"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart."
—Psalms 90:12
I'm not normally superstitious, but I am fond of numbers. Last year I turned 77. Double O-7 is cool, but I'm not sure about Double-Seven. Seven seems important; seventy-seven seems redundant: The 77 Wonders of the World? The 77 Deadly Sins? Snow White and the 77 Dwarves? Whoa! We don't want to go there.
In the Bible (Matthew 18:22), Peter is asking Jesus how often he must forgive a brother who has hurt him: "As many as seven times?" And Jesus tells him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times."
I don't have a brother, but I am sure that as a kid, I bothered my sisters seven times seventy (as another version goes). Still, I take 77, Biblically speaking, to be a stretchable number. Naturally, I like that idea. I think the meaning of the story is that Peter should forgive his brother a lot — not just 77 times and then stone him. (Let's face it, Jesus was a poet — we've got to look below the surface here.)
I'm thinking about numbers today because this is my 50th "Poet's Notebook" in Creative Loafing, and that seems significant. Fifty's a serious number. President Ulysses S. Grant glares seriously from our $50 bill (so I've heard). When Jeanne and I had our 50th anniversary we went to the Algonquin in New York for a martini, and then our son took us to the elegant Capsouto Frères Restaurant in TriBeCa — a time to remember, even for the memory-impaired. In St. Petersburg, on significant birthdays, we'd have our martini and dinner at Redwoods — alas, no longer with us.
Numbers proclaim milestones, a certain steadiness, in relationships, and Jeanne and I are surprised and happy to be working together for Creative Loafing at this time in our lives. People tend to turn more conservative as they get older, but somehow — we feel the country has pushed us — we've both tumbled leftward on the major arguments of the day: civil rights (blacks, women, gays, immigrants), the wars, health care, global warming, gun control, torture, abortion, taxes, evolution, separation of church and state, minimum wage, marijuana, banking regulation, CEO compensation, Cuba, Guantanamo, death penalty, etc. I could write 50 columns on 50 of these touchy subjects, maybe 50 times 50! But, as I point out to young people reading their poems, sometimes less is more. (You don't want your audience leaping up and shouting "One less!")
We also feel good about this connection because a while ago we were complaining to novelist Dennis Lehane about feeling out of it, old doofuses wrestling with blogs, Face Books, ipods, twitters — or is it tweeters?
"Out of it?" he said (kindly), pointing to a copy of Creative Loafing. "You're running with the hip crowd!" Well, I thought, we're not exactly running, but if anyone we know understands what's hip today, Dennis (Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone) is the one. We didn't tell him that when Jeanne glanced at some of the personal ads in the back of CL, and saw the references to DWFs, she said, "What's with it with all these dwarfs?"
A careful reader of my poems — big hypothetical here — could infer most of my positions on the above topics. But the poems seldom name names or even wars, as they're aimed at least partially at the future, when Dick Cheney will be an obscure footnote — I almost wrote obscene (and now I have). In the conclusion of his "Defence of Poetry" (1821), the radical Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Well, maybe… but in any case, yes, it's worth a shot.
In truth, this is my 57th "Notebook." The St. Petersburg Times published the first seven (there's that number again!), starting in 2004. Early in 2007, I judged a fiction contest for Creative Loafing, and at the presentation ceremonies, CL's editor David Warner asked if I ever wrote articles or essays. I said I'd done a few for the Times, but they didn't want many of them, and hadn't used Jeanne's drawings since the long-gone days when Malcolm Jones was their book editor. "Send me a couple," David said, and on April 4, 2007, my first CL "Poet's Notebook" was published: "March Madness," a meditation on the Iraq war and education. On August 1st, CL used a drawing by Jeanne — a fisherman's shack on Cape Cod — and the pattern has held since then.
50 is the shining number, the mature person, the golden anniversary. From now on, I'll try to write better, funnier, kinder — no matter how idiotically our elected cretins and Supreme Court behave!
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About our beaches I will write
To keep the oil rigs out of sight
—with apologies to A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
Peter Meinke is St. Petersburg's Poet Laureate. He knows his days are numbered, but he's trying to make less of them count. (Jeanne said, "Strike two!")
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2010.