A Metaphor

It's a sink hole? Sometimes called a swallow hole.

It made me curious. I had read of a sink hole swallowing a car in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How close can you go before the sands suck on your heels? Is this a metaphor for life?

Poverty is a sink hole. Sometimes people can't climb out and they choke on the debts, the futility.

War is a sink hole—swallowing combatants— sending those who live home with pieces missing.

A sink hole opened and Lake Jackson disappeared—it lost its water, its fish and its alligators. The people of Tallahassee, Florida lost their favorite lake for fishing.

Giving Thanks

"Make a joyful noise unto the LORD..." Psalm 100

People whose names I know
whose faces I've never seen
People who lived thousands of miles away
joined in prayer

and the prayers were heard

today the words
spoken last week
lost their bite

today is the beginning of tomorrows
thank you for every word
every prayer
every amen

Keeping Up

My local CVS doesn't carry wristwatches anymore. You can't find analog televisions on the shelves. It's even hard to scope out a tape for a VCR player. Keeping up with changes requires a keen mind. Just when I learn the lingo, that technology is on its way out. Everything is replaced by a newer, brighter, more streamlined version.

Some things don't change. They trudge along— often seen as inevitable and out of sightlines, save on occasions. Yet, some folks wear these afflictions on their hearts. They speak of the homeless, of children with distended stomachs, of divisions of land, of people, of faiths, of the earth's needs, of children who will not grow up, of children who die before they reach a respectable age for dying, of crops that burn up in a soil hard to till, of water too polluted to drink, of blindness, of metaphysical blindness.

In today’s newspaper: blu-ray disks may not be the cause célèbre because soon we will all be streaming video. I've never held a blu-ray disk, yet it may be living on borrowed time. Perhaps I should seek out a disk so that I experience its feel before forced obsolescence?

I've never touched a dolphin, or felt the texture of sand in the Gobi Desert, or ran my hand across the stones on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

I loved my old wristwatch. It didn't do anything except tell time. It never glowed in the dark or acted as an alarm, timer, and lap counter. It liked a dry environment. It didn't stop working. I lost my watch.

Hollow Words

Did you speak without thinking?
Did you want to bring good news?
Did you forget that your words,
magical incantations, words from
a shaman, words penned in with
tomorrows, words that made dancers
of those who heard, words erasing
the past months of treatments , words
that made buying two year calendars
real, lilting words, words poets use to juggle,
These words that said you're fine, no more
treatments, no more waiting to see if
you spent a day waiting for the next day,
no more weight loss, no more.

So when they told her so soon after
your words, not even a month, not even
enough time to get used to the word survivor ,
when they told her they thought your
words might not tell the whole story,
when they said they needed to scan
her body looking for errant cells
the ones that found other places to hide--
your words sounded hollow.

Choose

I

“Choose” he said, “between the blessing and the curse.”
“Choose” he said, “between believing and being left out.”
“Choose” she said, “between living in communion or alone.”

This edict to choose—the red paper or the green paper, eat in or eat out, insider or outsider, a 37inch television or a 40 inch television or no television. Simple choices. Complex choices. Disconnect life support or not. And what is life support?

II

My mother’s friends sat around the bridge table playing Maj -jong.
“Two bam”
“One crak”
“One dot”
and the tiles banged against one another.

I chose to play my music loud enough to drown out the clacking tiles.
I chose Labor Union Songs—the music of Baptist Hymns adapted by Joe Hill. The same Joe Hill who was wrongly accused of killing two people and who was executed by a firing squad.

His supporters —the daughter of a former Mormon church president, labor radicals, activists and sympathizers — even President Woodrow Wilson. "The Utah Supreme Court refused to overturn the verdict and the Utah Board of Pardons refused to commute Hill's sentence."

My mother’s friend came into my room, “Could you play something a bit more melodic?” “A bit more upbeat.”
“I want meaningful music.
I’m studying the American Labor movement.” I said.

We lived in a three-room apartment and my music resonated. Teen-age rebellion.

III

“Choose,” he said, “your political affiliation.”

My grandfather was a union man. He told me to never cross a picket line—“Never.”
I never had to choose to cross or not to cross. I’m not a scab.

IV

Hobson’s Choice: a free choice that offers no real alternative.

It’s either this or nothing.

In the 16th century Thomas Hobson ran a livery stable. He instructed his customers to take the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. It’s either this or nothing.

V

Multiple Choice.
I once wrote answers for a test maker. “Here” she said, “is the question. We want four answers—two that are similar, one that is obviously wrong and one that is not quite right.” She added, “Defeat the test wise student.”

A whole day and only two of my test items were accepted. They paid me for the day and for individual items. I left the job after one day. Too many choices.

VI

“Choose”—
It’s all about choice.
I chose the chocolate chip yogurt over the mint chocolate yogurt.
I chose the chicken sandwich with mandarin oranges and cranberries instead of the Mexican wrap.
I chose a ginger candy over an oatmeal cookie.
I chose an Empire apple over a baked apple.

Those are the simple choices.

Torn Fabric

What's wrong?

Why do four boys break into someone's house, a randomly selected house, and brutally kill a woman and seriously hurt her daughter? Why did a few boys beat up a man so badly that he lives somewhere between life and death--unable to do anything for himself?

What is missing from the lives of these boys? They all can't be mentally ill. They all can't be toadies. One of the boys, in the most recent case, told police that he came home after an evening with friends and watched Dexter—the television show about a likeable serial killer. Dexter, after all, had been schooled by his father to only kill people who deserve to die.

Something in our society, in our towns, in our neighborhoods is missing. We worship war--that must be so because we're constantly involved in wars. If we worshipped peace wouldn't we be devastated by the civilian lives truncated by war? —by the thousands of men and women returning with both seen and unseen wounds.


We have become inured to violence and it takes an exceptional killing to shake us—the boys used a machete and we were shaken.

For most of us —what we see, hear, read, forms who we are. These boys didn't come from poverty. They didn't live in crowded cities. They fit in, but they really didn't fit in--they were the puzzle pieces that couldn't be part of the picture.

And it's too easy to say we have moved away from religion. Organized religions have a poor record for peace. Look around the world and you see sect against sect, anti-Semitism, genocide, wars. But I'm not willing to throw out religions--only the need to say mine is better, mine is the only truth, and mine is the only path.

We need voices to overcome the din of violence, the worship of might.

I like technology. I enjoy the Internet, but I worry about people whose reality is their online community of avatars.

Earlier this week I attended a study session of 1 Kings 18. Fourteen of us wrestled with the character of Obadiah, a man who considered himself a spiritual man, a man who hid 100 prophets because Jezebel was killing off the prophets, a man who did Ahab's bidding, a man torn between two masters.

It's so easy to be conflicted about who we serve.

I don't know the answers—but I worry about the worship of idols and violence is an idol too many have embraced.

No answers--

Remembering

Put salt out for the deer
Bake coffee cake and biscuits in the iron oven
Gary Synder “Things to Do Around a Lookout"
Things to Remember While Listening
to One Hundred Folk Songs


A morning at the Harper’s Ferry Folk Festival
Listening to music played on a cigar box dulcimer
Watching a mountain man
Tune sets of strings on a hammered dulcimer

Four women sing "Amazing Grace" A capella
and transform a field into Holy space

“We’ll walk hand in hand…”
Reading psalms on top of Old Rag Mountain

“I do believe…”

A Wolf Trap concert—
Joan Baez sang in bare feet
“With God on Our Side”

Where are the protest songs now?

Pete Seeger at Queens College
During Academic Freedom Week
We sing…

“And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.”

“and I know what I’ll do tomorrow…”

A maple trestle table
In the kitchen
Ballads strummed on a guitar

“It’s a mighty hard road…”

Memory of Walking

I

Days have a rhythm. Some, languid, while others harried—somedays devoted to roaming—but not without a purpose. The purpose discovered in the wandering.

The third floor of this library, filled with non-fiction, exudes purposeful writing. Perhaps no one wants to read what these shelves hold. The quiet of the stacks floats around my soft upholstered chair.

I've spoken too quickly. Several students arrive and they settle down with their phones and books. One is texting. Perhaps tweeting her position in space. They whisper, but their words enter my space like an uninvited guest. Is this the time to eavesdrop on a conversation?

I picked up four books on the second floor —home of fiction books.

I select two books from the list I carry like a talisman — then two other books catch my eye. Titles do act as hooks—I am drawn to The Rabbi in the Attic by Eileen Pollack. Perhaps the title drew me in because today is Yom Kippur. I am not observant, but the holiness of the day doesn't escape into simply another day on the calendar.

My parents didn't observe the day, but when my grandfather was alive my father went to shul with him and recited the prayers he had learned as a boy. I wore good clothes on Yom Kippur, carried no money and walked everywhere —stopping at shul to visit my uncles and grandfather. Did my aunts attend that small place of worship? Later my aunts belonged to temples made of stone with polished floors and coat racks.

You entered my grandfather's shul , the ground floor of a house, and listened to the music of prayer. Some men chanted rapidly while others took more time. No one on the same line, but the prayers wove together into one voice. I stood at the back watching the men move back and forth as they read the prayers. Each body wrapped in a tallit—a sea of blue and white.

Then after the visit I walked somewhere else, usually with my friend Nina. Nina's father was a socialist and atheist, but her mother told Nina that she must respect the day even if her father went to work.

II

The students just left and a man with a crew cut and a Starbucks cup sits down at the vacated table. He doesn't have a computer nor a phone and writes with a pencil on yellow tablet paper.

III

I open one of the books and read the quotation on the opening page: "To find the soul it is necessary to lose it." --A.R. Luria

Genealogy:

A.R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist wrote books about memory.

Rabbi Isaac Ben Solomon Luria The 16th century Kabbalist, introduced into the Kabbala the concept of tikkun (mending or correcting).

Connection: “ Tikkun Olam refers to the imperative to repair the world” —And that must be grounded in memory —

IV

It is evening and Yom Kippur is over and I have roamed —and thought of the coming year. I am left with the question:

How in the coming year, may I be part of Tikkun Olam?

A Composite

Some folks hone in on a particular hobby and spend a lifetime as a devoted follower. Others jump from one endeavor to another in a mad chase to find the ultimate— nothing lasts too long before it pales and they must seek another outlet. Of course it is possible to juggle a number of balls and engage fully in each.

I'm engaged in the juggling of balls. A section in my basement holds the odds and ends of art pursuits. Once I signed up for a bookmaking course, bought the requisite materials, made a hard—backed journal in class and then fell in love with hand made papers to use for the covers. I found a store that sold sheets of paper, each sheet created by an artist. I bought several sheets--rice paper with bamboo embedded in the paper, a rough textured paper I called the paper of many colors and a muted gray sheet with flamboyant streaks of red.

We learned how to hand stitch the papers for the insides of the book. After the class ended I made myself a journal and then I created five more books. I loved the details, selecting the papers, folding the signatures, even the sewing. I disliked having so many materials in disarray. The kitchen utensils vied for space with the awl, thread, boards, papers, and glues. You need a place to leave everything out. The putting away and taking out of the varied materials became a pain. In time I packed it all away and put it in the basement.

My basement art corner is the place of lost pursuits. But there's a commonality.

Several years ago I took a watercolor course and bought the supplies listed as necessary. When I almost added the brown paint stained water to a recipe thinking it was beef broth the watercolors ended up in the basement. I did buy a small box of watercolors. Each color remains in its own pan. Instead of large pieces of paper, soaked and taped to a wooden board, I use a small watercolor pad.

Two plastic boxes, read large, contain a history of possibilities and rejections.

Scratchboard pens, graphite pencils and charcoal, gouache pigments, hog bristle brushes, oil pastels, and odds and ends of my foray into oil painting.

Products remain around the house, an oil painting of the canyons in Utah, a large watercolor of flowers and several landscapes completed in a Chinese Brush painting class. I haven't given up on the Chinese ink drawings because I only do them in class—avoiding the taking out and putting away of materials.

Downsizing. My sketchbook, mechanical pencils, assortment of pens, and small set of watercolors fit me. They travel easily.

When I go into the art store my interest is piqued by all the possibilities. Then I remember how I want to fit everything into a small space and turn away from the air brushes, encaustic supplies, and soft pastels.

I knew someone who loved fish, tropical fish. One day I noticed that the aquariums with their pumps and consistent bubbling sound even invaded the kitchen. When he had a tank built with extra heavy glass he moved his bed into the living room.

"You need to downsize," I said. "Remember your first guppies?"

Now if I could just find a silk screen course given at the right time...

To Change

Changing your mind, deciding that you want to take a different route, not persisting on a path because you started that way—

Changing your mind, applying the brakes when you recognize the futility of your position—

takes guts. We've seen politicians adhere to a position even when the temper of the country dictates a change.

In the past week I've seen or read stories about soldiers suffering the after effects of combat. I've seen photos of soldiers who left limbs thousands of miles away. And I read about the administration wanting to send more troops to Afghanistan. But now I detect that there may be a change.

Mr. President changing your mind is a strength when the handwriting on the wall shows the futility of a decision.

Clutter and Space

Because I'm reading Homer & Langley, E.L. Doctorow's fictionalized account of the Collyer brothers, and because the brother's home was filled with tons of newspapers and found objects, I am stuck on the subject of clutter and space.

When does a collection slip into clutter?

Someone I know collects flamingos. Her bathroom contains flamingos holding a soap dish, two flamingos on either side of the toilet paper dispenser, and small drawings of flamingos as ballet dancers,flamingos as tennis players, and flamingos attired in suits seated around a table.. Everything is in order, each to its own space. The species has not invaded the tile floor and the flamingo shower curtain stays in its place. They have not migrated out of the bathroom.

Migration is what the knick knacks and stuffed animals do at one of my favorite lobster restaurants in Maine. Beanie Babies, piled in a higher and higher pyramid, outgrow one of the tables and take over another table. Customers must make do with less seating.

Salt and pepper lighthouse shakers, lobster magnets, potholders with recipes for clam chowder, wooden lobster shacks, tiny lobster buoys, aprons emblazoned with directions on how to eat a lobster, napkins with fir trees, fir trees for miniature dioramas...spill over the sides of a plastic coated lobster tablecloth.

Paintings, wood plaques, two-dimensional depictions of Maine life and photos cover the walls. Everything is for sale. Each year the wall loses out to more hangings.

This year knick knacks migrated to the tables. The salt and peppershaker shared space with a painted puffin.

How many is too many? If the collection is orderly and everything has a place then the question is ignored. Yes, I know that people like the Collyer brothers suffer from a diagnosed disorder and that they cannot throw anything away even if it means that they lose their sleeping space.

But what about the other collectors? I once had a friend Dennie who wrote poetry and lived in a small apartment with her husband and son. She and her husband were neighborhood organizers. Placards filled their hallway— ready for another picket or demonstration. They believed that no one should take up more space then they needed when people were homeless.

The definition of hoarders may need to be expanded.

Welcome to a New Thesaurus

Words have a past. Now the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, a behemoth costing over $300.00, touts itself as a treasure chest of words, synonyms and the historical progression of words. Yet who can keep up?

Perhaps they'll establish an Internet site to add new words as we coin them. They stopped collecting words in 2003. That means that for six years, and counting, words entered our lexicons unaccounted for in the Oxford complete—yet now incomplete reference book.

Tweeter, tweet. Does modern usage propel them into a dictionary or thesaurus?

Words change. Pronunciations change. A word's grammar changes. Even the meaning of a word may change. A word takes on metaphorical connotations. Bland words, in a different period of time, morph into pejorative words or foul words.

Writers play with words, discarding and replacing, honing and plumping up. Some scrape every adjective out of their prose; some eschew words of too many syllables.

When I entered the sixth grade I discovered my father's Roget Thesaurus and began a love affair with the variety and flavor of words. Instead of writing: The new student walked into the room I discovered a column full of possibilities in Rogets. Now the new student sauntered, loped, rambled, strolled, —even schlepped into the room.

My teacher, Miss (not Ms) Kosel, had assigned one of her weekly writing assignments— I don't recall the topic, but I do remember writing a first draft and then selecting about twenty words for a Thesaurus revision. My definition of revision consisted of finding longer, more complicated sounding words. I replaced my sixth grade vocabulary with new words, some arcane, a few unpronounceable.

Miss Kosel wrote me a note: Linda, put away the Roget. She underlined the twenty words I so laboriously upgraded and wrote: Please replace these with the original words and hand it again.

I still love my thesaurus, but try and exercise restraint.

Words have a past.

We tend to use many of the same words over and over as if the others are unable to carry the weight of what we mean. Is it a word rut or laziness or an emotional tether? I'm not referring to the small words or the filler words like irrespective or phrases like— the way I see it. I knew someone who kept referring to things in the world as being too congruent for her manic personality. She applied that word, like a sticky note, to the aisles of the grocery store, to library shelves, to the people she saw at a mall.

"What does it mean? I asked.
"You know, " she said, "they are all alike. Cookie cutter."

Words--"so many and not enough time."

Welcome to the World’s First Historical Thesaurus—but I'll still hang on to my Rogets. We've grown accustomed to our combined quirks.

That doesn't mean that I'm not anxiously looking forward to thumbing through the Oxford's entries. The question remains—will my local library purchase the thesaurus?

Too Much Sun

The ordinary umbrella dates back 4000 years. I visualize someone complaining about the sun and another soul putting together the first handheld sunshade.

I rather like other names for the humble umbrella:

Bumbershoot and once used
Bumbersol and Bumberbell—
Or a brolly
or a large gamp—

Time

I

Summer is waning, yellow school buses pick up and drop off students, evenings happen earlier, and the Red Gravenstein apples are ripe. Despite loving Gravensteins I'm not ready for the Apple Orchard. Walking among the apple trees means I've capitulated to autumn.

It's easy to fool myself about holding Fall at bay. I'm still wearing shorts, my arms are bare and my toes wiggle unencumbered in my Teva sandals. Thwarting the turn of the calendar is easy--it just requires a refusal to accept the inevitable. We do that all the time.

When I turned thirty I collected thirty white stones at Race Point Beach in Provincetown. As I placed each stone in my pocket I recollected the year--either my memory or a family story. Recollections--past tense.

Time, fickle and relentless, expands or contracts the same hour. Wait for a response and the seconds elongate and echo. The clock dispenses minutes with a frugal hand.

We need to know the time. Contemporary life is time regulated. As soon as civilized life became complex people wanted to organize their day into time segments.

Obelisks, with their changing shadows, sliced the day into morning and afternoon. Later— markers around the base segmented time into narrower slots.

Now we measure ultramicroscopic parts of seconds.

Could people be satisfied with an outdoor sundial, save in the garden? No.

Once the Egyptians perfected a more portable timepiece it started the quest for smaller portables. Our digital timepieces parse our live into microseconds.

Personally I am fond of water clocks--clepsydras. "These were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Other clepsydras were cylindrical or bowl shaped containers designed to slowly fill with water coming in at a constant rate. Markings measured the passage of hours."

I imagine standing in front of a water clock, mesmerized by the passage of time. Do I want to watch the water disappear or appear as the measurement of elapsed time? Either way the inaccuracies of such a device bothered minds now focused on capturing the passage of time--precisely.

Did anyone scoop out some water to delay an odious task or add some water to hasten time? Who hasn't set a clock ahead? What happens to the minutes you bypass?

Chess players in Harvard Square keep turning over a small sand timer to keep play moving. No time to procrastinate--know your moves.

New England Puritan preachers not only delivered hell and brimstone sermons but also placed an hour glass on the pulpit to time their two-hour Sunday sermon.

Queen Victoria, obviously upset by long sermons insisted that an eighteen-minute glass be set on the pulpit in her church. The local newspapers interpreted the timer as an indication of the Queen's displeasure with extended rhetoric.

My mother used a three-minute timer to cook soft-boiled eggs for my father.

We record our days in daily diaries, in journals, and with photos. My first diary came with a small key and tiny lock. "Dear Diary" I wrote, "today I am seven years old."

Did I tell the diary about my whole day? Did I admit to stepping on the line when playing hopscotch or just say I played hopscotch and won? In a few weeks I tired of the diary.

II

October 2007
The New York Times wrote a story about the Reverend Robert Shields. The good reverend spent twenty-five years "chronicling his life in five minute segments." He recorded every aspect of his life, even his visits to the lavatory.

"Dear Diary, it's Sunday, August 13, 1995...

7:25-7:30 I sprayed, and puddled and piddled and widdled”

He only slept two hours at a time so that he could record his dreams.

When Rev Shields died he left a 37.5 million-word document that fills 91 boxes.

"Mr. Shield’s words apparently exceeded the more than 21 million in the colorful diary of Edward Robb Ellis, a newspaperman who died in 1998, and the 17 million words of Arthur Crew Inman, a reclusive poet who died in 1963. The 19th century London diary of Samuel Pepys was a mere1.25 million words."
New York Times October 29, 2007

Rev Sheilds gave his diary to Washington State University. The terms: The diary can't be read for fifty years or subject to a word count.

"What seems certain is that Mr. Shields believed that nothing truly happened to him unless he wrote it down." Once he started in 1972 he couldn't stop. He said, "Maybe (historians) by looking into someone's life at that depth, every minute of every day, they'll find out something about all people."

Time captured on paper or on a blog—an assurance of how time was spent, our thoughts and ideas.

Half a bookshelf contains my journals-- not daily doings, but thoughts, readings, and recollections.

According to the Guinness World Records a Colonel Ernest Loftus of Zimbabwe kept a 91 year daily chronicle of his life (1896--1987).He began at the age of twelve and continued until his death July 7, 1987. Age--103 years 178 days.


In January I received a gift of a five-year diary. Each page contains enough room for five years of that date. An inch and a half makes for a terse discourse.

Or use the Internet to keep an electronic diary of days. Then you can go back in time by clicking FIND.

III

Summer is fading, but today it's 80 degrees and I am experiencing time hanging back and refusing to enter autumn.

Back From Maine

I spent part of last week infatuated with the ocean—not as a beach lover, nor as one who succumbs to the lure of large sandy expanses. It's the ocean either cresting and breaking or continually bearing down on cobbles that acts as a lure.

If you see something everyday does the mystery disappear or deepen?

Several years ago, on the way to Monument Valley, I stopped at a combo gas station/ convenience store to buy water and fill up my depleted gas tank.

"Unbelievable shapes and colors," I said to a woman who picked up two large waters at the same time I pondered between a six-pack of seltzer and a six-pack of Spritzers.

"I don't know," she said. "I grew up here and I'm used to seeing these every day. It's just where I live."

Does everything become mundane for some people?

It’s never the same— each pattern of a wave, its swell approaching the coast, the height of a wave—so many differences. I think about the distance a wave travels.


I think about the distance we all need to travel—metaphysical musings—

****
I just read this report from Maine:

Three days ago the surf was calm and today "...an early afternoon crowd of thousands ...lined the national park’s rocky shoreline to watch the high surf and crashing waves, ..the effects of Hurricane Bill”..."

" ... waves swept over 20 people..." Tragically one young girl did not survive.

Small Bookstores

How many closings of independent bookstores can/will a society tolerate? Probably not a question pondered by those addicted to avitars and giant bookstores floating in cyberspace.

I don't loathe the mega stores on the Internet nor do I refuse the convenience of finding a long sought for book long out of print.

I subscribe to a handful of blogs written by people who read and suggest new or old books. My yellow pad of want to reads is full of their suggestions. These bloggers are the Internets’ independent bookstores.

My chagrin is with the winnowing down of the small-unaffiliated bookstores where books, conversations, suggestions and certain quirkiness existed side by side.

On August 1st Kate's Mystery Bookstore in Cambridge closes its door. Kate established her store on the bottom floor of an old house. Floor to ceiling bookcases with an idiosyncratic system of organizing books enhanced the experience. Once you understood book locations and you embraced the system you were a "Kate groupie".

Kate was often ensconced behind a small desk, often eating lunch and surrounded by bits of paper or answering the phone. Yes, she shipped books.

Over the years I'd ask Kate to suggest something.” Who do you like?" And then she'd make suggestions and even start telling me about the book—enough to whet my appetite. Her latest volunteer, Audrey, a retired engineer, knew the British authors and books of the war years (that's the first and second).

Going to Kates wasn't a ten-minute excursion—more like an hour or more. I never knew whom I'd talk to, who I'd see. Once I met a woman with a list of all of the seminal mysteries in the 19th century. We ended up talking about the criterion we'd use to create a list for the books of the last twenty years. "Of course," she said,” We’d have to have a cyber mystery category." I know you can google cyber mysteries and ....

But it's the personal contact, the conversations, the unexpected suggestions. The human quality.

I recall two other bookstores in houses. One was in Wellesley not too far from the college. I never really got a sense of the store because it closed shortly after my introduction. The other store occupied the bottom floor of a small house in Sudbury. The owner was an older woman who kept a metal cash box and wrote down each book she sold, date and I expect the purchaser and then some comment.

The entire store occupied the parlor, but her collection was hand picked --she carried "good books" and poetry. Over time I found out that she grew up in China, the daughter of missionaries.

She owned a house in New Hampshire where she entertained friends.

"We have beautiful hiking right out my front door. I do ask my guests to write of their experiences hiking in a journal I keep in the living room. Forty years of entries makes for a wonderful read."

At the time I met her I was teaching English and she suggested Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers. In time I read all his books and used his ideas in my teaching.

I loved her license plate: Books2
As long as she lived she maintained the store.

"I don't have too many walk-ins, but there are long time friends who stop in and buy a book or order a book."

When she died the house was sold and became a dress shop. It's present incarnation—a real estate firm.

When small bookstores, run by passionate readers, close their doors there's a loss that is palpable. Huge mega chains with coffee bars attached like umbilical cords can't fill the void. Yes, they sell popular books and even the small sellers, but they may not include the incendiary book, or the book from a small press that can't afford to link in with a distributor.

I'll always miss the quirky bookstore where books and conversations and chance meetings and philosophical discussions all melded into part of the experience.

Someone referred to these bookstores as "old fashioned". Not everything that is old fashioned should be eradicated, nor is it old fashioned.

Words Create Rituals

When the only way I connect to what happens on stage is by standing offstage eavesdropping, a passive onlooker to what is unfolding, then it's time to invent a role—and the mystical belief in the strength of the role.

Who has not promised to defeat, hold at bay, or alter a story by performing a ritual?

Wear a special hat, carry a good luck charm, don't step on cracks, repeat a mantra, and recite a psalm.

It's hard to be impotent.

It's hard to wait for what trickles into your vein to obliterate the cancer.

My words, my prayers, my rituals—all for you.

Healing Waters

The waves, relentless in their cycle, wash the rocks in Maine while I watch each repetition. One wave carries foam, spindrift, and spends it on a barnacle encrusted rock. Spray, a geyser of white, engulfs a lobster trap hiding the red and yellow bands. Sounds echo.

Ninety-Seven percent of the Earth's water is found in the ocean as salt water.

The lachrymal or watery layer of my eye contains salts. My tears taste salty.

Immersion

To swim underwater
To hold your breath until that feat robs you of another second without air

To slowly enter the frigid Maine waters inch by inch
To let go of a rope hovering three feet over Lake George and drop into the water...

To immerse yourself in a watercolor painting — trying to replicate water flowing over rocks and grasses—

I wet the heavyweight paper and apply color washes. The water has its way. One tributary runs down the paper finding its own path.

The Missouri River is a tributary of the Mississippi River, yet it is two hundred miles longer. I've always wanted to go to Itasca, Minnesota where the Mississippi begins. Beginnings—promises of possibilities.

Imagine traveling down the Nile? Begin at the beginning and keep at it for approximately 4,000 miles. or wend your way down the Amazon, 3,980 miles through South America.

Pedro Teixeira traveled down the Amazon in 1637 – 38

28 April 2004
“ Two Americans have made history by completing one of the last great adventures of the modern age -- the first complete descent of the Nile river from its source as the Blue Nile in Ethiopia to the shores of Alexandria where it spills into the Mediterranean Sea. Pasquale Scaturro of Colorado and Gordon Brown of California reached the mouth of the Nile on April 28, 114 days after launching their epic …journey.”

Baptism

Baptism.
Dabs of water or full immersion? Once upon a time, isn't that the way stories begin, I was baptized with dabs of water. Later, the story continues, I returned to different waters.

I joined the group of women who entered a swimming pool, our Mikveh, and said the traditional prayers. Immersed in the water I said the few Hebrew words I knew.

Replenish

I am replenished by the sound of water moving slowly against the lip of a lake or water carving calligraphy on the sand as it retreats to the ocean.

When I hiked down to Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States at 1932 feet, I embraced the clarity of the water and the piercing blue color.

Tears

Eyes, a reservoir of tears, saved or spent over the years: on a sad movie, a mud slide taking innocent lives, newspaper stories of errant decisions resulting in horrific outcomes, political oppressions, religious brutality, the path of history and the salty tears reserved for the personal.

For my daughter

May the waters of healing,
flow through your body.

From Rabbi Milgram’s prayer for healing

The Things You Save...

"The things that you save—you save them, I suppose, so that when you're old, you can fondle and caress them and feel the breeze of nostalgia brushing your face. "

The Indian Clerk David Leavitt

Inclement weather lends itself to nostalgia. Yesterday I dusted bookshelves, pictures and what some people call knickknacks —stopping often to recall the circumstances and history of several pieces.

A mauve glass vase, hand blown, pinched in the middle, with a heft that belies its size came from an artist's studio in Shelburne, Massachusetts. I bought it for several dollars because the artist, Maria, gave up. "I can’t," she said, "support myself." Her asking price for all the work in her studio—"priced to sell"

"The contours and curves of this vase," I said,
"captivate me. I can lose myself in the glass."
"I made it," she laughed, “with you in mind."

A wood horse on the Flying Horse Carousel, the oldest merry-go-round in the U.S.A., stares beyond his wood frame. Three of us, all teachers at the same school, unaware at the time of the circuitous years ahead, went to Martha's Vineyard for the day. I liked the spirit of those wood horses—first carved in 1876 in New York City.

Years later I went to the New England Carousel Museum where hand carved horses went to be repaired, gilded and put on display.

A glass box is filled with postcards, cards from friends who traveled all over the world. One friend managed to write pages of words on a postcard by diminishing the size of her handwriting and necessitating my use of a magnifying glass.

No one sent a card that relied on a witty saying and few words from the correspondent. We all still loved the written word in longhand.

Shells fill a bottle and the bottle underwent a metamorphosis into a lamp.

A carved seagull—bought in the town of Perce on the Gaspe Peninsula –balances on a flat rock. She misses the sea air, the thermals, and the sea smell. I miss the replenishing ocean, the waves, and the assurance of the tides. The sounds of the ocean surround me, enter me and cleanse me. The repetition of sounds remind me of life’s rhythm even when that rhythm stutters.

Two photos of faces—one, a profile jutting out of a tree stares at Walden Pond, the other created out of geological rock layers on the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Path.

I've walked around Walden Pond in early spring when the ice is a thin glaze receding from the shore, in spring when greens move beyond an artist’s palette, in summer when early morning swimmers cross the pond, in winter when the snow covers my boots.

I've hiked down Bright Angel Path, moved over to let the mules pass, watched a hummingbird hover on a branch, spread my fingers on the canyon walls and encompassed eons between my thumb and pinky.

And I recall the prayer –“Blessed are You... who makes the works of creation”

Tizita

Tizita means memory tinged with regret

Abraham Verghese

Tizita 1

My Bronx neighborhood

halfway between the elevated train on Jerome Avenue and the Grand Concourse, home to blue-collar and white-collar first generation children of immigrants

included a Junior High School, Minnie's Grocery, a meat market, a Chinese laundry, a drugstore, and Mo's Candy Store.

An orphanage —just beyond my immediate roaming ground —sent age appropriate girls to an elementary school on the other side of the Grand Concourse. When I was in the fifth grade my mother was ill and I lived with my Aunt Dottie, Uncle Murray and Cousin Bobby for several months. I attended that elementary school.

Mary, with her institutional bowl haircut and ill-fitting clothes, joined our class in November. Prior to her entrance the teacher said, "One of the children from the orphanage will join the class."

Yvonne ruled a clique of girls in the class.

Maybe the idea of being an orphan frightened us—
Maybe the haircut and the too often washed clothes, maybe the way Mary held back, maybe the way she spoke —hesitant and flat—made her Yvonne’s target.

One afternoon Yvonne and her clique surrounded Mary with their presence and questions.

"Why are you in the orphanage? Doesn't anyone care about you? "

I didn't belong to the clique but I and several others wandered over to see what was happening. We heard Mary say that her mother's favorite sister was coming in a few weeks to pick her up. Yvonne, with a carefully balanced attack worthy of a nascent Machiavelli, dove into that comment with the agility of a fencer.

She aided Mary in spinning a tale of an aunt who lived in a country estate, of promises of horseback lessons and her own piano. As the story spun out of control Yvonne bided her time until she said, "Why do you tell so many lies?"

By that time the toothpick edifice of stories tumbled and Mary began crying.

By the time I went over to Mary the clique had dispersed. "I'm sorry," I said.

The sorry, too late and too tepid, didn't do much.

Tizita 2

Getting a job at a summer camp as a Junior counselor teaching arts and crafts meant money, getting out of the city for eight weeks and a vacation. I taught crafts to girls whose parents could afford the steep cost of a private camp

I played scrabble with three other counselors and became friendly with Doris. When her parents came to visit, her father drove down the dirt road in a battered car complete with rust holes.

Camp ended and Doris invited me to her house. I took the subway and then walked to her building on Park Avenue in Manhattan. A carpeted elevator took me up to the tenth floor — a maid opened the door to the family apartment.

"Don't just stand there, come in."

I walked into a large room—the marbled entranceway. I thought that our Bronx apartment, with a few adjustments, fit into that room.

Doris and I didn't have a lot to talk about. She told me about her private school and the planned class trip to Greece. I told her of my art classes.

The cook prepared a lunch—served on China with sterling silver flatware and glasses that rang when clinked.

I never did invite Doris to the Bronx— I felt that she wouldn't be comfortable in a three-room apartment with layers of paint on the walls.

Tizita 3

The memories not written down, the ones we all carry with us, layered like strips of paper mache...

The memories we regret, the ones we want to alter refuse to allow that possibility...

Some memories have crevasses where people drown or people seek forgiveness.

Some memories are simply shadows

A Metaphor

Tonight sports became a metaphor for life. I watched the Red Sox falter, give up runs in a big inning, swat ineffectively at balls and lose. Sitting at home I couldn't do more than offer suggestions,

Take out Wake.
Why did you wait so long?
Do something about the dh not hitting?

My words echoed and no one answered.

My daughter sits in an oncology office. She will take more tests. Tests to determine if there are errant cells. My words can't change anything. They can't eradicate anything. I can pray.

The Denver Nugget's season is over.

The fans didn't affect the game.
They watched, yelled, twisted their hands, and hoped that the Lakers got cold and stopped defending.

I'll pray that you have strength; that the cells didn't migrate, that you feel enveloped in love, that our prayers will be answered.


Please know that I love you.

If...

To find an intriguing plot with engaging characters isn't sufficient.

To write without lapsing for long periods of time into the enclave of passive constructions isn't enough.

To put together sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters of coherent thoughts, to eschew flaccid prose, to make Strunk and White proud, to offer up details and concrete particulars— isn't adequate.

I want to write a good novel, not fiction masquerading as good, but one that is worthy of being read.

I read across the spectrum —from weak kneed quick reads to tomes requiring a slow perusal.

Some books, like fine sherry or good teas, slow time down. They obliterate the now and offer a glimpse of another reality.

Sentences stop time.

Nothing happens there, and it's happening round the clock.

Jonathan Lethem

I pause. I am engrossed with the thought and immediately my autobiography enters the line. Every book seeks its reader's autobiographies, if not the book sputters.

Cynthis Ozick wrote:

Fiction is all discovery—
Essays know too much.

It is the act of discovery that lures the writer to check the landscape ahead. You may know the type of toothpaste your character likes, but it is the unexpected turn the character takes that draws the writer to follow. Following without stalking, following without fencing in, without predetermined outcomes, following without judging —

I think of writing a lengthy piece beyond the confines of a short story, an exploration toward the edges of a novel. Desire isn't sufficient.

If

If I find a setting and people it with characters and if I discover a plot and if I know what my protagonist desires and if I set up pitfalls and if I allow my characters' voices that travel beyond my assumptions— how do I begin?

Everything is gestation, then bringing forth.

Rilke

How long for gestation?

Suppose I tell the story of a woman who loses her children one by one. I knew such a woman. When her refrigerator only contained wine, beer cans and leftovers her children began to leave. Their father offered a refrigerator of food, shelves of snacks.

She told stories until the only story she knew how to tell remained at the bottom of a glass. The last time I saw her she never knew I left her sitting in the living room lecturing an empty house. I learned that there's only so much you can do. I left food in the refrigerator.

Aharon Appelfeld starts his new book:

My name is Laish, and those who like me call me Laishu. I have yet to run into anyone with such a strange name.


If I write a first sentence...will the rest follow?

Names

I'm impressed when people rattle off the names of flowers or identify trees by their leaves, or needles, or bark, or know mushrooms by their shapes and spores.

I'd like to recite a litany of the proper names for rocks and shells, for cloud formations, for the strata of the earth. Instead I imagine what it's like to dwell inside a moon snail, or to be tumbled smooth by the ocean, or to look at the sky and see a chariot.

To name. To be the person who names another. To earn a name: I named my son after my grandfather David. My grandfather had worn paint splattered clothes five days a week and then every Friday evening he put on a white shirt and welcomed the Sabbath. I loved to hear him chant the ancient prayers.

I lived close to the Bronx Zoo and learned to read the names of animals before I learned to read a proper text.

There are other names. Names that incite and names that hurt—a hurt corkscrewing into your marrow. Names invoked for an entire people, stereotypes that pass down from generation to generation. The pronoun they resounds with venom.

Naming is a gift. Discover a new orchid and it may bear your name.

Yesterday I heard a father call his little girl "my sunshine". That's a gift.

Appearances

A photo of a man who had a face transplant appeared in the Boston Globe; his story and his words accompanied the photo.

It's hard to imagine the isolation fostered on someone whose face causes others
to turn away to avoid staring.

The world must like synchronicity.

Yesterday I was food shopping, checking my list for the vegetables I needed to make ratatouille. A woman wearing a short sleeve cotton dress —a patterned dress with muted shades of blue or perhaps brown—looked at the green peppers, taking great care with her selections. I watched her bend over the peppers–discarding or keeping. I’m a quicker shopper.

When she turned around I noticed her face—so disfigured. A little boy started to stare and his mother whisked him off to look for cookies before he blurted out a comment or pointed.

I asked silently," Do you have someone, a friend or family, to share the meal that includes the lush green peppers?"

It's Not Simple

"I've made her a large card with the numbers nine and five created out of Werther's butterscotch candies. It's what my mother loves and the only gift she wants for her birthday."

I remember reading about someone’s 87-year-old Aunt who enjoyed “chain-sucking one Werther's butterscotch candy after another.”

"We had " she added, "a wonderful relationship, but the mother I remember disappeared a while back."

The thought gnaws at my memories. Do we always parse a person's life? Do we parse our own life?

Some segmenting can't be avoided—before, after, during. We recall events that connect to particular time periods, to certain people.

Fifth grade:

Bernie, the class clown, whose antics made Miss Kissel laugh even when she wanted to keep a straight face.

This is the same Miss Kissel Bernie saw on the school roof kissing a married teacher—or so he said.

Am I not the aggregate of all my years?

A number of years ago I joined a poetry group at a local library. One member of the group, Norman, was an assistant editor of a poetry journal. His poem had been accepted for publication in the Atlantic Monthly a month before his car and another car met at an intersection. The accident left him a quadriplegic.

I never knew Norman before the accident, but I knew him at our meetings. I knew how his words resonated on the page. I knew how long it took him to write me a note upon the publication of a chapbook of my poems. It's a letter I treasure--because of the sentiments, the words.

One of Kirk's poems is about how his father didn't parse his life.

Father Again

All the men at the bar say, “What a damn shame.”
and you see your son lying totally paralyzed
except for his wit, his jokes about “retiring”
at nineteen, being “pensioned off” and “damn if
there isn’t much truth in that. How can it be
that your broken son seems stronger than all
the other sons you ever imagined? No more
bar room. No son of yours will be “a damn shame.”

from Some Poems, My friends by Norman Andrew Kirk


"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."--Andre Gide

I think the passage of time is similar to the discovery of new lands. When my father retired from the New York City Department of Education he left a lifetime of teaching and mentoring. "Now, " he said, "I have time to study history." And he did—another land—one he returned to after a hiatus of years.

It’s not simple? Is it?