“But what about the grub?” Would the maestro hailing from Southern Italy have a predilection? A bias?
Wasn’t he into the Monteverdi Donizetti Rossini Verdi permutations & scores? Hearing the great Caruso
storm those cluster of notes like Custer at Little Big Horn.
Could he nurture the moment, squeeze the juice out of its ephemeral ness, Time playing out in the infancy
of our .21st Century. Capturing them, from the time he popped out of his mother’s womb, the umbilical
cord spelled CHORD….….his mind’s eye into……..
I
An egg white omelet of cheese: onions red peppers… oatmeal grits. Grits first, oatmeal second for the Easter Sunday brunch? History dictates its own menu in this Heidelberg castle like reality : Spudnik the space walk 3 disasters the Mir hookup....Libva Afghanistan Iraq ‘Nam Korea World War 1 World War2, the Spanish American struggle.., War of 1812 .
June15 1825....The Fort Hamilton garrison: .its modus operandi guarding the Harbor from the likes of pirates mercenaries gun runners terrorists on the quick for the Governor’s.Island of Mahican Indians, bartering their acreage for Peter Stuyvesant’s 24 dollars worth of trinkets beads and jewelry .
Those military camps that spawned GI kitchens…”Seconds Sarge?”, the adrenalin pumped up chow hounds….in their pre Baghdad Fort Dix’s basic training, reinventing their personas on the mess hall lines
II
Croissants pumpernickel ends sour dough bread slits of butter eggs over easy French toast cheese blintzes pancakes ice cubed orange juice in goblets. Decaf coffee, pastries, cookies…fruit salad jello Salmon lox rice pasta. .the salad bar of tired boring cauliflower beets cucumbers lettuce tomatoes broccoli carrots ,onions..
Sir Francis Bacon, the Bard’s scribe out of the Midlands into Olivier’s Old Vic, along the Thames docks…hams into their roles, robust capers of “The merry wives ..”
Tear Doll sheet for outlaw sex before the sexual revolution….
Paris’s left bank: masculinity’s strongest refuge The deux et maggots? The attic of the Grand Hotel of France on Vaugirard….the wholesale market….….
The “Second Sex” of deBeauvoir ... Simone Simone’s “gig”…, Crazy Horse Lido Josephine Baker’s “Folies Bergere” Chevalier’s .”GiGi, Little girls…...”…, Colette scribbling away… passionate Edith Piaf into her longing waif like vocals for Yves Monteau His Simone Signoret’s “Room at the top”
The scents whiffing through those cobblestone streets, the windows open into shafts, distancing the left from the right bank.
III
The enchantment of Joey N &Esther betrothal 7 days prior, at the Hansel & Gretel synagogue in Lincoln Center .his right or was it his left foot breaking the glass under the chupah…..Icing their relationship for better or for worse, slipping the wedding band on her third finger left hand… the Rabbi’s presence of mind, taking the solemn moment into soul searching “From here to Eternity”.IV
The dream like karma below the twinkling of the Verrazano Bridge, spanning Bay Ridge with Staten Island. The festive Easter Parade state of mind gripped the churchgoers at the celebrated three tables ‘Reserved’, adjacent to ‘Pinto’s Mountain’s’.
“To our ladies,” said the James Dunn double of a “Tree grows in Brooklyn”, Mickey Rooney’s boss in Saroyan’s “Human Comedy”. The Mick delivering Gold Star mother telegrams for his manager,
unlike David Sarnoff who spun off RCA, from his Kansas City telegraph yesterdays..
A glass of bubbly held high, the men &their women on their feet, he repeated himself . “To our ladies,” those hearty cheeks, the hair streaked with gray, his shirt open at the collar, beaming an open mindedness. All the way from Cork County, Ireland…Kings County, . Brooklyn, USA
Could it have been Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” playing out .....…..
V
The sun dimpling through the windows like a Van Gogh swirling of cosmic tone color, a gossamer contrast in space and motion. A Cypress tree against the sky….
Witness to the outside pool and the cannon mounted knolls overlooking the entrance into the harbor…..the British fleet under night’s darkness, slipping into the Dutch of Manhattan..
The Fort Hamilton garrison, the guardian for this North Atlantic reality … its fragile stormy ferocity…. off & on closing,……The Revolutionary War its cause celebre 229 years ago ,General George’s guerilla fighters fresh from the French &Indian war, lightning fluid as the Marines and Army , rolled….Kuwait City-Baghdad’s 17 days ..during the Spring equinox.
Torching their cannonballs from these lofts… a thrust from the flank, thwarting cocky cockneys into their “Treasure Island” sail toward the Brooklyn Heights promenade, vulnerable Governor’s Island..
VI
The ‘Pinto Mountain’s’ table of four had their own bubbly of delirium &euphoria, the Harold preparing himself for a four day regimen of surgical pre testing In his Sherlock Holmes bent, his surgeon had discovered a suspicious like tumor on a kidney, hidden under a rib .He and his team were thinking of grounding it forever…
It’s life aborted by the surgical knives, giving way to a long life for the ‘Pinto Mountain’ and indirectly the memories of the former Officer’s Club Maimonides cancer unit: cat scans, MRI’s, spinal taps, biopsys, chemo, radiation ..Whatever it takes for longevity-a wholesome healthy life style- in this century of the 21st..
Like the Pinto mountain: its roots forever as the Joshua Tree National Forest sentry, 20 minutes from Rancho Mirage, in the Mojave Desert.
“Long live the Pinto Mountain!”
VI
The capping ebbs & tides flogging the concrete pillars of the Belt Parkway, the Easter bumper to bumper traffic, breathing in oxygen for an everlasting moment of Homecoming Prayer.
“To our ladies,” toasted the Irish tenor sounding like John McCormick , his octaves resounding in the sound and fury echoes of our Republic’s first 2 centuries.……
April 19, 2003.. March 21, 2011 the first day of Spring.... the whirling cruise missiles spinning like yo yos
over Tripoli.....cities to the East and West... the Libyan desert..
