Leftovers

When leftovers are the entre
I hesitate not to say "Nay!"
The turkey that's wilted
is easily jilted
and sent on its botulus way. 

En Strengen av Perler: Cursed are the Gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are superfluous and hateful. They practice simony and barratry without shame or hinderance.

I’ve always thought so, ever since Kindergarten -- when my teacher dictated who got to play in the sandbox and when; and who got to use the colored clay sticks and when; and told us when to lay down for a nap and then, just as I was starting to get sleepy, telling us to get up.

What kind of life is that for a child? Being denied time in the sandbox because it was time for finger painting, and other folderol.

I have spent a lifetime cocking a snook at gatekeepers and trying to escape their baleful influence.

I hated my father for being the gatekeeper of my allowance. In the early morning I would get up and hide his dentures so he would be late for work. Down with oppressive gatekeepers!

In high school when I told my counselor I wanted to be a circus clown he told me I couldn’t do it. It was impractical. There was no future in it.

He tried slamming the gate on my dreams, but I fooled him good. I got into the Ringling Clown College and then got a contract with the Greatest Show on Earth, and went on to perform as a clown for nearly the rest of my working career. It kept me broke, ruined my marriage, and estranged me from my children for 20 years, but by the Great Horn Spoon I did it in part  just to spite that high school gatekeeper!  Nyaaaaaaaah!

“Stop!” “Who goes there?” “What’s the password?”

That’s all I’ve heard all my life. When I worked at Circus World in Haines City, Florida, the boss clown fired me for changing my makeup without permission, leaving me with a sick pregnant wife to care for and no income. Who the hell made him the gatekeeper of my clown makeup? Nobody. The finicking bloated martinent!

When I wore a bowtie instead of a necktie to work at radio station KSAL in Salina, Kansas, I was fired for insubordination. What in the wide wide world possessed those apple-knockers to think they could deny me employment because of what I wore around my collar? Such abuse of power was, and is, as shocking as it is moronic. Those gatekeepers should be made to sleep on a bed of sandpaper in the nude. Grit size P12.

The Utah courts would not listen to my appeals against my wife’s petition for divorce -- they called it “No Fault Divorce”. The gibbering villains. The supine homebreakers. The monstrous gatekeepers, battening on the law for their indifferent subsistence!

Who says I can’t put mustard on my scrambled eggs? Protests when I use a paper plate as a Frisbee. Frowns when I leave dirty dishes in the sink until lichen grows on them. Tells me eating at McDonalds is a civic and moral sin.

I’ll tell you who says all those despicable things. Dirty lousy gatekeepers. Officicious, prying gatekeepers. Malign and self-serving gatekeepers, without a shred of any real jurisdiction, and nobody else!

When I wanted to dress up like Hitler so I could parade past Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and give him a Sieg Heil during a Ringling matinee, who stopped me? Charlie Baumann -- that tumefied Teuton gatekeeper!

At my first radio job in Williston, North Dakota, I wanted to announce the self-inflicted death of a prominent Catholic businessman. The station manager, Bill Anderson, wouldn’t let me do it -- because he was nothing but a ferret-faced, toadying gatekeeper for the business community. The other radio station in town and the town newspaper gave full coverage of the suicide. Pfaa! It makes me ill to write of it.

My own sister took me to court to rob me of my inheritance from my mother, leaving me homeless and unable to pay my child support. Why? Because she wanted to play gatekeeper of my money and self respect -- she thought I had too much of both. Once decided on such a foul career, no gatekeeper can keep their heart beating with anything but malice. If they can keep their heart beating at all.

I worked for the Utah State Tax Commission as a telephone tax collector. When I applied for an opening as supervisor of telephone collectors an insufferable gatekeeper named Dorothy from HR told me I was disqualified because I neglected to include a small detail on my application about previous employment -- a job that had lasted barely 3 months. She denied me the chance to progress in government employment and so provide my family with a stable and adequate income -- the bilious old crow of a gatekeeper!

I curse her, and all gatekeepers who function without authority, compassion, wit, or humanity.

I curse the gatekeepers at the Minnesota Department of Recovery Services for revoking my driver’s license for back child support when I was making regular payments, all I could afford, and taking care of my dying mother. Because I no longer could drive I could not take her out on the brief excursions she so much enjoyed, and so her last months on earth were made much more miserable by soulless and rancid gatekeepers to uphold an unjust and unhallowed piece of legislation. May their ears fill with coarse hair and their lungs fill with kapok.

The gatekeepers at airports. At Costco. At Walmart. At nameless roadblocks and speed traps. At gas stations that want payment before pumping. In MBA programs and at walnut burl desks in Washington. Cops that profile skin color and imagined nationality. They all proliferate like maggots on dung.

My own body is full of gatekeepers. My narrow arteries that won’t let the blood circulate freely. The enlarged prostate that restricts my urine flow. A digestive system that takes too long to process my meals, giving me sour breath and constipation.    

When will God strike down the gatekeepers and give us surcease from their senseless, useless, and cruel blockades?

And there are gatekeepers who keep out the real gatekeepers. Yes there are. Such usurpers thrive amidst the noisome din of existential and atheistic clap-trap.

I loathe the unfrocked and unchurched gatekeepers who block the path to repentance and forgiveness.

In Thailand I was often drunk, and lived with a Thai woman who was not my wife.  And there were so many pseudo gatekeepers who told me “It’s alright, you may pass; you have nothing to worry about and may continue on with your life as you please.”

Thank heavens I recognized them as the mountebanks and chiselers they are, and finally sought out the true gatekeepers -- for have I said such do not exist? -- to seek their kindly help in finding the correct and proper way into inner grace and harmony.

These real gatekeepers, with authority and conscience, have conducted me safely into green pastures. And so they may do the same for you, if you have both the wit and humility to recognize them. And if you don’t; well, you might be lucky enough to be beaten into recognizing them, as I was. And still am beaten from time to time, for my own good (and maybe Someone Else’s amusement).

How often do I talk of Christ?

And they were also conversing about this Jesus Christ, of whom the sign had been given concerning his death.    3 Nephi 11:2

How often do I talk of Christ outside of Sunday School,
Creator of the cosmos and the blessed Golden Rule?
How frequently do I invoke his teachings in my life,
the scriptures he inspired to end all my grief and strife?
Not take his name in vain as television preachers do,
but speak about his nature -- loving, wise, and always true.
His melancholy sacrifice that from Golgotha led
to atonement and redemption as my sacred Head.
Tis not enough; tis not enough -- his name upon my lips
should be as nectar flowing that my soul unceasing sips! 
O help me talk with dignity and words not multiply,
and never say a word that might His life re-crucify!

En Strengen av Perler: The Hidey-Hole

In 1994 I lost my son Irvin. He was eight. He went into a diabetic coma, which was not diagnosed until it was too late to save him. I was not with him when he died. Recently divorced, I was unwelcome in my former wife's house. Initially I blamed Amy for Irvin's death, but I don't any more; now I blame God. I figure the Almighty's shoulders are broad and strong enough to hold my resentment. And sometimes I blame myself a little bit. Those are bad moments. Thankfully, they come less and less as time lengthens. I don't know if that's a good sign, or a bad sign.
There's nothing more I want to write about it. I scribbled this poem soon after the event:

Your photographs end all abruptly, too soon.

Where did you go? (Perhaps off to the moon?)

Why did you go? Did I do something wrong?

Did I say crabby words, or not sing you a song?

Come back to me, son -- I won't holler again;

I won't say you're naughty and count up to ten.

Stop hiding yourself, this is no sort of fun;

come out, little Irvin, come out precious son!

But you won't, or you can't, and I'm left all adrift

while the days turn to ashes, unraveling swift. 

Your hidey-hole someday I'll find out for sure,

and never believe that harsh Death has no cure. 

Restaurant Review: Pho Plus Noodle House. Provo, Utah

Small and intimate, Pho Plus on Center Street in downtown Provo offers a limited menu, but since it was packed today at noon I assume it's all good stuff.

I had a bowl of the basic Pho rice noodle soup. Their broth is outstanding -- I nearly ignored the meat and vegetables just so I could slurp up the stock. They obviously make their own bone broth. Its umami is pleasingly pungent and slightly sweet.

I give the place Three Plus Burps. For a regular bowl of Pho and a fountain drink I was nicked $10.05. The one thing I noticed that bothered me has nothing to do with the restaurant itself, but the people who eat there. Most of them left their bowls brimming over with broth -- the best part! I can't understand that at all. My guess is that people are just too darn lazy to use those little ceramic spoons to slurp it all up and are too hoity-toity to pick up the bowl and drain it, like I did. Their loss.

En Strengen av Perler: The Homeless Shelter.

For part of 2012 I was forced into a homeless shelter for men. In some other universe I'll explain why.

For now, all you need to know is that I found myself in a homeless shelter in Woodbridge, Virginia.  Here are some notes I took at the time:

The Death of Miser Jeff

Sunday evenings tend to be moody, melancholy times at the homeless shelter.  A group of disengaged, lonely men, recently out of jail or rehab, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, vaguely aware of some long-ago Sabbath day traditions and expectations, which are now lost, they sit out on the patio and chain smoke, kvetching with each other over the slightest incidents.  I’ve lost the button to my last pair of summer shorts, so am trying to thread a needle to sew on a new button, which I’ve cut off from an old pair of pants someone threw in the trash. But my eyes are not good enough to thread a needle anymore.  I ask if anyone can do it for me, since they are, for the most part, thirty-five years younger than me.  Nobody bothers to answer.

I put away the needle and thread, and use a large paperclip to keep the zipper up to the button hole.  I’m throwing these shorts away when I leave on Friday morning anyways.  My legs are getting so scabby and blotched from edema that I don’t want to wear shorts any more.  My bad legs remind me of Swede Johnson, an old circus clown I knew on Ringling Brothers.  Before becoming a clown he was a lion tamer . . . until the day the big cats turned on him, ripping his legs to shreds.  He always wore long pants, even when undressing and dressing in clown alley; his wife Mabel said his legs never properly healed after the mauling – they looked like raw hamburger, and he wanted to spare everyone the gruesome sight.

The sun sets, there’s no light on the patio, and the mosquitoes are active, but no one goes indoors.  Miser Jeff, who has been closeted in his room for the past two weeks, so that no one has seen him, comes shuffling out onto the patio. He's called Miser Jeff because he collects pennies in a Mason jar. Even in the dark, I can see that his stomach is huge, and perfectly round, like a basketball.  He says, to no one in particular, that he’s always hungry but can’t eat anything because he throws it right up.  I make a sympathetic murmur, but no one else even grunts.  Then, summoning up a bit of entrepreneurship, Miser Jeff announces that he knows there will be another urine test on Monday, and he is prepared to sell his urine to the highest bidder, so they won’t ‘drop dirty.’  Mickey the pyromaniac, who just got out of jail for setting fire to a Walgreens, has been drinking mouthwash all weekend, so he agrees to pay miser Jeff twenty dollars for his clean urine.  This makes miser Jeff so happy that he immediately goes into the kitchen to make his favorite meal – ramen noodles and mac and cheese mixed together in a big, gooey pile.  He hums contentedly, and since he has a cleft palate, it sounds like angry bees in a barrel.

That is the last time I am to see Miser Jeff alive.

Monday morning I go out for a walk, right after the daily rah-rah-sis-boom-bah group prayer.  When I come back the ambulance is in front of the House.  They are carrying miser Jeff out under a yellow blanket.

He had been discovered just a few moments before in his bedroom, sprawled on the floor in a pool of black vomit.  We are told he likely died from a stomach hemorrhage. Everyone is upset, especially Mickey the firebug --- where is he going to get his clean urine now?  He begs for some of mine, but luckily before I have to say no and risk his fiery wrath it is announced that the testing is postponed until Wednesday. By then I hope to holy God to be out of here, living with one of my children.

Miser Jeff’s body will be shipped to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for burial in the family plot.  No funeral service is scheduled for here in Virginia.

And Mickey pours several bottles of Listerine down the toilet, repeating over and over again "crappity, crappity, crappity . . . "

After the storm and the sorrow

 . . . therefore there was silence in all the land for the space of many hours.
3 Nephi 10:2

After the storm and the sorrow,
after the wreckage is clear,
some can begin on tomorrow,
while others are strangled by fear.

Silence descends like a cover;
stillness spreads like the salt sea.
Over the land now will hover
the echo of our Deity.

The keening is hushed and forgotten;
our tears are beginning to dry.
Whatever the day has begotten,
my Savior is standing nearby.

  

En Strengen av Perler: The Clinkered Alleyway.

Until the early Sixties, parts of Minneapolis had alleys paved with clinkers.

The fused waste residue from industrial coal furnaces, clinkers are black vitreous pebbles pocked with iridescent blue holes. The city dumped fresh clinkers into our alleyway every other year then had a heavy roller crush them down and even them out.

I initially thought clinkers were tiny meteorites that a merry crew of astronauts dug up from some star-swept gravel pit to lay at my feet as a reminder of the strange grandeur of outer space. My mother was only too happy to set me straight about such an innocent fantasy:

"They're nasty leftover trash from the NSP plant" she told me kindly.

 Clinkers were hell on your pants when playing kickball, or with any other activity that required you to slide or get on your knees. With sharp obsidian-like edges, clinkers could rip open a pair of jeans at the knees in an instant -- and also leave a livid line of scrapped skin oozing blood. 

My mother kept the iodine bottle handy all summer, as well as an assortment of knee patches, for when I would come keening into the house with a bloody knee.

The clinkered allway an important social haunt for boys during my young summers.

We not only played games in them, but hunkered down amidst the clinkers to speculate in privacy on the theory that all sisters were aliens in disguise getting ready to take over the world, al a The Twilight Zone. Or what the best bait was for catching carp down on the Mississippi. The consensus ran heavily in favor of a gob of Velveeta cheese mixed with canned corn. 

We also went treasure hunting through the neighbor's galvanized trash cans in search of dull kitchen knives with broken handles, unstrung tennis rackets, racy paperbacks, and, best of all, empty whipped cream cans.

A discarded whipped cream can placed in a burning trash can is a pyrotechnic marvel to rival the Fourth of July. Back in those dirty unenlightened days each household burned its own trash in a metal barrel. The fires were lit by a responsible adult, who rarely stayed around until the flames went out. So when I and my cronies would latch onto a whipped cream can we quickly found an untended trash fire. We then hurled in the whipped cream can and sat back to await the fun. First a geyser of parboiled cream would come squirting out of the can. A few minutes later the can itself would explode with enough volume to rattle window panes while ashes and burning bits of trash rocketed up and then spread out over the landscape in a pyroclastic flow.

Needless to say, I and my pals would take to our heels as soon as the explosion occurred. Safely away from the mayhem, we'd stop to giggle hysterically and think of ourselves as invulnerable ruffians. Maybe that same puerile rush is part of the appeal to modern terrorists . . . 

In the winter the clinkered alleyway was a dismal and forlorn place. The clinkers mixed in with the slush gave the appearance of a long ribbon of filthy gray slurry. It provided good traction for cars; much better than the cement pavement that replaced it. But that was of no concern to me as a boy. The trash fires smoldered so much during snowfalls that we couldn't enjoy tossing in our whipped cream hand grenades without the discomfort of asphyxiation. 

Besides, in the winter we had the ice rink warming shed at Van Cleve Park. Redolent of damp wool socks and a kerosene heater, it was a place where boys could tie granny knots in their broken laces and talk shop about how many sticks of Bonomo Turkish Taffy a guy could actually stuff in his mouth before choking. At five cents a bar, it was a feasible experiment.

My own record was six sticks -- but I made the mistake of using banana. I think with chocolate I could have gotten up to ten, easy peasy. 

To be the son of God

"And as many as have received me, to them have I given to become the sons of God"
3 Nephi 9:17

What greater gift is given than to be the son of God?
What blessing could be sweeter than our feet in peace be shod?
What can the world then offer that is half so wondrous great,
as sanguine expectation that we leave this fallen state?
Embrace the Savior, O my soul, and love him, O my heart,
that from his love and kindness I may never live apart! 

Restaurant Review: Thai Evergreen. Orem, Utah.

Located at 1360 Sandhill Road, Thai Evergreen is a Thai cafe run by Laotians that serves Chinese fortune cookies with German proverbs. Mine read: "The trees never reach the sky." Kappe zu, Affe tot.

I ate there today with my daughter Sarah, her husband Jonny, and the grand kids Ohen, Lance, and Brooke. We had massaman curry, green curry, green papaya salad, orange chicken, fishcakes, chicken satay, and lots of jasmine and sticky rice -- enough to feed all six of us and have plenty to take home -- for $60.00.

Our waitress, by the way, did not want to be photographed.

I'm giving the place Four Burps. The service was good, the food even better, and how can I complain when I get to play Foxy Grandpa to three adorable children? Tell 'em Groucho sent ya . . .