Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

GRAY STONE, APRICOT, METAPHOR, MEMORY: Some Thoughts While Flying from Istanbul to Ankara

In my search for something unique, I picked up a small gray stone this morning outside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

Surely its band of black markings matched that of no other stone?

To make sure, however, I would have to test it against every stone in the world, which would not only make me miss my flight to Ankara, but, more crucially, violate the rhetoric of uniqueness: a rhetoric that bans not only comparisons and contrasts, but the words like and unlike, different and same, along with all those post-hocs, metonymies, metaphors.

Now sitting on the plane, I leap from stone to time. Surely this day is unique. Correction: every day is unique. So there must be a multiplicity of uniquenesses. Still I imagine holding this one particular day in my hand, a solitary day brave enough to break away from its vast conglomeration of kin, all those jours and tage and dias.

But the day would then become a personification, an abstraction so far removed from my hand’s capacity to feel and at the same time lacking any capacity of its own to sense my hand’s texture, degree of dampness and warmth, perhaps some fine trembling, that even a stone would be better. At least I could feel the stone’s jagged coldness, wrap my fingers around it to make a small cocoon. Also lost in abstraction, the day’s unrepeatable moments, its unique markings:

–how the sun now briefly tinges with copper the clouds below before their cobbled islands drift back into the Black Sea.

–how the woman next to me, whose long brown headscarf matches her chador, opens her Koran, then suddenly closes it, leans forward as if searching for something–

a jewel, a unicorn?–retrieves some apricots from her bag and offers me one, which I politely refuse, lest it be unwashed.

–the helical scar on the face of a man across the aisle

–the smell of Turkish coffee laced with fenugreek

Still, I want something more tangible than memories of such moments. At least a sound, a unique sound. Even if the latter is merely a syllable, a phoneme, a sound not yet uttered. Or uttered so long ago even other sounds have forgotten it, like the other small gray stones have forgotten the one I picked up.

But why would I want such a sound? Because, I have begun to realize, what I really want is something that would speak to me alone, thus ratifying my fantasy of uniqueness.

Yet is my own or anyone else’s uniqueness necessarily desirable? Yes, we like to think we’re unique– a fantasy of being the only creature in the world to merit food and comfort on demand, a fantasy that goes back to early infancy when we felt unique, at least special. Even if born an identical twin or sextuplet.

Air turbulence. The woman in the brown headscarf reopens her Koran. The man with the helical scar searches for his seat belt. But I must not let the turbulence distract me from awareness of my need to rethink the notion of uniqueness.

Identical twins, to say nothing of triplets and octuplets, jar our socially instilled notion that each person is unique, his or her spirals of DNA different from yours or mine. Prior to the use of fertility drugs, such “multiples” were considered circus freaks, plural creatures whose Evil Eyes were so precisely the same they might have been produced on an assembly line. Twins and Technology: a topic worth pondering further. But there’s a comfort in multiplicity.

The now bouncing Boeing 727 en route from Istanbul to Ankara where I write this is surely the same as any Boeing 727 produced whenever mine was, one of many, the very opposite of unique. Which makes their behavior more or less predictable. Multiplicity may become tedious, but the unique can be uniquely threatening.

I think for the first time in decades of Rebecca Horbund, a woman from my Brooklyn youth who walked around with a large protrusion that bounced from the left side of her face; it resembled a bunch of purple grapes encased in flesh. When she approached, we kids would laugh to disguise our fear that Rebecca was The Monster of Ocean Parkway who at any moment would snatch us and turn us into grapes, or perhaps cause similar protrusions to grow on our own faces. But then she would no longer have been unique.

Though each leaf, each particle of rain, each snowflake , each fingerprint and iris is indeed unique, sometimes the evidence of uniqueness can be so slight, as in each blade of grass, any particular blade might as well pass for yet another replication of one of nature’s numerous patterns. Yes, patterns. Nature, that consummate trickster, can create both uniqueness and multiplicity. We may assume that the red blood cells in our bodies and the bodies of others are similar if not alike, yet according to biologists, the anatomy of the red cells in my bloodstream differ from equivalent cells in your body; from the cells in the bloodstream of the man with the helical scar; the woman wearing the brown chador. Yet they are basically comparable, as are all bodily organs and processes, unless a mysterious and rare disease has distinguished them from the norm–that is, made them unique like poor Rebecca’s grapey face.. Otherwise there could be no remedies at all, no ways of predicting the course of any condition, no need for any medical doctors.

Which is scarier, uniqueness or multiplicity? Despite the jarring effects of identical twins, let alone octuplets, I dare say most of us prefer multiplicity no matter how

vigorous our claim to rebellion against the norm.

So why do I still at times crave my own uniqueness? Probably I confuse uniqueness with originality and the unusual. Or with an egotistical pleasure of standing out from the crowd. But that sounds too close to an absurd craving for eccentricity, a total separation from the crowd. And the more unique I might be–that is, the more removed from the cultural norms of my society, my time and place, the more literally ec-centric or outside the circle, the lonelier I am likely to be. Just as well that the craving for uniqueness–physical deformities aside– is impossible to satisfy. Even fantasies of such can create barriers between self and others, interfere with friendship, destroy love.

The woman closes her Koran, the man with the helical scar sleeps, the flight attendants resume their usual beverage service. \

Returning to my earlier expressed wish for a unique sound that would speak to me alone, I now realize that hidden behind that metaphor–a breach, of course, of the “rhetoric of uniqueness”–is the desire to be praised, recognized, appreciated for what I consider my best achievements and traits: my art, my writing, my adventurousness, my loyalty and kindness, my wit. . . Enough already! Even when that desire is sometimes satisfied, it brings on a strange sort of amnesia. Within a day or two, sometimes even within a few minutes, the nice words drop into the black hole of the forgotten.

So much for a “unique” sound that has been expressed so long ago that even other sounds have forgotten it, like the other small gray stones have “forgotten” the stone I picked up this morning and removed from its “community.”

CODA

–Memory is to the connections implied by metaphor as forgetting is to the literal, usually isolated word or phrase:

APRICOTS FOR SALE! ACCIDENT AHEAD! EAT MORE FISH!

– Memory involves connections to the past, likewise the closely linked distortion of memory known as nostalgia, which involves fantasies of of repetition, replication, multiplicities of time.

–Because memory depends on connections with the past, it may be considered part of the anti-unique, that is, the connected rather than the isolated. Forgetting, on the other hand, severs links with the past.

Does that mean that the narcissistic craving for uniqueness is after all a craving for forgetfulness in the broadest sense of that word? After all, if I want to think of myself as unique, I am really expressing a nonsensical wish to forget all those traits, anatomical, psychological and otherwise, all those experiences I share with the vast majority of my fellow human beings.

After we land, I think I’ll go stone-hunting again. Maybe in Ankara I’ll find a stone with orange and chartreuse markings, shaped like a heart. Or purple like Rebecca Horbund’s grapes. Most likely, though, the stone heart or grape will have dropped into the grass from some tourist’s necklace purchased at the Grand Bazaar.

Meanwhile I’ll take up my seatmate’s offer of an apricot, washed or unwashed. If she has any left in her bag.

***

NOSTALGIA, TECHNICAL VIRGINS, THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

Patti Page

The aging Patti Page was singing her 1950 hit The Tennessee Waltz on one of those nostalgia programs that Public Television broadcasts when trying to raise money. A man in the audience, who looked to be in his late middle age, could not control his tears.  Likewise a woman I took to be his wife. Then another man, several men and women, all of a certain age. To my surprise, I. too, felt tears in my eyes, though I’d never been a great fan of popular music. of the time.  For good reason:

With few exceptions, my generation, which came of age in the 50’s, had the most saccharine, boring, and downright stupid popular songs. like Sh-boom, Sh-boom; Perry Como’s Hoop-Dee-Do Doo, one Eileen Barton’s If I Knew You Were Coming/I’d have Baked a Cake. . ./ Of course there was some decent jazz, the Third Man Theme on that haunting zither,  Pete Seeger and The Weavers (later banned from the airwaves because  the group was allegedly  “pink”) and early rock to liven things up. but the song I most remember was The Tennessee Waltz. I even recall associating it with a boy on whom I had a crush, though I’ve no idea why. Probably because my crush and the popularity of the song took place at the same time.  (As illogical as any ad hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:  I am wearing a white shirt; it is snowing today. Yet I wept. And for a mini-second imagined I was back in the 50’s with my friends from high school and college, most of them now drifted away. many no longer alive. As the key line from the Tennessee Waltz goes I know just how much I have lost…

Nostalgia

Nostalgia: that sentimental hankering for the past, literally the ache to go back to an always idealized time or space, the blessed isles of fantasy, a golden place lacquered to shine more brightly than it ever did in its day.  Actually, this deeply conservative urge is more concerned with time than space, though the two are sometimes interchangeable, like the idealized wish to return to the womb noted in Freudian theory.  Yes, the womb, where all mammals once romped and frolicked in a warm sea, a state of being that demanded neither thought nor action –not unlike fantasized abodes of the dead.

It is the opposite of both irony and skepticism, a bastardized version of Golden Age myths, in its most extreme form, nostalgia fed the delusion that led to the suicide of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.   At its core nostalgia is the impossible craving to reverse time and return to one’s youth—or to some idealized civilization in the presumed dawn of civilization, which varies between cultures.   As Linda Hutcheon claims, nostalgia “exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near.”  [italics added]  [1] The closer the past, the more distant the future, particularly one’s inevitable death.

As architectural history and studies of interior design reveal, nostalgia for earlier styles is rampant: why else the fondness for colonial American furniture (or imitations thereof) and a recent resurgence of the French bidet: a must for the upscale American bathroom even though far removed from its original purpose.  Prominent arbiters of style like Ralph Lauren and Estee Lauder decorate their private offices with Empire and Belle Epoque furniture; computers, fax machines, and file cabinets relegated to the main or public offices.  Fads of all sorts glut the nostalgia marketplace: what consumer can resist the inevitable revival of suspenders or the micro-miniskirts of the 60’s?  As Witold Ryczynski claims, “…acute awareness of tradition is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation. “  [2] Even if the nostalgic objects and styles have to be invented.

Yet nostalgia is the sine qua non of much poetry, especially of the romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats.  Often they and their contemporaries craved a return to nature as the antidote to the rising Industrial Revolution as well as to earlier aesthetic traditions—e.g. the creator of the classical Grecian Urn in Keats’s famous Ode or the

Florence of Boccaccio in Coleridge’s poem of that name.  Baudelaire links nostalgia with the search for the unknown, but insists he will resist its call: “I will not whine like Ovid/Driven out of Latin paradise” (Horreur Sympathetique), Contemporaries like Billy Collins address the subject sardonically at times:  “Even this morning would be improvement over the present,” but the prominent American poet Philip Levine devotes the vast majority of his many poems to evocations of his Detroit childhood.  More than I first realized, I myself have my stock of nostalgic references from childhood: the creek, kitchen pump and ice-box of my grandparents’ summer house, the splendor of skipping through the grass that has long ago been paved over, et al.

The 50’s

The 50’s?  While Pat Boone and Eddie Fisher were crooning banalities, sexual mores, at least in middle-class white America, were as strict as any Victorian headmaster could preach.  Pre-marital sex?  Verboten, especially for women, some of whom protected their reputations by calling themselves technical virgins—heavy petting but no penetration. To say nothing of severe limits to the ambitions of all but a few ambitious women.  To say nothing of rampant racism.  Of intense fears of communism that led to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the inquisition of suspect “reds” led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his minions.  Of the Korean War and the lead-up to Vietnam.  Rarely did anyone protest; such protest that took place was mainly aesthetic and social  (remember Hootenannies and Coffee Houses?) No wonder that at my college graduation in 1956, the speaker, poet Archibald McLeish, called us “the marshmallow generation.”

Janice

The story of my former college roommate, Janice, could only have taken place in the 1950s.  I remember visiting her at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers on Staten Island, NY, one late summer day in 1955. I had recently returned from a year of study abroad.  In mid-April she had written me a letter about her secret pregnancy: I must contact her at the Home soon as I returned. She also said she had secretly married her boyfriend, Bill, a graduate student at Yale, over Thanksgiving break.  So the pregnancy was not illegitimate.  In fact she and Bill had only had sex two or three times, as I later learned.   Her last sentence was underlined in purple ink:

God forbid if the baby comes late and I can’t arrive on time for the beginning of our senior year.  I could say I have mono, but they might suspect something else, even contact my parents.  I’ve never told them about the elopement, let alone about the baby.

I must backtrack.  Unbelievable as it might seem today, in the 1950s it was strictly against the rules for a student in our fancy women’s college to marry without the permission of the Warden, one Miss Withee, whose eyes were the color and size of raisins. Pregnancy from an unreported marriage would be a major sin, equivalent with an out of wedlock conception.  Unless one could prove she was beyond doubt a virgin, a real rather than a “technical virgin”—i.e. everything but penetration.  Abortion, of course, was illegal, the pill didn’t come along until 1960, diaphragms and condoms were hard to find in Massachusetts.

“I did what I could,” Janice said, averting her eyes as if to study the cracks

in the building’s brick porch. “Nothing worked.”

“What about Bill? Didn’t he try to help?”

“Oh, he looked for a doctor who would take care of the problem. But they all wanted lots of money.  So I planned to get rid of it myself until one of the girls here almost died from trying it with a coat hanger.”

Someone was playing a radio, The Ballad of Davy Crockett booming through an open window, loud enough to drown out our voices.

“But you were married.  Why couldn’t you have the kid and finish college later?

“Shh. The Home doesn’t know that.  It’s supposed to serve only unwed mothers.”

Before I left, Janice pleaded with me to protect her, lie, if necessary, if the college officials suspected anything if she had to show up late for fall registration.

“There’s something else that must remain secret,” she whispered. “I lied on the adoption agency’s health form and mentioned nothing about Bill’s epilepsy.

I started to walk towards the ferry. And refrained from saying how all her secrets and lies put me in a risky position.

I guess that on one level I enjoyed being the custodian of her secrets.  After all, Janice had “gone all the way” as we used to say.

CODA: She gave birth to a boy in late August and managed to return to school on time. as if it was part of a script.  We rarely talked about the baby, who had been adopted by a nameless couple (that’s how things worked back then) Many years later I visited her in Chicago, where, now divorced from Bill, she lived alone and had become devoutly religious.  We chatted a bit about old times.  Finally I got up the courage to ask her about that summer of 1955.

“1955.  That was the summer I worked as a waitress in Wisconsin,” she said in a rote manner.

Genuine or feigned amnesia? The latter the opposite of nostalgia, an act of forgetting.  Memory, albeit distorted, is to nostalgia as forgetting is to nostalgia.

The Grandfather Paradox

Shortly after that PBS program on music of the 50’s I found myself singing The Tennessee Waltz; an audio-tic or, more expressively, an earworm, as some psychologists call it.   Maybe I was far more nostalgic than I thought.  I began to read about The Grandfather Paradox: in fantasy one could travel back to the past and prevent his or her own birth by killing a grandfather or maybe a great-great—great grandfather.   That one missing piece from the genealogical chain would have a far greater effect: not only would I not have been born, but my great-greats, etc.  Mind-boggling.  And even abstractly possible argue physicists who study wormholes and cosmic strings. Maybe even infinite regress: knock that apple out of the tree before Eve could pick it. Voila! No original sin..

In earthier terms, I but the imagined effect on history of a single seemingly trivial moment, like when Tristram Shandy’s mother distracts his father just prior to the height of intercourse by asking if the man had remembered to wind the clock.  A different sperm might well have won the race to her waiting ovum.  If Hitler’s mother had a headache that night, or, for that matter, Albert Einstein’s.  What if, what if . . .

Come to think of it, The Tennessee Waltz had banal lyrics even for the 50’s, when it was number one on pop, country, and R&B charts.  Better to go back to the music of the 1930’s when despite the Depression and beginning of World War 11 swing and jazz flourished along with such tear-jerkers as Melancholy Baby. (YouTube is replete with musical nostalgia channels.)

So much for Patti Page: now I really know just how much I have lost. Not that much after all.

***

NOTES

1.  Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin: 1987), p. 9

2.  Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, ” Comparative Literature 30 (2000), 189-207.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT & THE RUBBER TREE PLANT

So any time you’re gettin’ low

‘stead of lettin’ go

Just remember that ant

Oops there goes  another rubber tree plant–from “High Hopes”; Cahn/Van Heusen, 1959

And  there was Eleanor Roosevelt  singing about a  rubber tree plant,  a deadpan smile on her face as she looked directly into an early version of a video camera.

Perhaps everyone in the world knows of  her performance of  that old Sinatra nonsense song  about a rubber tree plant,  better known as “High Hopes.”   But when I saw the film clip where she  sings,  or rather recites, the lyrics in the spirit of talking blues,  I was so astounded that I assumed someone was impersonating her. And  I laughed –along with the rest of the audience.  When  I  asked the lecturer at the Smithsonian Museum Seminar on Cabaret Music  if  Eleanor was really Eleanor, he emphatically said, yes,   that was indeed the real Eleanor.  I was convinced the other peopIe in the audience nodded in stunned unison and turned towards me as if I had just asked whether  Washington, DC was the capital of the USA.

But how could Eleanor Roosevelt do something like that?

The rest of the day and the next day as well I couldn’t stop  humming to myself  what I recalled of the ditty, sometimes singing with whatever words I could recall. A tic of some sort that I share with  others  who inexplicably start singing a particular song out of the blue–and, one hopes, not in earshot of anyone.   So to get the tune out of my head, or at least to  lower  its volume, I began to ponder several issues  raised by the film  clip:  notably  questions of authenticity and stereotyping, along with  a host of sub-issues, such as the use of  masks, costumes, drag, disguises, to say nothing about  the  significance of  late life surprises.

Why would the eloquent and high-minded ER stoop to such a level? Had she made some deal with Sinatra– of all people?   How would FDR have reacted (the performance allegedly took place in  1959, 14 years after his death).  Maybe she had some serious purpose related to her  High Hopes for America and the world?  And where did that 1959

performance take place?  In The White House?  Unlikely, given that Eisenhower was President.  Hyde Park?  Las Vegas?   Berlin?  Carnegie Hall?

I turned first, of course, to Google.  Which I imagine ER herself would have done had it been possible to google  in her  day.    All  I  could find  was a comment about the song in German: “FDR’s Witwe Eleanor Roosevelt  begrussen konnte und die alte Dame mit ihrer  beruhmten  tiefen Stimme den Originaltext von 1959 charmant rezitiert.” (FDR’S widow greeted [Sinatra] and the old woman with her distinguished deep voice charmingly recited [the song’s] original  text in 1959.)  No mention of where or when said  recitation took  place. On another site there  was some information  about a Sinatra TV show entitled  “Here’s to the Ladies,”  sponsored  by  Timex and broadcast on ABC on 2/15/1960;  his guests included, among others, not only Eleanor Roosevelt but Lena Horne and Juliet Prowse and Mary Costa.  Songs performed included  “I’ve Got you Under my Skin”; “Paper Moon” and “Get Happy” –but no song about a rubber tree plant, or Gummibaum as it’s called in German,  and no indication that ER sang or even recited any section.

Just what makes the little old ant

Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant. . .

I did  find several versions of the lyrics, but nothing whatsoever about the text’s

inner meanings, especially as the latter might demand the  attention of none less than Mrs. Roosevelt, the Queen, the  Grand Matron of the country  throughout my childhood, worshipped by my  own mother and the mothers of  everyone else I knew.

True, I recall a few nasty parodies of  ER, her oh so cultured voice, her seriousness, and a mock-syllogism that went: “I hate war.  Eleanor hates war. Therefore  I hate Eleanor.”  Scarcely funny to a kid who didn’t even know the word syllogism.    Of course few  back then so much as whispered about Eleanor’s preferences for women, though there  was some talk about  her husband’s mistresses, especially Lucy Mercer, who was present when  he died.   So much for Google: when it came to pondering the deeper  meanings of that astounding (to me) moment at the Smithsonian,  I was on my own.

Why was I so surprised, a surprise I masked by laughing?   Perhaps because the concept of  authenticity was in November, 2004  obsolete  to the  point that nothing could be taken at face value; further, that nothing was genuine, so we lived  in a world of masks and  camouflages and outright lies, a feeling much abetted by recent political events.  Or maybe the major hermeneutical message of  the text, or rather the subtext,  pertained to the dangers of  stereotyping, i.e.  my assumption that Eleanor Roosevelt would never do such a thing:  was it a sign I myself  was more prone to stereotyped thinking  than I cared to admit,  despite my conscious awareness of  how such rigid generalizations were at the heart of  the ugliest racial, sexual, and geographic biases?

Of course  some stereotypes had been confirmed by the Smithsonian lecturer’s stress on the strong gay-lesbian presence  in the world of  cabaret: e.g.,  Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward, to name the most famous,  and such contemporary performers as Elaine St. George and  Elton  John as well as  the so-called Pansy Clubs in Paris and  New York.  But such a presence was in fact but one manifestation of  the strong link between  cabaret and political protest, especially in Weimar  Germany and the America of the late 60’s, early 70’s. Also,  the cabaret world has long celebrated openness and intimacy–unlike traditional theater with its “fourth wall” between performers and audience, the  former detaching themselves  from the latter by imagining there existed a  stout  wall across the front rim of the stage.

Next time you’re found with your chin on  the ground

There’s a lot to be learned, so look around

Yet I soon realized my reaction to the film clip, if not the song itself,  had a deeper meaning  than the dangers of stereotyped thinking, a  meaning more closely and specifically linked with my own memories.  In short, the performance was a desecration of the image of  ER that  dominated my childhood well  into early adult life.  Not that there was anything evil or even crude about her singing a ditty about rubber tree plants. Though, of course, the reference to their inevitable “bursting” did have a slightly obscene connotation about another type of rubbers.   It’s just that  La Grand Dame of America doesn’t do such things, any more than one’s grandmother or great aunts, decorous ladies all,  would do a striptease in the subway or even wiggle her hips in front of the butcher or fishmonger.

Indeed there were but a few female  heroes aside from ER when I was growing up—serious heroes, not flouncy movie stars or pop singers.  But they were all dead, and foreign as well,  like Madame Curie or Queen Elizabeth the First or  Joan of Arc.

Ah, that was it:   I was, at least on a subliminal level, as much  taken aback by the tarnishing of  ER’s image, as I would have been in my youth if  someone had splashed red paint on the Statue of Liberty.  But why wasn’t anyone else  in  the  audience seemingly taken aback as well?  And how come I wasn’t aware of  her  performance before, as everyone else seemed to be?

Yes.  Just as I found cabaret music compelling, along with its performers’ flamboyant red and purple  taffeta costumes and  peacock  feather  hats,  I  found something about ER’s recitation compelling.  Like the occasional slumming we white city kids would indulge in by daring to take the subway all the way up to Harlem.  In my own case, the  source of the  lure must have been  my parents’ high, albeit rather  snobbish, standards, though neither of them was what I would consider part of the intelligentsia.  Like a few other ambitious parents whose own parents were Jewish  immigrants from Eastern Europe, they strongly discouraged me from reading comic books or  listening to soap  operas or going to silly movies.  Rarely was their  radio  tuned to any stations other than WQXR or WNYC . Thus, my  childhood radio memories go back not to “The Shadow” or “The Lone Ranger” but to “Let’s Pretend”;  “Let’s Learn Spanish”;  and “  The Quiz Kids” and–oddly enough–Jimmy Durante.  Not to forget the Dodger games announced by Red Barber and Connie Desmond–a concession from my father.   My mother preferred “ Information Please” and any  speech by either Roosevelt plus the music of  Chopin and Mozart.  Sometimes, though,  I caught her listening in the afternoon to “Make Believe Ballroom Time, “ improvising dances to the music in front of the large foyer mirror.   Sinatra?   A  pop singer from New Jersey who couldn’t even sing as well as Bing Crosby,  whose songs were occasionally tolerated to accommodate  my father’s penchant for sentimentality. “The Hit Parade” was permissible  on  Saturday nights, but in a friend’s house, not my own.   On Sundays  my  parents and maternal grandparents and I went to Carnegie Hall or listened to the NY Philharmonic on the radio, the NY Philharmonic  conducted  by Arturo Toscanini, with guest artists like Artur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz.

Oops there goes a billion kilowat  dam

. . . .

Oops there goes another problem kerplop

So if there were any deeper meanings, they concerned my conflicts over the enjoyment of  forbidden fruit, conflicts covered up by the jokes my  junior high school friends and I would make about the sex lives of our spinster teachers as we–titter, titter–imagined their liaisons with the school custodians, or somewhat later even with one  another.

I now realize  I was both acutely embarrassed by ER singing about a rubber tree plant yet at the same time  envious of her.   Not because of her eloquent speaking and

her humanitarian ideals, but because she  knew  how to let  her hair  down without actually letting her hair down:   something I have found  hard to do till this day–unless in the company of a  particular type  of person,  usually a wild  friend from adolescence or later versions thereof , on occasions enhanced by alcohol and other substances.

No absolute and  universal meaning after all.  No secret code.     But  like the ant that couldn’t move a rubber tree plant I do at times have “high hopes ” . . .  “ high apple pie in  the sky hopes.”

Even in the troubled early years of the 21st century.