Howl and the University Cafe

I know. It's wrong on several levels. Ginsberg and Palo Alto is like pulling together raw meat and espadrilles. It's tough to find the point of connection. In Palo Alto, the point for me is Bell's Books. Faith invited a few of the faithful to a reading of Howl at the book store. I'm nervous (what does one wear these days to hear beatnik poetry?) but also eager to see who comes to listen.

The bookstore is crammed full of people so I stand in the doorway with the should-have-been-earlier others, all of us leaning in to hear. There's a funny confluence between the street noises, the cars and laughing young women outside, horns and sirens, and the steady voice inside the store.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...."

Not my generation, I think. The minds of my generation have been minimized by greed, by a pursuit of technology without grace or poetry.

"... who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedies among the scholars of war...."

Soon, the sentences stop sounding like full thoughts and instead I'm rattled by separate words:

"...joyride neon, blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree...."

"from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge..."

"who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts..."

As I listen, the clock stops ticking and even the outside street noises seem to pause.

"I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange..."

Faith stands in the balcony and her voice joins in: I'm with you in Rockland... I'm with you in Rockland...

Then it's no longer poetry, it's a call, a bloodline connecting us, those of us who love words, who love books, who love Faith, who yearn for connection and meaning and truth.

And afterward, we stand by the cookie plate, awkward, making polite conversation, necessary but somehow too meek, too mild. And we fold the chairs, and Faith and Kippy and Don and I walk to the University Cafe where we talk about decades past: Kippy in Canada, farming; Faith, leaving her hometown and meeting Kippy and staying there with him; Don, teaching in Israel, and every day riding in a sheroodt -- a large shared taxi full of people all viewing him with suspicion. Trying to make a difference.

And the food doesn't matter at all. It's fine: it's good crab cakes, nicely browned, and a decent steak salad, and greens and coffee, yes they're fine, but we remember a time when it wasn't about the food, when it was about the thinking, and the people, and the hopes we had for our shared futures. When did food come to matter as much as the words matter?

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack