Archive 11/14/11 - (2)

 

   

Miss Hullings Cafeteria

                                                                  

This noon, I'm in downtown St. Louis. It's March of 1941,

And I'm navigating crowded Washington Avenue,

Walking from my office, as hastily as possible, to 10th and Locust,

 

In the direction of Miss Hullings Cafeteria,

To sate my raging lunchtime hunger for her delicious dishes —

A roast-beef sandwich and slice of sweet apple pie, my favorites.

 

My boy won't be a reality for another month or so,

And FDR hasn't committed the U.S. to war against Germany;

Japan won't attack Pearl Harbor, for another nine months.

 

And I'm just beginning to catch fire,

Get the drift of how business profits can exponentiate

Once you learn how to make the "right connections,"

 

Exploit your opportunities in on-the-verge-of-wartime America.

I'm going to avoid enlisting, unlike my brother, Mort,

By finding a patriotic way of supplying my nation with essential materiel,

 

Having my factories convert from making "Topcoats & O'coats,

Men's & Boys' Trousers, Boys' Knickers, Sports Apparel & Breeches,"

To manufacturing thousands of armed-forces uniforms.

 

My darling Charlotte, whom I courted from 1934 to 1938,

Still finds it lonely, here in St. Louis,

Where the haughty and entitled Ashkenazic German Jews reign

 

And the Eastern European and Russian Sephardics, like us,

Are, even now, looked down upon as peasants, a shtetl breed.

My North Shore Avenue Chicago beauty queen is pregnant,

 

And when I go downtown, to my office, at 1128 Washington Avenue,

Or out on the road, to Springfield, Champaign, Bloomington, Decatur,

As the traveling salesman I've been since 1929,

 

She often walks our unborn first child around the pond on Lindell,

Not a ten-minute stroll from the Congress Hotel,

Where we're staying, on the second floor's northeast corner,

 

Just a short walk from the house on Union and Waterman

Where my mother, Ruth, and Louis Daniel, my father,

Lived with her parents, Jacob and Flora Slupsky — where I was born.

 

This noon, this early March of 1941,

I can actually see where all my sweat, focus, energy are leading:

I'm on the brink of achieving Solomonic financial success,

 

About to give free rein to my ambition, resourcefulness, chutzpah,

Acquire, amass, aggregate riches beyond my parents' belief,

By dint of my willingness to work twenty-eight hours a day.

 

Soon, we'll have prevailed over Hitler and Hirohito, won WWII;

Char and I will have a son, L.D., and two daughters, Babs and Dale,

A new house in affluent, if closed-society-Gentile-blueblood, Ladue,

 

And the future, in our new, seven-acre estate, on Litzsinger Road,

Will be all ahead of us, my dad's bankruptcy buried in my past,

The American Dream a reality as palpable as my hunger is, right now,

 

As I enter Miss Hullings Cafeteria, its aromas overwhelming me.

For the next half hour, all I'm going to think about  

Are my roast-beef sandwich and slice of sweet apple pie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/14/11 - (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 

 
   
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