I think it was Wilde Oscar who said something about us all being born in the gutter but some of us having been born-such looking up at the stars. Hard to say whether he (assuming my memory, this morning, is better than it was, yesterday, when neither M nor I could remember Glenn Close's name) was prophetically seeing the present era in which we live, during which each of us had to learn to devote a certain amount of time, each day, sifting through our Spam file. I'm confident that I'm not alone in having been invited, this AM, to:
- Get hot with Asians, Brazilians, and Russian Women and/or Men;
- Buy from Walmart, Kohl's, Sears, ToysRUs, the Grommet and others whose names I don't recognize;
- Receive 100's of $Millions;
- "Hook-Up" (some graphic metaphor, aye?) with multiple, horny married folk of both sexes (is Howard that hermaphroditic a name) in and out of the shower* with a varied and explicit menu of gustatory delights;
- Simultaneously get back at Big Pharma and "get hard" by buying ED-Rx knock-offs;
- Vote and Support Donald Trump;
- Cure my obesity;
- Save a friend who was ripped off in a foreign land**; and
- Get degrees that prepare you for a multiplicity of careers helping others.
Ach du lieber ... y'got the picture and if you're reading this, you get similar Spam. My Spam file (I imagine like your's) was 137 deep, this morning, and part of me fears hitting the "unsubscribe" button wondering if it will end in my identity being stolen ...
Hit that button ... and ... snap ...
Holy Cannoli and Abra-Cadabra ...
You'll be turned into a Gremlin or
Freddie Bartholomew searching
for a piece of stale bread on a dark London street.
M reminded me, yesterday -- while we were driving and listening to a soft melody, of the kindnesses shown to her by my Mother during our first pregnancy. And, indeed, my Sainted Mither whom we both miss was a kind and caring -- if complex -- person who I suspect favored M over all her children. The mind ... even the Swiss Cheese mind of the Fourth Quarter ... is an associative machine. Give it a feeling-saturated image with which to resonate and it bounces about like a Meson in a Particle Accelerator to all sorts of other images related to that feeling. Two imagistic factoids wafted into my mind, immediately. Poof!
In the first, I recalled December 1956. My Father had come home with our first new Television set. I had been reading through the toy catalogues that would come in the Fall ... heady stuff in 1956 as we were all -- under the watchful eye of Dwight David and Tricky Dick, Adlai and Estes -- unwittingly awaiting the arrival of better times in which: cars would drive on their own; not just Dick Tracy would have a watch on his wrist; and all that glitters would be distributed from Trump Tower and the pyramids that would be filled with grain and not mummies. TV was great ... I could watch Elvis wriggle his hips and Gorgeous George wrestle Killer Kowalski and some other guy who kept pointing to his head, noting how smart he was. Cisco and Poncho. Arthur Godfrey and Kate Smith! ... Any case, I remembered, as well, that it was the next day that my Father was fired from his job and procured one 600 miles away. My parents were 37 and 38 when that happened ... kids ... younger than all of mine, today. Curious how I never considered how hard it must've been for my Mother to again be temporarily left as my Dad went off to fight a different kind of war ... an economic survival one. His Dad, during the Depression, would get on a pickup truck in Brooklyn each Sunday night and travel to Northeastern Pennsylvania for a workweek at a foundry ... only to return to Brooklyn on Friday.
The second memory was different. A little earlier. There was a guy who -- with a Shetland Pony -- would encourage kids on the streets of Brooklyn to don a cowboy hat and climb on board that Pony. He would take a picture and return somedays later to demand payment from Mothers for these pictures. I remembered the picture and that my Dad was upset that my Mom had been conned into buying it. Not angry, per se, but upset. I suppose $ was hard to come by in 1953 ... but who knew. There was always food on the table and my Mother, the kind lady who effectively adopted M when we got married in 1965, was always there.
Ah! I suppose scams have always been there ... from Jack and his Beans to Esau getting swindled out of his birthright for a pot-o-beans. And, still, I hold on to a wish for a Spam-Free Universe.
Fantasies for the Good, I suppose, die hard.
______________________________
* Funny. It was just yesterday that prior to beginning a public lecture I was responding to someone else's comparison between the ends of Abraham's and David's lives. I wondered rather cheekily if she was referring to the Biblical claims that Abraham -- after Olde Sarai died -- successfully and repeatedly got hot with a lady named K'turah (maybe Gen: 25 or 26) but David, poor Old David (somewhere in Kings I?) wasn't sufficiently warmed by another purportedly hot lady named Avishag the Shunamite. Think how much happier David might've been at the end with Cialis ... spending the end of his life in a claw-foot tub next to Avishag's? "Shoulda checked his Spam File, aye?"
** Hey, I can get ripped off right here on the internet. Why did my friend have to loose their passport and wallet in Venice?
