Jelly Bread

I have the same lunch everyday: peanut butter spread on a large piece of good bread. For years, I ate peanut butter called “Once Again,” which I bought in health food stores. But for the past couple of months, I’ve re-discovered the delicious taste and texture of the Teddi brand, which I buy in supermarkets.

As for the bread, I have switched to another supermarket brand of multigrain Panini. The combination of bread and peanut butter is delicious and healthy and easily concocted, and I eat it daily, not just out of habit or routine but out of simple pleasure.

I will often add to the coating of peanut butter a layer of fresh honey made by bees working two towns away.

On rare occasions, instead of honey, I will add a layer of strawberry jam from Italy. And it is on those strawberry days that my peanut butter mood will turn a little more complicated, a little more poignant.

The reason for that shift can be summed up in two simple words: “jelly bread.”

“Jelly bread” was what the mother of former New York Times columnist, Russell Baker, offered him in compensation for an especially sad day, when he was just five years old. His father had just died and his mother had just given away his sister Audrey.

Baker and his parents and his sisters, Audrey and Doris, grew up in a small, poor town in Virginia. They were almost dirt poor. Little money, skimpy food, hard times day to day. The mother was strong and out-spoken, while the father was good and sensitive but weak and drank too much. He worked as a stone mason and could just barely make ends meet. The children loved him. His wife was continually disappointed by him. And they all clung to their poor rural life by their fingertips.

But then the father got diabetes, which went untreated. And it got worse as the years went by until one day he was taken to the hospital. The children were sure it was just for a short time. They waited for him to return home. But after a couple of days, he died and that was the end of that. He was just 33.

Russell was heart broken. “He is not dead,” he kept shouting, as he ran up the road towards home. “He is not dead; he is not dead.” But then the reality took hold and his five-year-old broken heart had to accept the fact.

The family was immediately plunged into deep, inescapable debt. No money coming in and no prospects. Three young children and a mother without a way to earn sufficient income. They had to give up their home and move in with one of the mother’s younger brothers in New Jersey. They had to give up what little they had and leave the state and move north.

But there was always the business of the children. Russell was five and his sister Doris was just a year younger. But Audrey was merely 10 months old, and bringing her along to New Jersey to move in with the mother’s brother and his family seemed too heavy a burden on everyone.

And so Russell’s mother gave Audrey away to Russell’s uncle Tom and aunt Goldie, who had always wanted a child but were unable to have one of their own.

He wrote about it in his wonderful autobiography, “Growing Up.”

“A few days later,” he wrote, “Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie arrived in Morrisonville again. My mother helped them carry out the crib and the boxes packed with baby clothes. When the car was loaded, my mother bundled Audrey into blankets, carried her outside, handed her to Aunt Goldie, and kissed her good-bye.

“When their car was out of sight I went back into the house. My mother was sitting in the straight-backed oak rocker, the fanciest piece of furniture we owned, staring at the stove.

“ ‘When’s Audrey coming back, Mama?’

“She didn’t answer. Just sat staring at the stove and rocking for the longest while. I went back out into the road, but she came out right behind me and touched my shoulder.

“ ‘Do you want me to fix you a piece of jelly bread?’ she asked.”

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On those days when I add a little strawberry jam to my usual peanut butter sandwich, the thought of Russell Baker’s ‘jelly bread’ often comes to mind. And I find the combination a little harder than usual to dismiss as simply ‘lunch.’

Not Exactly Clearing the Air

I went to the sea yesterday, even though the weatherperson advised against it. He said the air was “poor.” By poor, the Accuweatherperson meant that “the air has reached a high level of pollution and is unhealthy for sensitive groups.”

I’ve always considered myself a member of a sensitive group — a reading and writing group, mainly, but also a group that favors music and cinema . . . and baseball.

I was headed for Lighthouse Point. But the description of the air was not encouraging.

“Reduce time spent outside,” warned the weatherperson, “if you are feeling symptoms such as difficulty breathing or throat irritation.”

Her warning went on. “Fine particulate matter are inhalable pollutant particles with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers that can enter the lungs and blood stream, resulting in serious health issues.”

Not only that, but the temperature at the time was hot. At 1:34 pm, it was 86 degrees F, but ‘felt’ like 97.

Only a reckless, albeit sensitive, person would go out in weather and air pollution like that. But I needed the sea . . . even though the high tide had peaked five hours before and wouldn‘t surge again for another seven hours.

But just having the sea — even a lower-tide sea — a mere hundred feet from my seat under the black cherry tree — would be enough to nourish my dehydrated soul. And so off I went, the sky the color of gun metal, the shoreline just barely visible under a cloak of fine particulate smog.

When I arrived at the lighthouse, I found myself surrounded by a couple of hundred men, woman and children from, I assumed, India and Pakistan. The men were dressed in light cotton sheaths with pull-on trousers and light, long-sleeved tunics. Male children were similarly dressed. The females were not so formally attired, though they mainly sat in chairs and on the ground, preparing picnic food and looking after the children.

The mood was light and relaxed. The boy children ran around a lot. The girl children stayed closer to their mothers. Middle-aged men strutted around like cocks of the walk. Children scampered over the grassy areas, though not close enough to the water to get wet.

This was not what I was looking forward to. I was hoping for no crowds and seaside silence. It was a weekday, after all, not a busy weekend. Why were all these people here?

But I tried to make the best of things. I set up my chair under the black cherry tree, after straining my back to move one of the heavy, intrusive picnic tables.

But I couldn’t get into the quiet, calm mood I was hoping for. There was too much distraction, too much celebrating, too much wandering around, too much pleasure.

I had never seen so many East Asian people at Lighthouse Point. I figured they must have arranged a special, all-purpose get-together. Perhaps they were members of a mosque or a church.

And then this morning I read an Associated Press article in the New Haven Register that said that yesterday was a Muslim holiday. It was called Eid al-Adha, translated as the ‘Feast of Sacrifice.’

In Saudi Arabia, the holiday was celebrated in happy fashion by celebrants performing the symbolic ritual of stoning the devil. They threw pebbles into a pit where the devil’s presence was trapped in symbolic bondage.

There were no stoning rituals that I could see at Lighthouse Point. And since the devil had been voted out of office last November, there were no signs of him there, either.

I assume it was this holiday that brought all the Indians and Pakistanis to Lighthouse Point yesterday. In all the many years I have come to this part of the sea, I had never before seen such a peculiar feast day celebration.

I went home after sitting under the black cherry tree for an hour. I was still edgy and discontent. The temperature was still high. The air was still unhealthy. The sightlines were still hazy.

But, at least, somewhere in the world, the devil had been bruised by all those pebbles.

And I figured that life being what it is: sometimes you just have to settle for something like that.

Getting Old

Nothing gets better when you get old.

You don’t see better; you don’t hear better; you don’t taste food better; you don’t think better; you don’t remember names better.

Your feet don’t feel better. Your back doesn’t bend better. Your joints don’t move better. You don’t run long distances better.

Your vocabulary doesn’t get better. You don’t sleep better. You don’t pee better.

Your energy level doesn’t rev up better. Your horizons don’t widen better. Your ambition doesn’t propel you forward better.

If you’re lucky, you can keep much of what you had when you were ten years younger. But what you had a decade ago doesn’t get better. It just lingers longer.

Old age is what we call Nature’s plan to kill us. Nature is always on its own side, never on our side. So when we get old, Nature treats us the way it treats everything else that ever lived. It kills us by taking away what it is that kept us alive. It slows the sap in apple trees, flutters the heartbeats in humming birds and hardens the arteries in human beings.

If you were strictly vegetarian about what you ate and disciplined about doing exercise, and didn’t die in a war, you may live longer than fat meat-eaters. But in the end — and there always is an end — you wind up as dead as the nearest doornail.

Of course, religions can’t handle death. So they make up stories about ‘heaven‘ and ‘eternal life.’ We don’t die, they say. We just move on to an afterlife that is even better than the one we’re living now.

They just make it up.

There is no evidence — except for wishful thinking and vague words from people we call gods — to support an after-life that’s personal and supports autobiographies.

For Nature, of course, there is always an after-life. Nature just keeps going on and on, without taking notice of us. It was Nature that propelled the Big Bang and it will be Nature that causes our sun to blow up and become inert. And it will be Nature that causes the universe to speed up by extending the separation between stars. And it will be Nature that drives the universe into eternal darkness or that reasserts gravity and brings everything back into a bundle that explodes again into another Big Bang.

There may already have been a million or a billion Big Bangs in the timeless of non-Time.

My old age and your old age are just fading lightning bugs flittering around the nighttime of a dying Sun.

The most we can do in our final earthly dance is grab onto our old age and make the best of it, as we complete our plunge into the Nothingness of forever.

Compared to extinction, our old age is like a farewell gift, a last-minute piece of chocolate, a farewell sound of the sea.

The Sidewalk ‘Hearts’ That Failed Him

He drew heart symbols on Manhattan’s sidewalks, using chalk. There was nothing especially artistic about these drawings. They were just simple, everyday kinds of hearts that anyone can and has drawn on greeting cards and letters for generations. The kind of heart symbols that take about five seconds to draw.

Only he would draw them on sidewalks all over Manhattan. And people loved them. He became know as the “heart guy.” His chalk hearts became symbols of love and hope at a time when people were feeling discouraged and at loose ends and isolated. But when people walked down the street and came across these simple heart drawings, they felt a little better.

It seems odd to think so. That simple, sketchy chalk drawings of a heart symbol on a sidewalk could boost people’s morale. But the sheer volume of such simple drawings seemed to have that effect.

It shows how fragile and needy people nowadays can be. A cluster of chalk drawings of hearts can cheer up people desperate to feel good about something . . . about anything.

The man who drew these chalk hearts on sidewalks became the focus of a profile in today’s New York Times. He went by the name of Hash Halper. He was 41 and identified as a ‘street artist.’ He also did paintings on canvas and other materials and was scheduled to have a one-man show until his work was destroyed in a physical fight he had with someone he knew.

He began drawing the chalk heart symbols as a tribute to a woman he loved. But when that relationship ended, he kept doing the drawings because people seemed to like them.

But he himself was emotionally troubled and had and lost the love of other women and friends and was sometimes homeless. Although he drew hearts on the sidewalk that seemed to make people happy, he had trouble finding happiness for himself.

He was beloved as the creator of public chalk heart drawings that made strangers feel good. But those drawings didn’t work their happy magic on him.

But he never brought up his own pain. He couldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t the sort of thing the creator of happy heart drawings was supposed to feel. And so he felt trapped inside his own depression. A graduate of Yeshiva University as a history major, he stumbled through life unable to live the kind of orderly, coherent existence that can handle the normal ups and downs of daily living.

And yet his chalk heart drawings kept bringing smiles to countless people in his city.

Until he just couldn’t do it any more: couldn’t cope, couldn’t recover his destroyed paintings, couldn’t figure out what to do next, couldn’t find the secret to happiness that strangers found in his sidewalk chalk drawings.

And so on June 11th, he decided that enough was enough. And he did what many others have done before him: he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.

And that, thank god, was finally that. No more suffering, no more pain, no more loneliness.

His sidewalk chalk hearts would just have to live on their own, until they began to disappear, smudge by smudge, under the summer rains that would fall indiscriminately on the sidewalks upon which he would no longer walk.