Poetry

The store front was mostly dark, appearing almost vacant that Sunday. 

The butcher opened early for Eddie who had protected him from a gambling debt helping the man and his family business stay upright in the early ‘60s. The butcher held unprecedented Sunday hours to serve the churchgoers from the Maronite Cathedral seven blocks down Kercheval on Detroit’s lower Eastside.

Eddie shied away from the sacred instead performing the family ritual knowing his brothers and their branches would visit, especially on this revered day of the week. He sipped the black coffee, exhaled his Newport while the meat-cutter sliced the ‘knuckle’ from the top of round. The front of the rear leg of the very lean steer. Five pounds of beef in chunks ready for the imminent Kibbee ceremony.

The next stop - a windowless, makeshift Paramount bakery directly across from the Lebanese church. The vegetable vendor from Windsor was stationed outside the door selling hot-house “mitt-thee” the perfect cucumber with the “right snap” that Eddie craved. Avoiding the crowds, we left with two mini-baskets of cukes and four-dozen “Syrian” bread in brown paper bags. Forty-seven loaves made it home as I clutched the still warm aromatic ethnic history against my pudgy body.

Once home, the kitchen rite commenced. The soaking #2 bulghur wheat swelled in its bowl. The meat-grinder was fastened to the table. The three grinding plates awaited their chore. Each was designed to mill the meat fine-finer-finest. Once completed, the raw onion/green pepper “tub-lah” was plunged through the same crusher adding its own sting to the final mixture.

I was handed the task of grinding the cumin seed. With each crank of the converted coffee grinder, a fusillade of smoky, woody, nutty, anise, pepperiness would fill my senses. Folding in the remaining ingredients, ancestry visited in every spice. 

To watch Eddie’s maestro performance of uniting the meat and spices and sodden wheat, you would feel the weight of bloodline in every turn of his self-manicured hands. And to be offered the first taste is reward for assisting tradition. 

Half of the mixture became “bil sanieh” layered into pans stuffed with “hush wee”, decorated in crisscrossed X’s and sent into the red-hot oven. The remaining was plattered in an oval mound of “ny-yee”. Eddie’s fingers, like that of his forefathers, pressed a rhythmic pattern into our Sunday staple. The over-sized plate completed the colorful still life on the abundant dining room table amid the rich pink turnips, the brown/black olives, yellow/green pepperoncini and the evergreen sprigs of mint while the waft of licorice hung in the air from the awaiting Arak toast to a gathering family.

A custom resurrected every Sunday.

It is said, or bemoaned, that nothing is like it was in the old days.

Do we ache, as Simon says, for times of innocence – for times of confidences?

Why can’t it be like that long-ago, black and white, slow-motion world 

where memory still lives while memory fades?

Progress improves your state of being.

as it quietly causes history to become pale.

Nothing is like it was in the old days…

yet the Kibbee still tastes the same.

We cannot impede steps forward.

Science and society advance.

From Edison’s bulb to L.E.D. - 

From the Model T to EV’s -

From party lines to Zoom – 

Progress devours the past… 

yet the Kibbee still tastes the same.

What you learn at your father’s hand 

is how tradition survives.

It is the prism of heritage undaunted by time.

It is the indestructible line in lineage. 

Food is legacy. 

The signs were the first pieces to face the hydraulic excavator. Each letter was scraped from the outside façade of the first Harness Racing track in Michigan. The capital ‘N’ from ‘Northville’ and the capital ‘D’ from ‘Downs’ crashed loudest into the waiting dumpster. The lower-case letters filtered into the alphabet soup of debris. The demolition beginning to the end of an era. Progress rings louder than protest. The new development, “The Downs” will include more than 400 residential units, retail, 15 acres of parks and new green space by the daylighting of the Middle Rouge River which has been asphalted over since 1944.

That 1964 summer day, Eddie offered his middle son the opportunity for a road trip and the chance “to see a man about a horse.” That catch phrase was Eddie’s normal good night to his children as he left our lower Eastside Detroit home for his frequent 45-minute trip across Eight Mile road into the westernmost part of Wayne County. This day would mint an indelible memory for his young son. My “Day Downtown With Daddy” came to life with Eddie’s famous “lahim mashwi” BBQ in a picturesque roadside park along Hines Drive and what would become a momentous visit to one of Michigan’s thriving horse tracks.

Eddie had a favorite perch inside the bustling clubhouse. Six windows down from the finish line, he could see the entire oval and note the standings at each pole as the majestic Standardbreds paced in ballet precision. Gallops were not in form. These horses, with bloodlines traced to 18th-century England, were so precise in their training, that to break out of trot would cause them to drop off the pace and finish out of the money. Those “breaks” were indicated by an “X” in their past performances in the Daily Racing Form.

Eddie had three superstitions at the track. He would select his horses mostly on speed and come from behind abilities. Secondly, while in line to place his bets, if he’d hear too many people picking the same horse before him, he would step out of line and handicap a different horse. Last, he always bet a 2–2 Daily Double. This day, he would bet it twice due to the chatter of the racetrack touts in queue. Both Number 2 horses in each race were long shots. The first race, his 2 horse, with 30 to 1 odds, came from off the pace and closed to win by a neck. So, Eddie had two tickets alive. Here’s the rub. The 2 horse in the 2nd race was, by far, the fastest animal. So why the long odds? Perusing the racing form, over his last nine races this horse had won two times but “broke” out of pace (indicated by an “X”) four times. Each time he broke, the stallion was in the home stretch. That night, a 2-2 Daily Double would pay a whopping $1,300 for a $2 dollar bet. Imagine the anticipation.

“They’re off!” roared the announcer. The motorized starting gate zoomed away from the eight trotters in the 2nd race. Eddie’s 2 horse assumed a small lead. His pace at the quarter pole was electric! Down the back stretch his lead widened as did my expectation. As they turned down the home stretch the speedy 2 horse held a commanding lead, but what of the potential “break”? Eddie could not bear to watch. I could not fathom what happened next. Inexplicably, Eddie turned his back to the race and uttered this shocking plea, “Stay flat,  You Fucker! STAY FLAT!” which I came to learn meant “DON’T BREAK!”  It didn’t. Eddie hit the Double. And I was sworn to secrecy about his new found wealth. Two unforgettable things happened that night. I heard my father drop an F Bomb for the first time and how two winning tickets cemented a lifetime memory of a now demolished site.

All good things come to an end.

We hope they will not. 

Yet we cannot control them.

Hold on to the old in favor of the new.

Progress rings louder than protest.

We loved Briggs Stadium. Then Tiger Stadium. Now Comerica Park.

We loved Olympia Stadium. Then Joe Louis Arena. Now Little Caesar’s Arena.

We loved Cobo Arena. Then the Silverdome. Then The Palace. Now LCA.

We loved Tiger Stadium. Then the Silverdome. Now Ford Field.

We loved Detroit Race Course. 

And Hazel Park Raceway. 

And Northville Downs.

Now, no more.

Yet your memories glorify all that you witness at such iconic venues.

Kaline’s bases loaded single. Gibson’s upper deck bomb.

Number Nine. Yzerman’s missing tooth grin hoisting Stanley’s Cup.

The Bad Boys. Mr. Big Shot.

Barry, the GOAT. Jar-ed Goff! Jar-ed Goff!

Two winning Daily Double tickets that were worth ten times that in today’s money.

You never have to relinquish your memories.

We all possess the ability to close our eyes and relive those moments.

What was it that Thoreau said?

“Memories are the sweetest souvenirs of life’s journey.”

And like Eddie taught me that day.

They don’t break.

They stay flat.

“Can you imagine us years from today sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy.” – Paul Simon

My left knee creaks like an un-oiled hinge.

My body weight resides on a lifelong Ferris wheel.

My sense of smell abandoned me a decade ago to a desolate island of three and half senses.

Stumbling for names, foraging for elusive words and unintended pregnant pauses are daily skirmishes with the 12-foot wall my 6-foot memory struggles to scale.

I have long since vacated the key buying demographics, insurance rates have entered the usurious category and I am forced to accept that my enduring relationship with hypochondria has been time misspent, as I am still here.

I retrieve my earliest recollections.

My mother and aunt in silhouette through the slats of a hospital crib. I was three. Maybe two.

My immigrant great grandmother’s tree-branch cane and high-pitched, almost shrill voice. I was four. Maybe three.

How a monochrome TV set lit a rainbow in my imagination. I was six. Maybe five.

I relic faces and voices of every aunt and uncle gone. 

         (Save one).

I am fifth of thirty-three to celebrate seven decades. 

         (Maybe fourth if we ever discover the fate of the miscreant cousin).

I have out-aged each grandfather. As for my nonagenarian Sitos? 

         (Smart money is on the under).

My brothers live in every sentence of our on-going story.

I am being chased by the specter of my sister.

I still hear my mother’s muddled voice in her rosary prayers.

I crave my father’s spirit for life.

My son has taken my lessons into a wholly other sphere.

My daughter embraces embracing.

My wife is life.

My grandchildren bloom and branch.

Across seven decades, I have been prodded, scoped, cored, ectomied, bariumed, biopsied, invaded, stitched, roto-rooted, drilled, implanted, monitored, thalliumed, cuffed, probed, unpolyped and, for the most part, repaired.

After a seventieth of a century, I have basked in intelligence, devoured creativity, frowned at the characterless, been couched by my obsessive compulsions and I have grieved.

Reflecting on this mile-marker, I have danced with giants, been knocked to a knee, under-performed, over-delivered, fulfilled a deathbed promise, participated in history and scribbled syllables in search of clarity.

I have loved and been loved.

I have, 

until I have had it.

Fate leads him who follows it, and drags him who resists.
-Plutarch

The steady roar of the surf roused my ocean walk.

Where the chalk white sky met the morning mist, I strode an old-man pace.

Could there be a noisier peace?

What more could soothe my come of aged heart?

I often bless the days she gave birth to us.

How towering were the odds that her choice would become us?

Every square inch was incalculable.

Where my steps deepened the sand, my mindset matched.

The constant tide carried off both footprints and wanderings.

I often bless the fate that gave birth to us.

and how her smile enchants 

and how the brunette of her eyes seduce

and how her intellect drowns out the noise 

and how her touch quiets my raging storm.

I often, on my knees, bless that every day is birth for us.

Count today, count tomorrow, count the sign for infinity.

Each day, a magnet drawing her to me

and I, her…

The mist melts away…the sun assumes its ownership of the sky…

the ocean erases my sandy footfalls…

nothing erases the brunette of her eyes…  

To a person…a visceral response…as if choreographed. 

“Wow! Picasso. Homage to Picasso. I love it!” Those who knew, knew straight away. You can’t fake genuine astonishment or their processing eyes as they scan your work in a silence that swings between surprise and bewilderment. 

To a person…the inevitable and identical question…as if choreographed.

“Who knew you could sketch like this? Why didn’t I know until now, that you possessed such ability?”

And your perfect rejoinder “Well, you never asked.” 

Your talent awash in plaudits and praise. Even though you “honestly” don’t remember doing this piece. Although you admit it does feels like you. Oh, and the “damning” evidence that the original had been spiraled among your undiscovered art in a sketchbook dated, in your hand, two decades ago. 

Tucked like a lover’s rose inside the penciled sheets are other foretokens of a gift, loved yet too long ignored. You knew while you were still in single-digits that your eye and your hand had met. 

Thru your looking glass self, you see the sweep in a gown. The cut of the collar. The earth in gray tones right before dusk. The nose’s ancestry. Hair in fly-away. The wrinkle in a knuckle…

You get the picture? Drop the question mark. Add an exclamation point!

You capture with penciled lead what your eye commands. Perhaps that’s the explanation for the other recurring declaration. 

To a person…the predictable pronouncement…as if choreographed.

“Ooh, look at the eyes! How, on earth? My Lord, the eyes!”

You transfer the grace of your own eternal eyes onto vellum for us. 

In every infant, child, girl, woman, mother… You get the picture? 

Drop the self-effacing. Add acceptance. Add mad skills. Add your eye meeting your hand. Add your pencil tip dancing on the parchment…as choreographed.

Add artist.