Happy Mother’s Day. OK, that’s out of the way. Here’s more important stuff.

I’m not a big poetry person. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to read the writers’ tea leaves. Maybe I ask: why did they chop up the lines like that? It all could’ve been just one paragraph and c’est ca, you know?

But. I read Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, a writer from nowhere’sville Michigan. Just like I’m from nowhere’sville, NYC. And I have to say: whoa!

Read this interview with her by my friend and uber-talented poet, William Lessard.

“But the Nightingale”: William Lessard Interviews Diane Seuss

She reminds me: just keep writing. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. It’s work. Hard work, and hard work is honorable.

A remembrance: one day I was old enough to earn my adult library card. I was a punk kid, but no longer confined to the tiny children’s book section of the shoebox that was the Jerome Park branch of the New York Public Library.

It was one flight up from a dry cleaning store on University Avenue and the place smelled like Perchloroethylene (PERC). This is the most common solvent used for dry cleaning in the United States. PERC is a reproductive toxicant, neurotoxicant, potential human carcinogen, and a persistent environmental pollutant. In other words, it’s poison.

I LOVED the scent of PERC. It was sweet and soft and I equated that sensation with the safety, warmth, and value the library afforded me, during my chaotic (ha! understatement of the year) early childhood.

And that first day, with my new adult library card, I — a pitzl — picked out the biggest, thickest, heaviest book — WITH NO PICTURES — and checked it out. When I got it home, I started reading it, and quickly realized I had no idea what it was about.

But I knew it must have been important, for it to warrant all that weight.

In time, I checked out more books, six at a clip — the maximum allowed by NYPL rules at the time — and began to digest the words. My brain was a python eating a goat. The process was slow, but it did happen.

I cherished the after-school time in that poisoned, PERC-scented, library. That space kept me safe. And provided a soft place to hear myself.

Yep, the rumors are true. My third short story collection, “When Paris Beckons”, is now available. Visit my website to get your copy. Just click through to your favorite online bookstore. http://www.martykleinman.com.

My seventeen new stories zero in on the societal stresses of the past few years. Covid, politics, the economy, immigrant issues, the new workday paradigm — it’s all here.

Spread the word, far and wide. I’ll do Zoom readings for your book club or worship group — just reach out and we’ll make it happen.

Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, simultaneously shot her pup in a gravel pit and her political future in the butt. After she shot poor Cricket, she turned her shotgun on a male goat that won Kristi’s disfavor, somehow only wounded it and, as it lay in agony, strolled back to her truck to fetch another shell and put the screaming animal down.

Sad as that was, it was nothing compared to the impact on my seven-year old brain of the time Margie’s brother, Shirl, killed Tinkerbell. Tink was Margie’s fourteen-year old, rheumy-eyed toy poodle. Shirl slammed the poor thing’s head in the door of Margie’s fridge.

Alcohol may have been involved.

My mom told me the story over dinner one night back when I was a kid. We were having boiled “new” potatoes, Del Monte canned peas and carrots, and beef tongue, which I watched my mom prepare. First, she trimmed the thick, disgusting bottom part of the tongue, peeled off the outer membrane (“and the nicotine stains,” my dad “joked”), boiled the crap out of the grotesque, meaty mass with garlic and onions in a white enameled spaghetti pot and, finally, sliced it up (way too thickly, unlike the nearly transparent, silky smooth slices the counter guy proffered at Tower Deli on Kingsbridge Road). As a result, the lengua was repulsively chewy, saved only by smearing mounds of Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard over each rubbery slice. “Don’t complain,” my mother said. “If you’re hungry, you’ll eat.” (I’m teeing up a Mother’s Day post, as you can see.)

But I digress.

Yes, Margie’s brother was named Shirl. See, Margie came from Kentucky. My dad explained that Down South they still were fighting the Civil War and searching for newcomers’ “Jew Horns”. He said that parents Down South sometimes used girl’s names for their boys (see also: Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue” — and Lindsay “Ladybug” Graham, the latter being another story for another day).

Shirl came up to The Bronx after a frantic phone call from his sister. He immediately landed a job in a diner as a $90/week dishwasher, which even the seven-year old me knew was chump change for a grown man. But our building’s men-folk thought Shirl was cool. He drove a beat-up white Ford Galaxie 500 with the 427 engine mated to a four-on-the-floor manual transmission. In the glovebox, he had a scuffed .38 revolver, a pint of Rebel Yell, and a small stack of two-ounce Dixie cups.

So the guys would hang out across the street from our apartment building, listen to the ballgame over the Galaxie’s AM radio, and knock back bourbon shots. One time, Shirl let me load and unload his pistol. My dad took it from me when I sighted it at a white and red No Parking sign.

Margie, being from, yes, Down South, had a heavy twang. She chain-smoked Newports, and didn’t so much “walk” as “sashay”, in a way that clearly grabbed the attention of the dads in our building. “She’s got that southern sway,” my pop would say, as his pal, Charlie Cohen, who toiled in a corrugated box factory, smiled, ever- appreciative of a well-turned ankle.

Margie was married to a connected guy. That kind of connected. He was a very quiet, dark haired sort who barely made eye contact as he slithered down the street, scanning ahead for trouble. He would disappear for long stretches and, in time, I learned that his absences meant he was “away”. “Upstate”.

“Guys are following me,” Margie, highball in hand, confided to my mom as she put up pot roast for dinner. “I’m afraid.”

My parents were a lot of things, but savvy to the world of wise guys they were not. “Don’t be paranoid, Marge,” my mom said, dispensing all the worldly wisdom a forty-something outer-borough woman still dominated by her Vilna-born mother could muster. “Don’t go into orbit. No one’s out to get you.”

They were, though. Out to get her, that is. It had to do with her hubby’s line of work. My dad laughed and said Margie’s husband was in “import-export”.

So Shirl’s role was to act as a two-legged pit bull while her husband — oh, let’s call him “Silent Sam” — was doing his latest bit “upstate”.

Now Margie had a flock of drop-kick toy poodles, who yipped all day and apparently screwed all night, for there were always puppies aplenty roaming her ground floor flat, enough to support her booming puppy mill business. Red-rimmed eyes watering, they’d cluster around the fridge whenever Shirl went to get another Schlitz. They surrounded him, barked, and begged for grub. The pack leader was a fourteen-year old bitch named Tinkerbell who yipped her bloody heart out.

Shirl’s presence kept the bad guys at bay, at least for awhile, for his pheromones served the same purpose as a house cat brought in to walk around a rodent infested apartment. That is, solely for its scent, which kept mice away.

The downside was that Shirl was, shall we say, erratic. Today, he’d be called neuro-diverse. Back then, he was considered a good natured, nutty, drunk. He wandered about the neighborhood in his white tee-shirts and rumpled chinos, cadging drinks and smokes off day drinkers in the myriad Fordham Road bars.

He was able to do this because within days of starting his new job, he missed shifts and was unceremoniously canned after just two weeks, Not a fan of alternate side parking, he amassed a thicket of tickets and crammed each one into the Galaxie’s glovebox, just under his pistol.

One sleepy dusty summer day, Shirl weaved into Margie’s kitchen for a breakfast brew. There, behind a bowl of egg salad-gone-iridescent, was a solitary can of Schlitz.

One Schlitz wouldn’t do, for Shirl was nursing a hangover bigger than Mandingo. What to do? Shirl leaned hard on the open fridge door, unshaven and unwashed, an insult to unmade beds. His head throbbed as a herd of yip dogs yelped in a key that made Bernard Herrmann’s shower scene score in Psycho sound as soothing as Swan Lake.

As always, the leader of the pack was Tinkerbell.

“Tinkerbell,” Shirl screamed, “Knock it the hell off, girl!” Tinkerbell’s response was to yip faster, louder, and in a higher key. Shirl reached for the last can of beer.

As he did, Tinkerbell’s tiny jaws locked up on Shirl’s shin with the ferocity of a seven-pound pit bull. “Dang!” Shirl cried, simultaneously slugging Schlitz and wagging his foot in a futile attempt at dislodging Tink’s tiny teeth.

Finally, Tink’s jaws released. But the forward force of Shirl’s leg swing propelled the geriatric doggie head-first, into the fridge. Out of pain, rage, and sheer animal instinct, Shirl slammed the fridge door shut.

All Shirl heard was a high-pitched “ERP!” All the other doggies stopped yelping and slunk away, heads turned back for one last look at their fallen den mother, dead as a doornail on the linoleum floored kitchen of Margie’s flat.

From a highly reputable source, the super’s son (my bestie), I learned that Shirl wrapped Tink in doubled-up plastic bags from Merit Farms on Fordham Road, and dumped the critter in the garbage, where it was incinerated along with Mrs. Waloshin’s frayed old brassieres and Mrs. Gibney’s Sunday dinner chicken carcasses.

I further learned, as we ate our dinner of beef tongue and new potatoes, that Margie saw a white Eldorado tailing her that very day and was in such a state that she never said a word about poor Tinkerbell.

Dinner finished, we did the dishes and went back outside to catch fireflies and light punks with our dads’ Zippo lighters. The very thought of Shirl’s deed chilled my soul and I hugged my doggie, Topper, tightly. He snarled at me, so I let him go play with his soup bone. I remember the seven-year old me thinking this: Topper knows I would never slam his head with a refrigerator door. He is a cool dog and bit only one person that I know of, but it was Norman’s fault anyhow. At least that what dad said.

And all this was largely forgotten, locked in my memory’s hard drive, until news of Kristi Noem’s heartless execution of Cricket and the goat broke just a few days ago. Amazing how the mind works.

(Oh, and by the way, at least 90 percent of the stuff in this story is true.)