Forever Isn't Over Yet - March 2nd, 2008

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven lives.
Seven lives in seven sacks,
Like seven beaves on seven racks.
These seven lives he offered to sell,
But which was best he couldn't tell.
He swore that with any I'd be happy forever.
I bought all seven and thought I was clever.
But his parting words I can't forget,
"Forever isn't over yet."
(Ogden Nash)

Many years ago -- in another century in fact -- I spent eight hours of every weekday in a cubicle in the offices of a telecom company in the old China Basin building. It was a very strange existence which, of course, seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Fluorescent lighting, the smell of white-out, dark green computer screens with pale letters, and that flimsy maze of what looked like cork-board enclosing us all, studded with employee notices, out-of-date greeting cards, and occasional snapshots. Conversation came in the form of disembodied voices drifting over the cubicle walls like fog over Twin Peaks. You could tell the difference between someone speaking on the phone and speaking to *you* by a slightly raised pitch in their voice. Anybody who has ever worked in cubicles probably knows what I mean.

Several of us were talking about elderly relatives and assisted living and about seeing our own futures in their fate. I mentioned my grandfather and how he'd had the habit of reciting snatches of poetry at what seemed like very inopportune times -- quietly under his breath in a movie theater in the middle of a film, in conversational tones over a family argument at the dinner table, shouted as a greeting to passing skiers from a sailboat. "I hope I don't end up like that," I said.

There was a moment of perplexed silence. Then, the voice of one of my co-workers -- "Pam," he said kindly, "I really don't know how to break this to you..."

I admit that there is a trickle of poetry running through my subconscious during most waking hours, and the poem that most constantly bubbles up to the surface is the Ogden Nash fragment I've posted above. There are others, of course. These include Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech, Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream," the theme song from the old "Captain Nice" TV series, ("That's not no nut booooooy! That's Captain Nice!") and "Kangaroo Joke," a parody of Poe's "The Raven" that was one of the winners in a New York Magazine contest back in the '80s. ("In there came a hopping mammal, to the bar and lit a camel, then it ordered a martini, damndest thing I ever saw...")

In my defense, I should add that while my grandfather frequently recited snatches of Shakespeare and Chaucer, he was known for his rendition of "The Hermit of Sharktooth Shoal" a Tod Parmentier poem he'd learned from a bum he met in a Manhattan speakeasy. I'm willing to bet he had a few 1920s era advertising jingles rattling around in there too, but he was too cagey to recite them.

So maybe this will serve as an outlet for any stray bits of poetry, anecdotes, or whatever else that occurs to me. I've been a diarist for much of my life. I already blog on such deadly serious issues as politics, and have a currently rather moribund written diary that I use for more personal matters. There's a novel too. (Of course there's a novel. There's always a novel.)

It's a pity I can't draw very well, because if I could, I'd sketch that moment in my family's history where my grandfather learned the poem. The old bum in the speakeasy was wearing a long raincoat and, for some reason, carrying a large fish. My grandfather paid him a quarter to recite the poem until he (grandfather) had committed it to memory.

Picture if you will an old man standing near the bar, buttoned up in his floor length raincoat, the fish drooping from his hand. My grandfather was in his twenties back then, black haired, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes set over high fine cheekbones. He no doubt had broad shoulders from which his opera cloak hung in an especially dashing manner. I don't know whether he was wearing his top hat or carrying it along with his cane, but I prefer to imagine it cocked on his head as he leaned forward to listen. The bum probably had to shout a bit. In spite of their name, I don't think speakeasies were very quiet.

And no, I don't know "The Hermit of Sharktooth Shoal," though I can still hear my grandfather's voice reciting it, softened by age, his gentle Tennessee drawl lingering over the syllables. One of my cousins has carried on the tradition and I understand he gives a very good rendition of the poem to his wife and children every Thanksgiving. This would have tickled our grandfather no end.

I do, however, know the entire "Kangaroo Joke" poem, and if you would like to meet me and my husband at The Utah, I'd be glad to recite it for you. Accounting for inflation it'll cost you ten dollars. I'll bring a fish.