Mirth, Wind, and Ire

By Bill Gralnick

Mirth, Wind, and Ire is a book of essays on the contemporary political and social scene--with a bit of humor thrown in. The essays are "op-ed" columns. Born from a review of some 800 columns written over nearly two decades that showed something startling: some problems from ten or twenty years ago still haunt us, unsolved today.

Each essay is about a specific incident or issue. The book is organized to lead the reader to the conclusions. That process begins with an introduction that opens the door to the book and ends with a conclusion that offers the reader a "how to" for either a good think, or a "how to" for getting community-involved with implementing fixes.

Section One, "You and Me--Perhaps to See" contains 16 essays. Each is from the writer's observation of the world around him. There is an encounter by a neighborhood mother with a local street gang--that she wins hands down. There are musings on morality using a father who put his talented son to cheat in a baseball league. The problem is the team finishes in first place, but the boy is exposed. Money in pro ball is explored as an evil for players and young fans alike. Also to be found are thoughts on the odd, seemingly economically linked post 9/11 expressions of patriotism.

Section Two, "You and We...." has 15 essays that speak to the world's most complicated and at times dangerous subject--religion. Using PT Barnum's adage that "There's a sucker born every minute and two to take'm in," the section explores the deceptions used by the Messianic Jewish/Jews for Jesus movement to convert Jews. The reader is urged to think about the meaning of the Southern Baptist Convention's ban on ordination of women for the pulpit. The "December Dilemma," "religion in the public square" and the societal battles it causes, and the unique relationship of Israel to Christians in the Holy Land to round out this section of conflicts.

Section Three, "Beyond Here--But Still Near" takes the the reader overseas. "Of Ships and Tacks and Sealing Wax" explores the challenge of keeping the ship of state afloat when the US Mail is used to kill people. The cultural paranoia so famously linked to the Russian psyche is at the heart of the tragedy when the Russian government lets hundreds of sailors suffocate at the bottom of the sea rather than permit US divers to enter the stricken sub and save her crew.

Section Four is "You and Me--Perhaps We." It can be captured in the woeful plea of Rodney King in Los Angeles as he wailed, "Why can't we all just get along?" It is a tour through multiple intergroup relations issues from the condition of the Urban "Indian" (Native American) to the positives that women bring to the workplace.

Section Five deals with the 2015-16 obsession, politics. In "Power, Pabulum, and Purchase of Politics" the writer shares a letter to President George W. Bush, explores how Palm Beach County golf clubs were allowed to exceed their water allotments by one billion gallons a year, and delves into the "election from hell--" not Clinton v. Trump, but Bush v. Gore with its chads hanging out for all to see.

Mirth, Wind, and Ire has many things to commend it. It is a quick read, but it is mentally challenging. It uses real life issues and actions to highlight the intractability of inertia in the attempt to create change. It points out that time passes, but with the passage of time remain the same old problems. It is a book that can be used by adult students of the world condition. It is can also be used in high school and college as a case history study companion to more traditional looks at American politics and culture.

In sum, Mirth, Wind, and Ire is "a good read."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Gralnick
• Release date: Dec 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370469659

Bill Gralnick

Born in Brooklyn, NY where trees actually grew, front yard and back and all along the streets. I grew up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, walking to both elementary school and high school (PS 217 and Midwood High School). My footnote in Brooklyn history is that I was a member of the last 8th grade graduating class in Brooklyn. Jr. High Schools were the educational rage of the day. My early childhood was one of motion. I was born in Maimonides Hospital and was brought home to Prospect Place above the subway station. It was in walking distance of Prospect Park. Then in fairly quick succession we moved to the New Ponsit Section of Belle Harbor Queens, right across the Marine Parkway Bridge, a bridge I once bicycled across from my home to impress a red-headed beauty of my dreams (she was 12). I got a flat time and arrived looking like a grease monkey. But she did kiss me hello and goodbye at moment her older brother did not have an eye on her. From there is was back to Prospect Place and then around the corner to a larger, more modern apartment building 500 Ocean Avenue. It had a terrace from which one could see the Trolley Cars on Church Avenue and the occasional Organ Grinder with monkey in tow looking for money. My final destination, before leaving for college, was to Waldorf Court. A 1906 3 story house with basement on a dead-end street. Now more idyllic place for city life could be found. We could walk four blocks to Avenue H, the local BMT stop, and drop in at Lou and Al's Candy Store, which sold a limited amount of candy but lots of most anything else a kid could want. Here I learned about lime rickeys, cherry cokes, and egg creams. The house was sold at first for about 8 grand. We bought it for maybe 20, sold it for maybe 40, and find out did I that about 10 years ago it went for a million bucks! Graduating from Midwood in '60, I attended The George Washington University in the District of Columbia twice, BA and MA. My work life started like my childhood. I spent two and a half years in Johnstown, Pa and 1 1/2 in Boulder, Colorado, then 4 in Stamford, Ct before beginning a 33 year stint with the American Jewish Committee followed by a 2nd career of 8 years with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. My mother was one of those who believed that little pitchers should be seen and not heard. I've been writing then since I could hold a pen. I wrote probably 800 love letters to one girlfriend and finally had my first piece published in the 1970's by News Day Newspaper. And I haven't stopped since. Mostly an op ed columnist I've written from most of the major newspapers in the southeastern United States. I had four articles published in USA Today and a 3,500 word feature in the Sunday Magazine of the St. Pete News. I'm married, have 3 children, two grandchildren, and a cocker spaniel named Jax. That's all folks.

Book preview

I still have it somewhere, the cause of this addiction. It was a rant about the Ozzie and Harriett show’s portrayal of life. Not only did Newsday publish it, but they got letters about it, which they also published. Holy printer’s ink Batman! My mother was wrong. Not only did I have something to say, at least some people were interested in what it was.

That was about 700 columns ago, some memorable, some not so much. Some well-placed (four on the opinion pages of USA Today) and some not so well (a series for the Dade County Courier, readership being a few more than the publisher’s family and me).

Mostly I am self-taught in terms of style. The rest is learned from hard-knocks – caustic but instructive comments from editors who don’t have time for dumb mistakes, a non-profit president who was a PhD in English, Dr. Judith Beiner, and editor of an award-winning high school newspaper. A book or two, particularly On Writing by Stephen King worked into in the mix. Reading the Classics and anything else that was well written was and is always key. A by happenstance crossing paths with some journalism classics like John Siegenthaler whose mantra was just write it, then we’ll worry about the rest and H. Brandt Ayers who had a genius for writing lead sentences that were better interest catchers than Venus Fly Traps.

I found a seven-year old home at a unique community newspaper that filled a niche in Boca Raton, Fl. Neither the major dailies to the north or south of Boca covered it very well. It also had its own voices, some with a lilt of the south and native Florida some nasal and noisy from my hometown of Brooklyn and its surrounding environs. It was a place of well-educated people whose first newspaper was either the NY Times or Wall Street Journal, then an area daily, and surprisingly enough then the Boca Raton News.

The News went through several ups and downs. At a down it was bought by the Miami Herald which would use it for experiments based on demographics. The News was a stalking horse to use they hoped for considered changes to the Miami Herald. As one already writing a popular column for the News, I was called into the new managing editor’s office to discuss how to frame the column for the new adventure. He said, We need a name. How would you describe what your column is?

I said, It’s opinions, at least they are from my perspective.

That’s that! He said. You’ll now be writing a column called, At Least From My Perspective! And so began a string of issuances on most anything that seemed either interesting, important, or both.

I’ve written about Jewfish and race riots, pelicans and legalizing pot, alligators and plane crashes.

What you have in this book is a selection of opinions written for two reasons. One is the insistence of a persistent editor and adoring wife that I should ‘just do it.’ The other was a realization that hit me like a brick when I decided, What the heck? I’ll look them over. That realization is that change is not inevitable. In fact, lack of change can be intractable. It was apparent that every issue-oriented column written a decade ago dealt with an issue which is still being dealt with today. So it’s true, The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s interesting, but it ain’t necessarily good!

A final thought: because the world and comments on its condition can be downright depressing you will find here and there what in fancy restaurants are called, ‘palette cleansers.’ They are little gifts of memory and humor to throw a ray or two of light your way after rummaging around in a bunch of the world’s dark corners.

Section One: You And Me – Perhaps To See

Preface

My editor is always writing and he gets riled every time someone asks him, How do you always have something to write about?

The answer falls into the category that could be labeled, They have eyes and they see not, ears and they hear not. He says, Look around, listen. There’s always something out there to write about. The more intensely you observe and listen, the deeper you will be able to write about something.

In reviewing my columns many were rooted in things I had seen or heard, sort of bumped up against by accident or that seemed to come looking for me. Take last night. My wife called me with a tremor in her voice, Come quick, it’s really big! Well it wasn’t Godzilla-big, but it was a big curly tailed lizard. They are about three or four times the size of our regular everyday brown sidewalk lizard. I’d known he had taken up residence, but since I couldn’t catch him and the dog had little interest, I just let him be. When he and my wife had their encounter I said, Not to worry. You know all those other things in the house you hate? Well he’ll eat them. See, the makings of an article perched right by my inherited 18th century Dry Sink.

I hope I don’t curse myself by saying this, but I think people who get writer’s block have lazy brains (or bad eyes and ears….). If I can’t get the thought I’m looking for, I look for another thought and write about it. Eventually the gears engage on what I needed to get back to.

What follows in Section One are a series of columns based on observations, i.e., my observation of a near gang fight and my mother’s view of the same thing. There’s one about a five-alarm fire in the dead of winter viewed by a boy of eight. Whenever it rains, which during some certain months in south Florida is often, I observe that the city/county sprinkler systems are pumping water as if they were the tools of rainmakers; then I discovered that my elected leaders permit a billion gallons of the stuff to be used – on golf courses! So and article about that.

And there’s much more, so let’s begin together observing and pondering.

The War of the Itchy Balls

Why then did they cross great divide?

An old Arabian proverb intones: A man is known by the reputation of his enemies. At age 12, I was to learn that maybe one should work one’s way up to enemies with big reps, not start with them.

It all began with a new comer to the neighborhood. How he found us I do not know. We lived on a dead-end street in the middle of a series of dead-end streets in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section. Our street dead ended at a fence that kept us off the subway tracks. Yes it was still called the subway, even above ground.

One day there he was, Steven. He lived in one of the many apartment buildings lining Foster Ave. He clearly wasn’t ‘one of us’. He wore pegged pants, had a ducktail haircut, wore tee-shirts with sleeves rolled up, a pack of cigarettes tugged into the fold. Very James Dean was he. And he was Jewish! Not only had we never seen a Jewish kid look like that, none of us had a mother who would have permitted us to look like that much less let anyone else see us look like that.

Steven wasn’t much into what we were into, which was anything that was done with a ball. Yet he noticed that come fall we would begin collecting the droppings from our block’s massive sycamore trees. These round balls, when ready to turn to seed would release thousands of furry feeling ‘stickletts’ which, when dropped down someone’s back, were crazy itchy – and hence the term ‘itchy balls’. Later it would take on an adolescent meaning, but that was later and this was still the age of not yet.

Gathered up before they went to seed these itchy balls were not at all itchy; they were as hard and compact as a golf ball. We’d store them up until winter, center them inside snowballs and do minor damage to all manner of folk or automobile not from the neighborhood. Worry about getting caught? Not so much. After all, like insurgent guerillas we knew all neighborhood’s ins and outs – which basements were unlocked, which backyards had the lowest fences, and where you could hide in, on or under something. This becomes important as the storms of war approached.

Steven became a fixture around the block. He began to refer to us as ‘his guys.’ That too should be tucked away for in the run up to war often times it is the seemingly innocuous phrase or deed that can turn something nasty into something ugly. The Archduke of Ferdinand knew something about that stuff.

When not hanging with his guys, Steven was causing trouble with someone else’s guys. These guys were Irish, older, and came from the other side of the ethnic divide, Coney Island Avenue. They all seemed to be named Frankie. It was however, the last name of their leader that struck fear into our hearts. It was, Slaughter. Truth.

Known to the local constabulary as the Slaughter Gang, these young thugs (yes, thugs) had been in and out of ‘juvie’ and one at least had done ‘real time’. In every way were they strangers to us. Not only did they live on the other side of the divide where none of us went without being in a car with a parent, they attended Catholic school, and principally were the problem of the priests.

Why then did Stephen cross the divide?

For the taste of a potato chip.

Steven lived pretty much on the corner of where the two neighborhoods came together – or separated. He often made forays into forbidden territory. One compelling reason was the Irish Deli that made its own potato chips. To die for they were – and at least in our minds perhaps literally. While there he’d bump up against the locals to make a statement. He might have been a stranger in a strange land, but it would be his choice when to be there and when not.

One day the heat of the potato chip maker I guess caused brain cells to melt. Heated disputations began over territorial lines. Like many negotiations begun under adverse circumstances, these broke down. There was no chivalrous glove slap to the face with secretaries making a time and place for a duel to end these talks. There were a lot of threats and a lot of, Oh yeahs? Finally one of the Frankies said, Let’s settle this. I got my guys; you get your guys….. Steven chose our block because he knew that’s where the store of itchy balls was. A three o’clock rumble was set. If you can’t already envision how ridiculous this was, wait. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Playing General Eisenhower, Steven had a strategy which he breathlessly explained as he raced onto the block raving about the appointed appointment. He would place his guys (that would be us) in strategic places. Armed with piles of Mother Nature’s golf balls, we would allow the enemy to filter past the mouth of the street and then we’d surround them, pelting them into submission with our rich store of itchy balls.

Fortunately it was Eisenhower who planned D-Day, not Steven.

Three o’clock came and so did they. The Slaughter Gang was a gang, really. They came, lips dangling cigarettes, swinging bicycle chains, swishing stolen, broken off car radio antennae, (that’s what cars had before satellite radio – radios didn’t play without them) and a pair or two of brass knuckles. They all wore black leather vests with studs over white T-shirts featuring rolled up sleeves holding packages of – well you get the idea.

And there were a lot of them.

One was the size of an NFL defensive tackle, or so it seemed.

Faced with this oozing mass of terror, it was probably the first time all seven or eight of us had ever uttered, Holy shit! And I think we did it in unison.

The moose of a guy grabbed my next door neighbor Sandy. Moose had Sandy by the shoulders and said something like, We heard youse guys were lookin’ for a little rumble. The only sound Sandy made didn’t come from his mouth. Cut and run was redefined at that moment. With nary an itchy ball being fired, we began to turn for the exits – except there were none. Like a cloud, these goons had everything covered. It was the proverbial ‘no place to run, no place to hide’.

So you ask, You lived to tell the story; how did the war end? Was an armistice signed? Did you lose the rights to your street having to play ever after in serfdom under the weighty thumb of the Slaughter Gang?

Nah. Mom saved the day.

Timing is everything; it was time for me to practice the accordion, and I was late. Believing five minutes early was being on-time, my mother had come to find me. Upon opening the front door she stepped out onto the stoop and saw this Mad Max movie scene whereupon she didn’t utter the ‘HS’ explicative, but instead launched a fusillade of F-bombs. It was a series of verbal cluster bombs that to this day amaze in my memory. It went sort of like this – but probably faster than you can read it – and a lot louder, so turn up the volume inside your mind.

What the F*** are YOU doing here! Who the F*** are you little (she’d obviously not spied Moose from the NFL) bastards, and what are you doing on our block! You better get the F*** outta here or I’ll call the cops… followed by a riff that just trilled off her tongue.

Forget the cops. I’ll call the Navy.

Then I guess she realized we were landlocked between Rugby Road and the railroad tracks and followed up with forget the Navy. I’ll call the Army.

Then I guess she remembered we lived in the flight path of Floyd Bennett Air Force Base because the sights and sounds of F-86 Saber Jets and B-47 bombers were suddenly etched into the balloon above the head of dear ole mom who had now become a cartoon character. After the Air Force came the pièce de résistance.

G-d dammit! Get-out-of-here-this-minute-or-I’ll-call-the-G-dammed-UNITED-STATES-MARINES!!!

And all this with her own lips dangling a cigarette.

What was so amazing was that this riff came from a college-educated woman born in New Brunswick, NJ, who was married to a dentist, and who fancied herself a bit of a fashion plate. I was stunned.

Cut and run? It was their turn. The Frankies took one look at this foaming Fury spewing poison from her mouth along with smoke coming from her nose, cursing like someone losing at craps, and thought she might actually come down off the stoop after them.

They just evaporated.

Gone. Never to be seen again this side of Coney Island Avenue.

She had effected a permanent armistice. Peace reigned – and so ended the Great Itchy Ball War, circa 1957.

Memories Are Made Of This

The building groaned as if in pain

Why do little children have such amazing memories?

The likely reason is that there’s not very much otherwise clogging up those developing brains. Any schedule-like thing is taken care of by parents – leaving the primary memory concern the location of a favorite toy.

When a child I saw some things that are as fresh in my memory as if each happened yesterday. But in pondering them, one tops the charts – the fire.

But I get ahead of myself.

Researchers have confirmed that young children can and do remember, i.e., I remember with clarity the day our German Shepherd Salty was taken because of my mother’s allergies. She became a guide dog – Salty, that is – not Mildred my mother.

I remember hugging that big, soft and hairy neck. My parents later pooh-poohed: You were too young. You’re remembering what you heard us talk about.

Wrong! say current researchers who’ve discovered evidence that demonstrates children can have early memories, especially of dramatic or traumatic events; for me, Salty’s departure was both.

Speaking of traumatic, there was the day when for unknown reasons my mother told me I could answer the knock at the front door. I was 4ish – maybe.

I opened the door and there stood a black beard engulfing the door way and blocking out the sun – or so it seemed. It actually was attached to a face. I recoiled, quickly diving and screaming, under the couch. It was an orthodox rabbi making his rounds for a yeshiva. It was years before I stopped having to cross the street when I saw a bearded man, and well into my early teens before my stomach stopped knotting at the same sight.

I remember the