SJ Rozan

Okay, the article’s old, but city agency wheels grind slow. Maybe this summer? Let’s eat!

Not as exciting as “Clarabelle speaks!” perhaps, but you might find other similarities. The people at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine being as impractical as they are charming, I, instead of an actual, you know, actor, was asked to read my short story “Golden Chance” for a podcast. So, ever the obliging ham, I did.

Sharp black roof shadow

Thrown by early morning sun

Onto blank white wall.

Mug on concrete step.

Steam rises through chilly air.

Dog barks on next block.

Privet and sedum,

Forsythia and myrtle —

Any minute now.

And in case you want more, here’s my 211 HAIKU book for you.

Riding the train to Boston, to check in with my nephew and family (including the great-nephew who, when told that if he met a monster he could just say, “Oh, monster, you’re not real!” thought about that and said, “Maybe I should say, ‘Monster, you’re probably not real, but I could be wrong.'”) In the Bronx we passed through the railyard where the Ringling Bros. train is parked while the circus plays the Barclays Center. When I was a kid we went to the circus every year and I loved it. It was a less enlightened time, and I was a kid. I thought the elephant parade was delightful, and the acrobats and tigers were equally thrilling to me.

When I was twelve — just about time for the magic to wear off anyway — we went first to the midway, as we always did. I don’t know if they still do this at the circus, but in those days the midway was the prep area and they let the audience stroll through it before the show. (And parenthetically [is that redundant here?] I have to say that when I think of times like this, I must admit that my folks, though they were difficult in many ways for a kid to grow up around, had their moments: not just the circus, but the midway? With four little kids, and a neighbor kid or two? Every year?) I loved the midway as much as the show. The animals stared at you from their cages and the performers wandered around, clowns putting on makeup, acrobats testing their rigging. That trip I saw one of the clowns almost fully in costume except for his gloves. I don’t have a problem with clowns; the problem I had with this guy was, he was a dwarf and he was wearing a wristwatch. I guess he took it off just before the show; but I was hit with the realization that he was a person, just a regular person who needed a watch to tell time like everyone else, only because he was a dwarf he was a clown because people thought being a dwarf was funny. Twelve-year-olds have quite a sense of the tragic and that struck me as about as tragic as you could get. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known the circus performers were people, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I saw that wristwatch that maybe they weren’t entirely happy in their lives.

I had another brief flirtation with the circus when Gunther Gebel-Williams joined Ringling Bros. Anyone remember him? An electrifying animal tamer who put some serious old-fashioned thrills back in the lion and tiger acts. But by then you had to work hard to keep from noticing that, whether or not the people in the circus were happy, the animals certainly weren’t. Even a charismatic guy like Gebel-Williams could only sell me the magic for a season or two.

Now the only circuses I’ll go to are ones without animals, with the possible exception of dog acts because dogs actually like to do tricks. But when I saw the Ringling Bros. cars this morning I was hit with a wave of nostalgia for a time, both more innocent and more brutal, when what rolled into town in those train cars was an intoxicating combination of a weird, exotic world, and the thrill of a life on the road.

Bella is persistent and very fast. For days now she’s been throwing shoes around from where they’re lined up by the door. I figured she was chasing waterbugs. Not the case, as I discovered last night. There is, however, a problem. She has the instinct to hunt, as all cats do, and the physical talent for it, which not all cats do. But cats need to be taught to kill, and no one ever taught her that. Fugazy came here fully educated. All Bella knows is how to pounce. She swats her paw down on the mouse, and then lifts it up to see what’s going on. The mouse runs, Bella leaps on it. That was the situation when I got up to see what was going on. She had the mouse cornered but she didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what to do about the whole situation but my being there distracted Bella enough that the mouse snuck under the closet door. Now I had a cat scrabbling at the door and a mouse in the closet. I stood there a minute, thinking if the mouse was smart it wouldn’t come out. Of course, if the mouse was smart it would be a miracle. I decided to choose to believe it wasn’t coming out, and I went back to bed. Bella came in a couple of times to suggest that I open the closet door, until finally she gave up, too. I’d like to live in peace with the mice, as long as they stay off the counters. It would be good, though, if they were to at least stop racing along the hallway right under Bella’s nose.

Tuesday, down to my sister’s in Philly for a second-night Passover seder. Ten people and a puppy. Seder went on and on — midnight bedtime, much later than usual! Food was great, though, as were Talmudic discussions. Stayed over, hung out in the morning, drove back — okay, JL drove, I sat — to Staten Island, waited for the ferry (which was unbelievably crowded with tourists, this being vacation week), ran home, jumped in the shower, ran up to Juilliard for piano class (no, I do NOT play, thank you, this is piano literature, not performance) and then after class played an hour an a half of basketball. Home at 9:30, another shower, late supper, fell into bed, fell asleep — and was woken up by Bella an hour later, very excited because she’d caught her second mouse.

Down by the river, snowdrops have been up for a couple of weeks and yellow crocuses are popping. In the park near me the tiny lawn was planted with purple crocuses last year and they’re all up, with pigeons napping between them. The daffodils are all about six inches high and ready to open, except for the one that opened yesterday, the only spot of yellow where soon everything will be yellow. The tulips are starting to come up, too — will be interested to see what colors they’ve planted in that park this year. It’s always different. In the backyard, nothing’s blooming yet but Squirrely, Squeeze and the winter litter are racing around like crazy. One of them — he has a fairly flat tail, I’m going to call him Squish — just now dashed along the fence, took a long leap onto the big tree, and clung like a statue while the one who was chasing him kept zipping along the fence to the next yard. Pretty good trick. I’ve seen cardinals and a lot of titmice back there over the last few months. On the river, buffleheads, red-breasted mergansers, Canada geese, Brant geese, mallards, Gadwalls, cormorants, gulls and at least one loon are sharing the water. The snow last night turned to rain and is now all dried up. Could this really be it? It seems like a very long winter here in NYC, because it really started with Sandy at the end of October. We’ve had a couple of serious snowstorms and lots of plain old bad weather. So maybe, on the full moon that marks Passover and Easter, we’ve made the crossing? Hope so! Meanwhile, happy holiday, whichever is yours.

When Pope Benedict retired everyone was talking about the last time that happened, in the 15th C., which allowed the Council of Constance to elect Martin V — which event happens to be pivotal to the present-day action in Sam’s book, BLOOD OF THE LAMB.

Then came the election of the first Jesuit Pope, and everyone was talking about Jesuits, which Father Thomas Kelly, one of the heroes of Sam’s book, also happens to be.

Now, this isn’t nearly as big, but the Opinionator blog in today’s NY Times is about a lost letter concerning the death of Margaret Fuller. Fuller, almost forgotten today, was an important figure in the mid-19th C. A brilliant and passionate writer, she was sent by an American newspaper to cover the Italian uprising know as the Risorgimento — making her the first woman war correspondent.

Here, let Father Thomas Kelly, Sam’s hero, tell you about her as he tells a Cardinal in Chapter 6. He’s discussing an Italian poet named Mario Damiani, whose theft of a document in the 1840’s sets in motion the action of BLOOD OF THE LAMB.

“There’s a letter he wrote to Margaret Fuller. The American journalist?” No light went on in the Cardinal’s eyes, but it didn’t matter. “It’s what I’ve been doing in London. Going through Fuller’s papers. She was enormously important in Italy. Her reporting shaped the American view of the uprising and helped make Garibaldi a hero. She was married to a partisan, knew them all, and didn’t pretend to be objective. Damiani and she were particularly close. In his letter he tells her he stole something from the Vatican. He’s coy about what it is, but calls it, quote, ‘a document that will shatter the church.'”

Will it? Sam wouldn’t like it if I revealed any more. Luckily for you, the book will be out this summer…

From Jennifer J., this link to the blog of a working tugboat captain in NY harbor. Inside tugboat baseball!

I was out this evening (at Dance Brazil at the Joyce, I’m exhausted and I was just in the audience!) so when I got home I thought I’d check to see how the Knicks did. Went to Facebook, to the Knicks page. Good news: they won. More interesting than that, though, is the list down the right side, of other pages Knicks fans have liked that maybe I’d want to click on. Carmelo Anthony. Tyson Chandler. Amar’e Stoudemire. And: the Hospital for Special Surgery. I find this inauspicious.