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Hello, poetry lovers,

In the face of unrelenting bad news, I decided to take some aid and comfort in poetry, specifically in the poems of Tibullus (55-19 BC), my favorite Roman poet, introduced to me by Kendall Hailey in The Day I Became An Autodidact (a swell book, unfortunately out of print).  Tibullus is known for his love poems, particularly those written to the faithless mistress who torments him, but his war poems are every bit as impassioned and lyrical.  I share Ms. Hailey’s admiration of anyone who stood up to be counted as a pacifist in an age when there was a god of war.  The penultimate stanza is especially poignant to me, a nice antidote to Cato’s advice to ”make her afraid of you.”

Off to Philadelphia for the weekend, dear friends, but I may try to visit one more time, LuthorCorp permitting.

Who first introduced the terrible sword?
What a brute he was, truly a brute-steel-hearted man!
From then on murder was hereditary in man, and war was born,
The shorter way was opened to the terror of death.
Or is the man innocent, to be pitied rather, we being the ones
Who turn what he designed against wild beasts to our own misfortunes?
This is surely the fault of precious gold; there were no wars,
When the cup that stood ready for the feast was made of beechwood.
There were no strongholds then, no pales; the shepherd looked for sleep
Among his piebald flocks in peace of mind.
If I had lived in those days, I would not have known the crowd’s desperate weapons,
Or heard with quivering heart the trumpet-call.
But as it is I’m pulled off to war, and some enemy soldier perhaps has on his back
Spears that are destined to come to rest in my side.

But as for me, kind Peace, come and possess my ears of wheat,
And from your white bosom overflow with fruit.

Consider this:  a Sunday morning in Astoria, a bit of a chill in the air but still your basic springlike day.  In the breadbox on top of the fridge is half a loaf of stale brioche, no longer fit for sandwiches but still usable for bread pudding.  Hey!  Bread pudding!  We’ll have bread pudding for breakfast!  I love bread pudding, not only because making it is easier than falling asleep on a cool spring night, but also because you can make it as lean or as rich as you’d like.  You can add eggs, subtract eggs, use whole milk, lowfat milk, cream; you can add sugar, honey, maple syrup, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, or eschew the sweets entirely and make a savory pudding.  Whatever you pick, it is easy to make, it is soothing and satisfying to eat, and it makes your kitchen smell like a million bucks. Hmm, I thought.  Maple pecan.

I turned on the oven.  I buttered a baking dish.  I cubed the brioche and laid it in the dish.  I sprinkled pecans and sultanas over the bread.  I took down my trusty Waring Blendor, plugged it in, loaded it up with milk and grade-B maple syrup (grade-B is stronger and more maple-flavored, definitely what you want here) and five eggs.  Turned on the blender, the blender of choice of bartenders everywhere, supposedly the only blender one will ever need to buy.  Watched first in surprise, then in curiosity, then in horror as the motor made a horrible grinding sign and the kitchen was suddenly filled with smoke and the smell of burning rubber.  Apparently the fan belt has given up the ghost.  I am able to decant everything into the Cuisinart and proceed as normally, but it is too late.  The kitchen should be smelling of maple and pecan, but instead it smells like an industrial nightmare.  The eventual bread pudding is indeed lovely, gently sweet, warming without being overfilling, but for me it is too late.  Every bite tastes like the cost of a replacement fan belt.

Consider this, part II:  Another Sunday morning in Astoria, the first warm muggy Sunday morning of 2004.  Lloyd turns on the air conditioner.  A horrible grinding noise is heard.

look me up.

Actually, that’s a lie.  Or, rather, it’s not a lie, but my ego making a promise my soul can’t keep.  I blather a lot about what children my fellow New Yorkers can be; that we give this image of hardboiled toughness and a willingness to roll with the punches, and while that may be true when it counts (e.g the World Trade Center attacks, last summer’s blackout), when the stakes are lower we are a city of short-tempered six-year-olds, stamping our feet and shrieking when we don’t get our own way.  I say this as though I am any better than anyone else, when, really, I’m as guilty as the guy sitting in the bench across from me on the W train, splaying his legs wide as tiny women, young and old, scrunch in and give up their personal space so that this peacock display can take place.  I get impatient when I am in the checkout line at Key Food, behind some 200-year-old woman who insists that to not honor her expired-in-2001 coupon for 25 cents off the price of Nescafe would be an act of Communism, and then insists on paying her total in dimes.  I have even been known to get a little mouthy with a security guard at the Virgin Megastore who insisted on stopping Lloyd and going through his backpack while ignoring the guy who really *did* have DVD’s stashed under his jacket (the guy made it out, too).  I take people to task for shooting their mouths off and taking everything too personally, even as I shoot my own mouth off, convinced that it’s all a big bloody conspiracy against me.

So, no, I will complain again, and plenty, but not today.  Today I will give it a rest because this morning I paid a visit to I could have been a contender and read about how Billy’s daughter Steph spent her Sunday. She is shaken but unhurt (thank the fates).  Billy is understandably furious.  I am a confluence of shaky-hand, racing-heart emotions: full of fury at the thought of some bastard pulling a gun on this sweet young woman; full of impatience with her employer for only now deciding to put in closed-circuit cameras (the phrase “locking the barn doors after the horses have escaped” springs to mind); full of love and wishes for Billy and Carolyn, who faced a parent’s worst nightmare square in the face.  Most of all, I am relieved that it did not end in a much uglier, more horrible way, the stuff of our worst fears about our children.  At the same time, I am angry for that relief.  What does it say about us as a society when we have to take comfort from the notion that the worst thing that could have happened didn’t happen?

From those wacky funsters at Google comes the best hit I’ve ever had:  “funny shaped onion aphrodisiac.” To say that the mind boggles is a gross understatement.