Her Dream

Talked with my mother on the phone the other night.
She's nearly 86
and much of her conversation is about her arthritis
all the pills she has to take
and what it's like to be old.
"It's no picnic growing old," is her refrain.
She knows her time is short.
She's healthier than most
at her age
but still
she's almost 86.
Last time we spoke she said,
"I can't believe I'm this old already.
My whole life..all those years...it's like it wasn't even real.
It passed like a dream."
Yes.
A long dream.
In which she grew up hungry, in a country town in Depression Germany.
Then Hitler came, and her father took a job in Munich
and her family lived in a cold water flat.
Still poor, but no longer hungry.
And her mother, short-changed and angry at life, beat her and her brothers
and screamed at her father while he read his paper.
That silent man who cut his own Christmas trees
spending long hours trimming them to perfection.
When he got fed up he stood
and belted the old woman
and that shut her up for a while.
But then he was taken by the war
an old man before his time, aged by toil and sorrow
sent to fight the Russians.
My mother said goodbye to him
and he never came back.
He froze to death in Siberia.
And by that time
my mother was a waitress
at the American airbase in Munich
ladling gravy over mashed potatoes
for the officers and NCOs
and reading American magazines
to learn English.
She came home one day and her mother knocked her across the room
for wearing lipstick.
I would like to know what she did when my mother came home pregnant
by one of the NCOs.
She followed him
with her young daughter
to the U.S.A. on an ancient ocean liner
where they were seasick for a week.
And he skipped out on the both of them
leaving her no choice but to try to make it here.
She was a typist for some years
at an insane asylum
where the smell of the food they cooked for the patients
hung thick and foul in the air
sickening her.  She could never eat her lunch there.
At night she sold dresses at a department store.
She knew how to survive
But she didn't know how to love
and so she had endless troubles
with her daughter.
There were some men
but they didn't stick around
and while my mother blames them
she's no picnic, to be honest
with her bad temper and
always criticizing
and always negative
so she may have driven them away.
I wasn't there, but my sister was.
She can tell you.
Then she met my father at the Roseland ballroom
he was eighteen years older than she
charming, handsome
a New York City Jew
flat broke
and completely without ambition.
He was looking for a woman to take care of him.
A man from another time.
A madman, really;
delusional, and with an explosive temper
that matched hers.
It wouldn't have lasted but then I came along
an accident, I'm sure.
So she stayed
and like most women
hoped she could change him.
But she couldn't.
Nor could she change herself.
Fifteen years of hell followed
until she finally left him.
We lived in two small rooms for a while after that.
My sister was in and out of our lives like an infrequent tide.
My mother found a steady job
at a major corporation
just office work
but it paid enough
for her to continue to return to Germany
every few years.
Not for vacation
but to mourn
what she left behind
and to look for it
even though
it was no longer there.
She stayed at the company
surviving waves of layoffs and pay cuts
until they finally let her go
at age 79.
Over the years, grandchildren came.
One by my sister.
Two by me.
She and I had our own troubles
and both of us
have failed at life
at least as far as making a living is concerned.
And at relationships, too.
My mother is mad at me
for leaving them too soon
and at my sister
for staying in them when she ought to leave.
And as such, we are great disappointments.
And now, at nearly 86,
my mother lives in a one bedroom apartment
in a low-income apartment building
open only to senior citizens.
It's a nice place, though.  Fairly new, and clean
and in a nice neighborhood.
She drives a seventeen year old car
with less than sixty thousand miles on it.
She doesn't go places.
She has a little money
in a retirement account.  All that's left
after helping to support me
through several years of being unemployed.
And that is the sum total of her life.
Her life
that passed like a dream.
She didn't tell me, though,
whether she thought it was a good dream
or a bad dream.
I'm not going to ask her.
But I do hope
that her Eternal Dream
is kinder.

Dnepropetrovsk

There's a guy at work
A tech guy, in my group
big pot belly
squinty little eyes with dark circles
and those sneaker shoes that old guys wear
although he's probably
only a few years older than me.
They're comfortable, I suppose.
He's a nice guy.
Ukranian.
Not Russian.
There's a difference.
Especially
if you're the Ukranian.
So I asked this guy
where in Ukraine
(not THE Ukraine--just Ukraine)
was he from?
And in his round and rolling
thick Ukranian accent he said,
oh, someplace you never heard of with a strange name.
And I said, I bet I have.
You're from Dnepropetrovsk.
And he said, yes, yes I am.
And I said, sure, it's on the sharp bend of the Dnepr.
I know my geography: Ukraine, Dnepr, the Crimea,
the difference between Eastern and Western Galicia
and how they lie along the Carpathians.
(the Carpathians are a mountain range running approximately from Romania to Poland)
We talked a bit.  Or, I did.  About the girlfriend I once had
whose father came from Galicia.  And a high school friend who married
a Ukie girl
whose family came from Kiev.
And my old man
he was a Jew
and his family came from Slutsk, southeast of Minsk
which today is Belarus
but once was known as White Russia
as it was
when they fled
the pogroms around 1905.
My old man was born in New York City
but his brothers
and his sister
were born in the Old Country
as he liked to call it.
The Ukie guy had work to do, he said
and smiled and walked away.
Leaving me
with my spreadsheets
and my telephone
and a list of customers
I had to call.
And then it hit me.
I knew where Dnepropetrovsk was.
That was exceptional
as was the fact
that I even knew
it existed.
What was I doing here?
Or at the other places
all basically the same
that came before.
For twenty years
with my spreadsheets
and my telephone
and my list of customers
that I had to call.
I should be in the State Department
or at a Think Tank
or best of all
a professor at some University
a Doctorate tacked to the the wall of my office
and a hot little Poli Sci grad student
some immigrant Ukie blondie
tall, leggy,
grading my papers for me
in the afternoons
and mixing my drinks
and twisting my sheets
at night.
One pays dearly
for playing it safe.
One dies
slowly
living beneath
one's potential.
There was a moment of silence, then
for my passing
that only I
participated in.
Then I opened up
the next spreadsheet.
Dnepropetrovsk.
It's on the sharp bend
of the Dnepr.

Good News

You told me
I would never find anyone like you
ever again.
Best news I've heard
in a long time.

Cubes

Everything good
always ends.
Like the drinks I pour
in reminiscence.
Fleeting pleasure
tasted
swallowed
and drained.
Gone.
Nothing left
but memories
discarded
like the shrunken cubes of ice
I dump in the drain
melting
and soon gone.
I can pour another drink
but I know
how it will end.

Blue Smoke

I inhale you
and relish
the brief burning
but
like a long drag on a cigarette
I can't hold you in
you won't let me
I exhale
you're blue smoke
playing halo games around my head
then
you're gone

When He Comes

When He comes to take you
in his ice cold hands
pray
that he takes you
in a merciful instant
leaving you no time
to mourn
the years
days
hours
minutes
you squandered
the chances
you never took
and the love
you kept locked
in your heart.
Pray that He's quick
delivering you to Oblivion
and spares you
from mourning
yourself.

Passive Agressive

You told me
not to pin it all
on you.
I suppose you could find fault
in my silent endurance
of your abuse.
You hate that, don't you?