Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac is by Jim Harrison, who holds a special place in Owl Chatter. OC poet laurate Ted Kooser wrote his Winter Morning Walks poems on postcards and sent them to Jim Harrison, his close friend. This one of Harrison’s is called “Peonies.”
The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
My thoughts upon reading that poem were (1) I loved “too heavy with their beauty,” and (2) if I ever had to read it aloud I would, without question, trip over “deliquescence” and say delicatessen instead. And now I’m thinking of corned beef. All great poems get you thinking of corned beef, I’ve noticed.
Can you handle two today? This one is from the Poetry Foundation. It’s called “Real Estate” and is by Richard Siken. It doesn’t make me think of corned beef, but I liked it.
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.
Speaking of the dead, Linda and I met with a lawyer we really liked and had our wills drawn up. I told Sam about it and he asked if he was the executioner. I told him the term was executor.
General Mark Milley is the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our highest ranking military officer. He has served in the military with great distinction for 44 years. He holds a degree in political science from Princeton, a master’s in international relations from Columbia, and a master’s from the U.S. Naval War College in national security and strategic studies. He’s retiring.
You know, these days, if you surf the internet you can find so much hateful bullshit it’s ridiculous. For example, this letter popped up referring to Milley as “the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” a “deviant” who “was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society,” he wrote, “quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung. He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump.”
But, of course, if you read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, you know that this was not the product of some random internet troll. It was a letter you and I paid for that was sent out by Republican Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona to his constituents. (His newsletter is taxpayer-funded.)
Trump weighed in on Milley too, calling him a “woke train wreck” who should be executed for treason. Milley has told friends that if Trump is re-elected, “he’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list.” But Milley is confident Trump will not be re-elected because he has faith in the American people. From your mouth to God’s ears, General. Amen and kinahora.
Jango Edwards passed away last month. He was a wonderful, groundbreaking clown, who was born in Detroit but trained and mostly worked in Europe after selling his share in his father’s landscaping business to his brother. He liked to say he got rich selling grass. We are inducting him into the Owl Chatter Hall of Fame, posthumously, today, for reasons that will be obvious, below.
In 1981, the NYT wrote: “For sheer theatrical energy, for schmutz as well as chutzpah, he makes John Belushi look like Charlie Brown.” He was always in character: When leaving the restaurant after the Times interview, he kissed a restaurant patron, bonked another on the head, and flipped the “open” sign on the front door to “closed.”
In one of his bits he played a goggle-eyed magician doing a card trick but instead of cards he used a “deck” of about eight uncooked hot dogs. He picked a gorgeous woman from the audience to assist him. He asked her if she was married and when she said no, he grabbed her and kissed her. (This was many years ago.) He “shuffled” the hot dogs and had the woman pick one. Meanwhile, of course, he’d be doing all sorts of lewd stuff with the hot dogs as the audience convulsed with laughter. He had her place “her” hot dog back in the “deck” and gave them all to her to “shuffle.” As she was shuffling them, he said, “I can see why you’re not married.” Then he grabbed them all back from her (“Gimme those!”), picked one out and asked her, “Is this your hot dog?” (OMG — too funny!)
His given name was Stanley, but he took the name Jango when some children in Morocco said he looked like Django, a character in a spaghetti western film. He dropped the D.
In 1975, he co-founded the International Festival of Fools, a street fair in Amsterdam, which became the centerpiece of the movement called Nouveau Clown. They took as their central tenet a quotation from Erasmus, in his 1509 essay “In Praise of Folly”: “They’re the only ones who speak frankly and tell the truth, and what is more praiseworthy than the truth?”
His fan base in Europe was broad and included the Rolling Stones and Federico Fellini. He performed relentlessly — multiple 90-minute shows six nights a week. He semi-retired in 2017 and worked on a memoir/training guide “The Clown Bible,” which he completed a few days before his death.
He is survived by his wife, Christi Garbo, also a clown, three children, his brother, and three grandchildren, all of whom appreciate to their core the importance of laughter in our lives.
The first photo, below, is of Jango in his early years. In the second one, he’s in the center, flanked by his two sons.
Rest in peace Jango.
In the puzzle today (Dirty Old Man Dept.) the answer at 43A is SAG, and the answer at 51A is BRA. Commenter egs noted: “You’ve gotta love that BRA is positioned to be holding up SAG.” (And they are both right above GOAL SETTING.”)
The clue at 70A was Boy band with the hits “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me,” and the answer was NSYNC. egs noted: The Pope is rumored to be working on a letter to all Bishops concerning Justin Timberlake’s former band. It’ll be an NSYNClical.
Ba da boom.
See you tomorrow! (Unless I’m too tired from my classes to crank out the usual nonsense.)
The Wellington Files 