change

Change is hard, espcially if there are coins involved. Paper money, less hard. But there may be paper cuts if the money is crisp enough and if you are an idiot.

What do you call someone who chooses the evening of the 21st of December to say "I'm about to hire a hit on you." ?
Easy. You call that person Wife.

Some pleasure can and will be derived from this situation, but it will have nothing to do with the Rolling Stones tune "Moving On," which, though vintage Stones, sucks. There will certainly be lots of learning. And I may take on some of the characteristics of that albino guy in the Da Vinci Code. You know, he was profoundly religious. And he self flagellated. Rock. Talk about Hard!

I was writing nice poems there for a couple of days.
Here's my Christmas poem:

A FINGER IN THE UPDIKE

The old Polish dentist
His shoulders hunched over
Suspecting foul play,
But wrong Dr. K, the play
Was fair and sweet between
Your daughter and me.

We didn’t have sex til New York
And the subway was dirty too.

I think of my father
Laying in supplies for the winter,
I think it was colder and folks hibernated.
Bernie drank a lot, the way I’ve told it.
Whether or not an alcoholic.
But I loved those trips to the State Store
With the Pennsylvania shield on the door
The keystone state
And if you need proof, well that’s just the
Alcohol content
Times 2.
Not divided by 2, boy.
As it often was.

He drank with a friend of an evening,
Discussed Freud, Marx, China, and possibly,
When I was not in the room,
Women.
Or homosexuality.
By age 23 I knew more about sex than he did.
He held forth:
"Sex is highly over-rated."

Bernie was not from Shillington (Updike’s town), but close.
Reading.
And he was a reader and a
“Writer of letters.”
Sometimes he typed, more often wrote by hand,
A neat blockish alphabet.
Point was,
He never wrote a book,
Though he seemed to want to.

A man with potential for loneliness, but no follow-through.
His great consolation and joy,
Those trips to the State Store
From which we emerged into the cold December air
With 2 or even
3 boxes of Canadian Club blended whiskey, Gilbey’s gin
and vodka.
And he and I were both happy
Laying in those supplies.