One Shoe Baby
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep parked in front of a fire hydrant at the corner of 10th St. and Second Avenue. I watched belly buttons pass by while Bernadette retrieved chicken soup from Veselka's. Some belly buttons were pierced and some were tattooed. Some were without marking at all but existed so far above the pant line that I had to reconsider the definition of clothing, and in this latter case, where the belly button seemed to be floating so impossibly high, the purpose of clothing was clearly to accentuate nakedness.
As eye catching as public nakedness may be, I was soon distracted from this spectacle of skin by a man with a baby in a backpack. The man was tall. The baby was not small. The man leaned forward against the weight. The baby leaned into the man. As they crossed Second Ave. heading west on 10th I noticed the baby was missing one shoe. I saw the man's future. I heard him getting yelled at because money doesn't grow on trees and neither do shoes. I exited the vehicle with the windows down and the engine running and started out after the man who carried his baby in a backpack. I had no clear intention. Was I going to cobble a shoe while in pursuit, say you dropped this sir, and risk bringing to attention the rare foot disorder which required the baby to only wear one shoe?
On 10th near the corner of 3rd Ave. I passed a vampire sitting on a stoop and he tipped towards me a cup filled with red liquid and said, cheers.
At Washington Square I caught site of the man as he weaved his way around a circle of white men with dreadlocks playing drums, but then I lost him again in the crowd.
The next time I saw him I was exiting the elevator onto the top floor of the Empire State Building, just as the man and baby were entering the down elevator.
Around 42nd St. I had to enter an office building, get a quick photo ID made at the security desk, insert the ID into a turnstile blocking the elevators, go up four floors, make three lefts and two rights, knock on a door, enter and explain myself, apologize for not being Bernadette, explain various lackings that would prevent me from ever being Bernadette, reach a hesitant agreement, pick up her taxes, and exit the way I came in. I offered up my ID but the security man said I could keep it.
At St. Patrick's Cathedral I was close enough to touch the man but when he entered a pew and sat down to pray I stepped back to reconsider my sin of pride which was believing that I could in any way positively affect this man's life.
While the man prayed I crossed the street and entered Sak's Fifth Avenue in search of a bathroom. I had the beginnings of a mild panic attack amidst the eight floors of high end consumer goods as I kept exiting elevators onto floors that only offered women's restrooms.
Back on the street I saw the man loading his baby into a cab and I flagged the next one passing, thinking, is there any way around all this predictable derivation? I mean, I'm going to chase this guy around the landmarks of the city, just narrowly missing him each time, my goals vague, barely even passing muster as narrator, and for what? Just to return with an unlikely timing to a Jeep that has not been towed away or stolen or inhabited by a homeless family who are tapping their toes on the dash while listening to XM 101, the sounds of Jamaica?
I should just go back now. I mean come on, people. The guy is going to circle all the way back to the corner where the Jeep is parked and he's going to find the shoe. Get it? No? Exactly, neither do I.
I did stop first in the bowels of Grand Central for a dozen oysters. Unfortunately though, one of the dozen was apparently grown in the bowels of a dying sea monster and here I just seem to be going down the list of deadly sins because it was gluttony that caused me to eat the damn stinky oyster, even after smelling it I knew I shouldn't. I didn't die though. I just went on living.
I entered the Jeep through the sun roof, installed just seconds earlier for this purpose, so that I could throw you a curve, ha, no, he's not waking from a dream at the end, he's returning from an astral projection, which I guess doesn't really require a sun roof, so I can save on that.
Bernadette returned carrying soup and blintzes. As she pulled away from the curb she pointed and said look at that guy with the baby in a backpack. No thank you, I said.
...more recent posts
Faulkner Nobel Speech
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. William Faulkner, 1949
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. William Faulkner, 1949