Bagels with the Bards #9

The scene.7:45 AM Au Bon Pain Davis Square Somerville. The lone figure of Dennis Daly at a table seemingly praying over a poetry book. This is how Saturday morning breaks for the Bagel Bards. By 10 AM there is a cacophony. 90-something Joe Cohen on his wheelchair bites into his cheese danish drinks his black coffee and shows us his latest photographs. Krikor arrives tall and regal looking for all the world like a refugee from a Russian novel. And Harris Gardner a shock of white hair an impresario of verse an Einstein with a bag of books from Salvation Army bins - offers all of us a share of his pastry. And so it goes with Luke and Zvi and Lawrence and Paul - and all the others. We are regulars. We are kibbitzers-old middle-aged rarely young. Stumblebums friends writers poets. We cross our stage-give our soliloquies our Sermon on the Mount the stunningly bad jokes the salient points. Then...we call it a day... and drift away....