Shining when the light is gone.
May you ever be the star
Of mellow drama all life long.
Your loving aunt and uncle.
“But a good cigar is a smoke”
This hoary joke
Is worth a smile, perhaps a chuckle,
Medicine for those who knuckle
Under to their pumping glands
(The covert leers, the trembling hands)—
Not females, no: testosterone,
The liquor that unmixed, alone,
Taken straight, not on the rocks,
Deadens brains and rouses libidinous desires.
More avidly I puff my stogy;
I’m lecherous, a raw old fogy.
Ah, whatever might have been,
I’m now a senior citizen,
With glabrous pate and sagging skin.
Too late, alas, to live in sin.
Thank Jove, I say, for senile vice;
It’s not exciting, but it’s nice.
Cigars and such, as Freud well knew,
Keep one going, see one through.
And when at last my hormones cease,
I’ll puff away my life in peace.
How to Read a Page
Like Henry Ford, who mined the Mesabi,
Ore for River Rouge.
The great plant smoked and fumed and clanked.
Ore in one end,
And out the other, Model A’s.
Like Evel Knievel, gunning his bike,
Metallic thunder down the track,
Up the ramp, over the abyss.
Kerthump! the hind wheel hits the dirt.
Through a cloud of dust and exhaust,
The rider takes his bow.
Like a hawk circling high,
But tighter, tighter, above the rabbit, crouched and trembling;
Then the plunge, the miss;
Wings pulsing, the struggle upward;
The lazy glide on the thermals;
Then circling high in tighter spirals.
The plunge.
Like Grandpa strolling in the park,
Pausing now and then to feel the breeze,
Waiting for the child totteringly to catch up;
Then, hand in hand, onward,
Both silent in the swish of fallen leaves.
Hot chocolate at a sunny table
In the stand beside the lake.
Like Uncle Jim, whose story was the telling,
On the porch at gloaming.
III. Academy Awards
1. Chicken Cacciatore
Professor J. Melongaster Druse had married badly. In fact, his wife was a bowler. Every Wednesday she donned her crimson polyester shirt (blazoned in gold on the back with “Happy’s Hamburger Haven,” her team’s sponsor), lugged her ball and shoes (in a tooled leather bag) to the ungainly red Buick parked in the driveway of the Druse residence, and made her lumbering way to the lanes.
Druse had watched his neighbor, Cynthia Golden, depart for her sets at the Newport Racquet Club, golden Cynthia in her tennis whites (the decorously provocative short skirt revealing just a callipygian glimpse beneath the lacy line of immaculate panties), skipping to her Mercedes convertible, waving gaily at her neighbors, and gliding off for a morning of sociable recreation, followed, no doubt, by lunch at the club.
Tanned, manicured, and perfumed, fastidious, meticulous, and chic, lithe graceful and girlish, Cynthia was overtaking middle age with purring, dignified equanimity, and when Mel Druse saw her, he warmed, not with lust, but with envy of Dr. Greg Golden, who had not only Cynthia, but also the cachet of being an enormously successful neurosurgeon (tooling about in a silver Porsche with the personalized license plate “Brain 1”). Inevitably, Greg was imperially slim and crowned with a glorious, wavy, carefully tended silver mane. Mel, of course, was short, pudgy, and bald. Greg and Cynthia were, naturally, the social lions of the neighborhood, much sought after as guests; the annual Halloween brunch at the Goldens’ was the neighborhood’s most festive and eagerly awaited occasion. Whether hosting or guesting, Greg and Cynthia were unfailingly considerate and witty, paying alert attention during conversations, listening patiently to accounts of lawns, pool filter systems, golf games, and children gone awry or aright.
In short, Greg and Cynthia Golden were everything that residents of their very upper-middle-class neighborhood ought to be. Greg even played bassoon in the Orange County Doctor’s Symphony, and Cynthia was, as might be expected, an active member of the Museum of Art board.
All of this glowing perfection gnawed persistently at Mel’s peace of mind. So much glamour and romance created insuperable odds against a literary scholar married to a bowler. Who, after all, would not snicker if Mel recounted his adventures in putting together his book on the fop in Restoration drama: poking about dusty libraries and pecking out ideas on a Dell laptop hardly compared with the tense hum and beepbeepbeeping of the operating room; being mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement hardly ranked, among the laity, with being featured in the “Modern Living” section of the Sunday paper, as the Goldens had been. And then there was the vibrant tennis player versus the bowler.
The neighborhood was eclectically expensive, Elizabethan bungalows elbow to elbow with French chateaux, and ranch styles rambling about oversize yards, with split rail fences and wagon wheel motifs. Palm trees and pines cohabited peacefully, but had not gone quite so far as miscegenation.
It was a residential area in which the few churches resembled medical complexes, the medical complexes looked like groupings of expensive cottages, the lawns were as uniformly pruned and verdant as Astro Turf.
The dogs were standard poodles, Irish wolfhounds, Weimaraners, and Dobermans; the cars were Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars, and Porsches. (One neighbor who drove a Rolls Royce was the object of general scorn. Such conspicuous
