Monday, September 16, 2002 7:44 PM

Well Shiver Me Timbers – Bobbing along somewhere in America

Here is it that I yam where I yam -
½ mile off US North 271 on the borderline twixt Beachwood and Pepper Pike some miles east of Shaker Heights, suburban playgrounds all of Cleveland Ohio. For a short stay in an Extended Stay America.

I have just washed some clothes in the coin-op and finished a fine feast of fairly foppish foods. And am feeling tired dejected and out of round.

How I came to this thriving city that has every other neighborhood labeled Heights, when there are no definite high or low spots, is a story that I will leave for another more plebian and quotidian journal. It is enough that I sit here in the relative quiet of what is essentially a motel room with a kitchenette hard opposite the bathroom and write.

People hump up and down the hall, talking, slamming doors and blocking my way as they talk in a conclave that manages to make five people take up the space of the throngs that greet the Pope’s high mass at the Vatican. They are discussing plans for the evening until I harrumph loudly and ask to be excused while they look tolerably surprised that someone would dare to want to cross into the hallway opposite while they are making what are probably momentous decisions in their lives. To their ever loving credit they part like the waters before Moses when I make my return trip. I feel quite grand and biblically correct. I manage a short circling motion with my hand as I pass among and through them.

Today is my son’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Tim). I didn’t forget the date, merely the day (thought it was tomorrow, the date). This month I must be working on some peculiar perhaps ancient certainly personal Calendar. It is Yom Kippur which I also missed as we pulled into Corky and Lenny’s Deli for lunch marveling at the many parking places available. A Miracle? Oi! Yech! I heard the Yiddish ghosts chant as we got back into the car looking for open Christian fare, dumb Goyim.

Time does indeed march tediously onward while I beat a rough rhythm that manages to evade the tempo, riff and cycle. Some days I almost have a clue and can see the whole world at a glance and put it into an interesting perspective that lies before me like a diorama. My heart and the whole damn world just throb. Mostly I scurry trying to match the cadence. Succeeding suspiciously, du temps à temps.

This weekend at some bookstore or other I managed to purchase a book (imagine that) called Speak the Speech (Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated – An Actor’s Toolkit written by (speaking of delicate essence) Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin (go figure). It is a truly swell (and swelled running to 1028 pages) book (Hey, Kevin Spacey has a blurb on the back) that indicates the scan (iambic pentameter most) and has commentary as well as notes of interest about the Monologues – History Comedy Tragedy and Problem Plays. Shakespeare has at last caught my fancy. I can’t get enough, (daughters with their hands removed, a lover awakes with her husband lying next to her – less his head, Richard III offs a couple kids in the manner of a Mafia don, Hamlet pours poison down Claudius’ gullet after he guts him, if those slash and gash, gore and whore, slice and dice, movie lovers only knew).

But, My, his language, (it’s so elegant) the flow of meaning and sound, the resonating depth of image, the incite, the horror (that Shakespearean rag). I am amazed. Once again it took me this long to catch up. Dense, I am buoyed up and sipping coffee about two and a half hours from home. Atone.