Good Ole Mel

 Mel Brooks? Mel Gibson? Mel Torme? Melchizedek?

Yeah,that’s it. Melchizedek. It all goes back to good ole Mel, Melchizedek, whoever he was.

When you’re an ole guy,72,  like me, you have all these unidentifiable names, images, phrases, vaguely remembered snippets of this, that and the other floating around in your head. 

Maybe the cinematic recorder in my babyboomer head was ringing up some neuronic association of a hollywood producer who had floated images into my head, or maybe some necktie-bound, old-school nightclub singer who had crooned  love-song hopes into my brain while I was watching Ed Sullivan show, back in the day before we had the Web, back in the day when we had a boobtube in the living room.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s what I was thinking of . . or 

Maybe it goes back further than that. . . Melchizedek?

Who was that guy anyway? Some important guy that Abraham had met back in the day, back in the wayback Torah movies. You know, the ones where Moses parted the waters so his enslaved people could escape slavery and enter the promised land. 

Promised land? Good luck with that. I mean, you can’t take this stuff too seriously. . . you’re liable to get flung into the concentration camp, or worse, the gas chamber,  or neglected at the oscars or neglected at the grammys or maybe just pass into mediocrity, the veils of history, forgotten forever like your granny, or maybe remembered in some museum somewhere.

Did I say “promised land”? Yeah, that’s the place that Moses caught a glimpse of before the Lord took him to the real promised place. That’s the place that Dr. King caught a glimpse of before the magamaniacs shot him dead the next day. 

Wait, I remember now. That’s the place that Abraham went to when he left the old country, when he somehow managed to escape Auschwitz and jump on a boat that took him to New York harbor where he caught a glimpse of Lady Liberty, who was, methinks, Abraham’s cousin, and then he got off the boat and settled in the lower east side for awhile.

And then I think he headed west again, all the way to the newest version of promised land, California.

Yeah, that was it; that’s what I was thinking of. . . Mel in Hollywood. It all comes back to me now. How can I forget about good ole Mel? I catch a glimpse of his work every time that promised land crosses mind, every time I sit in my easy chair and look at my back yard, my own little promised land, my own little acreage that I was bequeathed, having driven a stake in the ground and declared that God and the county.gov granted it to me, after I had paid my dues and taken a few turns on the great mandala.

I mean, we paid for it, me and my wife, back in the day. Maybe one of these days I’ll leave it all behind and go see Abraham, Martin and John and. . . and Mel. Maybe I’ll meet Plato and we’ll talk about the shadows on the wall. Maybe I’ll meet Pythagoras and we'll talk about triangles and Trinity and the good ole days back in the old country. Maybe I'll catch up with Mel himself. We'll sit in chairs and reminisce.

Maybe one day! Yeah, that’s it. I believe it could happen, at least that’s what Mel’s great-great nephew said after he walked out of the tomb on Sunday morning. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. 

Hope to see you there! 

Glass half-Full