"Thelonious Pinsky Lives!"
May 21, 2010
It’s me, Thelonious Pinsky. I know the name is absurd. Most people, except my mother, who has passed, and one aunt in Ontario, call me Pinsky. My wife used to call me Pins – which sounds like “Pinse” or “Pense” – when we made love. But let’s not go there right now. She’s on the way to becoming the ex Mrs. Pinsky. Even this is not true. She kept her maiden name and truthfully, it just didn’t matter to me. Drifa Johnson was, I suppose exotic enough. Drifa, means “snow” in Icelandic. I’ll leave it to you to make any connections between my soon to be ex-wife and the meaning of, and appropriateness of, her name. Listen, Drifa Pinsky would be just too weird. Not that Pinsky is so uncommon. Pinsky is fine name of an American poet. Robert Pinsky was the United States Poet Laureate, and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. If that isn’t cool then what is? Forget about “Thelonious.” If you’re not a jazz fan, you won’t get it. My father was a jazz fan – a rabid, book-your-holidays-around-the-dates-of-jazz-festivals kind of jazz aficionado. He used to wear a Porkpie hat around the house. But that sort of eccentric artifact never made it out the door into the big world. He’d read with that hat on, sometimes he’d wear it in the bathtub. He sometimes would sit in the back yard and have a beer with that hat on his head. But it never made it down the street, to a concert or a party and cetainly not to work. Maybe it was just too flamboyant. It was a private quirk, which may be an oxymoron. If a quirk is private, can it be a quirk? Or is it just a tic?
I have to go. Inka is playing the Mahler symphony again and you know what that means. Well, maybe you don’t, but I know, and eventually, you will too….
This was my coffee this morning…Eventually, after the coffee kicked in, I straightened out….
May 21, 2010