What if story -- Aladin revisited

The One Minute Writer (see side bar) gives daily prompts. On Friday writers are invited to do a bit of flash fiction from the prompt.  Last Friday's prompt as "If ... then..." and I was named the Friday winner with this bit little version of, what else -- yes, you can guess from the picture.  (do prefer to visualize my genie with a blue turban).

If I went to the big Saturday flea market and found the perfect little brass lamp for the hallway table, then a perfect little lamp shade and came home and polished the lamp ... and when it was beautiful, then -- poof! -- a genie with a blue turban and handlebar moustache was bowing before me, then he might say, "Your wish is my command."

"Oh, gee," I'd say, "Any wish?"
"Within reason." he'd say.
"Ten million dollars?"
"Why not a hundred, or five hundred million?"
I'm not a selfish person so I took a moment to think. "What if I ask you to cure cancer?"
He'd shake his head, (I imagine in this fantasy we have going here.) "What kind of cancer? There are many and some have different causes and cures."
"I admit that's a bit big," I'd say. "And I suppose you can't stop global warming."
He'd laughed. And not a pretty laugh either.
I'd pause and remember once I heard someone say, if she had one wish ...so I'd asked what she asked, "Could you turn every gun in the world into a banana and the bombs into bunches of bananas?"
He actually staggered back a couple of steps and just stared at me in utter disbelief.
Finally he said, very softly, "I'm just one genie. Now if you want me to save the mountain gorillas or the whales, I could try. But I don't know how I'd do it. I mean it's a complicated, difficult world out there."
I realized there was not point in asking for a stop to global warming, even if there were an army of genies, it's probably too big a problem

I nodded. Yes, even genies have their limits. 'Okay," I finally said. "Make it five hundred million after taxes."
"After taxes?" he asked weakly. "The genie business isn't what it used to be. But you've got it." With that he disappeared and I plugged in my sweet little lamp. I wouldn't be polishing it again for a long, long time.

A Terrible Day

Often I scan the news and let it roll over me. I add the daily count of deaths in the Middle East, be it Syria, Egypt, Iraq or elsewhere to my cringe-reaction. Everyone of those deaths was a  person fighting for what he or she believed ... well, not every one, some were by standers, people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (as when a bomb went off  in a market place), all had mothers, fathers, loved or loving ones who were shocked into grief.  It's hard for me to think about it. 

I read about trials and verdicts, about police brutality and various kinds of injustice in our country. My cringe reaction works a little harder -- so much of what I think we believe is not what our country does, not how our elected officials and justice system are supposed to work. 

While I am cringing, an American woman who I've come to know through the internet, someone with whom I share many interests and values, who lives in Sweden -- a country with a different political attitude -- is aware and not self-defensively cringing.  She is feeling and reacting to these same headlines.  Arlene Corwin writes poetry like many of us drink coffee -- daily, satisfying a need she has to express herself and to help herself face the world as it is. 

A long introduction to a moving poem she has given me permission to print here:

This Is A Terrible Day.

This is a terrible day.

Outrageous day.

Over thirteen hundred murdered:

Women,

Men

And children

In

A gas

Attack in Syria

Whose rulers say “Not us!”

Then there’s Bradley Manning

Who leaked

Military secrets like:

“let’s get ‘em, kill ‘em all” the …

Or words to that effect. 

For that

He’ll suffer thirty-five years

In a prison. Here

In Sweden he’d have got

Six months, a cell phone, and a lot

Of loving letters.

Speaking of which,

Swedish citizens are going sick;

Taking billions from the taxes

To recover (or do something)

From the new bipolarist depressions ups and downs;

Stress related illnesses that do not end in ouch.

Taxes taken

From the healthy watching TV on the couch

To pay the weakened on a couch

Without a cure in sight.

But worst is loss of life.

The Mozarts, Rembrandts, who’d have been

Now dead without a fight. 

This is a terrifying day.

This Is A Terrible Day 8.22.2013

Older Poets

Poets are a special group at the Academy for Lifelong Learning.  Some twenty-five or so enroll in the "So You Want to be a Poet" each semester. They are joined, on an ad hoc basis, by quite a few others who have taken the course over the years and feel they are a part of the group.  They also do not stop with the semester's end but have three "rump sessions" during the summer at class members' homes. The poets are among the more senior students at ALL, average age is probably a bit over 70.

The coordinator of the class, Peter Saunders, decided at retirement age (after a life in business) to get a Ph.D. in poetry and then to teach seniors, which he has been doing for 19 years.  He is a quiet, gentle soul and well loved by students who are never criticized and always encouraged. He put together an anthology about 6 years ago called Silent No More with poems by thirty or so of his students. It was aptly named. A few of the poets speak of feeling empowered in later years to write about things they only thought about writing before, and writing in verse. The book was published by a press in Provincetown, Cape Cod and took all these years to come to fruition. In the meantime a percentage of those represented have died, and the accompanying photos of those who remain look wonderfully young.

The group met yesterday on the porch of a long time member. 15 people drove 10 to 25 miles to be a part of the group on a very beautiful summer day when they might have chosen any sort of summer activity. All brought poems, read them and shared copies with everyone else. Much catching up with absent members and  much concern about those who have in the last several months weathered one or another physical malady. I am not a spring chicken and was feeling a bit creaky myself having pulled something in my back causing stiffness and some pain. (Not serious enough in that crowd to merit mention.) I have rarely felt myself  so much surrounded by older people.

These were not stereotypical older people.  All are active, all are eager to put their thoughts and feelings in words and pleased to be able to share them with a sympathetic audience. The feeling was one of great warmth and concern but also of the pleasure of not being silent, of  having found an outlet for things that they care about, be it a new granddaughter, abundant dogwood trees, the old habit of franks and baked beans for Saturday dinner, a child's dismay at not being allowed to go to a funeral of an uncle, or the fragility of age. For all of us two hours on a porch with friends, gossip, sharing our poetry, looking at the Cape Cod canal at the end of the street was the best way we could spent an August afternoon.

Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchette is perfect as a very lost woman in Woody Allen's new movie.  Critics are talking about her similarity to Tennessee Wiliams' Blanche du Bois of Streetcar Named Desire and there are strong parallels: The emotionlly fragile, suddenly out of money, woman who throws herself on the kindness of her very working class sister with the equally working class boy friend and apartment.  This is Woody Allen with a more meaningful story than usual.

We get the back story of Jasmine's past life and recent emotional problems, as we watch her about to ruin, (for the second time) her sister's life. As usual in movies, it is a little too easy to meet eligible men at parties but the story has to move along.  The story is more layered than expected, there are emotional and story line bombshells dropped into the story, the final flashback is the most painful.  There is no slobby Stanley in this story; the working class people are admirable if sometimes ill mannered.  I did not expect the complexity of finding myself sympathizing with Jasmine while abhoring her values and most of her actions -- that's proof of good acting and directing.

The Black Out of 2003

I'm reminded that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the big northeast blackout.  Yes, I was in it -- sort of.  At that time in my life I spent most weekends in the Catskillls and had arrived in the afternoon  as usual. My friend's house was between Saugerites and Woodstock. Weekends were usually very relaxed. We went to a cafe in town for an early dinner and were told by a waiter who was listening to a kitchen radio that New York City had a blackout. The  so-called "rolling black out" had not reached upstate to Albany where the radio station was. The restaurant had electricity, air conditioning and light. We were glad to be where we were. 

Not long after we got back to the house, however, the electricity went out.  Dusk was falling. We sat for a couple hours on the back porch watching night fall. It was hot in NYC but comfortable there. The house did not have air conditioning and didn't need it.  We assumed the lights would be back on soon or at least by morning. Of course we couldn't turn on the TV to get news and didn't care enough to think about the car radio -- which, in reality, would not have had a signal either.  We knew we were in an interim in our lives -- two older people who had spent time together 25 years ago and had come back together once more.  We were comfortable and easy together and old enough and sensible enough not to be particularly vexed by the outage.  We made a point of not opening the refrigerator and did not take showers because the water heater would be off.  Otherwise we were not greatly inconvenienced.

Little did I know that my friend, Maggie, would, in the following week, relate graphically her ordeal in the city.  She was on the subway, going from her midtown job to her apartment in Inwood at the north end of Manhattan. The train stopped just after the Lincoln Center stop. Eventually trainmen lead the passengers out of the train and down the tunnel until they could exit. But how was she to get 110 blocks north?  She began walking up Broadway, hoping to get a bus.  But as any New Yorker knows, buses become impossibly packed the moment there is a public transportation problem. She managed to squeeze onto something eventually and get to about 115th street. She still had 25 blocks to go.  I think I would have started walking and decided to take my chances going through some if-fy sections while watching for a taxi. Although, of course, taxis with any space at all were not to be had. I really can't remember how she traversed her final blocks, I know it was around midnight before she got there. 

When there are big  public traumas like that, everyone has a story. Except it seemed I had no story at all.  I did not exactly "miss" the great  power outage but it seems I was in the right place at the right time.  I've been doing a lot of pondering because that lovely period of my life ended a couple of years later (sad but not entirely a bad thing for many reasons). The man died this spring and has been on my mind for the last few months. It's not a matter of closure (that selfish new age-y concept). It's a matter of being glad for the times we had that were good and knowing that all the other, much larger parts of our lives, were the meat and that was gravy -- homey metaphor, a finer, more literary one does not come to mind.

Good man wins good prize

One of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry, has just been awarded the Dayton Peace Prize.  Berry is an septagenarien who has been writng poems and stories for a very long time.  He says:

"We are violent in our use of land. ...The most direct way, which is invariably the most violent way, to get what we want is the accepted way."
In his writings, he has pointed to strip-mining of mountaintops for coal, clearing forests for timber and putting chemicals into the soil for agriculture. He took part in a 2011 sit-in at the Kentucky governor's office in protest of strip-mining.

"As a poet and fiction writer, my goal was to write a good poem and tell a good story. That's complex enough. A lot of knowledge, a lot of study, a lot of work goes into that, I have as a storyteller, and somewhat as a poet, been stuck with the story of the decline of rural life in all its aspects during my lifetime"  He is a fine writer and a very wise man. He deserves this honor.

To the Vineyard by water

Until now I have not experienced being on the water in a powerboat and actually going somewhere for lunch.  Saturday I went with two couples I knew two "lives" ago from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard in a nice size powerboat.  We had a perfect day for the trip: bright sun but not too hot, some breeze (besides the breeze we made), sparkling water, just enough clouds to make the sky interesting. The water was calm.

On such a Saturday the area between the Cape and the island is busy. We saw two sailboat races lining up. Many other pleasure boats of all sizes were out but, of course, there was plenty of room.  It took a bit more than an hour; we were lucky to find a slip in which to tie up and then we had about an hour to wander the narrow old streets, dense with old trees and lush plantings, full of white clapboard houses, many with shops and galleries and restaurant and inns in them.  Of course we could see only a tiny bit of the town -- and the island is actually fairly sizable with other towns, of course. The Obamas had either come or were about to arrive -- someone said he saw Air Force One in the air but that could have been untrue or meaningless. We figured they would have to land at Otis Air Force Base  on the Cape and be helicoptered to the Vineyard.

We found a busy harbor front seafood restaurant for lunch,  and an even more convenient ice cream shop almost directly in front of where the boat was.  It was a relaxed day.  The two couples were long time close friends; I had been especially friendly with one of the women and more an acquaintance with the other (who lives not far from me her--but spends about 7 months of the year in Florida--but whom I almost never see--we share an interest in quilting).  It was kind of them to invite me to come and I enjoyed it. I feel I have tucked a somewhat quintessential experience into my memory.