore. Enormity slims me, intimates me, shrinks me more than anything has before. I peer at the rock iced walls with a timidity known only to giants. I imagine the history, the geology, the ages that past between here and Minnesota. Our 10,000 odd pot-hole lakes are nothing, mere divets in the earth to pale in volume to this pageantry. It is clear blue, deep. It's a knowing depth that give a chill to me, a fear, an insecurity. It's a waiting epic catastrophic property, a swallowing, a swelling of earth's precarious proportions. As sun descends early, hesitant, behind icy coolness, we make camp.

Congenial-speak #11

Norse ledge ends

Back in the day, when recycled newspaper was worth something, our scout troop filled many endless semi trailers. We called the parcels of paper, the finds, the booty, the jackpots, “lucys or “baglys” in reference to how they were received. The fathers, the leaders, the masters of tender-feet too young to drive, learned routes. We taught them. We smelled on instinct where the loosest and most bagged papers were. There was a house inhabited by a hermit, a creature of habit, an OCD'd accumulator of news. We went there in a pick-up, a flat bed, sitting, flouting laws, to a house on the corner. It was the kind kids might TP because they thought no on cared. White ribbons trickled down, around branches barren, defiant of seasons reasons for changing, for living. It was the house of Boo that got TP'd because kids knew it was a easy job, festooning the trees until the rain washed it away. Around wood stairs to descend into musty dampness, prizes revealed in a single light blub's shy intensity. Wound and cornered by stone work, lime and sanded liths of monosyllabic resonance we saw our quarry. Yellow edge entail of yester-years news, stories of Tet or Nixon's resignation, led us to more—much more—and then some.

Across from the Lyndale house—my second neighbor/childhood—was a Lutheran church that sponsored Viking Counsel's troop 262. It at least allowed the semi truck to wait in its lot. It was there for weeks before and after the sale, the paper drive, the Norway exchange fundraiser. The drives, themselves, usually occupied the best parts of a Saturday. I was often on the assembly line, a pair of arms in the chain that went 20' back. Older, stronger scouts sometimes accepted my slower, slimmer, less dexterous hands begrudgingly. I was still using crutches and often fell back into a wall of newspaper, slipping to stand, on the glossy magazines and catalogs, the copious ads from Sunday volumes people discarded religiously.

Sometimes they left me, the older scouts, to hold the wall. I waited in the truck while they went on routes. I accepted paper donations from individual old men and women. They drove up to the mouth of the semi, all day, in minty Buicks and Oldsmobiles whose odometers read 20, 000 in May. Often, curmudgeonly, they quickly as their eighty-year-old bodies move made their deposit right on the loose gravel of the church lot. Most had taken time out of their sedentary life to put the paper in grocery bags. Occasionally, though, a car pulled into the lot with a trunk full of the dreaded “lucys.” My depends were out hunting, and I cringed, I blithely chagrined, falling back on the solace that I was only a second-class scout. The donators saw me shuffle, barely walk without my resting crutches, and they lifted out armfuls of loose paper and put them up on the truck for me. I thought when the older guys returned they'd get mad, so I worked fast bringing lucys back before they returned. When I succeeded there was a pride I had I kept humble, just between me and the semi.

It was fun. Nicknames were born. Lucys were thrown as bagglys were quickly passed down. The truck was packed to the roof, to the steel bars that structured the semi. Row by row, wall changed wall, through the best hours, the most productive, of a Saturday. Jackpot fresh pick-ups returned two to four times, younger scouts near buried in the bed with newspaper surrounding their head. Some stashed away Playboy magazines they unearthed. Or the less shamed older scouts returned sitting in the flat-bed atop a sea of paper looking at center-folds for all to see.

The drives, raffles and Christmas wreath sales paved the way. A decade plenished our coffers and, in 1983, most of our troop flew to Norway. We arrived in Oslo on SAS (Scandinavian Airline System) via Iceland and Greenland for fuel. Our efforts bought us two weeks at $400.00 per capita, meals and lodging included. Transportation, except for a few ferries and taxis, was limited to our feet.

That's how we got to a land of the midnight sun, of glaciers, fjords, and the sublime passionate beauty of females with viking ancestry.

Congenial-speak #10

Grounded at Zero

In the days of my book, for the times it took to memorize history, years from mis-remembered nuances, the idiosyncrasies of narrative writing, ours stood at subterranean level. Before carpet covered the floor, when it was still tile floor and overhead lights bouncing off them like cues to grow into something wise, better, more sociable and judicious. And the walls enshrined my eight-year-old mind, bombarded with audible, textual and visual cues. They were tan wood begging for adornment.

Before antiques or political buttons, I played on the stairs, on the brown-specked carpeted descent to the basement. I had a “big Jim” action figure, I had a Muhammad Ali figure, I had a black version of 'Big Jim.” My figures were diverse, they were powerful, muscled, but not dispositioned to war, to general infantry. The Jim figure came with a silver band that wrapped around his biceps muscle, on the arm you chose, and when it was flexed the band shot off. They all got along, Jim, Ali and the black Jim (I want to say his name was Jack). They went on adventures. I had an RV and camping equipment. It went down the stairs and broke at the bottom. Camp was set, or they climbed the stairs to scale them. My sister came on some trips, crinkling cellophane to simulate frying sounds. I twirled a tiny plastic pan between my fingers. We were a team.

And then one day I noticed the accumulation of the politics of earlier days, of McCarthy, of Humphrey, of Don Fraser, of state and local politicians, of LBJ, of Warren Spannus-AG. I heard the nailing, the hangings, the exacting measures and levels my dad made. Subsequently I felt the walls' emptiness populate. Gradually I watched the bulletin boards' burlapy orange surface area fill, with buttons like islands within another island on wooded tan infinity. A bumper sticker interrupted the islands' tows—of eyes—with a subtle infrequency. They served as inlets, estuaries to teach compromise, to appease a metaphor.

I crawled normally, anyways. I trailed behind the ethnically diverse RV, behind the bar. At the far end of our basement was a bar with an orange-pink shine. Its Formica ran roughly 8 feet. Four stools in front provided endless fun, taking turns, spinning, dizzying, stomaching, the revolving gold seats. Political fundraisers, U of M and socially kosher parties filled the room's memories. My dad's HELP Center parties (a low-income university program) attracted hippie types, creative student, ex-cons and counseling faculty. They drank, and drank, smoked a bit and drank some more. They ate sometimes if a meal was offered. They slept on a trundle couch. I remember one man, somehow associated with my dad and the U of M, staying for an extended time. I had a bowling set, a light ball and 12 plastic pins. We framed our games in the laundry room where I played floor hockey (see blog post CS#7). He was the pin-boy of yore, and set about pinning our games. The ball scuttled across a smudged tan-specked tile floor, unguttered, unparalleled in random accuracy. Three strikes is a turkey he taught me, and also what constitutes a foul.

Six bulletin broads accrued the walls, dulling and enlightening my play and Saturday cartoon sanctuary. At the end of the room, opposite the bar, were twin couches and our first black and white TV. I watched there, as the rest of the house settled, Schoolhouse Rock and Archie. It was an osmotic room with walls that seeped political progress and history. Antiques from up-north auctions were eclectic, at first they had to be. A mannequin in a black dress with breasts and frills stood. It looked in the dark like an evil old woman, and in the early days sleeping downstairs scared me. The witch woman was next to the wicker wheelchair, a combination antiquarian fraught with murderous possibility. On the bar, on trees, were the pointed witches shoes. Above, mounted, was an old gas-light run electrically. Mirror wall backed the bar and your face and all its where was there for all to see. They saw you spinning, dizzying, assimilating to the eclectics of a youth, a stewardship, naturally.

The basement was a museum, a signed den of amusing politically bred and bartered antiquaries. The walls were now hanged with old railroad lights, irons, rug beaters, bed pans and various agrarian utilities. In the corner, as you came down the stairs, one saw a wood box, a copper kettle, a clothes ringer and rack. In the curtained work-room was where repairs were made. My mom stripped and re-finished antiques once begun. In rags and turpentine, she varnished the smells. It was lacquered and mixed, clumpy, gooey, fixes that lasted and peppered the air. I built things with no particular design with legos, tinker toys or Lincoln logs in the next room. The auction lots that were brought home as trophies, as non-political tangible possibilities, to stand in the most elegant and docile room of the house. Upstairs, where the piano played and my dad added method reading to the Sunday paper.

poetic interlude #1

Defenses of Youth

by M.P. Amram

Derelict rejections of what I was

come spiraling down,

blending like side-burns

the sediments of me,

I dare to nurse and coax sweetness

from a pear and wipe

juices on my leg to soften it

for the next forage

suns that are hidden behind drapes

lacy with transparencies

opaque pulpits that guard boundaries

morning crows' are my ripe sentries

They're shapes of fruited trees

silhouettes on shades pulled

behind what drapes fit ghosts

of what I think I must leave

with hinged spectators outside

the rattles of windy nights

star-borne sadists that taunt me

until beds end their fetal fights

and in the union of the night

as I lay, spent, betrothed,

addled with my dignity

in my bed hat and sheets

that sieze to fly up to moonlight

glare—they're ribbons in cells

within my jailed defiance

yet I lay still, I quiver

as beams of vindictive light

embolden me.