Le Petit Trottin

This morning, while I am waiting to see Dr. Feight, I find among his magazines an expensive-magazine-sized and -shaped book of Toulouse-Lautrec plates. It doesn’t include Le petit trottin, an illustration Toulouse-Lautrec made for the cover of some sheet music, and the subject of a long-ago poem by my friend Rick Dietrich, who, like every poet since Keats, has written a wan version of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

To listen to Rick read the poem, click here.

Le Petit Trottin

Tonight, I am the wicked gentleman
disappearing from Toulouse-Lautrec’s cover
for his cousin’s song: the crumpled top hat,
the cane over his shoulder, the down-turned moustaches
and drooping jowls, the dotted green ascot
and green checked trousers—one thick leg vanishing
into the space that marks the cover’s edge,
but one leg left behind solidly planted,
and one eye left behind, leering from behind
its monocle, glued to Le Petit Trottin—
the name of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cousin’s song,
“The Little Errand Girl”—though she is not
so little, the leering gentleman observes,
her blond hair upswept over sensual ear,
her pink mouth, the lilac ribbon around
her pretty throat.
                                 “What do you have in your
basket, ma chère?” he is—without thinking—
for ever thinking, while she keeps him
there, fixed in the corner of her eye,
till the other thick leg can take the next step,
and he can disappear for good.

H is for Hannah.

  annah, my sister, the youngest of us originally, is on the phone.

 Not long into the conversation, she asks if I had ever been ambitious
  (past perfect tense). Her husband, Dwight, is retiring, and they are going
  to travel, first to Alaska, then to Costa Rica, then New Zealand, and
  maybe Scotland after that.
     “I don’t think I ever was,” I say. “I have no imagination when it comes
  to the future,” I add after a pause.

Hannah says that Dwight thinks I am the kind of person that goes into a field to gather stones, trips over one, then rolls over and lies down with his hands behind his head, staring into the clouds.
     “He said that?”
     “Maybe not in those exact words. But, yes.”
     I want to say that I’d always liked Dwight, but I never thought he understood other people very well. He understood what they were for, but he didn’t understand them.
     But I don’t say it.

R is for Roz

 oz says: 

“I was thinking before I went to sleep last night about the story in the Bible where there’s a funeral procession and Jesus runs into it somehow. The funeral is for a boy — or young man — the son of a widow. And Jesus raises him from the dead, he is the sole support of his mother. And that’s where the story ends; we never know what happens next.”

I say: “It’s ‘The Widow of Nain.’ In Luke.”
     “Right,” she says, remembering. “That’s right. But it’s sad — I was thinking this, too — that the story has to follow Jesus. I mean, I know it does. It’s heretical, probably, to think otherwise, but it’s also sad. Because his story ends, and the young man’s keeps going, and the young man’s mother’s, and we don’t know what happens to them.
     “I also know,” Roz goes on, “because I went to Sunday School; I know that Jesus’ story never ends. So, don’t say that. But I want to know what happens to the man and his mother.”
     “What do you think?” I say.
     “I don’t know. I have no gift for stories. What do you think?”
     “I don’t know either,” I say. “They live until they die, like we do.”
     “There’s a happy thought,” Roz says. “But then we live forever!” she says brightly though she doesn’t believe it.

A is for Albert.

A is for Albert.

Uncle Albert says he’s moving out if I don’t go back on my meds, but I don’t think he will. Roz says I need to though — go back — because he doesn’t have anywhere to go.
     I say, “What about where he was, with Maggie and Carl and them?” I still don’t believe he is going to go; he’s not going anywhere, regardless. But Roz shakes her head. “No,” she says, meaning he can’t go there.
     “It’s no different,” I say about whether I am on them or not. “He wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told him. He wouldn’t know the difference.”
     “But he does know, however he knows it,” she says. (This is not what I thought she’d say. I thought she’d say something about how everyone can tell the difference. But she is too kind to say that.)

Here’s why I don’t want to do it: I just don’t. Besides, they don’t help. I can’t tell the difference.
     “He’s 96 years old,” Roz says.
     “So?” I say. She looks at me. I say, “He’s been 96 for as long as I can remember.” She looks at me. “Maybe he’s only 86,” I say. “Or maybe he’s 106. Who knows?” Still looking at me. “I’m going upstairs,” I say.

“You can’t flush medicine down the toilet,” she says after me. “You have to take it to the box in the Sheriff’s Office.”
     “I know that,” I say because I’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter that I’d forgotten for the moment; I know it.

When I get upstairs, Uncle Albert wants to know if I can help him go down:
     He holds onto the banister with his right hand, and I go a half-step ahead and he holds onto my shoulder with his left. That’s going down. Going back up, he holds onto the banister with his left hand, and I go a half-step behind, and he holds onto my hand with his right elbow.
     This time he is coming down to watch the Premier League matches. Neither of us knows until I turn the TV on that they have been postponed because the Queen died and all the clubs are mourning.
     He met the Queen once, he says, Uncle Albert. They were born the same day, they discovered, Uncle Albert says. “The same year?” Roz asks.

S is for Sunday last.

Listen here.

 

 

unday last:

The guest priest struggled with a different “everything” passage, the one in which Jesus says if anyone comes to him not hating his own father, mother, wife and children, he cannot be his (Jesus’s) disciple. So, count the cost, Jesus says. Wouldn’t you do as much if you were going to build a house or if you were about to get into a fight? So, count the cost of following me; and this is it: “Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” 

So, we count? asked the priest in his collar (not bundled up in all the regalia), in just his collar and in short sleeves because of the heat. We count? asked the priest, pushing his spectacles up before they dripped off his nose. We count? he asked. And what if we find ourselves short?
     Then we know — What a relief! — we know there is coming something about grace, about how you can draw a camel through the eye of a needle if you slather him with enough of it. How we can sit here in our pews like on our couches at home and still follow Jesus, even after he is long gone. Because somehow with old God there is nothing impossible.
     That’s what’s coming, what the priest is going to say, what the priest has to say even if he knows that some thing are surely more possible than others. Aren’t they?

The Time of Man

 Listen here.

t’s unknowen.

“It’s pretty stuff, clover a-growen. And in myself I know I’m lovely. It’s unknowen how beautiful I am.” — Ellen Chesser in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time of Man.
     But how beautiful is she if in the next paragraph Joe Turner driving by with Emphira Bodine doesn’t turn his head to look?

From my sister, Moira: I see you are reading The Time of Man. I read it . . . when? I’m not sure, but it was in a group reading Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewitt. And how did Woolf get in there? Either we weren’t paying a lot of attention to what we were doing — though we were serious about it. Or, more likely because there wasn’t then a group of women readers of four or more that there wasn’t one in it but insisted on reading Virginia Woolf as if she was the Bible and anyone else was a sermon typescript or a poorly printed in red-and-black tract
     But as I remember, I liked the Roberts novel as much or more than anything else we read: there was an honesty about it that Woolf lacked because for her it was more important to be fine than to be honest and that Cather aspired to but managed only by dint of hard work, and the hard work showed.
     At least, that's the way I remember it. But I’m remembering only my feelings. The critics likely prove me wrong though for me that is
                                                                              still unknowen. There are clouds of unknowen.

Brought to you by the letter L.

Listen here.

uke 4:                                                                                                 

It’s confusing how he gets his start, Jesus. He’s in Nazareth talking about what he did in Capernaum — the Nazarenes will be expecting the same. This is in vv. 16-23. Only he hasn’t yet been to Capernaum. He doesn’t get there until verse 31. There he does do what they, the Nazarenes, were expecting or will be expecting when he gets there because I think Luke has got his paragraphs out of order. Or the printers didn’t set it up right.

But whatever the order in time, Jesus just keeps going. He casts out demons, he rebukes fevers, he lays on hands and heals and heals and heals. He fills Peter’s nets with fish, for all the good it will do him, for the moment he, Peter, gets his boat to land and climbs out he follows, leaving everything behind. John and James, too: they leave all the fish everything behind and follow.
     They’re all leaving everything behind. Levi is next — though Luke gets his paragraphs out of order again: first, Levi leaves and follows; then, he gives a big banquet at the house he’s already (though just) left.
     But my point is, that was what they were doing then, leaving everything behind. Nobody does that anymore.

CHAPTER II

Listen here.

hen September’s slippery showers . . . . (It’s already cold in Finland.)

When Villa come back to draw with City and United run over Arsenal 3-1, the world must be turning back to itself. It would seem. IF the world could turn back.
    Nor am I going back to my meds. So I say. [Let the reader beware.]

Outside a clamor of grackles bicker-talk-sing: squeaky wheels and hoarse, rusty gates.