Tiny Autocrat Scolds Whiners

            New York, Dec. 29^th (INS). Faced with rising anger over his city’s immobilization after last Sunday’s blizzardcane, Mayor Mike Bloomberg scolded his critics, calling them “whiners,” “babies,” and “scumbags.”

            “If I had known I’d face such ingratitude,” the tiny autocrat declared, “I’d never have taken the trouble to violate the two-term limit for elected officials so I could run for a third term in 2009.”

            “New Yorkers have to grow up,” he continued. “We’re doing the best job we can to clear the streets and restore service to our transit system. My people tell me that this should be accomplished by January 3^rd, when real work resumes—unless you live in Sheepshead Bay, Williamsbridge, or Staten Island.” He added, “In the meantime, our tourists are having no trouble getting to the theater.”

            Mary Tobias, a Queens secretary for a Fortune 500 company in downtown, said she was just a schoolgirl when then mayor John Lindsay allowed a heavy snowfall to strangle her South Ozone Park neighborhood in 1967. “‘Goddamn Lindsay’ was the preferred name for that bum, and then he never filled our potholes. Now it’s ‘Goddamn Bloomberg’! I still can’t get to work in less than two hours from Whitestone.”

            Notable for her absence from her usual stance just over the mayor’s shoulder, so she appears there on TV newscasts, was Christine Quinn, the president of the City Council, who led the legislative way to allow Mr. Bloomberg’s third-term campaign. Often called the mayor’s heiress apparent, Ms. Quinn is following his advice to lie low lest she be tarred by the blizzard’s white brush.

            As for the mayor’s most recent retort, he told the press today at City Hall, “If these whiners don’t just shut the f--- up, I’m running for a fourth term!”

The Black Cat II

An addendum to my previous post:

Black Sprite

The black fur and the big green eyes

Send forth most melancholy cries

From out in the hall or downstairs

Wherever they’re wrapped in cat hairs

And the cries always sounds like “George,”

Which I try to translate to “purge,”

To put this eerie feline sprite

Out of my ears and out of sight,

But its mournful cries cause me woe

Like the black cat of E.A. Poe.

The Black Cat

No, I'm not referring to Edgar Allan Poe's cat, but to the one in my hallway, crying from hunger and thirst and lack of companionship. This young black cat might belong to a neighbor one floor below, whose apartment door is open but who is apparently not home. My wife and I first noticed the cat last night when it began to cry and we went to see if it was all right and then saw the open door, the dark apartment, and got no response to our calls. I don't know this neighbor, because she is fairly new in the building and we simply haven't yet met. Cheryl and I decided to wait till morning in the hope that the neighbor might return by then. Other neighbors came home after midnight, but they ignored the open door and the crying cat.

Sure enough, this morning there she or he was, still crying, so I went to our nearby precinct house to report the open door, but the receptionist just told me to phone the super. On the way home, I bought a tin of cat food and put the contents on a paper plate and fed the famished cat under the staircase on the ground floor. I then brought it a bowl of water, and it already had almost finished the food. An hour or so later, I heard the cat outside my door again and opened it to find a large deposit of cat shit on my doormat and the cat looking up at me as though this was her/his thank you offering for the food and water.

The neighbor's door is still open, the cat is still in the hall, and the super, a cat owner who doesn't live in the building, says he'll feed the cat after work this evening and shut it in the neighbor's apartment for the night. I've taken the doormat down to the stairwell, hopeful that the cat will continue to use it as a litter site.

Oh, yes, I haven't taken the cat in, because I am allergic to pet fur and would get asthma from her/his company. And yes, if you know about cats and have any suggestions, please comment.

Pragmatist III

I've written here about Pres. Obama's pragmatic move to the right of center as an aid to helping him politically, and in the wake of his recent legislative victories--the tax compromise, DADT, START, the health care program for 9/11 first responders--it looks like his new strategy of finding bipartisan allies in Congress is working. While I still oppose extending tax cuts for the rich, I have to give Pres. Obama credit for these important accomplishments, which have general bipartisan support and are crucial for their beneficiaries: if gays wish to serve openly in the military, they should not be denied on the grounds of their sexual preference; the START treaty helps reduce the number of nukes held by the US and Russia and makes us all marginally safer, and the 9/11 responders whose health suffered from their selfless work in The Pit deserve money for medical treatment. These achievements have bolstered the President's image as a leader. Let's hope he has more such success in this lame-duck period. Santa came early for Barack Obama, and for us.

Giving

My small family and I have decided to forego personal gifts this Christmas. Instead, the 8 of us who will eat Christmas dinner together will each chip in to send a check to a charitable organization. Yes, this decision grows partly out of being too busy or too disaffected to join again in the annual ritual of shopping for and wrapping gifts but also from the sense that our money can be better spent on helping the needy than on our comfortable selves. As we grow older, we need less and less, and luckily our young cousins join us in rejecting the gross materialism of our society. And yes, my wife and I will each exchange a small present on Xmas Eve, but there will be no gift-giving at Xmas dinner. Besides, each of us has a birthday, on which we can receive gifts if we like. Once a year to be gifted seems sufficient.

I write cognizant that some businesses need custom this recession year and, most of all, that Christmas was originally Christ's Mass, a holy celebration of the birth of The Messiah, to whom the Wise Men brought gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh. But that was long ago...

I share this message with no intention of sounding holier than thou, but if you like the idea of helping a charity for Christmas, maybe you can adapt/adopt it for your family. If you do exchange gifts on Christmans, may you love the ones you get as much as your gifts are loved by others.

Toward Forgivess Dec 11th 2010

That Good Night

I am grateful for the readers' comments on "A Fine and Private Place." After all, death is, with love, the poet's most frequent subject. With death so often swept under the rug in decades past, perhaps it's refreshing for death now to be made public, as in the long dying of Elizabeth Edwards. She fought valiantly and when the time came, she yielded with dignity. We can only imagine her pain, her struggles with the side effects of medication, her fatigue. But we'll remember her aliveness in the face of death.

I thought of Mrs. Edwards especially in the light of Jane S's comment that we must rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas urged his dying father. But eventually there might come a time when the dying person feels he or she has endured enough and prefers an end to the suffering. This was true of my mother after she had lived weeks in agony from a metasticized abdominal cancer. After she had achieved the escape she prayed for fervently, I wrote the following poem, which I chose to read last Friday night at the Cornelia Street Café:

How Sweet The Bye and Bye

               (For J.B.H.)

Once the pain preyed unrelenting

you could taste how bad

you wanted to go into that good night

you raged against the light

prayed for it to go out

for you no false heroics

just the stoic’s sort.

You could not taste at last

the bile rising to your palate

burned your taste buds out

as your huge tumor crushed gall

bladder and kidney and thrust down

your uterus till you could feel it fall

between your lips like a natural-

ly aborted fetus.

“‘There’s a land that is fairer than day’”

you sang me softly in the breath left you

“That’s where I want to be

where I won’t ever have to do

another goddamn thing I don’t want to . . .

‘I’ll be free in the sweet bye and bye.’”

Then you saw, being blind, the last dim light

your opalescent pupil could permit

and cunningly left behind your agony.