Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow (age 89)

I don’t do much of anything these days
And I spend much of my time indoors.

By far my pleasantest diversion
Is to play with Rosie, now four years old.

It seems to me that my parents
Wanted me to grow up in a hurry
And that I resisted, dragging my feet.
They (my parents, not my feet)
Needed all the help they could get.
They were forever asking
“What does the man say?”
And I would translate for them
Into heavy-footed English.
That didn’t help much either.
The old people were as ignorant
Of English as they were of Canadian French.

We often stopped before a display
Of children shoes. My mother coveted for me
A pair of patent leather sandals
With an elegantissimo strap.
I finally got them—I rubbed them
With butter to preserve the leather.

This was when I was six or seven years old,
A little older than Rosie is now.

Amazing how it all boils down
To a pair of patent-leather shoes.

Fortuitous Poem by Wilfrid Sheed

You noodle around
With tempo and sound
Until you get the perfect fit
For that particular song,
And then,
So long as you can sustain it,
God is on your side
And everything comes easily
And even the waiters smile.

Fortuitous Poem by Isaac Babel

Benya,

If you were an idiot,
I would write to as to an idiot.
But I know you aren’t one,
And God help me not to change my mind.
You are acting, excuse me, like an amateur.
How can you not know
How helplessly
We are sitting on our surplus wheat
Because of the glut harvest in Argentina…
And I will tell you,
From the bottom of my heart,
That I’m fed up in my old age
Eating such a bitter piece of bread
And living through such hassles,
After working hard all my life
Like a simple horse-cart driver.
And what do I have to show
For all this hard labor?
Ulcers, pains, worries and
Not a wink of sleep.
Stop this nonsense, Benya

Your friend,
A far better one then you might think,

Rubim Tartakovsky

Fortuitous Poem by Thomas Sowell

I am not Dear Abby.

“But what do you say
To the welfare mother
Or the ghetto youth?”

I cannot imagine
What would have led
Anybody to think
That I was writing handbooks
For welfare mothers
Or ghetto youths,
Or that either
Would be reading them,
If I were.

Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow, II

(To Phillip Roth)



There aren’t many people in the trade
For whom I have any use.
But I knew when I hit Chicago
(Was it twelve years ago?)
And read your stories
That you were the real thing.

When I was a little kid,
There were still blacksmiths around,
And I’ve never forgotten
The ring of real hammer on a real anvil.

Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow

Russian Baths in Chicago


Mickey who keeps the food concession
Fries slabs of meat and potatoes pancakes,
And, with enormous knifes, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw
And he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand).

The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets
From the blasting heat have a strong appetite.
Below, Franush the attendant makes steam
By sloshing water on the white hot boulders.
These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition.

To keep his brain from baking
Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off.
Otherwise he is naked.
He crawls up like a red salamander
With a stick to tip the latch of the furnace,
Which is too hot to touch,
And then on all fours,
With testicles swinging on a long sinew
And the clean anus staring out,
He backs away groping for the bucket.
He pitches in the water
And the boulders flash and sizzle.

There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.

Fortuitous Poem by Haruki Murakami

She looked to be in her mid-fifties.
She was short and stocky, and from behind, had a weird sort of gait, like a crustacean.
She wore tiny metal-framed glasses, but the space between her eyebrows was flat and broad and you could clearly see the downy hair growing there.
She had on a wool suit of indeterminate age, though no doubt it was already out of fashion by the time it was manufactured, and it carried with it a faint odor of mothballs.
The suit was pink, but an odd sort of pink, like some other color had been accidentally mixed in.
They had probably been aiming for a classy subdued sort of hue, but because they didn’t get it right, the pink of her suit sank deeply back into diffidence, concealment, and resignation.
Thanks to this, the brand-new white blouse peeking out of the collar looked like some indiscreet person that had wandered into a wake.
Her dry hair, with some white strands mixed in, was pinned back with a plastic clip, probably the nearest thing she had had on hand.
He limbs were on the beefy side, and she wore no rings on her stubby fingers.
There were three thin wrinkles at her neckline, sharply etched, like notches on the road of life.
Or maybe they were marks to commemorate when three wishes had come true—though he had serious doubts that this had ever happened.

Two Afro-American Women

Three weeks into the grand jury,
(Murders, random shootings and assaults),
She came in, 16 years old, pretty and poised,
A witness to her boyfriend’s robbery,
The school had lost power and
And they were walking to her house,
When he was jumped on and lost
His cell, debit card and shoes.
The prosecutor asked her
How long they had been together,
And she replied, two years, paused shyly,
And added, two months and 10 days.
And everyone laughed—
A magical moment amongst the urban grime.

In the same case, another witness
To a threat against the victim
By one of the robbers,
In a high school cafeteria,
Was an older, petite woman,
Working class by the look of her hands,
Dressed up as if for church.
The prosecutor asked her
What was she doing at the school,
And she reply, with dignity, I volunteer,
My two kids got high school diplomas there,
And I thought I should pay it back
By helping people like me
Who come in and feel lost.

Picture of Family Life

Our three room Warsaw apartment,
The living room which doubled
As Father’s and my bedroom at night,
A gloomy autumn Sunday,
Boredom I learned to disguise
To avoid lectures.
Father tells us to gather around
We’re going to have family time.
He directs and sets the stage,
A desk lamp is brought over to help
The weak overhead light.
We are sitting in a circle:
Mother on the sofa bed reading,
Sister sawing some piece of clothing
She was told was too expensive for her to buy,
I’m darning my socks, a skill
That was actually taught at school,
Father hovers over us, his own job
Is to select music from our new radio
With a glowing green cat’s-eye.
Father is humming with the music
He is happy, that is clear,
The rest of us are looking for pretexts to escape.

Many things have puzzled me about these episodes,
The chief one being where,
Having grown up in an orphanage,
Did he get his idea of what family life looked like.
Now I think I know:
As a kid, he must have read a book,
Some 19th century saga of family life,
And there must have been an illustration
A woodcut or metal engraving
Showing a family, bathed in light
Sawing and reading and listening to music,
And he must have said to himself,
One day I will have it.