Old
Men Walk Funny
Old
men walk funny with shadows eating at their heels.
Pediatric
walkers, prostate exams, bend over, and then mostly die.
They
grow poor, leave their grocery list at home, and forget their bank account
numbers,
dwell
whether they wear dentures, uppers or lowers; did they put their underwear on.
They
cannot remember where they put their glasses, did they drop their memory on
route to some place.
They
package old bones, dry dreams; testicles empty, and giggle choking on past
sexual fantasies.
Mogen
David madness accesses 100 BC concord wine, all remaining parts sit down -
waves
go through their brain as if broken cylinders float undefined travelers.
At
night, they scream in silent dreams no one else hears, they are flapping of
monarch butterfly wings.
Old
men walk funny to the barbershop with gray hair, no hair; sagging pants to
physical therapy.
They
pray for sunflowers above their graves, a plot that bears their name.
They
purchase their plots, pennies on a dollar, beggar's price a deceased wife
.
Proverb:
in the end, everything that is long at one time is now passive, cut short
.
Ignore
those old moonshiners that walk funny, "they aren't hurting anyone
anymore."
Old Man Walking In a Rye Field -- Laurits Andersen Ring
In 1980 Bobby Goldsboro wrote the song, "The Cowgirl and the Dandy," with the refrain, "I was Mogen David wine, he was Chablis '59." Mogen David is the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew "Magen David" (shield of David) but is used metaphorically to refer to the six-pointed Star of David. A few months before Prohibition was repealed, Max Cohen and his brother-in-law Henry Markus founded the California Wine Company in Chicago to bottle medicinal and sacramental wines. When the frm began making wine from Concord grape juice (or concentrate) in 1941 it changed its name to Wine Corporation of America. Concord grapes are typically used for grape juices, jellies, preserves, and kosher wines. After World War II the company converted a 50,000 sq ft (4,600 sp m) building in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood into one of the largest wineries in the US in order to produce just one product, Mogen David, a kosher wine for the Seder (Hebrew for "order, arrangement"), the ritual feast that marks the beginning of Passover commemorating the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt that involves drinking four cups of wine. However, due to its low cost the wine became popular among gentiles as well as Jews, and in 1946 the company produced 75,000 US gallons (280,000 liters; 62,000 imperial gallons); by 1953 the volume grew to nearly 5,000,000 US gallons (19,000,000 liters; 4,200,000 imperial gallons) and Wine Corporation of America changed its name to the Mogen David Wine Corp. Two years later the company tripled its capacity and added two more wines besides concord. In 1962 Cohen sold all of his stock to Markus, and the next year Richard T. Schofield bought a controlling interest and took over as president, though Markus continued as chairman. Four years later Schofield moved some of the firm's operations to his home, Westfield, New York, to be closer to the vineyards that grew its Concord grapes. In the late 1960s Mogen David introduced a popular flavored fortified wine made from grape and citrus wine, MD 20/20 (colloquially known as "Mad Dog 20/20." (The brand name originally indicated 20 oz of 20% alcohol, though neither that size nor that volume is still available.) In 1970 the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York, the largest soft drink bottler in the world, bought Mogen David, the 6th largest winery in the US, for $16,750,000 in cash. With its 1973 acquisitions of Tribuno Wines (previously Vermouth Industries of America) and Franzia, a California winery, Coke-New York became the third largest US wine producer. In 1974 the Coca-Cola Co. began unsuccessful negotiations of a possible acquisition of the bottling company; by the time the talks resumed in 1980, Coca-Cola had already entered the alcoholic beverage market via its Wine Spectrum subsidiary, the nation's 4th biggest producer; as part of the merger agreement, Coke-New York divested itself of its three wineries, which were bought by The Wine Group in Livermore, California, the country's 5th largest wine maker.
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