The Last Time I Saw Elvis

(This is a very short ditty inspired by the writing prompt: “the last time I saw Elvis…”.)

The last time I saw Elvis was in Old John’s Luncheonette on West 66th Street. He was waiting tables and served me my roasted turkey platter. It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but whenever I want a little taste of that turkey of a holiday, I go to Old John’s.

That particular time I had a problem, though. On any other given evening, as the last shards of sunlight refract through the front window, as the old Jewish ladies finish their early bird specials, as wizened John, the titular owner of the establishment, rings out the cash register and readies it for the night shift, as the smell of boiled string beans rides on kitchen zephyrs across the dining room, and as Elvis hums a few bars of “Are You Lonesome Tonight” behind the wall next to my table – on any other evening like this I’d have my bread stuffing resting underneath the carved turkey and hot, salty gravy on top of it all, but tonight, what the heck was this?

At first, I thought, Boy, the stuffing sure is burnt, I mean, look how dark it is, and it’s really hard. Geez-Louise I can hardly cut through it. And then I chewed and on inspection knew something was wrong. There was no stuffing. Instead, an impostor was there, and its name was meatloaf.

Did the cook actually think that I wouldn’t notice? A piece of meatloaf underneath my turkey substituted for the stuffing? A good cook can mask certain culinary inadequacies, but meatloaf is meatloaf and there ain’t no way around the fact that it doesn’t comes close to resembling light, fluffy stuffing. If they didn’t have stuffing, they should have let me know because I wouldn’t have ordered the dish. I’ve gotta have my stuffing underneath my carved turkey and hot, salty gravy. The cook could have at least chopped up some sandwich bread or an old roll to try to fool me, but this was blatant.

“Uh, Elvis?” I called.

Elvis, like a numinous specter, shimmered to my table, a hand on one hamhock hip, his grizzled sideburns connecting to the hair popping out of his ears around the stems of his sunglasses. “Uh-huh,” he said, the left-hand corner of his lip twitching.

I lifted the turkey and pointed at the slice of meat underneath and said, “This is meatloaf, not stuffing.”

Elvis reached down, tore off a piece of the loaf and popped it in his mouth. “Uh-huh, you got that right. Best in town.”

“I want stuffing.”

Elvis looked around the dining room and tapped his sequined shoes on the tile floor. He looked up at the red tin ceiling and sighed. An old man at a table by the window hacked up a piece of fat from his steak, but Elvis remained focused and hummed a few bars of “Love Me Tender.”

“Do you believe in love?” he asked me, still looking at the ceiling.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you believe in music?”

I did.

“Do you like food?”

“You know it.”

“Do you believe that music be the food of love?”

Here, here!

Elvis leaned on the table, pushed his sunglasses down to the end of his nose, and with rheumy eyes looked at me squarely and said, “Then eat your meatloaf and turkey because Charlie back there’s made a loaf of love, and when you eat it, just think of the music in your mouth as it tastes a medley of meat and carefully chosen spices, and know that all is well. Go on your way and be who you are in all things in life ‘cause when it comes right down to it, we ain’t nothin’ but houndogs that gotta break our chains. There’s no other platter of meat like this in the universe. Be unique, be an individual. Shake, rattle, and roll. And eat your meatloaf.”

Yes, I thought, I will, I will eat my meatloaf. Elvis is right. In his own way he touched upon the idea that forces in the universe work together in harmony in each individual life, but also in the greater whole of humanity, connecting us all in a dance of possibility if we’d only take that chance, the sheer energy of which can incarnate through the hands of a man forming a loaf of meat in a place called Old John’s Luncheonette on West 66th Street, served on chipped china by a corpulent, mystical icon.

That was the last time I saw Elvis. On my return to Old John’s I asked about him, but John just shook his head and said, “He got tired of the meatloaf.”

A Year to Live

I have a friend whose brother died three weeks ago. She’s not a close, intimate friend, but is someone I adore, admire, and whom I do call friend; a person I’d like to get to know better. Her brother was diagnosed on a Tuesday with melanoma and died in three days. The doctors described it as an “explosive cancer.” It reminds me that our physical lives are finite – our flesh, from the moment of our birth begins to decay, our bellies extend, our skin and tits sag, teeth yellow and rot, our butts hang down like pancake batter, our sight wanes, hearing loss joins the march of time, joints ache, and we shrink. My dad used to be 5’6”, now he’s 5’4”. The last time I visited him I had to ask, “Is the house getting bigger or are you getting smaller?” I told him that if he lives to be ninety I’ll be able to simply bury him in a suitcase and save a few thousand on a casket. “Get one of those wheely ones,” he said, “then you won’t need pallbearers.”

Last week, friend Kenneth sent me an email that stated he had one hundred free tickets for "The Story of My Life", a new musical on Broadway currently in previews. He wanted to know if F. and I wanted to go. F. did. I didn’t. I’d checked out the musical’s website and it wasn’t a production I was really interested in attending. It sounded hokey, corny, not my kind of thing. I’m not a musical queen, although I do enjoy some, like The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Singin’ in the Rain.

I did, however, change my mind and this is why: after my mom died last year, another friend, Pamela, sent me a book on CD called A Year to Live. Author Stephen Lavine had culled research on people who were dying and through this discovered unique lessons that people with terminal illnesses could teach all of us. A Year to Live is the book he wrote about the experience his wife and he had after they vowed to live for one year as if it were their last; as if they had been given a prognosis that they would cease to be, bereft of life, when three hundred and sixty-five sunsets had sallied forth into the wide blue yonder.

After listening to the book, several points resonated with me. They were ones the authors found consonant with many women and men who were terminally ill. The first was that people wanted to concentrate on expanding their horizons. Next was that during their lives they wished they had stopped, or slowed down at least, to smell or plant the roses. Even more said that they would have foregone their sequacious, unhappy jobs to pursue these goals.

Many spoke of the present moment as being the only reality. The past to them was a dream that, if unmindful, served to obscure their true nature. They wanted to become more mindful, more present. They wanted to extenuate their fear of their imminent deaths by truly being alive for a change instead of sleepwalking through life.

It was because of listening to and trying to live what I learned from A Year to Live that I decided to go to the play last week. I thought: if I had one year to live, would I go to this show? And the answer was affirmative. It was an opportunity to see friends, have a drink at the inimitably nostalgic Sardi’s beforehand, and even if the show was a complete bomb, I’d have the knowledge and experience that it was.

A young investment banker, recently laid off, was interviewed on NPR. He was thirty-four years old and had been making over $250K/year. When asked if he would eventually like to return to his former profession he said, “I don’t think so. I want to do something in which I’m valued for who I am, not valued for how much material things I produce for other people.” This wasn’t the first time I’d heard or read interviews in which people intimated that the recession has made them re-evaluate what’s important in their lives. This was especially true around the holidays when I heard a father say that his kids wouldn’t be getting many presents under the tree. He thought it was a good opportunity to show them that time with family, kindness, love, and charity are more important gifts.

Will I put into practice every day the concepts of living life as if each day were my last? Probably not every day. My intentions are usually good, but alack, alas, life is dirty; if it wasn’t, each day would be a goodly bore. Life is messy for a better part of the day and distractions and encumbrances deter me from focusing on being present and mindful of my spirit, but I make a concerted effort to wade through all the muck.

On an early frigid February morning the gray blanket of twilight mutes the urban soundtrack. I do my best to set my intentions when the city is still sleeping. I read a daily thought from Madeleine L’Engle, get on my knees and pray. I don’t ask for anything, I just give thanks to my Source for everything and everyone in my life. I then sit on the sofa and silence my mind so that the voice of my Source can come through to let me know what I need to do today. This helps me reset my mind and kickstart my spirit every morning lest I’ve forgotten since yesterday. I remind myself to try to live this day as if it were my last.

Each day I find a new aspect of me. My present self is born from the experience of the erstwhile Timmie. Death is an ineffable concept, but Socrates said, “We should always be occupied in the practice of dying.” By doing so we learn how to live. What would you do differently today if you had a year to live?

NGC 4921

I receive email updates every few days from the European Space Agency (ESA). I don’t always read every one, but the other day one message particularly caught my eye. The email stated the following: “A spectacular new image of an unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma galaxy cluster has been created from data obtained by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. It reveals fine details of the galaxy, NGC 4921, and an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early Universe.” (Click here to see the picture and read the brief article – well worth it.) I clicked on the link and was redirected to the ESA website where I was presented with a breathtaking picture, something that reminded me of my significance in the universe.

I studied the picture and marveled at the beauty of young stars recently born. I saw a few of the 1,000 galaxies in the cluster and was awestruck with the delicate swirl of the dust and detail of NGC 4921. The ESA article offers an apropos description: “Much of the pale spiral structure in the outer parts of the galaxy is unusually smooth and gives the whole galaxy the ghostly look of a vast translucent jellyfish.”

I feel connected to that “jellyfish”, to all the galaxies surrounding it, creating a life of their own, marching forward in an elegant cortege, taking part in a beautiful dance among countless other partners in time and relative dimensions in space. And each of these galaxies is unique, like an individual with different shapes, sizes, and colors particular to themselves. Like a snowflake, no one is alike, and I find comfort in the reminder of that. I feel like one of those stars in one of those galaxies in an ever-expanding universe, and I wonder: perhaps that’s what happens to us when we die – we’re reborn as stars; wouldn’t that be beautiful?

The picture’s focus is the spiraling galaxy NGC 4921. In the center is a bright orb-like glow and out of the radiance grows the galaxy, as if from a womb. There’s the saying, “so above, so below”, which tells us that as things are in the heavens, so it is around us and within us. If we go to the quantum level of life, we see that the same creative force forming galaxies is working its magic in the smallest particles of the universe – that which is inside of us. Those stars being born in one galaxy are us being born by the same mysterious Source.

February 12th is the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. As one of the most misunderstood and maligned people by fundamentalist Christians, he was not some godless naturalist, but a deeply religious man who believed in a god; he merely construed creation as an unfolding process that God set in motion, like the galaxy in the ESA picture that maintains a freedom of form. Darwin rejected the Victorian idea of a god who had fixed every detail — including every social flaw and injustice — at the beginning of time. Did God plan for that little gnat to be eaten by the sparrow? He doubted it, and so do I. This idea of evolution frees our concept of a god responsible for the endlessly minute details in life and gives weight to broader strokes of the artist’s brush.

Darwin was only trying to delve as deeply as he could, taking a leap into then hypothetical waters, trying to understand the process of creation and how God did it. Again, in that I find consolation because within the laws of the physical universe, there’s always room for unexpected possibilities, for self-determination. Darwin saw evolution (or transmutation as he called it) as a tree of life, much like the one in the allegory of the garden of Eden. Limbs grow, some fall off, new buds sprout – such is life. While I don’t believe in God as a wizened old man sitting on a throne dictating the laws of the universe and judging people one by one as they stand before him, or even that He is a he, I do believe in the Source of my Being, perhaps what Plato and Socrates proffered as the creative universal intelligence. It may be one big fabrication, but it suits me just fine.

For some, the idea of billions of stars and planets, with more and more growing and being created every second, evokes a sense of insignificance, the thought that: I’m one miniscule irrelevant blip in all of creation and time. To me it says: I’m one most significant star in the universe that my Source imbued with life by setting creation in motion, unfettering it, and letting it go to see what happens. I, and you, are the culmination of endless possibilities on different paths, walking down different hallways with myriad doors to open or close, but we’re all in the same big building. My Source is the architect and I am the builder.