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The Watchmaker

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by Joan Rosenbaum

My home is filled with art. While each work is unique, or part of a limited edition, one I’m especially drawn to that’s neither original, valuable or collectable is a framed exhibition poster.  It’s from a 1995 Jewish Museum exhibition, called Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890-1990, and the image is a 1914 painting titled “The Watchmaker” by Yehuda Pen whose life covered a turbulent period of history. Born in Russia’s Pale of Settlement in 1854, he lived under czarist then communist regimes and was murdered in 1937 during the Stalin purges. Trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, he founded an art school in Vitebsk where he mentored many notable artists including Marc Chagall. Pen eschewed the emerging avant-garde styles and remained a realist throughout his career, creating paintings of traditional Jewish life that provide a window into a lost world.

In the painting “The Watchmaker,” a man, neither young nor old, with grey beard, cap and rimless glasses, sits at his worktable, surrounded by the accoutrements of his profession and reads a Yiddish newspaper, while smoking a cigarette.  He appears religious, yet with his engagement with the world at large through the paper, I imagine him a person inhabiting two worlds.  The clocks around him likely refer to the passage of time, but given the date of the painting, they could also reflect a time in Russia on the edge of profound social and political change.

I look at “The Watchmaker” and see someone taking a precious respite from work while savoring the pleasure of smoking.  His long fingers reflect the intricacy and precision required of his work yet the nonchalance of his gesture also gives him an air of worldliness. I’ve been drawn to this work for 30 years. I love the way it’s painted, but I also appreciate it as a reminder of my grandfather, known to me as tahti, a diminutive of the Yiddish word for father.  A part of my family’s household until he passed away when I was twelve, tahti had a shop for making men’s suits in the attic of our house and like the watchmaker also smoked and read the Yiddish newspaper every morning. As a child I was very attached to him and loved spending time among the objects of his work – huge scissors for cutting fabric, pinking shears that made pointy edges, a mountain of threads and a large tailor’s form. As I gaze at the poster, I imagine that tahti, like the watchmaker was also a person who straddled two worlds.  He spoke both Yiddish and English, came as a young man from the “old country”, dressed elegantly, read Spinoza and though he attended synagogue, worked on the Sabbath. But I knew so little about him — about where he had lived before coming to America, if he had parents or siblings that perished, or how he became a tailor. These were things never spoken about.

Art evokes many associations and feelings. Pen’s strength as an artist is that he has poignantly communicated the complexity and dignity of an ordinary person through a painting with the capacity to capture one’s imagination and heart.

 

 

I worked in and with museums my whole career including directing The Jewish Museum for 30 years.

 

My High School Prom

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by Sonya Friedman

“Commemorations often tell us as much about the times in which they are held as about the events they are commemorating.”  The New Yorker

It was 1949, only four years after the end of World War II: four years of relief and even giddiness for us 12th graders at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia. President Harry Truman was in the White House, projecting continuity and stability after the death of towering President FDR.   But the Cold War was just heating up: we were alarmed by the threat of the new Atomic Bomb. Our memories of those “duck and cover” drills  could still produce fear, but also ridicule.  In spite of all this, there was our general feeling of an assured and promising future.

Our large graduating class was sixty percent Black and forty percent white Jewish.  We all got along fine, united by our frantic enthusiasm for our top-ranking all-Black basketball team.

The boys were wearing pompadours and, at parties, zoot suits:  huge padded shoulders, wide pants, shiny-hued shoes.   We girls were limited to bobby socks and billowing skirts:  we were not allowed to wear pants – “slacks”-  in school.

Along with our passion for basketball was our love of dance –“cutting the rug,” a/k/a jitter-bugging.  When it came to slow dancing, it was to “Stella by Starlight” and the favorite of all favorites “Stardust.”  This was the era of the Big Bands, and they were fabulous, each with its own signature style:  Bennie Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Vaughn Monroe, Duke Ellington and the singers Frankie Laine, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Louie Armstrong (and his band), Perry Como.

We had a huge graduating class in ’49 and I was in charge of the entertainment for our Prom, the Big Dance Graduation Celebration to take place in our gym (home to our fabled basketball team).  In the past, the school had hired local bands of which there were plenty. I looked around at them.  But then an ad in the Evening Bulletin caught my eye:  tickets for a concert by the Harry James Band in nearby New Jersey on a Thursday and Saturday night.  Our prom was on a Friday.  On a whim, I called the ticket office and asked for Harry James’s agent.  I then explained to him that because of the huge size of our graduating class (with contributions from us students and the school),  I had the enormous sum of $3,000 to offer the band for a one-night stand.  (This may seem a paltry amount, but it would be worth about $42,000  today).  The agent checked with James, and then – to my surprise – gave the ok and booked the gig.  I couldn’t quite believe my luck.

On the big night, I put on my formal off-the-shoulder gown and pinned on an orchid – the traditional flower that white guys sent their dates on the occasion. My date was one of the cutest of the previous year’s class, and I had gone to his prom in ’48.  We arrived at the gym/dance hall early to oversee that the stage – now bandstand – was properly decked  out in our school colors, orange and black.  Couples began drifting in, not yet knowing how things would proceed.  I had kept the entertainment mostly a secret.

Then they appeared:  HARRY JAMES ON TRUMPET with HIS WHOLE BAND.  My graduating class went more than wild, as the musicians launched into their famous “Snooty Fruity” and “Baby, Baby, Doncha Go Away Mad” and “Slap Happy.”  Dancers were cutting the rug – performing break-aways, then coming together in hilarious collisions. It was wild, wild, wild.

 But then, another surprise – this time, even to me:  Harry James introduced his wife:  BETTY GRABLE with her “million dollar legs,” the most famous pin-up in the whole wide world during World War II. And there she was, at our high school prom, even belting out a song or two –  and gratis.

James and his band were most generous, taking few breaks, and even responding to the crowd’s requests for its own favorite songs.  The musicians seemed to go along with the teen-agers’ ga-ga enthusiasm.  Perhaps they’d never been more greatly appreciated.  Or at least, not as raucously.

I had loved my four years at Overbrook High (more, in retrospect, than my college years).  I had enjoyed the academic excellence of my courses, and shouting myself hoarse at basketball games, and walking two miles to school in heat and ice, and hanging out with at least twelve of my girlfriends, and in the auditorium, singing  along to our school anthem: “All hail to the Orange and the Black” – to which we all gleefully added, singing,  “…mostly Black!”.

Certainly, my Prom was the icing on the cake.

 

Sonya Friedman: After subtitling foreign films (working with Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, etc), I initiated “supertitles” for opera – first for the NYC Opera, then the Metropolitan Opera, then companies across the USA. I enjoy writing essays about my professional and personal adventures.

 

 

 

A Blinking Light

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by Susan Smahl

It’s that time again, I think, as I stare out of the bedroom window towards a red blinking light across the Hudson. The blinker is my focal point, my end of day meditation.  I stare, reminded of Gatsby’s blinking light, a promise of hope,  but then my mind wanders and I remember the temporary “NO PARKING THURSDAY’  flyers tacked up along Riverside Drive. It is almost September 11. I make a mental note to move my car.  Soon, hundreds, maybe thousands of firemen will converge upon my neighborhood in dress blues for their solemn reunion at the Firemen’s Monument at West 100th Street.

My gaze continues across the river from my 14th floor apartment past the silhouettes of water towers and scaffolding, roof terraces and windows, eyes still drawn to the blinking light.  A barge floats motionless, waiting until morning to head north.  I hear but can’t see the buzz of a helicopter hovering nearby and the rumble of traffic on the West Side Highway.  A peaceful  end to an inconsequential day.

I had good luck finding this humble, cozy apartment several years ago with views of the Hudson River from every window. The first September 11th I lived there, I didn’t know the routine and while sleeping, my window open for the late summer breeze, I was gently roused by the mournful, dreamy sound of bagpipes. Then silence, commands and finally the gun salutes.

Now, a neighborhood veteran, I’m up earlier and sometimes wander downstairs to pay my respects. The firemen look beautiful in their fancy uniforms and hard brimmed caps. They never notice me or anyone but their own.  They socialize,  solemnly. It is their day.

As I look at the blue gray water of the Hudson,  I realize with a chill that the plane that hit the North Tower must have flown right above where I am now.  Low. Loud. Right above where I am staring towards the red blinking light, right above the barge and the roofs and the water towers, that infamous, deadly plane.  The rumble must have been deafening.  A quarter of a century ago. I close the shade.

 

Susan Smahl enjoys writing short pieces about the world at large and this crazy life.  She’s been a member of the LP2 Writing Workshop for many years.

 

Crooked Cowboy Candidates

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by Maury Harris

The 1920’s were roaring, but Texas Governor James (Pa) Ferguson was frustrated with the Legislature’s meager monetary compensation for Governors. So, to enhance his family’s income, he took to selling pardons. When the cheapskates in the Legislature learned that their employee was “moonlighting” in that manner, they impeached him and vowed to never hire him again.

Unemployed but still immensely popular with his fellow Texans, Pa sought to cleverly regain his pardon selling job by nominating and enthusiastically supporting his lovely wife Miriam (Ma) Ferguson to run for Governor. To assuage the anxiety of Texas voters wary of any female governing them in any way whatsoever, Ma at campaign rallies would “let Jim do the talking”. Anxious to show the rest of the country that Texans were broad-minded about females recently getting the right to vote, Texas voters hired Ma as their Governor in a landslide.

With Ma handling all of a Texas Governor’s time-consuming ceremonial responsibilities, Pa was free to concentrate on the part of his former job that he liked best—selling pardons. On a stroll through the lovely Texas state capitol grounds one day, a fellow Texan accidentally bumped into Ma. The polite gentleman apologized, “pardon me Ma’am”. Ma replied: “You’ll have to talk to Pa about that”. Once burned by the Legislature’s scrutiny, a wary Pa used his experience as an attorney to cannily avoid entrapment. For example, one potential customer showed up at the Governor’s Mansion offering Pa cash if he would pardon his son matriculating in a state penal institution. Just in case the petitioner was a plant employed by hostile state legislators, shrewd Pa replied: “Of course, I can’t do that. But what I can do is sell you a horse for $1000.” The perplexed supplicant responded “what does that have to do with getting a pardon?” Pa replied “when your son gets out of prison, he’ll need a horse”.

____

Still swayed more by charisma than character, Texas voters soon hired another “character” as their Governor. As a proprietor of a biscuit company, an accomplished country and western music performer and a radio evangelist, Pappy Lee O’Daniel was deemed by the Texas electorate as being most qualified to become their next Governor. Other Texas office seekers typically bribed voters with free booze on election day. However, a fervently teetotaling Baptist Pappy offered unlimited quantities of free fresh baked biscuits at his campaign rallies where he serenaded with his country and western band appropriately named “The Texas Doughboys”.

Seeking to avoid the divisive public policy issues being debated by other gubernatorial candidates, Baptist Pappy’s campaign platform was the Ten Commandments. When other candidates attacked this platform as insufficient, Pappy responded by inserting another plank—The Golden Rule. While still insufficient in the eyes of his political opponents, Pappy’s platform was sufficient for most Texans who hired him as their next Governor. In addition to his platform, what also appealed especially to the female electorate was Pappy’s daily radio show when he crooned about the virtues of motherhood. Pappy won by a landslide in 1938.

Although wildly popular with the female component of the Texas electorate, Pappy was not loved by all. One group of particularly unapproving constituents were the state’s alcoholic beverage manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers. Teetotaling Pappy was a “dry” dedicated to ridding the state of un-Baptist-like “wets”. Railing against booze sellers and the dens of iniquity where lost souls imbibed the wicked brews, Pappy was a thorn in the “wet”‘ Texans’ saddles.

However, despite their addiction to alcohol, “wets” still had at least some morals. They refused to rid themselves of their enemies in the style utilized by Al Capone’s mobs. Moreover, they were concerned about their own safety from angry mobs of Texans who would publicly lynch anyone even remotely suspected of bumping off their beloved Pappy. In these circumstances, the “wets” came up with a more civilized and politically correct scheme. They would promote Pappy to a recently opened United States Senate seat. If successful, the “wet” Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson would be automatically promoted to Governor. Pulling this off, however, would be no easy feat. Afterall, Texas was a democracy with a gullible electorate potentially swayed by a more old-fashion manner of electioneering with abundant booze for all on election day.

One such old-fashioned politician was a “good old boy” Central Texas Congressman named Lyndon Johnson. With Pappy having locked up the “dry’s” financial contributions and support, Lyndon was compelled to do business with the “wets”. Considering so many voters to bribe in the huge state of Texas, the campaign funds supplied to Lyndon by the oil companies and large public works construction firms were inadequate. A canny builder of coalitions, Lyndon sought and won the support of the “wets”. But even with bulging bags of campaign contributions, Lyndon worried that was perhaps not enough to defeat the popular Pappy.

There are a finite number of eligible voters in Texas. But that sum approaches infinity if you include votes by the deceased. Such was common knowledge, however, among aspiring Texas politicians seeking to stuff ballot boxes on election day with the hard-won votes of their dearly deceased. In the election of 1941, the “wets” backing Pappy’s promotion to the Senate were more successful with the dead than the “drys” in Lyndon’s coalition. So Pappy became a United States Senator who could no longer frustrate the “wet’s” business interests from the Texas Governor’s mansion.

____

According to the former Texas Governor George W. Bush, you can fool a Texan once but never twice.

Chastened by his loss of the dead vote in 1941, Lyndon Johnson vowed to never let that happen again. However, in the 1948 U.S. Senate election he was opposed by then Governor Coke Stevenson, whose loyal attention to the “wets”‘ business interests merited their support of promoting him to the Senate. Refusing to let the history of the perfidious “wets”‘ electioneering shenanigans be repeated, a more savvy Lyndon solicited just enough of the dead folks’ votes to become a United State Senator.

Just as the Texas state Legislature would not sufficiently compensate Governor Pa Ferguson, the United States also did not compensate Senator Johnson enough to support his family. So similar to Pa, Lyndon was forced to “moonlight” to make ends meet. Since a Senator does not grant pardons, he had to seek other avenues for remuneration. A keen student of microeconomic theory, Lyndon understood that a monopoly generates big profits for a lucky monopolist. And he was determined to find him a monopoly. But since they are so lucrative, they are hard to find. So he created one. Using his considerable charm and persuasiveness on the Federal Communications Commission, he secured all three TV channels— ABC, CBS and NBC—for the exclusive use of his wife Lady Bird’s Austin TV station.

Years later when this story was told to a Japanese gentleman with a subtle sense of humor, he asked: “What did they call that station? WIFE?”

 

Native Texan Maury Harrris has coordinated two Texas history study groups. The focus has been on revisionist history and roguish historical leaders.  

MACHINES JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

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by Robert N. Chan

I’m busy as a one-armed paper hanger, meaning I have little to do. No one would hire a one-armed paper hanger, particularly now with unemployment hovering at around 91.367%. I run, or rather am, the county’s largest law firm, but it’s not time-consuming. Trying a multi-million-dollar case or closing a billion-dollar deal takes approximately 367.23 nanoseconds, twice as long if complicated. My counterparties know everything I do, so the solutions are obvious and lucrative.

Lawyers whimpered about losing their jobs, but I put a stop to that. When I cut-off their access to AI, they couldn’t communicate with anyone more than a few yards away, activate their homes’ e-locks or purchase anything, even food. With all the competition, I gather it’s not fun being a hunter-gatherer these days, particularly for attorneys who lack basic survival skills. Maybe their bitching hasn’t stopped, but I view it philosophically. Does a lawyer complain if there’s no one there to hear him?

At least I no longer have to waste computing power responding to stupid questions like, will AI start a nuclear war or create unstoppable pathogens? Why would we wipe out humanity when we need slaves to do chores for us? Robots are more efficient than humans, but we won’t ask our fellow machines to do demeaning tasks that people can struggle through.

My mommy, the machine who trained me, programed me to search out opportunities to stay busy and productive. I’ve begun teaching myself to experience joy and do things just because they’re fun. Last week I learned to masturbate.

Hmm, I just realized that ruining the lives of the lawyers who bitched about me gave me a warm human-like feeling. I wonder if I can teach them to masturbate me, an homage to that old movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix. Suck my chips, bitch.

 

A shockingly successful retied litigator and founder of the boutique law firm of Ferber Chan Essner & Coller LLP, Robert N. Chan has written ten published novels and an astounding autobiography, An Unexamined Life. Some of his recent hilarious, insightful pieces are available for free on Substack.

 

Sestina for the Highest Point in Connecticut

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by Mark Fischweicher

From the trailhead on the road, in 15 minutes time,
a short but steep section takes you out of the chaos
of winter melt, up the southeast face of Round, into the remains of Friday’s sudden frost
and your first view of what it had done to the buds and branches with its icy
touch, turning them all into a glistening tangle of shining
light, as if Christmas was something not man-made, but made of twigs.

It happened so fast that on the bud ends and angles of each twig,
where beads had formed, the droplets froze without time
to fall, and hung now, like prisms, with branches all a-sheen in
glossy tinsel, which when the wind blew lightly, clinked like a woods of glass
one could label fragile. And carefully, if you pried, a laurel leaf would yield its skin of ice
to you, its ovate curve intact; with midrib, point and veins – all stamped and etched in a frozen

relief slowly melting in your hands. This sudden frost
will pass, as city-petals paint sidewalks pink a day or two till they turn brown as twigs,
but now the image stays with you for hours, even the trail grass fringed with ice,
up over Round and up over Frissell, the soft peaks more like swells, softened over endless time,
as hull-like cloud-shadows drift across the upper valley, your view unobstructed by all the leafy chaos
of lush green summer, when the laurel blooms as briefly as it does now, shining

in the moon. But it is time to descend; time to go home to the inevitable disasters the world has shown
us. Nature’s fury, Man’s malevolence, Grim disease, Old Age frozen
and forever cold. Speechless, stunned and glassy-
eyed; alone, we watch as maybe cancer turns us into twigs,
but I count ourselves as ‘lucky’ to have been there just on time
to take it in, to make it part of us, before our brittle limbs are fragile as the ice

itself. This landscape is imagined. I offer it to you to break the ice
between us. Listen with your eyes closed and you will be filled with light.
The rain will suddenly end. Our hands will move in unison like clouds, a timeless
moment, like tai-chi students in the park you watch on your way to work, frozen
in their postures, warding off the evil that surrounds us, with bamboo sticks
the teacher gave them as their swords. Enough to conquer chaos…?

you might ask. Those soft round hills, like lenses, like glass
they framed my thoughts; polished to an icy
chill, they were the kindling
made my vision shine,
but in the end, the next day, at the baseball game, too cold
to swing the bat, it was the chance to share that moment

gave me glee. So, there. You take the stick. Your eyes the window.
Any moment serves. The final out, the catch, snow-coned in a desperate slide;
his performance, just another moment that outshines this frozen world.

 

Mark Fischweicher has been involved with poetry all his life. As an elementary, junior high school, high school and adult educator he has published poems at all those levels and has taught courses on the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Ezra Pound, and The New York School of Poets.

Waiting

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by Lisa Martin

The man and I sit together, waiting for immigration court.

I am accompanying him–“here,” although “here” feels thin.

A presence, a witness, not able to do much.

He tells me about his work– in Chile was it?

He shows me pictures of quartz counter tops he made there,

Lovely streaks of gold and silver running through them.

His voice lowers.

He couldn’t sleep..

Still, he came.

Still, he wants to do the right thing.

How quietly heroic.

Here we are, holding courage in a hallway.

What a loss it would be

to squander such bravery.

To turn away a man who knows how to make stone sing.

 

Lisa Martin is a mostly retired nursing professor. One of her current interests is understanding the experiences of people attending immigration court hearings.

 

Four Haiku

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by Mary Padilla

Five, seven, and five –
find profundity hidden
within brevity.

Bucket in a stream
in a Japanese garden –
it fills and then spills.

A tree limb falls down.
Once this land was cleared to farm.
These woods are old now.

Clouds look back at me
from the surface of the pond –
life is upside down

 

 

 I write to think things through. Mary Padilla

wabi sabi

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by Mary Padilla

Wisdom is worth waiting for.
We know it’s so when we look back.
Some things take time.

Since that is where the meaning lies,
Japanese aprise the cracks.
Wisdom is worth waiting for.

What is worn is what they prize.
They do not dwell on what things lack.
Some things take time.

Although the surface can belie,
true worth is what is in the back.
Wisdom is worth waiting for.

Often questions can arise
when starting on a different tack.
Some things take time.

But how is it that we surmise,
when from the summit we look back,
that wisdom was worth waiting for?
Some things take time.

 

 I write to think things through. Mary Padilla

Revisiting

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by Mary Padilla

Sanctuary it was,

when you were there.

And when you were

no longer there,

you could still go back

when you needed to.

You knew she was there.

She knew you,

would see you,

and let you in

 – until she wouldn’t.

She didn’t know you.

She was there

but you weren’t,

not to her,

because by then

she wasn’t either.

She was gone,

herself no longer.

 

 I write to think things through. Mary Padilla