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?

Impressionable

I am impressionable. I recently read a book written to rally all striving artists to draw and observe life with diligence, a journal, and a pen. The author suggested drawing every aspect of your life—from breakfast to bed.

“Create quick five-minute sketches.”

This morning as I poured my Go Lean dry cereal, Oat Flakes, a sprinkling of puffed millet, and added sliced banana into my most colorful cereal bowl, I wondered if the pattern of the bowl could be misinterpreted for yet another grain. And should I add the Rice milk before or after the sketch?

For a few minutes beyond the allotted time I observed my cereal bowl and attempted to recreate my breakfast in a small black artist’s journal.

Not too small because “Your drawing should not be cramped”.

Tonight I'll draw another of his suggested items—the medicine cabinet with its array of shapes. A rather unremarkable cabinet harboring no secrets, only a selection of items that pertain to personal hygiene—brushes, floss, mouthwash, underarm deodorant, moisturizers, and hair gel which I no longer use.

I'm not certain that I ever succumbed to a hairstyle held in place by gel. My hair during adolescence underwent several permutations— from short, curly, even bordering on tight coils, to a long below the waist ponytail.

The ponytail stage lasted from my last year in high school through three years of college. The hair style complemented a studied bohemian style —a skirt made of dyed burlap, a penchant for old union songs, and a satchel full of deep tomes.

When my ends split I had a drastic haircut —from a bob to a moderate crew cut.

Hair makes an impression. The Yankees legislated the length of a player's hair. The Red Sox didn't care.

Women's hair causes problems. It's tantalizing and may cause a good man to err. Some men wrote rules encased in religious verbiage:

"Women’s hair must be covered."

Perhaps I am not impressionable, only susceptible to projects. Perhaps everything sounds so intriguing that I want to dip my toe in and take the journey.

Tonight I'll sketch the items in the medicine cabinet.

Tomorrow I'll have a sunny side up egg for breakfast with a slice of turkey bacon.

This is to....

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox…

William Carlos Williams


I want to say...”This is just to say…”

Today I read that only 15% of people under forty read the printed— hold in your hand get ink smudges on your finger’s newspaper. I assume the other 85% remain gloomed to some electronic device ranging from too large to move screen to a tiny handheld that also works as a telephone, music container, photo repository and game player. Or perhaps their newspapers appear on a Kindle where they can highlight, write notes and archive.

No stacks of unread or barely read sections, no rolled newspapers ready for use in the fireplace.

When I was in high school my ninth grade teacher, a woman who thrived on the Sunday New York Times regarding it as the secular Holy Scripture, taught the class how to properly fold the paper when riding the subway.

"You want to read the article in its entirety and not disturb your neighbor."
We all brought in a copy of the Times and learned how to fold correctly.

That same year I learned how to make my own serigraph silk screen frame. Now I can’t imagine stretching the silk correctly—taut and centered. Yet, I've never forgotten how to fold a large sized newspaper correctly, or lost the ability to follow a story from A 4 to A16—keeping the paper folded in its quarter size shape. Fold that in half and you are reading an eighth of the full page. A lifetime skill.

The newspapers in this country remain an endangered species. Zines replace periodicals and blogs proliferate. Someday the art of folding a newspaper will appear in a museum as a relic of a previous age.

This is just to say...

I passed on the list of 100 favorite mysteries of the twentieth century selected by the Independent Booksellers Association. Between indulging in other books I hope to work my way through these selections—especially the items listed as out of print. I feel a compulsion to read those books, but I've given up the idea of doing so alphabetically.

Once I thought that if I began a book I needed to continue on to the end, even if reaching the end meant trudging through weak writing, pasteboard characters, and conflicts no more engaging than the swatting of a barely aloft fly. Now I am the queen of the hatchet.

I equate the rereading of a book as a gift to myself. I linger with the words, the language, with characters I know. When I was below the age of double digits I read Nobody's Boy (Sans famille) by Malot. The long and convoluted plot offered hours of role-playing. Remi, the lead character, is catapulted from one heart-wrenching situation to another on his journey to find a place in the world. I visualized each chapter and, along with my friends Annie and Nina, role-played the scene. This scene called for real emoting.

Arthur's mother was English. Her name was Mrs. Milligan. She was a widow, and Arthur was her only son; at least, it was supposed that he was her only son living, for she had lost an elder child under mysterious
conditions. When the child was six months old it had been kidnaped, and they had never been able to find any trace of him. It is true that, at the time he was taken, Mrs. Milligan had not been able to make the necessary searches. Her husband was dying, and she herself was dangerously ill and knew nothing of what was going around her. When she regained consciousness her husband was dead and her baby had disappeared.

I want to say… “This is Just to Say”…

Back

created in wordie.net

To recall, to go back in time, to ferret out memories caught in the crevasses, to unwind the past on a new spool, to revise, to read the scroll backwards, to parse life into eras forces a conversation with the present.

Travel back in time. Hollywood loved the idea. Who wouldn't be enticed by spending an afternoon listening to Socrates? Were women in attendance? Good historians make me forget my immediate present. I relinquish the verity of the calendar. I've wandered in Mesopotamia, sat in a trench, drawn up a chair at the Yalta Conference, watched too many wars, and stood on a line waiting for food.

"Scientists have speculative theories in place, but technology hasn’t caught up yet to the point that they can be tested. Creating wormholes is one such theory. If space can be curved enough, and there is no theoretical reason why it can’t, then maybe a wormhole could be constructed to shortcut from one side of the universe to the other. If one of the mouths of the wormhole was made to travel very fast compared to the other one, then there would be a time difference between the two. Passing through the hole one way would allow you to move forwards in time and passing back the other way would allow you to move backwards in time. The main limitation with this method is that you would never be able to travel back to any date prior to the construction of the wormhole." Guy Micklethwait


Have I mentioned that my back hurts? I probably pulled a muscle when I turned too far playing golf. And I turned too far because I wanted to hit a longer drive. I wanted to watch that high arc moving down the fairway.

What would you change if you could go back? I'll not get caught with that useless conjecture. Change one thing and watch the other cards tumble. You can't return. You can only alter something in real time.

Annie suggested walking backwards. "Let's see who can walk the furthest."

Three of us started down the hill, taking care to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. I watched the curb and counted my steps. How many steps to Minnie and Bernie's Grocery Store where my mother bought Farmer's Cheese? How many steps to the corner drugstore where the pharmacist reminded everyone that he had attended two years of medical school?

We stopped walking backwards when the street stopped for a roadway.

Last night my back and the mattress fought against one another. Nothing felt right and I thought I never slept, but my dream of riding an antelope negates that thought. But it was a fitful sleep.

We rode back and forth on the elevated train one entire summer afternoon.

Once I didn't backup a short story and it disappeared. It's hiding somewhere in my computer. Now I'll never know the end.

My characters took off relishing their release.
Independence is such a heady affair.

365

What is there about doing something for a year?
Blog each day and at the end of a year earn a badge—not the kind you pin to a lapel, but one that appears on your blog.

A blatant announcement.

I did it.
I blogged everyday for a year.

But what to write?
"I ate frozen yogurt for the fourth time this week."
"My toothbrush's bristles sag."
"Aunt Zeporah knits long johns."

Is it possible?
Are there bloggers out there who write words, sentences, even paragraphs of worthwhile prose every day? Maybe so.
Does the blogger —the Don Quixote of erstwhile experiences negotiate through perils, wondering if today writer's block will stymie the daily pursuit?

Each 365 represents a challenge.
Post a photo a day for a year.
Write a poem a day for a year.
Does anyone cheat and use previously written poems?
Raise the bar.
Write a sestina one day, a villanelle the next and so on through the myriad forms and then recycle through them again.

Don't forget the Chinese jue ju — only four lines
of five or seven syllables each.
Don't tell a story, create a mood.

I don't know but I expect that there may be 365 forms.

I found a site that lists an astronomy fact for each day. Sometimes it's enough to stare at the stars.

Until I went to the southwest I never stood in awe of the sky. A New England sky, cramped and proper, meanders around fir trees. I couldn't see where it touched down to the earth.

Standing in the desert I watched the sky surround me --an immense shade of cerulean blue and at night darkness as a backdrop for the stars.

A portrait photographer in New York City posted a portrait every day.

I love this: 365 Days Of Trash. “One man's attempt to throw nothing "away" for a year... and beyond.”

He writes, “The idea for this project came about six months ago as I was throwing something away in the garbage. It occurred to me that I was doing nothing more than that. I was making it go away, not dealing with it, not accounting for it, simply removing it from my sight.”

Other bloggers picked up the gauntlet.

In 2006 a cheese aficionado ran a cheese course for a year.

Day 146: “Trentingrana is cousin to Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano, a hard grateable cow's milk cheese from Italy…”

Someone in Budapest posts a daily photo of “… the typographical diversity of Budapest’s street numbers.”

365—It’s ...mundane.

Instead I shall read the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century—selected by The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.

Yes, I'll read them alphabetically.

First, The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham.

I wonder if the Independent Mystery Writers created a badge for completion —or intends to...

Coming of Age

After indulging myself by reading two coming of age novels in one week, one set in Western Australia and the other in the land of Palestine in 1946, I am adrift in a sea of definitions.

Rites, rituals, elaborate ceremonies and frightening journeys mark the act of separation from childhood. Testing of one's mettle may be required. The experience, often traumatic, at times spiritual, thrusts the individual out of one accustomed place into a larger stage.

In Japan The Coming of Age festival, Seijin no hi, is celebrated on the second Monday of January. If you turned twenty in that year you are one of the celebrants. It is also the year you may vote, drink and smoke—legally.

Did I have a significant coming of age experience? Did I even know that I entered the passageway leaving childhood? Was my entry a slide on a barely perceptible slope and my arrival unheralded by pomp and circumstance? Did I realize that doors close and memory is not an entryway?

No solitary wilderness experience, no confirmation, no sleepless vigils, no organized initiation--

I didn't know the first time I traveled the subway by myself I took a step —in the process of my coming of age. We lived in the Bronx and the IND line and the bus provided a magic carpet away from 176th Street and my apartment building.

My mother’s words, before my first ride unaccompanied by an adult, "Don't use the bathroom in the subway and stay away from the edge."

********

We loved walking through the entire train by opening up the door of a subway car and moving on to the next car while the train was moving. It wasn't dangerous and there were handrails. Low-level risk. Being a New Yorker meant knowing that skill.


The bathrooms in the subway either smelled of disinfectant or needed disinfectant. I met my first bag lady in the 42nd Street bathroom. She was washing out some stockings in a sink and standing barefoot on the tile floor.

"My son's meeting me for dinner," she explained, "and I didn’t have time to go home. You mind if I wash my feet out in the sink? I stand a lot."

I watched her try and lift her foot to the sink and give up.

"You know," she said, "rich women get pedicures. I got one once."

********

A cement gully separated my apartment building from the adjacent tenement. Instead of a long grassy plain at the end of the slope, a three-foot flat area abruptly stopped at a fence. When it snowed the gully became our Olympic track. You sat on something slippery and set off down the slope. The trick—jump off before hitting the fence. For several years I watched the older kids and then the year I turned twelve I knew that I couldn’t wait any longer. Annie, my best friend, went down twice before I sat down on a square of corrugated cardboard and stared down the gully. At the end my timing was off and I landed facedown on the ice and grit.

Both my mother and doctor reminded me not to pick at the scabs because I’d have scars. “You did it,” said Annie, “even if your landing hurt.” What hurt was the doctor removing the grit from all the scratches and gashes.

********

My seventh grade home economics teacher insisted we say a prayer before we ate our home cooked dishes. That was the year I decided that I was an agnostic and therefore I couldn’t say a prayer. Miss Gannon, sister of a priest and a believer in discipline and compliance, called my mother in to school.

“Not only is she disrespectful, but she also smirks.”

I held to my belief in a refusal to say a prayer. My mother asked if my standing politely was acceptable. Miss Gannon, stood her ground. “If she doesn’t participate she doesn’t cook.” For the rest of the year I cleaned the kitchen when everyone else cooked and I never tasted the Welsh Rabbit that made everyone sick.

It didn’t matter that by the eighth grade God was back in my good graces. That year I stood my ground. A step.

********

This coming of age doesn’t happen quickly even if there is a prepared ceremony. Every change requires a coming of age.

********

Sometimes the journey is a magical or somber, or hilarious, or a collection of myths.

A Long History

Pundits remind us that violence accompanies weak economic times. In the past week newspaper headlines related the latest killing spree —-thirteen in New York.

We ask why a particular person purposefully created such a carnage.

Lost a job, domestic violence, bullied, or mentally ill.

Too often the perpetrator commits suicide and our questions remain unanswered.

History is the tale of killings-
Nations engage in genocides; neighborhoods in turf wars; countries in expansion.

The history of religion is one smitten with violence.

Ethnic cleansings occur with frequency.

Assassinations, coups—all part of our history. What military arm of a modern country shuns covert killings?

Are we numbed to the killings?

Dylan Thomas said that “After the first death there is no other.”

We can’t become numb. We must celebrate each life.

Reading

Perusing books —

Alberto Manquel wrote books devoted to the art of reading—historical panoramas of libraries including his own, the chronology of reading from the earliest pictographs, and diaries of his reading habits. Reading his words and insights about both the writer and the reader reminds me of the task of a reader. Without the reader written words perish, lie fallow. The reader imbues the writing with her own experiences, idiosyncrasies, and peculiarities.

I find myself seesawing between fiction and non-fiction.

It is almost Passover and I am busy putting together a Haggadah, buying matzah, taking out recipes. We will eat matzah for Passover week as a reminder of how quickly the Hebrew people left Egypt — no time to let the bread rise. If you fully observe the holiday all bread and flour products will be removed from your home—even the crumbs.

I read these words in The Same Embrace by Lowenthall.

The scene is a concentration camp at Passover.
"In the dark chill of the barracks the rabbi rose..... He was skinny now, almost too weak to stand.

"Into the dimness he lifted something up. It was a wedge of bread, no bigger than his fist. It was his own stale end of bread, saved from supper. The rabbi held the bread to his face.

This, he said, in what remained of his voice, this that you see. This is matzah."

The written word sizzles on the page. I cry when envisioning the scene. It's a simple scene described in spare language.

There are writers who write for an audience unable to read their words. The reader becomes the voice of the silent ones. Wallace Stevens said, "The word is the making of the world." How can I read without a visceral reaction? Some words force me to make a moral decision.

Jeremiah 23:29 : "Like a hammer, it explodes the stone." The rabbis said this meant that one read and read a text until it gave forth a plentitude of meanings. That is the way to read. Some books require the merest of taps to reveal their meaning while other require persistence and rereading. It is in the rereading that I find the rivers of meaning.

Life, like a story, begins in medias res. To start at the beginning is impossible. The writer knows this and drops the reader down into a stream mid-way between the beginning and the ending.

"He was forty-eight, a fisherman, and he never caught a significant fish."

Barry Hannah "Getting Ready"

"Yesterday afternoon the six-o-clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit"

Truman Capote "Children on Their Birthday"

I am seated at the coffee house writing when I group of six people arrive. This is lunchtime and I assume a prearranged date.

One man is bald, another has a long crew cut, one is losing his hair, another younger man has a beard and shoulder length light brown hair, and one wears his hair parted in the middle. A lone woman with long curly hair says, "Awesome," but I never heard what was awesome. Perhaps I'll write about hair.

Sentences remain in my mind, creating patterns I wander through.

In Gilead, Marilynne Robinson writes, "History could make a stone cry."— an invitation to stop and contemplate history.

I don't need to consider the far removed past; I remain within the last ten years and weep for the ravaged lands, the stony faces of the victims of genocide, the thirst for power that propels men to ignore morality.

A line written by David Berger comes to mind when I think of history: "We cannot allow the trees or even the groves, to persuade us there is no forest."

One line leads to another, permutations of meanings colored by my own experiences, and I travel through a network of thoughts.

The writer lets the reader see a tiny piece of the story; the rest is resting beneath the water. A reader plunges down through the words, through the simple sense and discovers a multitude of meanings. My imagination defines new dimensions—a warren of meanings.

I read somewhere that Miriam Rothchild spent twenty years studying and cataloguing her father's flea collection. Then she produced an illustrated catalogue of that collection.

How many questions remain unanswered. My mind takes on a flurry of activity. Questions tumble about—unanswered save in my imagination. I even want to take a furtive look into her bedroom.

Angelo Manquel in his book The Library at Night says "A study lends its owner, its privileged reader, what Seneca called euthymia, a Greek word which Seneca explained means 'well being of the soul,' and which he translated as 'tranquillitas'. Every study ultimately aspires to euthymia..." Did Miriam Rothchild attain euthymia?

Joan Didion writes: "Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them."

I love to lose myself in those places.

Greed

To design extraordinary schemes to fool people into false expectations, to create intricate structures that hide real motives, to wear one face while knowing your other face is beneath that exterior, defines a person who delights in debunking another of their innocence.

The people of money whose desires outpace their ability to acquire more and more money may find themselves on the path of reckless greed. I heard today that the best tickets at the new Yankee stadium cost over $2000 per seat for each game. You cannot, even if you want to splurge, order a single ticket for one game. These luxury seats are sold as a season package—doling out over $125,000 for a season ticket may be akin to keeping up with the Joneses. It all depends upon the Joneses you know.

I am aware of the difficulties of living under the strain of an unbridled need to acquire. Perhaps we, the others, suffer under our lack of compassion for the rich. We need the rich to keep business alive. Who else will buy the high-end items in high-end malls? Who will buy the mini-mansions? Who will buy kitchens with appliances meeting the needs of chefs trained at Le Cordon Bleu?

I am not tossing all the rich in one pot of broth. I am only speaking of those who lose their grip on the path in the middle. I am thinking of those people who believe that a bonus that exceeds the lifelong wage of many workers is a fair value for their contribution to a company—even when that company falters and sputters.

Yet, how foolish of me. How can they afford what became necessities without that added remuneration?

Oh share the tax loopholes and the accountant who knows how to hide money.

Did the money managers who defrauded people of their money need the money they made or did they need the rush that accrues to doing something risky?

Want risk? Become a follower of Evel Kneivil. Climb on your motorcycle and jump over Pepsi trucks and Greyhound busses. Risk takers are breaking his records—join them.

Trek across the Gobi desert. Helen Thayer and her husband walked 1600 miles across the Gobi when she was sixty and he was seventy-four.

"We enjoyed the simplicity of a trek in a world drowning in convenience and easier methods of travel."

But greed doesn't only stick to the craws of those financial and corporate people. It is all over.

Sometimes the name is different. .

The Shadows

Friday night my book club discussed Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow in the Wind.

Imagine belonging to the same book club for decades? Did we know at the first meeting of our eventual longevity? Certainly changes happened, either through happenstance, chance or studied willingness to try it a different way.

For years we only read books by women. Fewer publishers took chances on female writers—women still win fewer of the big literary prizes. We supported women writers and believed that the personal is political.

The faces changed. The original members—or members of a decade or more —now number seven. At our zenith twenty-five people showed up the fourth Friday of every month, now thirteen to seventeen show up the third Friday of the month—a more manageable number.

We always adhere to a discussion of the book. No veering off into private stories. The book doesn't act as a trigger to our personal reveries.
Last night Mary Ellen asked about Magic Realism and I thought about Karen; Karen who loved writers from South America, who studied those writers and wrote her thesis on the connecting links of land and religion and magic realism; Karen who died of breast cancer way too young. Karen who wanted to be buried back in the farmland of the mid-west, a land she loved.

Shadows—I perceived the shadows of the past in the room. Another Karen sought a spiritual path, one not found in the books we read. One day she packed her things, sold her house and became a Sufi.

Zafon said that he wrote his book as an ode to reading.

And Alberto Manquel wrote: "Perhaps in order for a book to attract us, it must establish between our experience and that of the fiction--between the two imaginations, ours and that on the page--a link of coincidence."

The Shadow in the Wind connected me to the shadows of those who once belonged to the book club.

We had a member who arrived barefoot in the winter. She walked on ice. "My feet smell in shoes."

A woman came who taught literature at a nearby university and remained a member until she led a discussion on Withering Heights, a book she wrote about in her own book. We disagreed with her interpretation and she left.

I recall the short women who only came a few times and suggested rather pallid books. Because she was new and spoke so energetically about a book she suggested, we voted it for the following month. At that point we chose a book for the next month; now we choose three books at a time.

The following month we tore apart the book—weak character development, sappy ending, and purple prose.

"Did you read this book before suggesting it?" I asked. “ A rule of thumb—read the book first.”

"No." she answered. Two people self-righteously took her to task for not following that rule —the eleventh commandment.


Maybe she came back once again and then didn't appear again. We learned she had died, was dying the evening we ripped into the book with a good ending and weak prose.

I think of her whenever I want to lean with words—anything can be said if the words aren't used to pummel.

Joyce suggested we interview each other for the newsletter. Everyone had a chance to play both roles. Joyce died several years ago—cancer. She wanted to live long enough to finish a children's book—she did.

Once someone brought a woman to the group who regaled us with her tales of time spent in jail.

We listened to one gynecologist member tell us of her decision to become a pastry chief.

One member lived in the shell of a dilapidated building. “It’s better, “ she said, “then living in my car.” She always sat closet to the cheese and crackers. One Friday she didn’t show up.

We need reunions—

Grocery Bag as Metaphor

I

Instructions:

A grocery bag, the ubiquitous paper grocery bag, the glued and folded square bottomed bag must be dismantled—reduced to a flat sheet of brown paper. Take care. Monitor your work. Be wary of the errant rip.

Glue the bag on an eighteen by twenty-four piece of newsprint.

II

Mattie Knight loved tinkering. She worked in a paper bag factory where she watched flat bags slide past her—bags looking like envelopes. Paper sacks.

Mattie Knight, "mother of the grocery bag”, invented a machine part to create a paper bag with a square bottom.

Stand aside and watch the machine automatically fold and glue the flat paper.

Now, you say, dismantle the square bottom and lay it flat.

III

Every textbook must be covered.
A teacher ceases lecturing on the difference between lay and lie when she spots a bare text—"Where's the cover? "

Before free publicity laden plastic coated covers distributed by insurance companies, before sports covers, gaudy stretch covers, the brown grocery bag earned a reputation as a strong textbook cover.

I instructed entire classes on how to fold, where to fold and how to create sleeves without resorting to masking tape.

That skill, now relegated to extinction, of little consequence, a dinosaur, remains a footnote in the narrative of the paper grocery bag.

IV

A void must be filled. People run in to find new uses for the square bottomed paper bag.
Another dismantling, disassembling—

"... tired of having to scrape ice and snow off your windshield? Keep some paper bags on hand. When there's snow in the forecast, go out to your car and turn on the wipers. Then shut off the engine with the wipers positioned near the middle of the windshield. Now split open a couple of paper bags and use your car's wipers to hold them in place. After the last snow flake falls, pull off the paper to instantly clear your windshield."

V

A domestic type, a person who turns bottles upside down and waits for the last drops to seek the lowest point, the coupon collector, the person who knows where to find the free samples also knows the uses of a paper bag.

Sleep during the day—cover your windows with grocery bags.

Cut into strips and weave fanciful place mats.

VI

Instruction:

Use your viewfinder to select a composition.

The low platform is transformed into a still life of bags

My viewfinder, an old slide mount, has an inscription on the cardboard —Bryce Canyon, Fairyland Trail.

A large Stop and Shop bag morphs into a trail across the canyon. I descend into the amphitheatre, and pass a hedge of hoodoos atop a ridge— the China Wall.

A labyrinth of limestone spires stretch across the small rectangle of my viewfinder.

VII

You can date a Kodak slide mount by the graphic design. It’s a way, along with creases, to access age.
In the 1965 revisions the "corner curl" trademark began to shrink. In 1972, the "curled corner trade dress” was dropped. I compare my mount to the graphic and identify 1983—1986.

I view the scene through a twenty-three year old mount.

Cardboard mounts may warp with age.
Paper bags may crease with use.

Grace Paley wrote of a woman with “ a nicely mapped face”

VIII

Instruction: draw a contour line around the large shapes.

I drew a contour around the bags until I reached the tallest bag. That's when I recalled the hike from one side of the canyon to the opposite side. Orange and red creep through the brown while tan, pink and white obliterate what is left of the brown paper.

XI

My banana ripens in a brown lunch bag.

In the fourth grade I created a paper bag mask and walked around incognito--for a few moments.

XII

The directions blend and I am left creating the bag details. Creases or crevasses?

XIII

I won.

I used the same paper lunch bag every day for six months. One other teacher kept pace until her yogurt leaked and weakened the square bottom. Taping was not allowed.

XIV

One bag took on the characteristics of a hoodoo. My white pastel and charcoal refused to stay within the rules:

—to dismantle a bag, to reduce a square bottom to a flat sheet, to then look through an empty slide mount at intact paper bags and reproduce those bags on a flat sheet of newsprint.

Frame

To frame something

to give it a skeleton,
a chassis,
a form,
a border,
a construct,

a way to hold together disparate pieces


Newspaper piece:
A local woman recently published her first book and she’s hit it rich—a first run of 100,000 copies. She says that everything just worked out—her agent, the topic, the present climate. May I add the phases of the moon, astrology, and the reading of tea leaves?

Speaking of leaves. A few still hang tenaciously to the oak tree outside my window. Why do they ignore the inevitable and hold on by their fingertips?

My fingertips turned the color of the blue-black ink in my antique fountain pen when the soft-rubber sac sprung a leak.

“… in 1945 … a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States.”

I owned many leaky ballpoints. My sixth grade teacher accused me of cheating. The evidence—fingers and palm covered with blue ink from my Bic ballpoint. She recanted after examining my leaking pen, but not before I learned something about the tenuous state of being innocent.

When I tire of ponderous literary tomes I read mysteries and attempt to discern between the innocent and the guilty. The clues, too often known only to the writer and her self-appointed detective, elude me as I read. I wait for an epiphany. Often detectives lack skills honed in a precinct or at a police academy. The sleuth may be a bookseller residing in a small community, or a botanist or a quilter or a medieval maiden wandering across the country.

I grew up in the Bronx and loved going to the country. That’s what we called anyplace with a green area larger than a city park. I returned from a trip to the country where sitting on a patch of grass, walking barefoot, rolling down a hill, and finding treasures in the woods initiated me into a magic kingdom.

I tried to find their equivalents in the city. Sitting on the stoop of my friend Miriam’s house, tiptoeing past the pigeon coop on top of the Lewis Morris building, eluding tags by running down the alley way when playing ringolevio, finding pennies in the street—all corresponding city delights.

To frame something—
To give it a setting, a casement, a stage—

On the Derivation of a Word or Why I Can’t Travel So Faror A Place Midway Between Here and There or How Does Halfway Sound ?

Why I Can't Travel So Far

I
The word frightened misses the mark. Scared reminds me of the time I heard creaks in the basement while reading a horror story. How did the doppelganger get into my house?

Petrified, disquieted, unnerved, perhaps cowed.

II

Try another list of synonyms. Start with a different word.

III

Hesitant. Reluctant. These words inch closer to my reality. Some people love taking risks--athletic risks, intellectual risks, monetary risks. I did roller skate down an alley way and come to a rapid stop before hitting a brick wall. In North Carolina I used a towel to slide down a slick rock fed by a small waterfall. After landing in a deep-water filled depression, I imagined myself plunging down Niagara Falls in a barrel. When hiking I love edges and don't hug canyon walls. But I'm not strapping on crampons and scaling rocks.

I do the daily puzzle and the puzzle on airplanes in ink. Is that arrogance or toying with risk?

I'm reluctant to travel to places where I can't pronounce the disease listed as endemic to the region. I don't want to take pills to protect me from malaria. I'm hesitant about going someplace where the water is suspect.

I'm hesitant about heading off into places that require me to travel for hours on end. Give me the Southwest and canyon country. Let me breath the orange, red, pink, and yellow landscape.

I'm good for six or seven hour plane trips.

IV

You know all those travel books written by intrepid adventurers. I devour them. I am the penultimate traveler--on paper. I've encountered devastating heat crossing the Gobi Desert, numbing cold in Antarctica, quicksand lapping at my heels, and a mamba snake, head held high, racing across level ground.

V

Thanks for the invitation— but— I can't make it halfway around the world this spring.

VI

Do you like Utah's canyon country? Fairyland Trail at Bryce?

The land beyond the 100th meridian? “A sign across U.S. Highway 30 in Cozad, Nebraska marks the place where the meridian intersects the routes of the Oregon Trail, Pony Express, transcontinental railroad…”

The Appalachian Trail when it climbs up Mt Katahdan? Walking the Knife's Edge? A jagged arête.

The Great Beach at Pt. Reyes? Searching for polished rocks, watching out for sneaker waves.

Do you enjoy swimming in the icy water off Maine's coast?


Hiking at Capitol Reef "with its twisting canyons, massive domes, monoliths and spires of sandstone"?

Walking through the wildflowers of Mt Rainier? Shooting Star, Alpine Paintbrush, Red Heather, Beargrass…



VI

Let’s find a place midway between there and here.

Thirteen Ways to Find Your Way With Pencils

After reading Wallace Stevens

I

Sign up for a drawing course and dive headfirst into a collection of the necessary materials. Graphite pencils, charcoal pencils and lead pencils, pieces of a torn tee shirt, kneaded eraser, pearl eraser, long metal ruler, 18"x24" newsprint pad, small pad for notes, box cutter, scissors, masking tape and a box to store, sort, and find the materials.

II

Check out books from the library on light and shadow, values, dark and light, 100 Ideas for Drawing, Betty Edward's books. Take notes about seeing —really seeing edges, negative space, lights and darks, shapes, and details.

III

Remove the negative from a Kodachrome slide and use the opening to compose scenes. Walk around framing everything you see. Omit everything that doesn't appear within your rectangle. Hone in like a homing bird on the essentials.

IV

I am looking at a salt and peppershaker in a silver toned holder. The pepper leans into the salt. They touch cap to cap. I note the shadows. So like people. One is stalwart and erect. The other needs support. The salt is homogeneous. The pepper is light and dark, each grain distinct. If I have to reside somewhere I'll stay with the pepper.

V

Go to art class and draw a still life. Look for those shadows; watch the tones, the values, and the shades of gray. Keep everything in proportion. How did that cylinder manage to be so large that it diminished the size of everything else? It isn't that large on the set-up.

VI

Set-up the pad in your basement or on the kitchen table and draw. It's inadequate. Purchase a slanted table. No, not a table. A white board with angled legs. That works, but the pad slips off the board. Tear out a sheet and attach it with the clips. Now it's time to draw something. Select the small bamboo plant. Lucky Bamboo. Don't forget the shades of gray

VII

Notice how much easier it is in class. The still life’s proportions become distorted on the board. Perhaps it's me. Think about a cheap easel. Search the Internet. Do you want to get one that's easy to take apart and light enough to bring outside for painting? I don’t want to drag a lot with me. Scratch outdoor painting. Get one that is sturdy and not expensive.

VIII

Travel down to Cambridge to see easels. Found one that seems perfect even though the edges are a bit rough. The edges can be sandpapered down or they can be covered with tape. It doesn't need to look attractive. People aren't perfect and it takes more than tape to smooth down rough edges. This is an easel ready for serious practice. Set it up and find a place in the basement to store the easel.

IX

Take the brown water resistant carrying envelope that stores the 18"x 24" newsprint pad, long ruler, and 19" x 25" foam board to the basement. The foam board is used to tape up individual sheet of paper. The foam board is then placed on the easel. "It's harder surface," says the instructor, "and you can get a better range of shades of gray."

X

Classical music accompanies the drawing when in class. Go upstairs and get the small radio. Try and find a station without too many commercials, interruptions, and music you like. Go upstairs two flights and get the IPod and connecting cable. Connect it to the radio and play your own classical selection. You'll need more music. Try chants. Too slow. It puts you beyond a meditative state. You ponder the state of economics and start adding up what you have spent.

XI

Get down to work. Set up an arrangement. Look through the viewfinder. Open the shades. Move the table to get good shadows. Set up the easel, tape your paper to the foam board, take out the viewfinder, find the appropriate composition and make that first mark. Ignore the phone.

XII

Wonder why you selected that particular music? Darken that area. Contemplate color and reject it for now. Think about taking some photos and working from photos. Wonder about the quality of air in the basement. Wonder about the dripping you hear. Go to the window and look up. Do you see icicles, an ice dam? Procrastination. The sphere lacks form. You found out the difference between shape and form. Look at the negative shape. The word negative is redeemed. I like the concept of redeeming words. Dyke used to be a negative word until redemption.

XIII

Buy another flat metal pencil case to store charcoal pencils. The graphite pencils are in the first pencil case.

Practice. Practice. Practice before moving on to another medium.

Third Floor at the Library

I

I discovered the warmth of the Concord Library and the two tables on the third floor two weeks ago. An entire upper floor devoted to the 600s and 700s hides an enclave for the writer who wants solitude. I am sitting on a faux green leather chair--to my right an open space looks down upon a reading lounge--to my left a six shelf stack of books the length of the room. I've selected the seat closest to the stacks and away from the view of anyone in the lounge. A woman passes, looks my way and then hurries on to the furthest reaches of the third floor. By the time the architects arrived on the upper floor they settled for a plain plan with pipes painted the same white as the walls. I am seated under a water sprinkler.

II

The Boston Public Library exudes confidence in its collection and public service. Yet an old woman died in the library when she wandered away from a group and opened a door, entered a hallway, perhaps closet, perhaps the entrance to a warren of hallways, and could not open the door back to the starting place. It is said that the people she knew looked for her inside the library and then beyond the library. She was forgetful and probably wandered away. I guess there are many doors leading to rarely used places in the library because she wasn't found for days or was it weeks. In time someone opened the door to her self imposed catacomb, notified her relatives, and suggested some alterations to the Boston Public Library. Is that a true story or an urban myth?

III

Two lions protect the New York Public Library.

They’re a common meeting place, "I'll meet you in front of the lion."

Many of the books, when I went to college in New York City, remained in stacks away from greasy, sweaty, or oily hands and away from the fiend who tore pages out and left with the purloined pages in a backpack or under a shirt. The collection was so vast that allowing everyone to roam unassisted might create turmoil in the stacks. I remember filling out request slips, handing them in and then waiting patiently. One day I waited for twenty minutes before approaching the desk. "The book you’re looking for," said the librarian, "is gone." What does gone mean? Did someone else have that tome or was it something far worse.

III

Because I was in Salem for the day and had seen the usual tourist attractions I sought something off beat. I ended up at a library that housed some of the original depositions used in the Salem witch trials. I identified myself as a writer interested in writing about Rebecca Nurse--one of the women accused of being a witch. After producing a number two pencil and a yellow pad and listening to the instructions for handling the document, I was escorted to a large polished mahogany table. A huge book was brought to the table and opened to the depositions against Rebecca. I recall the sepia colored ink and the handwriting that defied my ability to read more than a few words per line, but enough to fear for Rebecca--for the volume of words against these women threw me back to those times.

IV

Libraries reflect the tastes of those who purchase the books. My home library has a vast collection of graphic novels and the history of the early comic book artists. The head librarian's particular expertise is the graphic novel and its place in history. I recall that comic books weren't banned in my home, but they weren't given a stamp of approval. Yet when I had an illness that kept me in bed for several weeks my parents purchased comic books because I couldn't read for any length of time. Besides the heroes and heroines of the comics became part of my fantasy play. But it was the book I had borrowed from the local library that supplied most of my role-playing stories --Nobody's Boy and Nobody's Girl. The librarian had suggested those two books.


V

The librarian passes by with her rolling cart and the books to be shelved. I imagine a book sitting on a shelf for years with no takers, no one to peruse the words an author wrote hoping for an audience—the plot of a tragedy.

IV

The library is also the place that encourages subterfuge. My bottle of water, wrapped in a plastic bag from Shaw's Grocery, is hidden in my purple backpack. I sip water when I don't hear footfalls.

Naming

A Treasure Trove

I've found a treasure trove accidentally. It started simply enough when I wanted to find a book of Chinese Paintings and then intended to stay in the 700 room and write. That's the room in the Concord library that stores the 700 books, several tables and computers. It's warm and quiet there --womb like.

Today all the tables were occupied in the 700 room. I found two books and headed to the second floor where fiction and non-fiction to 699 is stored. Again--”serious” students or cold residents occupied all the tables.

I went upstairs to the 800 and 900 stacks. A man, several books and the ubiquitous computer occupied one table and the other table was empty. I was both hungry and thirsty and intended to stay long enough to do some quick writing.

Another man has just entered. He's wearing a beret and carrying a briefcase--probably encasing a computer. He eyed my table because the only available spot was a much smaller table with a less comfortable chair and facing a blank wall.

The treasure trove is to my left. I am seated next to shelves containing books about writing. From here I note Francine Prose's book about reading as a writer, a favorite.

Cocking my head sideways allows me to read some of the catchy titles like The Sinless Writing or Will My Name Be Shouted Out?

Erroneous title--when I approached the shelf the Sinless Writing disappeared. Possibly the letters close up morphed into something else.

I did find Carol Bly's book on writing non-fiction. I'm noting some of her techniques: instead of saying," Ask yourself questions about your writing she's quite specific".

"What would be a specific example of the generic noun I just put down?" I call that naming.

Naming is powerful and it can be ruthless.

New Path

I am connected to the accepted ways of welcoming in the New Year. I check the experts who pick the best books of the previous year and find several books I want to read. Then I wonder at some of the picks--favorites of reviewers, darlings to the critics. Too many critics accept the mantle of selecting the best, the “push the envelope style”, the author, the musician, the poet, the football player to keep in your sight.

I read the news analysts who both look back and project forward. They remind me of the horrors of war, the broken truces, the genocides, the religious strife, what leaders are in and who has been ousted. They offer possibilities for the following year--we'll continue to flounder economically, we'll make a slow recovery. Our social agenda will be mired in the fear of moving too quickly, our social agenda will be on a springboard ready to usher in a new tomorrow. And they will unfurl a list of accomplishments, of bravery, of brilliance.

The Globe lists those who died. This, again, is a selective list. Your grandfather won't make this list. Perhaps your grandfather made the list. My grandfather painted the interior of houses.

Yesterday I went to the American Heritage Museum to see Sherman's portraits of Ellis Island immigrants. Portraits without names. Some have handwritten notes. "This family went to North Dakota" "Tattooed stowaway. Deported." Only Emma Goldman's portrait has a name "Emma Goldman, anarchist, deported." Did any of those people make a list? —maybe their children or grandchildren.

Have you made your New Year's list? If no one reminded us to create resolutions, if no one suggested that the new year, like the first day of school, meant new beginnings, if we didn't believe in new beginnings, would we make lists of resolutions?

When I taught learning disabled students they brought their new notebooks to school the first day. One student said, "It only takes a day for my book to look like last year's book. The teacher talks and I try to take notes and I'm lost." New just doesn't happen without some intervention, instruction, grace.

My list of resolutions— influenced by what is around me, by my flights of desire, and the myriad possibilities in the universe. Many items on the list will plummet to the ground because, to quote C.K. Chesterton, they were too hard and I gave up. A few will take root--everything must have some roots to succeed.

Every year I have a food wish--eat healthy foods, abjure excessive sugar, and lose five pounds.

Send out two pieces a month. Hallow the time when I write,

Write more poems. Love words for their acrobatic nuances, their connection to time, and their bridge to the past. Read broadly, expansively. Put down a book that doesn't ring true for me. Forget the critic.

Stanley Kunitz says of poetry, "The craft that I admire most manifests itself...as a form of spiritual testimony."

I signed up for a drawing course. Usually I don't put in the effort to progress beyond a shaded apple--put in the effort, move, finally to where my sketches say something.

Keep up with my online teaching.

Be open to change. Grow as a spiritual person. What does God want me to be doing? That doesn't mean a supine position waiting for some intergalactic message. It means be open to the universe and the small still voice that can't be heard if I'm surrounded by the cacophony of my own business.

But I still can't help listing:

I want to walk and hear the earth inhale and exhale --but I'll accept the days when concrete is under my feet.

I want to read a book a day, but realize that impossibility, so I'll read as many as I can and put down a book if it doesn't resonate.

I want to climb a high mountain and stand on the top--but I'll accept the lower mountain and relish the sweat poring down my back.

I want to wander in new places

I want what I do to be meaningful

I want to continue to love and be loved

Frozen in Time

Old photos stare at me, challenging memory.

Yesterday I found an old snapshot of three friends: Kathy, Mary and Sandy. They are holding up a Trivial Pursuit game.

Mary never liked games, Kathy played the lute and gave it up when she met someone who played golf and didn't understand Baroque music, Sandy moved away when she started climbing the corporate ladder. Mary, the Civil War buff, attended enactments in Virginia. In the photo we all didn't know about tomorrow. I helped pack up Sandy's apartment a year later; I cried with Mary when the lump in her breast was malignant and I watched Kathy lose herself. Only the photo remains intact.

Old photo albums stacked one on top of another fill up a shelf of a bookcase. Some contain specific captions: people, place, date and comments. Others rely on memory. I see myself on top of Mt. Katahdin, the wind and cold obvious even in the photo. Gail, my climbing partner, fell on the way down and sprained her ankle. We both ran out of water an hour before we came to the end and then conjured up images of popsicles and Italian frozen ice.

Faith Moosand collects old photo albums. "I rescued them from the nastiness of not being wanted." What happened to the album? Why wasn't it passed down within a family? Perhaps there was no relative. What will happen to all the albums on my shelf? Will someone remove only the photos they want to save and consign the album to the trash or send it out to the marketplace? Faith wrote a book: Futile Gestures: Photo Albums and the Ecology of Memory. She's found scrapbooks of photos where a number of the pages have missing photos or pages are torn out or parts of pages have been cut away. Why? "The destruction,” she says, “may have been carried out by the creator of the album...censorship may have played a role."

Synchronicity: it's out there in the universe and ready to display itself even if you're not seeking connections. I found a book on the new bookshelf in a local library: a book about the history of the photobooth. I recall taking some photos in a booth in Manhattan.

Two seated friends pull the curtains, smile, and wait for the strip of snaps.

Were we pleased with the results? How did we divide the pictures? What happened to those photos? Have they been collected by a stranger or consigned to some waste basket?

When Joseph Anato invented the photobooth he hoped for success, but did he envision the long lines forming to use the photobooth in Times Square? Soldiers shipping out to World War II took photos to send home. How many soldiers returned? Did they look the same?

It cost .25 in 1925 to obtain a strip of eight different photos. Andy Warhol used the photobooth for the creation of art. In 1986 Bern Boyle created a year long project of taking one photobooth picture a day. He called it his "response to the AIDS epidemic...documenting my life became an obsession."

Sawado Tomoko took one photo a day to "create an army of me". The New York Times reported, "She spent weeks changing her physical appearance and dress to invent a total of four hundred different identities." Then there's Herman Costa who spends afternoons in photobooths creating photocompositions. The Museum of Modern Art owns one of his works.

The digital camera makes it easier to document a life. The Photoblog encourages strangers to post photos, to challenge themselves with a posting everyday for a year, with responding to people all over the world. I posted a photo or more a day for over a year and then posted several times a week. At the end of the year I created DVDs of all the photos and eradicated most of them from my hard drive. Some I saved. There are no albums to look at. What will eventually happen to the DVDs? Will anyone be interested in fifteen photos of brussels sprouts or endless photos of a polypore?

What happens to the photos when scrapbooks disappear? In the 1860s scapebooks stored tintypes. Everything changes.