View From Pardes

Visit My New WordPress Blog

2011-08-02T16:58:00.001-04:00

To read my new blog about the life of a fiction writer, scientist, bicyclist, and contemplative, please visit http://carolinehonse.com.

I’ve just switched to WordPress so I’m still in the process moving over some of the most popular posts from my three other scattered blogs into one main blog.

Thanks for visiting!

2011-06-01T00:40:00.001-04:00

My 4th Cousin Wiz

Yes, Wiz is my cousin, fourth removed and reported to be a White Crested Polish Chicken. Wiz is only a couple of months old and is being raised by my 9 year old 3rd cousin, Lauren.

I'll spare you the trip down genealogy lane and suffice it to say that Tom is my cousin who has a daughter, Tina (my 2nd cousin) whose youngest daughter is Lauren (my 3rd cousin) who has reared Wiz (my 4th cousin) from a hatchling for a 4H project in Newark, Delaware.

I consider Tom and his wife Nancy, their daughter Tina and her husband Don, and their kids Katie, Hailey, and Lauren to be a lovely family who makes me feel so very welcome every time I pedal on my bike from my house 3/4 of mile away to their suburban home where kids, dogs, gardens, charcoal grills, strawberry plants, mounted deer heads, the best iced tea on the planet, and love, laughter, and joy abound.

I spent Memorial day with them for a picnic where I had a chance to get to know all of my cousins better, especially four of them who are of the poultry variety.

Two young ladies from the neighborhood dropped by to visit the chickens as well.

Lauren is very proud of her chickens. The University of Delaware supplied the 4H with baby chicks from a variety of breeds. The kids got to pick out the ones they wanted and Lauren and her family chose four very different breeds. They all have names of course, Amy, Yoko, Wiz, of course, and I can't remember the 4th chicken's name since I'm so smitten with Wiz. Here is a short audio recording of Lauren talking about her 4H project. Oh wait! I remember now. The 4th chicken's name is Omelet. But don't ask me who is who because my heart belongs to Wiz.

Press the arrow on the left to start the recording.

Lauren claims her chickens are unique; but I have to say that Lauren is equally unique. She always has some project going whether it be raising chickens or setting up a very profitable vegetable stand in the front yard. I stopped by tonight on my way home to notice a lemonade stand. Also profitable. Lauren hadn't come home from her softball game but that didn't stop a car from pulling up and asking if there was any lemonade left.

Don's garden is a thing of beauty and bounty that will supply all of us with more tomatoes, lettuce, squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins than we will know what to do with.

It's a wholly organic garden with a dump truck of mushroom soil worked into the soil that supplies all the fertilizer that is needed for the season.

Ummmmm, can't you just TASTE those lightly-battered, deep-fried squash blossoms...not to mention the thin slices of yellow crookneck squash sliced up in a salad.

Along the side of the house is a very respectable strawberry bed which yields a quart or more of strawberries a day. It's peak strawberry season now and the shortcake we had was delicious.

Meanwhile, Don was manning the grill with burgers and hot dogs. Family and food just have a way of finding themselves together all the time. It's another of my cousinly delights.

As the day wore down, Tom (my 1st cousin, in case you forgot) retired to a lawn chair to investigate my new iPad after he wrestled it away from the kids.

Let's all wish Lauren and Wiz good luck at the competition at the Delaware State Fair. Naturally I will be following it closely with photos in a future blog.

A No-Brainer for Bicyclists

2010-05-15T13:27:00.000-04:00

Most of the time, my favorite dinner companion is my bicycle helmet.

It doesn't chew with its mouth open.

It doesn't argue about politics or religion.

It just sits there quietly, blinking now and then, so politely.

It's a no-brainer (no pun intended) that a bicycle helmet can often save you from a devastating head injury in a bicycle accident. Umpteen studies have been done that support this fact. However, for adults in Delaware, there is no law on the books requiring the use of a bicycle helmet. I suppose Delaware assumes we are smart enough to know what to do. It's up to us to decide if we want to protect our brain and life.

For more information on bicycle helmets and how to choose the best model for you and why, go to this site.

Mining Autumn Gems

2009-09-03T08:27:00.001-04:00

I am savoring the rereading of John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." It's a luscious experience. The book was never intended to be considered great literature; but in Steinbeck's masterful hands, even describing the crooked teeth of his canine traveling companion turns into a brilliant character study that has stuck with me since I first read the book three decades ago.

On my bus commute home a few days ago, a phrase caught me and something in me said, "Yes! Exactly!" Initially you are not sure why a particular turn of phrase has moved you to laughter, tears, or awe but if you pause for a moment, take a breath and close your eyes, it will come to you like a shy guest standing in your doorway.

What I've discovered about the process of rereading a favorite piece of writing is being able to tarry over a phrase or paragraph, backtrack and read it again...and again, and allow it to take me to those whistle stop personal memories or those delicious deja vu moments of amnesiac resonance.

Steinbeck was commenting on the awe-inspiring sight of New England fall foilage, the color and splendor of which you can't accurately remember, only newly experience it anew each time you see it.

"I can't even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."

The paragraph transported me to my annual autumnal trip to the mountains. Criminals return to the scene of the crime: lovers return to where they once loved. Each year autumn found me heading back to the mountains and gemstone mines of western North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains where both crimes and love were committed. I haunted the roads looking for the ghosts of the lovers Frankie and Johnnie, the mysterious Brown Mountain Lights, and instead found Juanita, a Carmelite cloistered nun on her Silver Jubilee Retreat, let out from her vow of silence convent to speak freely at will to anyone she chose and to spend a week in a mountain cabin. She chose me.

For someone who had not spoken freely and socially for twenty-five years, she did not hang back awkwardly nor did she spew words without thought. We fell into an easy week together of exploring mountain roads, gravel switchbacks that led to frigid mountain streams from which we drank our fill and dangled our pale white feet into water that gurgled and giggled more loudly than we did.

The autumn color arrived midweek and caught us by surprise as we rounded a bend to an overlook that displayed Mount Mitchell, Table Rock, and Hawk's Bill Mountain rising above colors that were impossible to describe without sounding hysterical.

Juanita inhaled sharply and exclaimed, "OH FATHER!"

Over the next few days, I would hear "OH Father!" each time we saw the orange, indigo, ruby red, and vermilion leaves set against the sparkling lapis lazuli sky. While she may have been freed to speak for a week about anything she wished with anyone and everyone she encountered, she never was far from her lifelong ongoing interior conversation with her Father.

On our last day together, I took her to a flume gemstone mine where we spent the day sorting through buckets of muddy rocks looking for rubies, garnets, emeralds, and amethysts. Juanita's brown Carmelite habit was soaking wet and muddy all the way up to her armpits and grinning face.

A cloistered nun cannot have personal possessions or covet any souvenirs or presents but Juanita broke that rule and returned to the convent in South Carolina with a small handful of mica and garnet encrusted rocks that she would put on her windowsill to catch the morning light.

It is true that you can't remember the precise spectacular color of autmn leaves; you can only experience them anew each time you see them. It's been enough years that I can no longer remember the exact shape of Juanita's beaming smile; but I can still hear the "Oh Father!" that now echoes in my own voice when I come across a moment, a glimpse of eternity, an expression of love from another person, a phrase in a book or from an overhead conversation; and as I read and find more gems to mine, I realize how true it is that "in the beginning was the word" and from there our lives unfold.

Bicycle Criminal Apprehended by Police

2009-09-01T19:55:00.005-04:00

Pardes, a 63 year old bicycle commuter, was ordered off the Christian Care Hospital access road by a security officer on Sunday afternoon, August 30, 2009. She had just come from Performance Bicycle, an extremely family-friendly bike store on Churchman's Road, where she had added a new set of dual flashing rear bicycle lights in preparation for the shorter winter days when she would be commuting home from work as the Laboratory Manager for the Controlled Substances and Arson Laboratories at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Pardes was on her way to the DART bus stop in front of Christiana Hospital where she planned to put herself and her GT Transeo bicycle on the bus, travel to a nearby park and get another 10 miles of biking in before nightfall. Unfortunately, she was told by the Delaware State Police sworn Constable that she was on private property and bicycles were banned from the Christiana Care property.

Pardes works with law enforcement officers in her job at the Medical Examiner's office and has the greatest respect for them in their often dangerous and thankless job. Rather than argue or protest, and taking heed that this hospital officer was clearly in no mood for discussion, she followed his sharp and humiliating directive, “Now you just turn your bike around and go back out the way you came in!”

Pardes, a Boomer who campaigned in the 1960's for Nixon (Who knew?) rather than partake in sit-ins and demonstrations felt certain that this was just a misunderstanding and that Christiana Care, so active in encouraging healthy lifestyles would never, in a million years, have something as archaic as a “bicycles banned” policy. Sadly however, when she called the President and CEO's office for his email address, his secretary confirmed that there is, in fact, a “no bicycles” policy.

But surely, this also was just a misunderstanding. She would investigate, clear it up, and everything would be fine again.

However, it just being a misunderstanding did little to dislodge the feelings of being insulted, harassed, and talked down to as if she was a three year old by a security officer taking his position of authority too far. Still ... maybe he'd had a bad day. It can't be easy being a security officer...

Still there were many questions Pardes had: A bicycle is her ONLY form of transportation! How was she going to:
1.go to a doctor's appointment on Christiana Care grounds?
2.Visit a patient at the hospital?
3.go for blood tests at the lab?
4.Get an xray or MRI?
5.Get an eye exam?
6.Pick up her new glasses at the optician's office?
7.Go the emergency room or medical aid unit?
8.Catch DART bus 33 or 63 that has Christiana Care Hospital on their regular route?

And since she was forced to miss the bus, there was nothing to do but pedal home, have eggs for dinner rather than the fresh salmon she'd planned to buy at the grocery store accessed by DART bus 33. So, pedaling home and planning on eggs for dinner and the other comfort to take her mind of of the “challenges” of life, she decided to scan the web for information on precedents of private facilities invoking their private property rights ..... but nawww that was just way tooooo boring. She was, after all, 63 years old and there were only so many hours in the day left to explore the interesting things of life and not waste them on plotting civil disobedience.

Of course this did not deter her from running through all the things she WISHED she had said to the officer like, “Well Officer, if I had been a ten year old kid on a skateboard who had just t-boned some pour soul on their way into the emergency room with a severed finger in a bag of ice, well then I could understand you metaphorically grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and ordering me to “turn your bike around and go back the way you came,” but since I was obeying all traffic laws and pedaling on the access road to a legitimate bus stop on hospital grounds, well in that case I just don't understand.”

Or, “Young man, is that how you were taught to talk to your elders?” (Except he wasn't young either.)

Or, “There are no signs posted banning bicycles. So bite me.” (Oh yeah, like she'd ever say something like that.)

Instead, Pardes is left to smolder in feelings of being unjustly harassed and she realizes how it's not the legality of it, or please forgive her all you bicycle advocates, it's not even that bicyclists are being treated unfairly. It's that she realizes that she has a vested interest and sense of civic pride in Christiana Care Hospital and feels as if a friend has just wounded her. Mortally.

In 1994 Pardes had a headache one day. The next day she was in surgery at Christian Care to remove a meningioma brain tumor. The capable staff literally saved her life. Don't think she doesn't think of that every time she passes the hospital grounds.

In a less overtly dramatic way, Christiana Care, once again had a significant effect on her life two years ago. She was overweight, had high blood pressure, was sinking into the depression of physical inactivity from extremely painful arthritis and feared she was destined to a life of walkers and wheelchairs like her mother. Then one day as her bus passed the front of the hospital, she noticed their “Wellness Walk” sign and a friendly MUP (multi-use pavement) trail that ran the perimeter of the hospital.

With arthritis pain that left her gasping for air after only ten steps, she knew she couldn't walk a trail back to health; but there, just across the street, she also noticed a bicycle store, Performance Bicycle. The rest is history.

Twenty-one gears of bike later with a frame light enough to lift unto a bus, she pedaled out of Performance Bicycle and onto the glorious grounds of Christiana Care Hospital. Scared to death of traffic, she pedaled the back areas of the hospital roads and figured out how to shift up and down, how to stop disc brakes without launching herself over the front wheel, and how to keep her pants legs OUT of the gear rings. On a particularly hot day, before she discovered the need for adequate hydration, and nearly succumbing to heat stroke, she comforted herself with the fact that she was only a hundred yards from the emergency room entrance.

That was almost two years ago. Pardes is now road-hardened and can claim a lane with the best of them. For the past 14 months, she's commuted to work every day from Newark to Wilmington by bike/bus combo no matter the weather. She's lost 30 pounds, lowered her blood pressure, decreased the debilitating arthritis attacks to almost nil, and she's now enjoying that moderate sweet buzz of endorphins that regular biking engenders. In part she has Christiana Care to thank for that by posting the encouraging “Wellness Walk” signs.

However, since the original posting of the sign, one of the signs has been amended to this.

How sad, that on one hand, health is being encouraged, and on the other hand, trespassers are threatened.

Okay, Pardes confesses. Without knowing it, she has been a trespasser. Cuff me, Dano and read me my rights. Pass me the legal pad and pen and I'll list the infractions of the law I've shattered.

Let's begin with the illegal photographing of an elderly egret in a pond on hospital property. How do I know it's an elderly egret, an elderly gentlemanly egret? Easy. That comb-over attempt of his tail feathers is a dead giveaway.

There are, of course, worse sins than that. Pardes has been known to tarry at the gazebo near the Helen Graham Cancer center. She's also been known to take out a notebook and write about the spot for her blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Garden of Hope

The expansive Christiana Hospital campus is between my home and a major shopping area I frequent. Today I discovered the "Garden of Hope" that has been newly added outside a new Cancer Treatment Center. There is a gazebo next to a pond with fountains and a Canada Goose conclave.

I stopped for my lunch picnic in the gazebo.

It's very peaceful and quiet. The fountains in the pond drown out all traffic noise and random thoughts cluttering your brian. I noticed a memorial in the distance.

I went to investigate and found a memorial plaque that made me catch my breath as tears stung my eyes.

I sat there for a long time taking it all in....the intense poignancy of it, the scores of women who lost their babies, the women yet to come who would add a name to a bronze leaf.

The surroundings of the memorial tree plaque had a distinct feminine feel to it. The keens and ululating of centuries of women who lost their babies hung in the air from the collective consciousness.

The leaves of the bronze tree appeared to be rustling in the breeze and dancing in the sunlight. I had to stand very close to see that they really were not moving, they were reflecting the sun.

Suprisingly it was not an oppressively sad place for only a few feet away was the Garden of Hope and the Walk of Hope pathway. It's what women do....pick up and go on, often with the camaraderie of other women.

But sometimes, we must go it alone and when no one is looking, and after the acceptable time limit that others will give us, sometimes we need to go alone to a private place and place a wreath for the anguish in our hearts.

And then we come back from that private journey with the instinctive urge to be with other women who know where we have been and may go again. There is such joy and beauty in that.

I want to honor all women who has loved and lost, and women everywhere

I worked a photo through Photoshop of fountain sculpture I found in a park. Women of all sighs and sizes who draw strength, humor, and knowledge from other women on the same journey.

Yes, I'm sure of it. Those bronze leaves that seemed to move weren't just reflecting the sun.

No, indeed. It's the babies definitely dancing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If truth be told, I suppose the most egregious violation by Pardes that continues to this day is to sit on the park bench near the memorial wall and say a Rosary for all the dancing leaf babies who have passed on, their families, and all the patients and families journeying through their path of cancer.

Unfortunately Pardes is a criminal without remorse and regret for violating Christiana Care's private property.

Indeed, she is already plotting her next assault on the grounds of Christiana Care Hospital. It involves contacting Robert J. Laskowski, M.D., President and CEO of Christiana Care Hospital. He's reported to be “one of the 14 most influential people in Delaware” and surely must think outside the box for programs that support their mission statement of “caring for our neighbors, building a healthy community, and existing to take care of our neighbors in the community.”

Maybe Dr. Laskowski would be interested in an “Elderberry Bike Project.” Instead of emphasizing daycare for seniors, let's get 'em on bikes!

There are herds of thundering Boomers on the horizon with blown-out knees and hips from arthritis who could benefit from the charm, functionality, and health benefits of bikes. All that stands between Boomers and bikes as a way of life is getting over the hurdle of getting road-worthy.

So many people tell Pardes, “I used to love to ride a bike. I'd love to ride a bike again for exercise, but the roads aren't safe now.”

Well that's wrong. All wrong. It's knowing how to ride safely and make that leap of faith that you REALLY can get anywhere by bike. You really can go shopping and get to appointments and enjoy yourself in the process.

So what do you say, Dr. Lawkowski? How would you like to be the first and ONLY hospital CEO to initiate a program that will bring health and well-being to Delaware Boomers, a model program for all states? Biking is the best kept health secret there is. Just ask Pardes who is fond of saying, “I can barely walk fifty feet without pain but I can pedal forever!” What a thing to introduce to seniors who don't want to settle for less.

You will have everyone on your side, cheering for you....Pardes, all the local and national bicycle communities, a grateful Governor who bikes, and, perhaps there is even a remorseful security guard we could press into action.

Pardes will call and make an appointment with you. She really would love to be part of such a program. It would make her proud again of Christiana Care Hospital.

Of course there is that sticky problem of how she'll get to the appointment at the hospital on her bike since she's been banned from the property.... But don't worry, she'll get there. She's very resourceful.

THE JOURNAL WRITER

2009-08-16T17:21:00.005-04:00

photo by Pardes 2009

On a below zero frigid night in Delaware last winter, I was waiting for my commuter bus to take me home. I was chilled to the bone and stamping my feet to keep warm when a young man walked up to the bus stop who caught my attention. He was eating a slice of pizza as he walked and seemed oblivious to the cold, oblivious to everyone and everything around him.

His suit jacket and slacks were black as well as his raincoat that was clearly not warm enough for such a winter night. He was neatly dressed and smelled of expensive cologne but his attache case was battered, of the out-of-style leather box variety. His billed cap in combination with his gold wire-rimmed glasses gave him more of an early 1900's eastern European air than that of a computer analyst from the large banking firm near the bus stop. He spoke to no one but did not appear reclusive or unfriendly. Yet there was something out of place, out of time about him ... so much so that I made sure I would be seated near him for closer observation. I patted my "stealth" Nikon 8400 camera in my backpack that would allow covert photos with its articulated LCD screen and low-light capabilities.

I needn't have worried that he would be disturbed by my observation or photographing him. As soon as he sat down, he opened his scuffed attache case and retrieved a speckled journal filled with pages of dated entries in black, red, blue, and green ink. I've been keeping a journal since I was old enough to hold a crayon, but somehow I was sure his was probably far more interesting. Why did I think that, I wonder?

I am not above eavesdropping on other people writings, particularly journal entries, but it was far too dark in the bus and my eyesight is limited by progressive lens bifocals. And so ... for the thirty minutes it took the bus to get to my bus stop, he wrote and I fantasized about what he was writing, what memories he was recording, or what existential questions he was wrestling with.

Within seconds I was sure he was a time-traveler from a Yeshiva in Poland in 1930. He had made his way to America and would send for his new wife and child as soon as he had enough money but somehow instead he found himself in Delaware in 2009 with a slice of pizza in his hand...

It was a silly fantasy but it took my mind off my nearly frostbitten toes that were stinging as they warmed up on the over-heated bus. I do not know who this young man is or anything about his history or ancestors, yet, in my mind when I think of him, I see a Rebbe rhythmically rocking and praying, Holocaust ghostly victims still shrieking without sound, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse racing toward Jerusalem, the millions who continue to visit the Wailing Wall, and yet ... despite it all there is still a joyful Fiddler on the Roof reminding us to find love, beauty, dreams, and humor in every moment and in every stranger's face.

I wish this young man well and hope there is a new young wife and baby that he goes home to every night to share the dreams and visions that he records in his journal written in inks of many colors.

The Coats of Many Colors

2009-01-21T03:11:00.005-05:00

By the end of January, I am always beginning to feel bedraggled and dragged down by my annual experiment in testing out what I hope will be finding the perfect winter coat. However, after the freezing temperature of January has me in its icy grip, this year's model, like all coats of all other years ....soon becomes the coat from Hell.

I loved the sporty hunter green coat when I bought it three months ago. It's generous length went down past my knees, it was surprisingly lightweight for being tested and guaranteed to be cozy and warm at subzero temperatures, and best of all, with multiple zippers, snap flaps, velcro closures in every conceivable place, and loose-fitting sleeves big enough to fit over multiple layers of clothing, Gortex fabric that was waterproof and windproof to boot, AND the hood was big enough to wear over my bicycle helmet! ...well, what more could I ask? It was the perfect winter coat to wear while commuting to work by bicycle.

That is what I thought in late November, even into late December; but, every year something mysterious happens in mid to late January when the coat and I become mortal enemies. It happens every year and you would think I would remember the solution to the problem. But I never do.

I suffer for several weeks in misery convinced that winter is never going to end and someone will find me buried in a snowbank, cold and dead under the crushing canabilstic weight of the coat from Hell.

It's always this time of year that I fantasize about the perfection of summer lightweight clothes. I remember with frost-bitten taste buds, the delectable savor of the tall glass of freshly-squeezed lemonade that the chef makes for me to quench my hot summer thirst at the French Vietnamese restaurant that I pedal to on my bike when there is still daylight outside at 8PM.

photo by Pardes

The coat revelation always happens when I'm looking for something in the deep pockets of the coat. Today it was a quarter to round out the bus fare. I sunk my hand deep into the right lower pocket of my coat where I generally dump loose change, Chapstick, and the crumpled GTD paper thingy with the list of 37 things I need to do and never will.

The pocket seemed to disappear into a black hole. The deeper I plunged my hand, the more items I found, none of which were a quarter. I could hear the loose change rattling in the depths of the pocket, but the flotsam and jetsam was so deep, I could not reach it. A sympathetic commuter flipped me a spare quarter.

While strapping my bike to the front of the bus for the Interstate highway part of my bike commute to work, I plotted the demise of my winter coat. I grouped the coat in the same class as the snowsuit from Hell, that my mother stuffed me in before releasing me from the house to play in the snow.

You may remember the experience of paralysis of movement from your own snowsuit. Remember the gloves that were clipped to your sleeve and flapped in the breeze while you attempted and failed in trying to bend over to make a snowball? You couldn't bend your knees or elbows. You couldn't turn your head in any direction. The only thing you could do in a snowsuit was breathe.

photo by brungrrl

Of course, once you get on the slippery slope of comparing the misery of winter with the perfection of summer, you begin to wallow in seasonal comparison that supports your contention that winter is surely going to kill all of us and no will live to see the summer sun again.

photo by Pardes

You long for the lithe responsive nature of the summery Trek road bike....

photo by Pardes

....and begrudge the lumbering nature of the Transeo winter mountain bike where you always seem to be biking in the dark...

photo by Pardes

You reminisce when you could swim with a horse....

photo by Pardes

....instead of cantering in a foot of snow.

photo by Pardes

....when you could walk barefoot in tender chartreuse grass ....

photo by Pardes

.... instead of freezing your toes while tracking runaway snowmen.

photo by Pardes

when you woke from a nap on the balmy August bank of the Delaware River as the Kalmar Nyckel silently docked fifty feet from where you slept ....

photo by Pardes

.... instead of commiserating with two seagulls who perhaps lost a leg to the now icy Delaware River waters.

photo by Pardes

The bellyaching doesn't last for long though because you know of a homeless person who does not have the luxury of middle-class whining. Swathed in so many conflicting layers of clothing, hats and scarves, slacks and skirts and sweatpants underneath a furry coat, you cannot tell the gender of this person; but you know for sure that dozens of forgotten quarters do not rattle in those pockets.

.... and then you pause for a moment of shame and promise to deliver all you other coats to the homeless shelter....

When I got to the lab, I decided to further explore the set of six deep pockets in my winter coat. No wonder I was feeling weighted down. The only thing I didn't find in those pockets was Jimmy Hoffa.

The items I piled onto the lab bench included: not one, not two, but TRHEE pairs of gloves; six tubes of Chapstick; two pairs of ear muffs; 22 voided bus tickets; one spare bicycle inner tube; 11 ballpoint pens; 2 CO2 cannisters for inflating bicycle tires; one completely flattened Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; an adjustable wrench; one Phillips head screwdriver; the iPod I've been trying to find for two months; a 4 GB flash drive; $14.27 in loose change; 2 letters I forgot to mail; 6 large rare earth magnets for an experiment in tripping traffic lights to change that the weight of a bike won't trip (the experiment failed); 2 sets of folding headphones (1 broken); 1 bottle of aspirin; 1 atomizer of Chanel No. 5; a Nikon point & shoot camera; 4 rechargeable AA batteries; and the most enigmatic of all, an unopened Christmas wrapped present the size of a matchbox. Some secret gift a friend of mine had left as a surprise for me.

For hoots, I piled the stuff on the analytical balance generally used in the lab for weighing cocaine and marijuana forensic evidence. All together the booty weighed a little under 7 pounds. When I added in the weight of the keys (lab, home and bicycle lock keys), wallet, Blackberry, and mini flashlight that I keep in my windproof, waterproof bicycle pants that I wear over my slacks, the grand total came to an extra ten pounds I was carrying around.

Consequently, like every previous year, I end up apologizing to my coat and assume full responsibility for the problem. Of course this will only last for a couple of weeks until the pockets get loaded down again; and I develop coat dementia again; and the coat and I will be back at odds with one another until Spring.

And that's okay, I tell myself as I plot not revenge on a coat this time, but a small gesture of surprise, perhaps even delight for someone else. I zip the still unopened Christmas gift inside the inner breast pocket to be discovered next winter when they pull this green coat off a rack at the Capuchin Friars Soup Kitchen Clothes Closet to be worn out into the frigid Wilmington night.

Diskgrinder, All Together Now

2009-01-18T22:05:00.001-05:00

photo collage by Diskgrinder

Diskgrinder is an enigma. Not the kind of enigma that you burn to solve; but the kind of enigma that you want to savor like a good bouillabaisse where each note of flavor presents itself in its own good time.

His Internet presence is known as Diskgrinder. I never thought to ask him his real name; possibly for fear of his response which would be so clever with his razor wit that I would be reminded that part of my fascination with him is his likeness to a grownup version of that kid we all knew in high school who could level you with one of his witticisms; but ahhhhhh if he liked you, it made you feel special and as witty and charming as he was.

You know the kid I'm talking about. The one who could even intimidate the teachers, the Principal of the school, the traffic cop who stopped him for a moving violation. He made the girls blush and the boy envious of his intellect, his feigned apathy, his extreme and unique coolness, and the creative spark that fired his interest in getting to the bottom of what he considered outrageous socially accepted norms. He was a mirror to our own insecurities so we kept him at a distance; far enough away to feel comfortable without the need to actualize ourselves; but close enough to garner the treasures he revealed.

I first found him on Twitter where we traded clever and terrible puns. Unlike many punsters, he is not a bully and often reveals his softer side; although, make no mistake, it sometimes takes spelunking to find it hidden in a cavern where fish are blind and echoes remain from the ancient ones.

We traded visits to each other's websites. I considered him somewhat bizarre, prone to swearing a lot, an artist, a musician, a perceptive observer of the human condition, a loving father, and most of all, an adult who never forgot how to play, and play with total abandonment of any worry of looking foolish to others. I'm not sure, but I think he considered me a 63 year old woman who possibly smells like Ben Gay, but one who also knows how to play.

I issued a "call for papers" to write about a hermit, mystic, or eccentric person and Diskgrinder responded with a wholly-unique Diskgrinder view of the eccentric known as Reg. It is an exercise in absurdity, irony, and reveals perhaps more about Diskgrinder than it does about Reg.

Impartial journalism can be a wonderful thing; but give me personal observations any day of the week. Sidney Jourard, the Humanist Psychologist, remarked that "disclosure begets disclosure." The limited expressions of Diskgrinder on the web consists of a few hundred often mysterious blog entries, a few YouTube videos, several scores of Flickr photos which is certainly not enough to fill out an accurate biography, not that the world is waiting with bated breath for a Disgrinder biography, nor is that my intention.

What I do note however, is that through Diskgrinder's description of Reg, the Hermit, and Diskgrinder's enigmatic presence on the web, the eccentric nature of the author himself is revealed and it makes the world a much less lonely place where we too as readers can be brave enough to reveal our own eccentric selves.

Reg said, "Most people think of the mind as being an intangible halo around their head, from which they call facts from the hot sponge in their skull. Like the brain is a bunch of liquid and dirty meat that keeps track, but the mind is this pristine glow that sees the track. But a recent theory is that the mind is Extended into legs and arms and maybe notes you write on the fridge, thinking's done within a yard. Your mind is in your fingers when you touch, in your local motion when you walk, there when you sniff. Which is why scent evokes memory." As Reg once said, "If your mind is in your head, why do you see everything outside, and not contemplate scenes inside?"

~~ Diskgrinder Tweets 2009

Art by Diskgrinder

Meeting a hermit

by Diskgrinder 2009

Back in the early eighties, when I was variously unemployed (an unemployed labourer, railway trackman, kitchen porter, painter) I met a man called Reg. He was an artist. He lived in Somerby, Rutland and refused electricity or gas, preferring instead to light his house with Gales honey jars filled with paraffin with a wick poked through the lid.

He was a mystic and a hippie, which in eighties East Midlands bitter bleakosity was unwelcomed by most (remember that the Vale of Catmose is in the lee of Lincolnshire, flat panned reclaimed fens where the wind is directly funnelled from the Urals).

He was a fellow of the Royal Academy, and once drank an oak tree*** off a high shelf with Craig Martin.

His paintings were abstract, and fairly fucked philosophically by his insistence on parallels with eastern mysticism and overdosing on cough medicine. Had he referenced Lacan, structuralism and maybe the decentered self he could have been successful. As he claimed his inspiration came from Kundalini, Gurdjieff and kif, he was deeply unfashionable.

But still he had a kind of scrawny integrity. He was a mountaineer, a painter and spliffster; a Barnsley ugly man with a feeling for colour, but no taste for the wank of art criticism.

I think he had a daughter, who lived in an inaccessible valley in Wales; inaccessible to him at least, as they were estranged.

~~~

***an oak tree: the text
reproduced by Ian Grant, Cambridge 8/7/2002 Michael Craig-Martin. An oak tree, 1973. In a room at Tate Modern there is a three-quarter full glass of water on a high shelf. It is a work by Michael Craig-Martin called An oak tree. Beside it there is the following text:

Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?
A. Yes, of course. What I've done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.

Q. The accidents?
A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size ...

Q. Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?
A. No. It's not a symbol. I've changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.

Q. It looks like a glass of water.
A. Of course it does. I didn't change its appearance. But it's not a glass of water, it's an oak tree.

Q. Can you prove what you've claimed to have done?
A. Well, yes and no. I claim to have maintained the physical form of the glass of water and, as you can see, I have. However, as one normally looks for evidence of physical change in terms of altered form, no such proof exists.

Q. Haven't you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?
A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree.

Q. Isn't this just a case of the emperor's new clothes?
A. No. With the emperor's new clothes people claimed to see something that wasn't there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.

Q. Was it difficult to effect the change?
A. No effort at all. But it took me years of work before I realised I could do it.

Q. When precisely did the glass of water become an oak tree?
A. When I put the water in the glass.

Q. Does this happen every time you fill a glass with water?
A. No, of course not. Only when I intend to change it into an oak tree.

Q. Then intention causes the change?
A. I would say it precipitates the change.

Q. You don't know how you do it?
A. It contradicts what I feel I know about cause and effect.

Q. It seems to me that you are claiming to have worked a miracle. Isn't that the case?
A. I'm flattered that you think so.

Q. But aren't you the only person who can do something like this?
A. How could I know?

Q. Could you teach others to do it?
A. No, it's not something one can teach.

Q. Do you consider that changing the glass of water into an oak tree constitutes an art work?
A. Yes.

Q. What precisely is the art work? The glass of water?
A. There is no glass of water anymore.

Q. The process of change?
A. There is no process involved in the change.

Q. The oak tree?
A. Yes. The oak tree.

Q. But the oak tree only exists in the mind.
A. No. The actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water. As the glass of water was a particular glass of water, the oak tree is also a particular oak tree. To conceive the category 'oak tree' or to picture a particular oak tree is not to understand and experience what appears to be a glass of water as an oak tree. Just as it is imperceivable it also inconceivable.

Q. Did the particular oak tree exist somewhere else before it took the form of a glass of water?
A. No. This particular oak tree did not exist previously. I should also point out that it does not and will not ever have any other form than that of a glass of water.

Q. How long will it continue to be an oak tree?
A. Until I change it.

As I understand it, this text is not in itself the work of art, so I am at liberty to reproduce it here. Ian Grant, Cambridge 8/7/2002

~~~

And that is the end of words about Reg. Let us now return to Diskgrinder.

The corporate world was taken by storm with David Allen's, "Getting Things Done," GTD strategies to ... well, get things done. Diskgrinder levels both his barrels on the GTD hype with this blog entry. Only those of us, like myself, who have spent hours and days playing with the GTD paper thingy can appreciate the humor.

Trouble fuck to-do list GTD taskpaper

As you all know. Each of you have your own spiky thorns in your metaphoric pants. Clearly, you need to divest yourselves of the spiky-thorn-pant thing. How should we do that? I hear you ask. In fact demand.

Here's my to-do list of GTD spiky-thorn-pant issue resolution:

* Download the latest GTD application to your iPhone

* Fiddle with that for about an hour: set some contexts; pinch some overviews; swipe some goals; above all, do that lip-sucking typy touchscreen thing inputting all your to-dos in before you realise it syncs with OmniFracas

* Download OmniFracas

* Marvel at its intuitive interface

* Don't open it for a month; shit, now it's expired

* Zero inbox your inbox

* Read every email in the trash

* Print out the tiny list paper foldy thing to-do list

* Realize you're not a twat

* Screw it up and throw it in the fire (if you wrote anything on it you will get a MOMENTARY sense of closure)

* Send yourself increasingly sweary post-dated emails

* Stack bills behind the biggest ornament you have on your mantelpiece

OR

* Keep on keeping on

* Occasionally apologise for not having done whatever the fuck it was

Oh, and change your pants

~~~

Diskgrinder's rapier wit is not only directed outward at the frailties of mankind. He is not above making fun of himself. Music is another important aspect of his life that he shares with his boys. However, as father, as mentor, as comedian to his boys he also demonstrates the absurdity and humor that comes with the hobby of music. Sigh #4 is the fourth in a series of videos about a musician who takes himself far too seriously.

Diskgrinder's boys, his little chaps who call him "Dad-face," are central to his life. I envy the noisy, racuous, musical fun they have on the weekends they spend with him.

There is music, there are light sabers, there is giggling humor and 24 karat gold memories being laid down for the future...

There is all of that before it is time to say goodbye for another week.

Diskgrinder said that he hopes that his kids say one day, "I grew up in a house full of music."

Indeed, his boys will say that. And they will also say that they grew up in a house full of magic and full of love.

Sony Digital Recorder and a Dragon - A Writer's Best Friends

2009-01-11T22:51:00.010-05:00

photo by Kevin Labianco

Writing nonfiction articles for a blog cam be laborious if you collect a lot of references to use in the blog. First you search for the references that are on target, and then you dump them into a subdirectory to be combed through later.

The problem is that going through them for nuggets of gold is a drag when you know you have hours of reading, highlighting ideas, developing the concepts into your own words, typing them into a draft file, and hoping that at the end of all of this you still even care about the subject.

I can't tell you how many subdirectories I have containing research material. They gather dust. The Kelpius subdirectory alone spurred the need to buy multiple flash drive to store all the data. I managed to squeeze out one paltry blog about Kelpius but it didn't satisfy me since so much of the material I had collected was just too cumbersome to review all of it.

Then I bought the Sony digital recorder and Dragon Naturally Speaking Recorder Edition version 9.5 voice recognition software. I was suspicious at first. I get a lot of "brilliant" organizational ideas that in actuality are sometimes just a ploy to avoid doing the actual writing. I am happy to report that in this case, that is not true.

Over the weekend, I've been thinking about an article titled, "The Memory of Water" that explores the mysterious, magical, mythical, and scientific anomalies about water. Good little researcher that I am, I compiled a subdirectory of about 100 references on "water."

You know how those subdirectories look with unintelligible filenames and sub-subdirecotries with miscellaneous gif files and the like that are part of saving a website view. It's enough to discourage anyone to look back at the garbled list of files and figure out how to begin.

No problem. I had Sony Dragon on my side. I just started at the top of the list of files, opened them one by one, scanned through them for ideas, put the concepts in my own words, and dictated it into the digital recorder. And then on to the next file and the next...

I then fed the file into the Dragon software and watched with amazement as my words were turned into text and magically typed themselves across the screen. Painlessly you have a workable draft file that avoids that "blank screen" terror when you are beginning a new piece of writing. After that, it's all downhill coasting as you edit, rearrange, re-edit, and finalize your piece of writing. Writing can be a solitary business but with the Sony Dragon you feel as if you have collaborators who are always willing to help you out at any time of day or night; they never get tired and cranky, and they never make fun of your writing.

However, there are moments of amusement while Dragon is getting used to recognizing your voice. This is when I discovered that Dragon is a hawk while I am clearly a dove.

I spoke the words, "The unique physical and aesthetic properties of water give it a mysterious component that fires mythological and religious ideas about water." (Okay, it's not deathless prose, it was a DRAFT, remember? Dragon doesn't give me a hard time like YOU do!)

I found it very sweet that Dragon didn't roll it's eyes at my draft copy; it just did its darnedest to accurately transcribe what I had said. Clearly though, Dragon still has memories of spitting fire and annihilating enemies because this is what it thought I said, "The unique physical and aesthetic properties of water give it a mysterious component that fires missiles and religious ideas about water."

Of course, now I have a new hobby...how to trick Dragon into saying the most bizarre things. There ARE rules however to this game. No lisping is allowed (wouldn't that be like kicking someone in a wheelchair?) No foreign words are allowed which is good since I can't speak any. Of course Middle English is fair game. "Here Dragon, transcribe this: "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour...."

A Dragon Teaching Pardes to Sing

2009-01-10T19:48:00.006-05:00

photo by Kellybug

Sometimes there are concessions that need to be made. Sometimes these concessions, originally thought to be a trade-off of something not quite so good for a more coveted thing that we must give up are thought to be bad-tasting medicine that we must endure. Sometimes that is not true and the concession actually turns out to be a gift.

I took up commuting to work on a bicycle as a trade-off for not being able to walk to the bus stop due to the ravages of arthritis. (I had taken up walking to the bus stop in protest of rising gas prices and the desire to be more physically fit as well as to re-connect with my environment, the weather, and seasonal changes that I'd lost in the comatose practice of driving to work on the same road for twenty-five years.) It turned out to be one of the most profitable "concessions" that I've ever made. Imagine. Something good for me, and good for the environment turns out to be one of the most pleasurable activities of my life.

This triggered another concession that needed to be made. Spending more time on a bicycle means spending less time doing the other things I love. Like writing. Add to this the fact that cramped, arthritic hands can't keep up with the right lobe of my brain that floods the left part of my brain with more images and ideas than can be recorded.

Enter the Sony ICD SX68 DRG digital voice recorder to catch all those loose ends when my fingers can't. Stir the pot also with the bundled software that came with it. Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.5.

The result? While I'm trying to teach the Dragon to speak, I am hoping that the Dragon, in turn, will teach me how to sing.

The learning curve for both of us is steep. It irritates me that Dragon insists and demands that I speak each necessary punctuation mark and that I take the time to spell difficult words slowly and distinctly. I'm sure that my penchant for adverbs and sentences longer than most paragraphs irritates Dragon. Our irritation with one another is not toxic. Indeed, it's more like making a new friend who has to learn the nuances of each other's voice.

Naturally, such a friendship takes time. I'll be missing in action for a few days while the Dragon and I are holed up in a cave marveling at the echoes of our voices, discovering the real meaning of our words, and watching the shadows illuminated by the fire that dance on the walls.

Call for Papers

2009-01-06T10:17:00.002-05:00

I have added another blog, Cloister Voices, as a magazine style blog, a collection of stories and encounters with the unusual people we meet in our lives whether they be hermits, mystics, eccentrics, or a stranger who captivates us. I would love to add your stories and encounters to this "call for papers."

Scientific journals bulge with announcements for a "call for papers" so that scientists around the world can raise their heads from test tubes and standard deviation calculations and share their latest work with their colleagues around the world.

As a chemist, I've always been most interested in reading about the first stages of research where the final answer is not known yet and where hope and exhilaration of "the thrill of the hunt" activates the mind and imagination.

Cloister Voices would also like to announce a "call for papers" of another kind, an investigation into our memories of catalytic encounters with unusual people. When and where did you meet someone unique who provided you with synchronistic synergism enough to excite the electrons of your life into a higher orbital, perhaps even to the point where your life began to glow.

Please share these stories with Cloister Voices by submitting them to cloistervoices at gmail dot com.

The Women's Gallery of the Shul

2009-01-05T03:40:00.009-05:00

As soon as I was old enough to speak, I invited myself along to the churches, secret meditation spots, or on the spiritual adventures of friends, neighbors, and even strangers. Most of them were flattered by the request, if not amused.

I was escorted to Kingdom Hall, Presbyterian buffets, Baptist "dinner on the grounds," fundamentalist snake-handler revivals,Catholic funerals, Buddhist sesshins, and Wiccan solstice celebrations. Some of my hosts tried to convert me to their "truth" but I remained the same within, the solitary daughter of an Agnostic who embraced the transcendent spirit without the need to name it.

The last of my forays into religious adventures was by far the most unsettling and ultimately the most fruitful in raising my heart from the dead. A Chosen One took me to his shul for a Resurrection.

The Women's Gallery of the Shul

where wives and children are sequestered witnesses
behind a door that groans each time it opens
to the second floor above male voices rising up incensed
and swirling round the rustling of long black
Sephardic Orthodox dresses with wigged tresses
bending to caresses of chanted Hebrew words.

In a charcoal ember skirt, the likes of which
I have not worn in thirty years, I contemplate
in quiet stillness and in reverent tears the primal
imprinting brand of the voice of man upon a woman.

Drawn to the railing of a sea of kippas and prayer shawls
below the wailing of the cantor orchestrates
the moments of harmony, the rhythmic movements of awe
in a controlled chaotic rendering of the Shema prayer
to "love with all your heart, all your might, all your soul."

In a slice of silence all women rise and bend as one
as they lean into the yearning to hear with discerning
that one voice rise above the others, standing out
in a whispered intimacy they've known since before
they were born. Their bashert and destiny.

I am torn between traditions, not of God
or burning bushes "as above, so below," but of man and woman
and the wishes of love so rarely spoken of and only known
by the separation of concessions made by the women
who will never hear that one voice and by their choice
are left to walk the second floor gallery railing of the shul
with nervous fingers and idle chatter that is so loud

I cannot hear the tenor bravissimo voice I strain to hear and know
who asked me to reveal the secret of women on a lake
moored where two loons floated round the point of his youth
spent in a summer home of adolescent discovery
and a lifetime of recovery from love now locked up tight
just beyond "no trespassing signs."

By design we are meant to love "with all our heart, all our might,
all our soul," but in a boat on the sea his kippa is no match
for the starboard breeze that lulls and rocks us to toasted
Carmel Kosher wine and I cannot define what is meant to be
for him, for me, or the ancient smile on a matron's face,
who as with me, strained to hear that one voice meant
just for her. Her bashert, her destiny.

By her choice in fantasy she scaled the railing
of the gallery ledge that is precisely a wedge the width
of a young woman's slender foot. She did a pirouette
and twirled on point. She danced the dance of seven veils,
let down her curls no longer gray but auburn now and full of lights

and when she stopped in front of me to bow the mirrors
of her Moroccan prayer cap reflected a sun warmed lake,
the echo of a gentle breeze, promises broken, promises made
while below in a sea of kippas and knotted prayer shawls
the Torah, Magic now unlocked was carried in love by men
with adoration while above two loons rose and took to wing,
banked and turned, and in their shimmering Shema prayer
rounded the point again.

~ Pardes 2006 ~

Meme Eccentrics

2009-01-04T19:39:00.010-05:00

Meme? I didn't know what it was either but Trulyana's post cleared things up.

Meme Challenge: Describe your first encounter with a hermit, mystic, or an unusually eccentric person. Those I've tagged are listed below.

Ches McCartney, The Goat Man, lay fallow in my memory as my own personal property. Prone to extravagant thoughts and debatable visions in childhood, I was never quite sure if the Goat Man was real.

He seemed real enough with his small junk-laden wagon pulled by goats when he took up temporary residence in an empty lot across from my home in central Florida in 1959. The odor of his clothing was real enough, stringent and potent. The smile that crinkled his eyes under his railroad cap was real enough.

I was thirteen, my father had just died, my mother and I were living on the outskirts of poverty, so is it any wonder that I was profoundly moved by the freedom of this wandering Goat Man who spent a lifetime moving on. Forever moving away quickly enough that pain could not settle around him.

I hung out behind a crepe myrtle bus for several days before gathering the nerve to speak to him and learn his secret of how to escape the world. I clutched the last box of Brownie Scout cookies under my arm, a gift, a token of exchange for the Goat Man to tell me his secrets.

He refused to accept the gift and insisted upon a barter. The cookies in exchange for a postcard of him traveling down the road. There were other terms too. I had to agree to eat the cookies with him.

Was it goat milk that he served with the cookies? I don't remember. It tasted of garlic and was on the verge of curdling. The cookies were stale but sweet.

We sat silent and watched the sun go down behind the centuries old live oak tree that was as gnarled as his hands and as lightning-struck as my heart.

In the morning, he was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~

I'm tagging the following people to tell us about their first encounter with a hermit, mystic, or an unusually eccentric person.

http://expressiveworld.com/
http://urbansitspot.blogspot.com/
http://boomerbabyboomer.blogspot.com/
http://theblackbuscompany.blogspot.com/
http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/
http://intothehermitage.blogspot.com/
http://wclwood.blogspot.com/
http://monasterywithin.blogspot.com/
http://www.oddthingsiveseen.com/
http://www.writingtosurvive.com/
http://stars-burn.net/ink/

If you name is not on the list, it should have been. I welcome your participation.

Weekday Evenings at the Kirkwood Spa

2008-12-30T13:47:00.005-05:00

The Jacuzzi is littered
with amorphous female bodies
too old for mating.
Like beached sea lions,
half-submerged and languid,
we rock against each,
gazing through papyrus eyelids
into effervescent water.

Only our diamonds still sparkle
and have kept their shape.

Displaced by bantering bulls
and the liquid iridescence
of adolescent females,
we ancient ones retire,
single file and silent
to the Desert Room
for a touching ritual
where postulants,
terry-turbaned kneel,
offering a cup of spring water
to the rocky gods of gravity and guilt.

Steaming rising, we are anointed
into the Chrism of Oil of Olay
while twenty feet away
in chlorinated deep waters
a rising, diving youth
arches her back
and breaks the surface.

~Pardes 2006 -

I went back to work after a nine day Christmas Holiday vacation and was greeted by multiple expressions of "my my my but you look rested." It was so frequent a phrase that I wondered how bad I must have appeared before I left. I know that I felt exhausted and wore the dilapidated musculature of a 63 year old in the body of an 83 year old.

However, the other actions of touching my shoulders, or gazing at my form with the other multiple comments of "you have to have lost 10 pounds!" intrigued me. Weight is weight and it never concerned me other than as a curious wonderment how gravity and gluttony can ravage a body on the outside while inside you still feel lithe and young. But this statement puzzled me. For the nine days of my vacation I did nothing but sit in a zazen position on my bed and watch movies, write blogs, answer emails from fellow bloggers, or sleep (not in zazen position). How is it possible that I could lose 8 pounds (verified on the morgue scales) in a mere 9 days of physical inactivity.

It's a mystery.

I used to belong to the Kirkwood Spa and would religiously swim every day and walk for miles around the track littered with other male and female bodies exuding a mixture of testosterone, estrogen, and that astringent odor of fresh sweat. All to no avail in terms of losing weight. I would shrug it off since in the old days when I looked like Twiggy, I felt like me and despite my growth sideways, I still feel like me. Feeling like me is a good thing and I wasn't about to make the chlorinated waters murky with the media's version of what "me" should look like.

Life got complicated with an advancement of work that left only complete exhaustion at the end of the day, certainly no time for a two hour trip to swim and surrepitiously observe the drama, not to mention the lovely forms of others. Then I discovered the joy of riding a bicycle which wasn't experienced as "exercise" but as a joy of remembering the wind in your hair innocence of childhood.

I rode for miles and miles and was transported to another realm of the sheer delight of how a body can perform when left alone, when not picked at with circuit repetitions on sweaty stainless steel machines, but just left alone to ride the wind.

I'm still me. I'm still the shape of a fireplug, just a smaller fireplug these days. I don't swim anymore but if you notice an older lady wearing a gold helmet on a silver bicycle adorned with panniers and flashing lights, that will be me. The real me. The one that will always be me. The one that never ages.

The Passion of Trees

2008-12-28T05:53:00.006-05:00

What is there to do with a runaway poem that's out of control and refuses to be edited? How do you cover the mistakes in lines that do not scan properly, or how do you define or defend phrases you have no idea as to their meaning?

If chefs can cover their mistakes, their culinary oversights with mayonnaise, then a poet geek can cover her shortcomings with photos and music. It's debatable if I write poetry any better than I cook. (Shrug.) Please allow a bit of time for the video to load .... oh ... and pass the mayonnaise.

text & photos by Pardes

Alone Under the Mistletoe

2008-12-25T17:15:00.004-05:00

On this major Holiday of Christmas typically spent with family and friends, I have to note that once again I am alone by choice. I stand alone under the mistletoe.

Mistletoe grew in the trees of my childhood home in central Florida and inflamed me with its rich mythology I found in the latest stack of books dragged home from the Ocala public library. Prepubescent, I didn't care much for the kissing lore, but learning that it was a hemi-parasitic plant fascinated my budding scientific mind.

The other, more pensive part of my mind that studied the migration of ants and squirrels and flamingos as a secret journey to the truth of their “home” was mystification enough to climb the trees for a sample of this hermetic plant when I also discovered that it was a symbol of immortality and if enemies met under a tree with mistletoe, they laid down their arms and maintained a true. It seemed worth a try to risk standing on the tree's frail limbs to gather mistletoe for my family in great need of immortality and truce.

I do not know or desire the need for the community experience that moves family and acquaintances to gather together. In the past when I have dabbled with mingling in the midst of communal festivities, I’ve always found it to be a mildly pleasant but unmeaningful experience. I seemed to be unable to find any sense of truthful bonding, just pretense and a dramatic effort by everyone that they were living out what it means to be “family.”

This insight, whether true gift or not, was given to me in 1959 when my father died just a few weeks before Christmas. At thirteen years of age, I was already established in the family circle as the quiet, reclusive child who said very little yet seemed to unsettle others with the way I wordlessly studied people and things around me. Each would try in their own individual way to find common ground with me but their attention span seemed short and their eyes and heart would rest instead upon the cousins and grandchildren who fawned for them, sang for them, danced for them, and who would give me a secret nod of superiority at the new game of “family” they had just won.

The death of my father, a pivotal authority figure in the family circle, left everyone at a loss. However, rather than address the angst swirling around us all, like the blue smoke hallucination that I saw as my father's spirit torn between wanting to stay and wanting to go to his final peace, we all, in our grief reverted to the cliché roles we'd been assigned or adopted on our own.

It was a relief for all of us and mostly for me. Viewed as transparent and unimportant to the clan, I had the freedom to watch the dynamics of how a family operates as a finely-honed mechanism of natural selection to protect itself from extinction. The dramas of falsehood that had originally offended me as untruthful suddenly took on new meaning and poignancy. It was just as much a matter of survival for me as it was for them. Playing the role of widowed fragile mother, bad boy brother, jocular uncle, snippy niece, grumpy grandmother, salacious aunt, and half-orphaned pensive daughter became so poignant to me that I could barely bare the intensity of watching it, swirling within it, and hearing my own silent soliloquy in counterpoint time to the practiced lines of others.

All roles in a family have their own psychological pathology if plumbed deeply enough. I've never been able to assess if this “wisdom” I gained at thirteen was a gift or a curse, a fantasy, a hallucination as a way to deal with grief; but nonetheless it was wholly mine and it has colored the remainder of my life, for better or worse.

It is a misplaced emotion to pity others who are “alone at Christmas.” By choice. I do not feel proud of my holiday solitude. It's simply a facet of my life. I am a better me by bowing to this need, embracing this need, and reveling in what it reveals to me as countless gifts from within to within which then are translated into outward gestures of love and compassion to other strangers.

My family seems to be strangers, animals, nature, and words that fly across the page of a book or journal as they follow the river of white space toward ultimate truth. It is the nature of words that they will never quite reach the “end” and that too is part of my choice to be alone. It’s not perfect and it won’t give me the ultimate answer but there is the sure knowledge that the very truth itself is a companion on the journey often disguised as a stranger, a good experience, a bad experience, whatever. If I am alone, I have the time and the quiet privacy to notice the clues, to appreciate the process, and to recognize the journey as a part of the destination.

We are all strangers. We are all family. Gather with me under the Grace of mistletoe as I wish all of you, my family, a very Merry Christmas.

Johannes Kelpius, A Mystic Amid William Penn's Holy Experiment

2008-12-24T18:00:00.008-05:00

"For my country, I eyed the Lord, in obtaining it;

And more was I drawn inward to look to him;

And to owe it to his hand and power, than to any other way;

I have so obtained it, and desire to keep it;

That I may not be unworthy of his love;

But do that, which may answer his kind Providence;

And serve his truth and people;

That an example may be set up to the nations;

There may be room there, though not here,

For such an holy experiment."

William Penn

Over a decade ago I became fascinated with a little-known Pietist Mystic, Johannes Kelpius, who settled a band of intellectual monks in the wilderness surrounding Philadelphia in 1694.

I discovered mention of him during a road trip to Ephrata Cloister near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The gigantic egoism of Ephrata’s Conrad Beisell left me cold but the frail, pale, “madness” of Kelpius led me down the path of exploring the mystical settlement of Colonial Pennsylvania amid William Penn’s Holy Experiment that continues to this day….both the Holy Experiment and my exploration of it.

I wanted to understand how such a young man at Kelpius barely in his twenties felt the world was coming to an end soon and he wanted to experience it as “The Woman of the Wilderness” in the brave new world of America.

I wanted to know what he was thinking in his heart of hearts when only a few years later he would die before his Millennialist dream came true. From the fragments of history that I have found, I believe he died in peace and with a greater understanding of his transcendental fevers that still leave their mark today upon American mystics of every stripe.

I feel very protective of his memory and legacy and chafe at the multitude who claim him for themselves from the Rosicrucians to modern Peitists and to every flavor of New Age babes who follow the ley lines of his life with their trembling dowsing rods.

I believe Johannes Kelpius would like to be left in peace with no marker at his cave and only the sound of the river and the bird calls to sing praises with him of their celebration of the union of all things with the architect of the cosmos.

Or painful Kelpius [13] from his hermit den
By Wissahickon, maddest of good men,
Dreamed o'er the Chiliast dreams of Petersen.

Deep in the woods, where the small river slid
Snake-like in shade, the Helmstadt Mystic hid,
Weird as a wizard, over arts forbid,

Reading the books of Daniel and of John,
And Behmen's Morning-Redness, through the Stone
Of Wisdom, vouchsafed to his eyes alone,

Whereby he read what man ne'er read before,
And saw the visions man shall see no more,
Till the great angel, striding sea and shore,

Shall bid all flesh await, on land or ships,
The warning trump of the Apocalypse,
Shattering the heavens before the dread eclipse.

from “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim” by John Greenleaf Whittier

“As early as 1700 there were four hermits living near Germantown -- John Seelig, Kelpius, Bony, and Conrad Mathias. They lived near Wissahiccon and the Ridge. Benjamin Lay lived in a cave near the York Road at Branchtown.
John Kelpius, the hermit, was a German of Sieburgen in Transylvania, of an eminent family (tradition says he was noble) and a student of Dr. John Fabritius at Helmstadt. He was also a correspondent of Maecken, chaplain to the Prince of Denmark in London. He came to this country in 1694 with John Seelig, Barnard Kuster (Coster), Daniel Falkener, and about forty-two others, being generally men of education and learning, to devote themselves, for piety's sake, to a solitary or single life; and receiving the appellation of the "Society of the Woman in the wilderness". They first arrived among the Germans at Germantown, where they shone awhile "as a peculiar light" but they settled chiefly "on the Ridge", then a wilderness. In 1708, Kelpius, who was regarded as their leader, died "in the midst of his days", (said to be 35) -- after his death the members began to fall in with the world around them, and some of them to break their avowed religious intentions by marrying. Thus the society lost it distinctive character and died away; but previous to their dispersion they were joined about the year 1704 by some others among whom was Conrad Mathias (the last of the Ridge hermits) a Switzer, and by Christopher Witt (sometimes called Dr. Witt of Germantown) a professor of medicine, and a "magus" or diviner.
After the death of Kelpius, the faith was continued in the person of John Seelig who had been his companion, and was also a scholar. Seelig lived many years after him as a hermit, and was remarkable for resisting the offers of the world, and for wearing a coarse garment like that of Kelpius. This Seelig records the death of his friend Kelpius in 1708, in a MS. Hymn Book of Kelpius', (set to music) which I have seen -- saying he died in his garden, and attended by all his children, (spiritual ones, and children whom he taught gratis) weeping as for the loss of a father. That Kelpius was a man of learning is tested by some of his writings; a very small-written book of one hundred pages, once in my possession. It contains his writings in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German and English; and this last (which is very remarkable, he being a foreigner) is very free and pure. The journal of his voyage to this country, in sixteen pages, is all in Latin; some of his letters (of which there are several in German, and two in English) are in Latin; they are all on religious topics, and saving his peculiar religious opinions, reason very acutely and soberly. From venturing with the thousands of his day to give spiritual interpretations to Scripture, where it was not so intended, he fell upon a scheme of religion which drove him and other students from the Universities of Germany, and under the name of Pietists, &c., to seek for some immediate and strange revelations. He and his friends therefore expected the millennium year was close at hand -- so near that he told the first Alex. Mack (the first of the Germantown Tunkers) that he should not die till he saw it ! He believed also that "the woman in the wilderness" mentioned in the Revelations, was prefigurative of the great deliverance that was then soon to be displayed for the church of Christ. As she was "to come up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved," so the beloved in the wilderness, laid aside all other engagements (i.e. being hermits, and trimming their lamps and adorning themselves with holiness, that they may be prepared to meet the same with joy), Therefore they did well to observe the signs of the time, and every new phenomenon(whether moral or preternatural) of meteors, stars, or colours of the skies, if peradventure the harbinger may appear". He argued too, that there was a three-fold wilderness, like state of progression in spiritual holiness : to wit, "the barren, the fruitful and the wilderness state of the elect of God". In the last state, after which he was seeking, as a highest degree of holiness, he believed it very essential to attain it by dwelling in solitude or in the wilderness; therefore he argues Moses' holiness by being prepared forty years in the wilderness -- Christ's being tempted forty days in the wilderness as an epitome of the other -- John the Baptist coming from the wilderness, &c. He thought it thus proved that holy men might be thus qualified to come forth among men again, to convert whole cities, and to work signs and wonders. He was much visited by religious persons. Kelpius professed love and charity with all -- but desired to live without a name or sect. The name they obtained was given by others. There are two of Kelpius' MS Hymn books still extant in Germantown; one of his own composing, in German, is called elegant; they are curious too, because they are all translated into English poetry (line for line) by Dr. C. Witt, the diviner or magus. The titles of some of them may exhibit the mind of the author :
"Of the wilderness -- or Virgin-Cross love"
"The contentment of the God-loving soul"
"Of the power of the new virgin-body wherein the Lord revealeth his mysteries"
"A loving moan of the disconsolate soul"
"Upon `Rest' after he had been wearied with `Labour' in the wilderness" Although he looked for a qualification to go forth and convert towns and cities in the name of the Lord, it is manifest, that neither he nor his companions were enthusiastic enough to go into the world without such endowment. They often held religious meetings in their hermitage, with people who solicited to come to them for the purpose. Kelpius' hut or house stood on the hill where the widow Phoebe Riter now lives. Her log house has now stood more than forty years on the same cellar foundation which was his; it is on a steep descending grassy hill, well exposed to the sun for warmth in the winter, and has a spring of the hermit's making, half down the hill, shaded by a very stout cedar tree. After Kelpius' hut went down, the foxes used to burrow in his cellar; he called the place the "Burrow of Rocks, or Rocksburrow" -- now Roxborough.”

read more of the fascinating early Philadelphia history at: Area History: Watson's Annals, Vol II: Chapter 2 - Pennsylvania Inland - Part I: Philadelphia Co, PA

read more about Kelpius’ voyage to America in “Stories of Pennsylvania….”

A superb presentation, “Bacon’s “Secret Society”: The Ephrata Connection, A Slide-Show Tour of Esoteric History” put together by Linda S. Santucci that links the Ephrata Cloister to Kelpius

Joe Tyson, an even more serious Kelpius buff has written a succinct and intriguing biography of Kelpius and his band of “The Monks of the Ridge”

2008-12-24T02:55:00.009-05:00

Skirting the Fringes of Copyright

Image via WikipediaI have a bulging folder of my favorite poems written by famous and not so famous poets. I have been wanting to add a periodic blog of these poems but I still haven’t figured out how to handle the copyright issues.

After finding yet another favorite poem today, this time William Meredith’s poem, “A Vision of Good Secrets,” the urge to post it was strong. Why not? After all, the author is dead and besides that I found it on someone else’s blog! Yet it still didn’t seem right.

So I did a little more research on copyright infringement on the internet and added those pages to yet another bulging folder to try and find a definitive answer. The issue to me is wondering how bloggers rationalize posting the creative work of others on their blog. I’m not pointing fingers as much as I’m curious about how blogging has stretched the limits of what used to be taken for granted as an unbreakable rule, an honor code punishable by heaps of shame and shunning if not by judicial process.

Rose DesRochers at “World Outside my Window” offers straightforward wisdom on the topic in her blog, “Copyright Infringement: Request Permission,” while Bobby Revell at “Revellian dot com” takes a more humorous (and completely ethical) approach in his blog, “How to Steal Blog Content: Ethically.”

However, neither of their thoughtful posts were on target with my dilemma: how can I post my favorite poems without spending eons tracking down permission to use them? I’m waiting for a reply from the Special Collections Librarian at Connecticut College where they host a website of William Meredith poetry. Perhaps they have some sage advice since they had to tackle it themselves a few years ago when posting a tribute to William Meredith.

Meanwhile, to pacify myself I’ll post two poems from two of my favorite mystical poets Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke where copyright infringement isn’t an issue…at least I don’t think so…..oh great, now I have myself wondering…….

Hopefully I’ll have an answer soon and will be able to share the gems written by William Meredith with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Nearly every writer has at least heard of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” if not own a copy of it. It’s a gem of a book, thin, yet rich with his love of writing and his compassion for others. However, his mystical poetry shares the searching of his spirit for union with the divine through sublime imagery that is timeless.

Image via Wikipedia

Falling Stars

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson often gets dismissed as an eccentric agoraphobic poetess until you take a few minutes or hours or days to study the precision with which she articulates her world of ideas. Take a look yourself at her work as an audio or text file at Project Gutenberg.

You’ll know it – as you know ‘tis noon

By intuition, Mighty Things
Assert themselves – and not by terms –
“I”m Midnight” – need the Midnight say –
“I”m Sunrise” – Need the Majesty?
Omnipotence – had not a Tongue –
His lisp – is lightning – and the sun –
His Conversation– with Sea –
“How shall you know”?
Consult your eye!

2008-12-21T18:49:00.003-05:00

Wales of Corduroy

I am delighted to have connected with a dear friend temporarily lost in the dust and discover that he has a blog! A Solipsist with a blog is a thing to behold. A Solipsist who I could make blush is also a thing to behold. Since this has been a day of memories, I will pull out another one, a poem I wrote about him a few decades ago to make him blush again today.

Visit his blog. (William Cushman Littlewood's Blog) See if you can make him blush too!

Wales of Corduroy

His jeans, smooth and reliable, speak more of the undeniable
than a chorus of pedantic Solipsists gone begging for lyrics
as melodic and deep as the corduroy pockets
that holds the hands, the hands
I still can feel pressed warmly against my back.

Pant legs with a scraping washboard beat
keep counterpoint time to the trimly neat
A capella lines I practice in my sleep:
“Answers aren’t nearly as interesting as questions.”
“Love is where you find it.”
“Only the self exists?”
“I have no promises to keep.”

I have not the words or logic to debate
what is existent and to whom.
I can only relate the wales of corduroy
and how they bend to fit against me as I stretch and unwind
like a primitive cat too long asleep to understand her dreams
of heavy-footed Neanderthals
casting shadows on burnt sienna painted walls
of fire and lightning, darkness and hands

and echoes in a cavern from a time,
from a place now inaccessible to the modern race
where pots of paint were stirred,
where points of arrows were honed
as finely as the prey was prayed upon a wall
and near the ritual throne where man and woman groaned
their progeny into a life that sadly would sing
A capella lines still practiced in our sleep:
“I have no memories or promises to keep.”

I have not the words or logic to debate
what is existent and to whom.
I can only relate memories from the deep,
Where only I will reap the sounds of breath,
The taste of claiming, the joy of naming
The sound of the wales of corduroy
and the touch of the hands,
the hands I still can feel
pressed warmly against my back.

2008-12-21T14:56:00.003-05:00

Christmas Gifts

Memories large and small have come home to visit like a flock of children winging their way home for Christmas. Some come in the form of poems written decades ago and some are mere flashes of images that take my breath away with their beauty and clarity.

I used to smile at the idea of becoming old and taking on the wisdom of the “Golden Years.” I was so sure that I would never age, nor did I think wisdom came without great effort; but I was wrong on both counts. Age I did. And wisdom did come as memories on the wings of angels. Pure gift. Pure Grace. And then I remembered a certain look in my parent's eyes when wisdom came to them as a gift. I had mistaken that look for wisdom coming from within them when in fact, for them too, it was a gift.

This is what I think about at Christmas; the real gifts that when bestowed upon us moves us to give to others. A cashmere sweater wrapped up in tissue and red ribbons or a tin of home-made cookies iced with Christmas trees and ringing bells is our attempt, at its finest, to share the light, the beauty, the clarity of what we have received.

Our parents gave us the gift of life, a primal gift that we spend the rest of our lives attempting to return to them in kind, something wholly of our own making as proof or validation of our worth. Sometimes that gift is rebuffed; sometimes it is taken to heart. Either way, it leads us to wisdom, it leads us back through memories to a state of pure Grace.

Both of my parents have passed from their mortal lives and gone on to another realm. One thing they worried about most in leaving me behind was that I would be alone without children to remember me. Just now I realized that was yet another gift they gave me. They had cherished how I loved and “remembered” them while still alive and mourned the fact that I would have no offspring to do the same for me. Parents, it seems, never stop teaching their children. Even after death they continue to give gifts of Grace.

You Played Hearts

I couldn’t swim, afraid of the water
and even the bream that gasped for air
and were hung from the stringer
on the side of the boat as we fished all day
on the lake curdled with water hyacinths.

You drank from the thermos,
the coffee I was too young to drink.
You cursed the sheared pin and turned to pee
over the side of the boat as I set free the dazed minnows.
From the bucket of bait and watched you row
and pause to rub your tightened chest
as rain pounded the lily pads
like your fingers drumming the edge of the table
when you played Hearts and held me in your lap.

Half a mile to shore where cypress trees
groaned and rubbed against each other
like you and mother outside the doctor’s office
when you couldn’t tell me about angina
but I knew you sickness from the number of times
you opened the aspirin tin, yellow paint worn thin.

Twenty pearly beads that took the grayness
from your face: three to walk our acre yard,
one to eat your diner, ten to argue with my brother
but never enough to keep you from growing thinner.

You taught me long division and how to spell separate
we’d argue if there was a God, quickly trying to communicate
all we had to say to one another without the other knowing why.

Eight nitros left to get us safely to the dock:
we sat in the rain and counted.

Mayflowers

My mother walked the ridge of Roaring Creek
in search of trailing arbutus and claimed
that when she knelt down to shell pink petals
hidden under the leaves of winter rubbish,
she felt me quicken in her belly.

She'd tell the story over and over again
when I couldn't sleep or was sick,
of many years of searching and never finding
that perfect fragrance of discovery,
the waxy delicacy of shy native blossoms
said to have greeted the Pilgrims of May.

Before I could read or write
and matched words not by meaning
or understanding but their Braille taste on my tongue,
I would sing myself to sleep with visions
of Indian maidens walking the ledge of Raving Waters
in search of flowers to quicken love in their belly
and braid in the hair of booted Pilgrims
with twinkling quicksilver eyes.

I never walked the edge of Rolling Rivers
in search of what so few have found.
Nothing has ever quickened in my belly,
but once, in a sleepless dream,
there was that unmistakable aroma
of Winter giving way
to the Pilgrims of May.

2008-12-20T18:01:00.004-05:00

Driving Home
(a journal entry*)

It’s odd, but it’s never at Thanksgiving or Christmas that I think about going home, a home that no longer exists in time and space but only in my memory. The home of my innocence. The home of my childhood. It’s when the first hint of Spring fills the air with the promise of things blossoming that I find myself getting in the car and driving. And driving. Searching for home.

A few years ago, one of these drives led me through the back roads of North Carolina. I wandered for several days amidst woods and streams and barefoot walks on the new shoots of chartreuse green grass and when I’d had my fill and felt almost comforted again, I pointed the car north and headed home, to the home that currently exists, sometimes just as much as a memory or an illusion as the home of my memory.

It was on this trip that the two most profound gatekeepers of my journey quest stepped into my path. Royal Amberline and Jimmy. They still live in my mind as friends, mentors, keepers of the secret and I wonder if they ever think of me.

I had pulled into the parking lot of “Royal Amberline's Gemstone and Rock Shop” housed in the long strip of a converted 1950's motor court on North Carolina's wide and quiet State Road 29. Once a going concern that feed, entertained and housed tourists on the only good road through North Carolina’s humid summers, the newer superhighways and large vacation theme parks had left it uncommonly quiet and isolated as the last bit of Americana where you could still buy a Coca Cola in its signature hour-glass bottle, postcards for twenty-five cents, and be entertained by Royal Amberline, the area's resident quarter-Choctaw native who told stories of his childhood spent with a grandmother who passed on to him her secrets of herbal healing and the mysteries of gemstones.

The motel rooms had been renovated into one long thin ten foot wide bleached gray wood plank building of dusty displays of rocks, gems, and geodes split open to reveal circles of sparkling amethyst. In nearby bins, leather moccasins, faux coonskin caps, rubber tomahawks, stale boxes of hard candy all lay as they had for years under the watchful eyes of two women clerks who seemed to be at odds with one another, a state they'd apparently been in for many years. Their anger had that shop-worn feel to it that was capable of erupting any minute into a long rehearsed dialogue of arguments now filed down to a shorthand of sidelong glances, subtle smirks, and appraising expressions that spoke volumes.

I was the only customer in the shop and felt drawn into their long-standing differences. They both eyed me suspiciously and tried to draw me into their conversation of edgy words. I busied myself with choosing a perfectly round piece of hematite and several postcards of the North Carolina's countryside. I paid for my purchases without comment and hurried out the door to my car.

"Find what you want, young lady?" a male voice said.

I turned to face the man who had been sitting in a rusty lawn chair tipped back against the edge of the doorway to the shop. He looked to be in his late sixties, had a slight paunch that hung over his belt, and wore a baseball cap with the insignia, "Just Say Yes!"

"Yes, thanks," I replied noncommittally.

"Could I see the stone you bought?" he asked. "I'll tell you the secret about it. And you."

"Then it wouldn't be a secret any longer," I said and smiled at him. "Now would it?” I continued on to my car.

"Suit yourself," he said. "But it's going to take more than a piece of hematite to keep you grounded.”

"What makes you say that,” I asked.

“Doesn't take a magician to read the signs. Or even a quarter Choctaw, like myself.” He smiled.

"Come with me,” he said. He turned and walked to the last door of the long building and disappeared inside as if there was no chance I wouldn't follow him. Such actions by men used to annoy me; but once I’d learned to ignore or sidestep the power struggle aspects of it, it became something amusing and almost endearing about them.

The room he entered was paneled in oak that was stained a pale amber and varnished till it glowed with the reflected light of the setting sun. In the center of the room was a long padded massage table. I stood tentatively in the doorway and glanced at the row of large gemstones and bottles of yellow, green, and blue liquids displayed on the shelves of the wall. He slid his baseball cap back on his forehead revealing a birthmark on his forehead the size and shape of an arrowhead.

"Name's Royal Amberline," he said reaching for my hand which I had not offered him.

"This is my crystal reading room. People still come from all over for a life reading.” He pointed his chin at the table. "Or a massage. Smell this," he said, squirting a liquid from a crystal bottle onto my hand before I could protest.

His touch was uninvited but did not feel intrusive. I raised the back of my hand to my nose and inhaled. "Not bad," I said. "Lemon? Chamomile?"

He nodded. "Lots of ladies come here. Nurses, waitresses, women on their feet all day. I massage their legs for them."

I sighed loudly. I wondered what had gone wrong between men and women that would force sad middle-aged women who no one wanted to touch anymore to seek out this man just to feel a connected again to another human being. I shuddered at the thought of ever being that desperate, that sad.

Royal, reading my body language, took a step backward, giving me more space. He reached into a tray filled with sand and holding several pieces of clear crystal gemstones. He remained silent and took some time selecting one of them. He finally chose one with pointed facets in the shape of an obelisk, rubbed it between his hands then handed it to me.

"Put this in your bra, next to your heart. It will help."

It was a pleasingly-shape piece of crystal that rested easily in the palm of my hand but it did not override the rising aversion I felt toward this man at invading my space, my privacy with his masculine fantasies.

"Women actually fall for that line?" I asked and smiled at him.

"Just the smart ones," he replied evenly though the taunt had clearly hit the mark and sunk deep.

For a split second I regretted my remark. He was an old man, past his prime and probably pining for the day when his now faded charisma had commanded attention from most women. Men were so predictable and so unprepared for the day when they had to rely on something other than their sexual prowess. I wondered when was the last time he had made love with someone who had touched him by choice and of their own free will.

"That was rude of me," I said. "I'm sorry. It is a nice piece of crystal and I thank you for it."

He smiled at me but did not attempt to close the gap between us. Instead, he took a framed newspaper clipping from the wall and handed it to me. The yellowed clipping showed a much younger Royal Amberline peering into a crystal ball with the headline, "Local Choctaw Native Reads Future of the World and Predicts DISASTER.” He'd once been a handsome man with a confident expression. I focused on his face in the photograph rather than the words of the article and could envision his prime years with a steady stream of lonely women coming to him for comfort and kind words. A gentle touch.

"Go ahead," he said. "Put it in your bra. Now.” His voice still had a remnant of the bravado of a man lucky enough and used to most women doing his sexual bidding, sometimes against their will or at least against their better judgment.

I lowered my eyes at him and handed him the framed clipping. "If you really are psychic, you can probably predict right now where I'd really like to tell you to put the rock.” I tossed the rock in the air and he caught it without missing a beat.

He shrugged one shoulder. "Never hurts to ask," he replied.

"Yes, it does," I said.

He conceded with a nod. "So, you're not impressed with a broken down old body of a Choctaw.”But I ask you," he said with his mahogany brown eyes finally devoid of complicity, "just where are you going to find what you are looking for? And how will you recognize it?"

It was a question I pondered for the next several hour on the road as the road wound through the blue highways of bypassed rural North Carolina.

Many hours later In Flagler, North Carolina, a small town that boasted of being "the home of the best barbecue pork in the universe," traffic piled up at the only street light in the center of town. Highway patrol cars blocked the intersection and state troopers were diverting traffic down a side street into a U-turn back south again. I sighed and slipped out of the line of obedient cars and turned onto another even smaller side street hoping to bypass the accident and continue traveling north.

With a few twists and turns I reached the main street again and was astonished at what I saw. A derailed passenger train was scattered into accordion pleats of twisted metal. An over-turned Club car rested against the side of the Flagler National Bank.

I got out of the car and walked to the corner where a small group of people stood staring at the wreckage. "Was anyone hurt," I asked a woman holding a bag with a loaf of bread compressed so tight that it was flat.

"Everyone's already been taken to the hospital," the woman replied without taking her eyes off the grotesque scene.

"Or the morgue," a man added. He was dressed in a tan workman's uniform. His forearms, smudged with grease, were roped with bulging veins still at attention from a day of strenuous lifting. Unlike the woman, he looked directly at me with interest and open friendliness. "If you're headed north, you can forget it. It's going to take a while to clear the road." He glanced at the over-turned Club car. "We just don't want to realize how fragile our life really is."

I nodded. Something about the man fascinated me, comforted me the same way my uncles and father had as they included me as a child in their bantering with one another after a hard day at their blue-collar jobs. By the time I was eight years old, I knew about the secret world of men, how gentle and funny and disclosive they could be when not pushed or prodded by women.

"Is there a phone I can use?" I asked,

"Sure is," he said. "That's where I'm headed." He pointed to two public phones outside a convenience store. "Mary probably has dinner on the table and I know the kids are watching the TV news and will be upset about the train wreck."

I smiled to myself. It was exactly the kind of statement I’d heard my father say as he hurried me home from one of my hideouts. "Your mother will have dinner on the table and I know she'll be worried."

I looked at the man again and realized he was the same age as my father was then. They were two men with a hard common labor job and a deep love for their family. At the time my father had appeared old to me but seeing this man standing before me made me realize how young my father had been to have so much responsibility on his shoulders with a wife, two kids, a mortgage, a serious heart condition, and future plans for his children that a minimum wage salary could not support.

When we reached the public phones a line had formed of others calling to reassure their family that they were safe and would be home late. "Do they know what caused the wreck?" I asked.

He shook his head and pulled a thin aluminum pressure gauge from his shirt pocket and held it out to me. "Something this small can bring down an eight thousand ton train without a problem." His words had no edge and held no bitterness about a life so fragile that it could be wiped out in an instant.

When he put the pressure gauge back in his shirt pocket, I stared at the name tag embroidered above the pocket. Instead of seeing "Ralph" or "Eddie" or some other name that many workers wore on their uniforms, this man's name tag read, "Romans 8:28."

The man laughed when he saw me looking at it. "Mama made me promise to get an education and never have to wear a shirt with my name on it. But I was never a good student. I like working with my hands. I'm good at it. Mama understood, and God love her, on my first day of work fifteen years ago, she sewed this on one of my shirts. By the way, my name's James. But my friends call me Jimmy."

"I'm Caroline," I said. "And your mother sounds like quite a woman."

Jimmy nodded as a TV news helicopter circled above our heads drowning out some of his words. He looked at me and winked. "The eye is upon us." His words had an ominous tone that made me shudder.

I studied the face of the man who was so young but who seemed to already know more about life than I did, yet the lines in his forehead were not deep, the wrinkles around his eyes not frozen into the inability to soften with hope and wonder and humor. They relaxed into a pliant and open smile when I commented about the women who were still typing up the only two pay phones for miles. "How is it that they can think of so much to say at a pay phone in the middle of a train wreck?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders conspiratorially. "My beeper has been going nuts for the last half hour. I need to return these calls as soon as possible," he said loudly enough for the women to hear.

His joking nature reminded me even more of my father. I felt a longing for his company that I hadn't felt for years.

"What kind of work do you do," I asked as his beeper went off again.

"Air-conditioning and refrigeration," he replied. "Warehouses, hospitals, that kind of thing." There was deep pride in his voice.

I wondered about his home and family. Did he live in a double-wide trailer on a large rural lot that required a riding lawn mower to keep the grass under control or had he gone on to a larger mortgage and a smaller lot in the suburbs so that his children could attend a better school system? Did he have a hunting dog or did he spend hours in his basement tinkering with an engine like my father had?

Jimmy, with his kind face, a spring to his step, and a relaxed sense of ease did not study me the way I studied him. I did not pose an oddity to him as he did to me as a mirror to the way my father had been when I was a child, how easy-going he was with strangers, how secure and content he seemed with his life. These were things I never knew about my father and the realization took my breath away.

I fantasized for a minute what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Orangeville, married and had children. I would have friends and relatives like Jimmy. He would drop off his children for me to watch while he and his wife had a night out alone and if my plumbing ever failed he would come at any hour of the day or night with his tools and only ask for a cup of coffee in return. A cup of coffee and a thankful recognition that he knew how to take care of his own because that is how he defined himself and took sustenance from the knowledge that he was needed and wanted and loved.

As a teenager I had dated men like Jimmy. They smelled like their father's bottle of Old Spice Cologne and hung the tassels from their high school graduation cap from the rear view mirrors of their tinkered and finely tuned Ford and Chevrolet cars. They didn't dance very well but their arms were warm and strong and they asked little of me in return but to surrender to them on a moonlit night. In return they offered a Wednesday night Prayer Meeting kind of honesty and a house full of children who would grow up just like them. Something deep within me had called me to this kind of life that other women were happy to have but something just as deep had repelled me from it just as strongly. It wasn't where I was meant to be.

For a minute I longed for the fantasy to be true but in the next second realized that it wasn't what I had ever really wanted. It would never have given me the contentment that I needed. I'd found a profession I like, unique avocations to fill in the nights and weekends and now faced a comfortable unique future …. but I also knew that I’d lost something as well. Lost it forever and there was no turning back.

The line moved forward. We were one person away from the phone. Jimmy looked down at my camera bag.

"You know about cameras?" he asked.

"Yes. I’m currently obsessing digitally."

"Great!" he said. "Maybe you can give me some advice. Karen, that's my youngest, is a real artist. Must get it from my wife's side," he said and grinned. "Anyway, her birthday is next month and I want to get her a camera but I don't know which one would be best for her.”

"What grade is she in?" I asked.

"Third," he replied, "but she's in a gifted student program and I don't want to buy something that will be too simple for her in a year." He rubbed his forehead, the first sign that weariness was setting in. "I've been working an extra job or two and have enough money to get a good one but I don't have a clue about cameras." He smiled a little shyly. "Karen can really make something of herself. I want to give her that chance."

I lowered my head to stall for time. A wave of emotion had overtaken me unbidden. All I could think about was my father working two extra jobs to finance my art classes as a kid. I’d come home to show him my latest drawing or experiment in collage techniques and he’d be sound asleep in his reclining chair to catch an hour of rest before he left for the midnight job that would keep him away from us for the rest of the night. As a kid I had never given it a second thought but now seeing it recreated with Jimmy and his daughter Karen, I realized how much it had cost my father, not so much in money, or physical exhaustion but in the knowledge that by providing a new opportunity outside of our rural world, he was exposing me to the possibility of an ever-widening chasm that might one day separate us forever.

I flipped through my wallet and handed Jimmy a business card. "This is a small photo supply company in Philadelphia that gave me a good price. The owner knows me. Tell him I sent you and explain what you want. He’ll take care of you.”

Jimmy squinted his eyes and studied the card as if it was a rare gift and then slipped it in his shirt pocket and patted his "Roman 8:28" name tag. "Mama was right. “Everything does work together for good.'" He reached for the telephone, inserted two coins and dialed a number. “Say, you wouldn’t like to come home for dinner, would you?”

“Thanks Jimmy. I’d love to meet your family, but I can’t. I’m on my way home too. I was a little lost for a while, but I found my way home again. Thanks for the map.”

I dropped more coins in the phone. Instead of dialing my answering service, my fingers automatically found the number they had not dialed in years.

‘Hello, Dad?” I took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m fine. Really…..I just called to….” I watched as Jimmy pulled away in his truck. We both smiled and waved goodbye. “Dad, I just wanted to tell you about a man I met whose name is Romans 8:28.”

* The events in this journal entry are factual with the exception of names and locations that were changed to protect the privacy of others, and sadly the phone call to my father at the end. He died when I was thirteen and I was never able to make that phone call except in my heart.

2008-09-07T19:27:00.002-04:00

FINDING THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

After a very hot and sticky 10 mile ride the other day, I hit the wall, passed out and slept for 11 straight hours. Waking up at 3:30 PM in the afternoon on a Sunday was a little disconcerting since I had planned a major investigation of the environs of New Castle, Delaware with a lunch stop on the river's edge and time for a little novel reading and napping.

So much for that plan. Instead I decided it was time to finally find the Northwest Passage between my house and my favorite shopping area. I can take the long way around but after pondering Google Earth I was convinced there just HAD to be a shortcut that would make the ride free of cars and a cool quiet passage through an undeveloped wooded area.

But first there were errands to run which required a bus/bike combination. I waited on one side of the road for a southbound bus while a young man waited on the other side of the road for the northbound bus. Both buses were late and I noticed that he paced up and down while talking on a cell phone. His conversation could be heard now and then over the numerous passing cars.

There was something very intense in his voice. It was emotional and it sounded if he was near tears. I postulated that he was having an argument with his girlfriend or arguing with his mother. He was a very young man but he already had that tone that men reserve for talking to women. At one point I heard him sob, "You've got to help me. Something terrible has happened."

The traffic was too ferocious to cross the four-lane road and offer my assistance. He was clearly very upset and it broke my heart. I tried to look away to give him some privacy though he was oblivious to my presence.

Finally he snapped the cell phone shut and walked several yards forward and kneeled down to the ground. It was then that I saw the problem. At first I thought it was road trash but then took on the appearance of a mangled furry pile was lying by the roadside. It was impossible to tell if it was a dog or a cat.

With such tenderness the young man leaned down, picked whatever it was and walked it to the edge of the woods to a shady area and laid it down on the ground. He took out his cell phone again, opened it, but then snapped it shut again.

He'd grown up a little in that moment. He'd faced something very sad, reached out for comfort without finding it, and instead drew on his inner strength and bent to the task at hand. I wonder if when he is an old man he will remember that moment. I doubt it.

There will be so many more moments more poignant to deal with and grow with. He may not remember it; but I will.I was no longer in the mood for errands and wanted to ride somewhere quiet and serene where I could just zone out on a Sunday afternoon in the last dregs of summer.

I found a bucolic spot that erased every feeling but wonder and appreciation of the stoic nature of trees. When things get bad, a tree can't just uproot and move. They have to bloom where planted and deal with what comes.I always think of trees as being feminine. Perhaps it the sway of their limbs and the rustling of their leaves that reminds me of women. Perhaps it's the deep roots that ground them. Perhaps it's the way they provide shade and comfort to anyone passing by.

Refreshed and recharged, I take a spin over the pedestrian/bike walkway that transverses a deep gorge between the University of Delaware new dormitories and the remainder of the campus.

It replaces a very steep path full of hairpin turns and steep ascents/descents that must have been a killer for bicycles.

I pedal through the campus on the Sunday before classes start. There are parents and kids everywhere unloading cars and new shiny bikes filling up the bike racks. There is also the evidence of bicycle theft in several places.

I stop for some lemonade and admire a building mural that invites you to climb the ladder.

.....as well as ponder some odd yard art......

But it's time to become Lewis and Clark and find the Northwest Passage. There is a section a mere 100 yards long through some single-tracked areas that would shorten my ride to my favorite bike store, camera store, and steak house. Surely it should be a simple matter of finding the path....

With very little effort I actually do find a single-track path at Point A and merrily roll along on it on a hybrid bike not designed for such shenanigans. The path goes on and on and I ponder the fact that I don't have a spare tube even if I could remember how to change a flat tire. The path goes around a bend and there in the distance I can see the other side that leads to the deserted Continental Drive no longer used by cars. There seems to be a little hill with a drop-off ahead but I figure that I can always walk it if need be. I think that only until I reach the drop off....

...and discover that it's a good 50 feet STRAIGHT DOWN with no slope. So, like Moses who was allowed to see the Promised Land but was not allowed to enter it, I turn around, take the long way around, and console myself with a filet mignon at Bugaboo Creek Steak House.

2008-09-07T15:56:00.000-04:00

THE GARDEN OF HOPE

The expansive Christiana Hospital campus is between my home and a major shopping area I frequent on my bike rides. Today I discovered the "Garden of Hope" that has been newly added outside a new Cancer Treatment Center. There is a gazebo next to a pond with fountains and a Canada goose conclave.

I stopped for my lunch picnic in the gazebo.

It's very peaceful and quiet. The fountains in the pond drown out all traffic noise and random thoughts cluttering your brain. I noticed a memorial in the distance.

I went to investigate and found a memorial plaque that made me catch my breath as tears stung my eyes.

I sat there for a long time taking it all in....the intense poignancy of it, the scores of women who lost their babies, the women yet to come who would add a name to a bronze leaf. The surroundings of the memorial tree plaque had a distinct feminine feel to it. The keens and ululating of centuries of women who lost their babies hung in the air from the collective consciousness. The leaves of the bronze tree appeared to be rustling in the breeze and dancing in the sunlight. I had to stand very close to see that they really were not moving, they were reflecting the sun.

Surprisingly it was not an oppressively sad place for only a few feet away was the Garden of Hope and the Walk of Hope pathway. It's what women do....pick up and go on, often with the camaraderie of other women.

But sometimes, we must go it alone and when no one is looking, and after the acceptable time limit that others will give us, sometimes we need to go alone to a private place and place a wreath for the anguish in our hearts.

And then we come back from that private journey with the instinctive urge to be with other women who know where we have been and may go again. There is such joy and beauty in that.

I want to honor all women who has loved and lost, and women everywhere yet to take that path. I worked a photo through Photoshop of fountain sculpture I found in a park. Women of all sighs and sizes who draw strength, humor, and knowledge from other women on the same journey.

Yes, I'm sure of it. Those bronze leaves that seemed to move weren't just reflecting the sun. No, the babies of our heart are definitely dancing.

2008-09-07T02:08:00.001-04:00

TANGIBLE/INTANGIBLE BENEFITS OF BICYCLE COMMUTING

A record day of 12 miles on the bike.

What to do with a bike on a lunch hour?

How long has it been since you've reclined on a luscious lawn of grass without having to park the car, find a spot, and then fidgeted because you are "supposed" to be doing something else.

On a bike, this is a snap. Put a foot down, stop, and collapse in a bed of Kentucky bluegrass, closely-clipped but not so close that you can't run your fingers through it and ponder how wonderful nature is.

Have you ever noticed that some blades of grass are blue?????

Or pondered the stately, albeit degenerate nature of another relic like yourself?

Or eavesdropped on a conversation between the asparagus and the rhubarb at the Riverfront Farmer's Market?

"Hey Rhubarb! Get a load of that tomato that just walked by!"

Back at work you convince your princely manager that it's a dire emergency that you have your gearing upgraded that afternoon and you need to take a few hours of vacation. Being a Prince with the Wisdom of Solomon, your manager recognizes the earth-shattering need for this emergency vacation leave.

A bus/bike ride to Bikeline, and you want to ring your hands to see Trekkie exposed in such a proctological position before surgery. Howard, the store manager and expert bike mechanic sterilizes his hands with a greasy rag and tells you to come back in two hours.

There's not much to do in downtown Newark, Delaware for two hours. You can watch the paint peel....

You can find faces in the wood of derelict buildings being renovated....

You can shop for items that won't fit in your bicycle saddlebags even if you could afford it...

You can stop in an antique store and ponder that fact that while others were doing drugs and rock and roll you were campaigning for Nixon. And then you can ponder that drugs might have been a wiser choice.

You can meet a little girl with her new puppy Riley (all 6 inches long and 2 pounds of him).

And then you go back to the bike store to gather your reamed and gleamed new gearing system. So Howard sends you out on a test ride and in your exuberance you sail down a road, shifting all the way through the 27 gears and ummmmm.....well accidentally you end up on both large rings and suddenly the gears grind to a stop and you've broken the bike and have to walk it back to the bike store in anticipation of three men who will find the whole thing very amusing.

"Good God, Howard! She did what? And you said with her panniers loaded she'd never make it to the third ring and get in trouble."

So Howard reamed things out again and loosened up the chain so "Rocket Lady, won't get in any more trouble."

Two trips around the Hall Rail to Trail and I went home and collapsed.

2008-09-06T21:50:00.004-04:00

TO RIDE THE WIND.....AGAIN

The View from Pardes has turned on a dime, or more precisely it has turned on a 700x32 bicycle tire.

Such moments have a way of sneaking up on you. One minute you are a comatose driver of a car stuck in an interstate gridlock and the next moment, you are discovering that change is as easy as it is sneaky. You never forget how to navigate change…. It’s easy, it’s like riding a bike.

Last year when I turned 62, I realized that I no longer noticed the seasons change and that I was working the majority of my waking hours, passing out in front of the TV, and repeating this day after day.

I attempted to remedy this with mixed results and none of them permanent.

One of my brainstorm solutions was to take the bus to work. This would stick my tongue out at the escalating gasoline prices and it would force me to get some exercise by walking 0.4 miles to the bus stop twice a day.

This was a great plan. I actually started becoming aware of my surroundings again. The weather, the nosey or catatonic or secluded neighbors, and the time on the bus allowed me to read, nap, or fraternize with the myriad of people who ride the bus.

The only snag was the severe spinal and hip arthritis that made even a 0.4 mile walk completely impossible without taking pounds of pain killers.

“I know what to do,” I thought one day as I limped home in pain. “I’LL GET A BIKE AND RIDE TO THE BUS STOP.” The irony is that even if you can’t walk ten steps without severe pain you CAN ride a bicycle for miles and miles with a smile on your face.

Who would have thought that such a utilitarian idea would blossom into an obsessive hobby as that which a bicycle brings into your life.

Such things as gear inches, saddle fit, land topography, the time of sunrise and sunset, and the weather channel became uppermost in my mind.

I splurged and bought a hybrid bike, my beloved Trek 7.6 FX, which would be light enough to lift unto the bus bicycle rack and a bike that had the required granny gears to keep me moving on what were to me the Mt. Everest hills of Delaware.

Within a month I’d lost 25 pounds, significantly lowered my blood pressure, and acquired a sense of contentment that I haven’t felt since that first time I learned to balance a bike and ride with the wind.

More and more Baby Boomers are taking up their bicycles and leaving their pains and worries and distractions behind them and rediscovering their generational pledge to change the world beginning with themselves.

At 30, I resigned from a successful career that had me on the fast track in the chemical industry. I felt like Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is,” as I turned in my letter of resignation with the quote from Charles Dubois, “The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”

I never regretted that decisive change or the others following it. Indeed, once again, I revel in becoming myself once again but this time from the seat of a bicycle.