As kids every couple of weeks
we’d take our allowances,
go down to the variety store
and buy the latest DC comic.
Larry and I would spend
that afternoon imagining
we were whatever superhero
was featured in our new,
and now most prized book.
Jimmy was with us
all the way, but admitted
he wanted to be Lex Luthor or
or the Joker, or better still
Solomon Grundy.
So we probably should not
have been surprised that
while I became a lawyer
and Larry a classics professor,
Jimmy became a politician.
A phone call, a lawyer’s clerk:
Can you tell me about Lisa Landesman?
I pause for that is a name I have
not heard in forty years, save
in a poem I once wrote,
now long forgotten.
She was my sister for two
or three weeks, adopted like I was,
and then Mike, my then father
dropped dead of a massive
heart attack and she was soon gone.
We were Federal adoptions, our
birthplace under Federal law, not
getting its own for two decades,
and her adoption wasn’t final so she
was re-placed and never replaced.
She won’t inherit as I will from
my cousin who died having no
siblings, spouse, children,
nieces or nephews, who left
no will, who left only kind memories.
Step into a hotel elevator
and you will see the sign
“Elevator certificate is located
In the General Manager’s Office.”
If Einstein were to come back
to life and see this, would he
inquire as to where he could find
the Special Manager’s Office?
And George S. Patton would
no doubt bellow out a demand
that the Corporal Manager
stand front and center.
But as a lawyer, now retired
I am far more interested
in learning the precise office
location of the Specific Manager.
A Rabbi once told me that
if you want to get to heaven,
something Jews don’t believe in,
you must atone to those you
have harmed, or injured
before you die.
I’ve started making a list,
and it feels like I am in
some wierd version of
High Fidelity, but mine
is more than a top five.
I’ve made a few efforts,
some accepted, some not,
but I have come to realize
that if I don’t believe in heaven
and I was a lawyer for years,
there is no way I am
getting in, atoning or not.
We were certain then that we’d be
a success in life, that we’d drive
the kind of cars our fathers
only dreamed of as our mothers
chuckled about mid-life crises.
They spoke about sons and daughters
of friends who were doctors,
or at least lawyers, bemoaned
those who taught or held jobs
they called manual labor.
But we were going in a whole different
direction, we would eschew medicine,
reject law, for we would be titans
of retail, and one day we would have
too many lemonade stands to count.
I had a meeting this morning
with a number of the birds
that inhabit our wetland.
The said they wanted to retain
my services, although how
they discovered I was a lawyer
is wholly beyond me as I
retired several years ago.
They asked me to draft
a cease and desist letter
to all Americans, demanding
that we stop tweeting, or
more to the point, that we
call our inane and sometimes
violent messages something
other than a tweet for that
is the sweet trill of their
songbird cousins and we
are besmirching nature
with each new posting.
an old writer and his words 