kenstraussposts

La Vega 10

2012-02-13T09:22:00.000-08:00

Act 1

Scene 1 (house in La Vega, Dominican Republic, April 30, 1965)

Gloria Esteban: I am a woman of this land

Uña y mugre con ella

Its soil’s between my toes

Frank: But you can’t stay here

Gloria Esteban: I have my children here

My mother, my blind mother

And other sightless ones

I’ve buried children here

Frank: They’ll bury you too if you stay

Gloria Esteban: You have to be buried somewhere

Frank: It’s going to blow

Gloria Esteban: It’s already blown before

Frank: Not like this time

Gloria Esteban: It’s just more bodies in the gutter

Frank: This time they’ll come for you

They know you were with him

Gloria Esteban: I was with him and against him

And with them and against them

If anyone has made enemies of everyone

It’s me

Frank: All the more reason

Gloria Esteban: What would your wife say?

Sharing a seat with her husband’s lover?

Frank: She wouldn’t need to know anything

She wouldn’t know

Gloria Esteban: Wouldn’t she wonder

Why you’d put this Dominican

On an American helicopter

Destined only for Yankees

Frank: There are all kinds of people being evacuated

Gloria Esteban: Not from here. It’s only gringos

And what would you say if she asked you who I was

Frank: She’s not going to ask

She’s out of her mind with worry

She just wants to get the kids out as soon as possible

Gloria Esteban: She’s bound to ask why her husband

The head of the mission, responsible for all the others

Has delayed twenty four hours after the evacuation order came

Has put at risk all the other missionary couples and their children

Now loads on a woman she’s never seen before

And you say she’ll never ask?

Frank: She’ll never ask

Gloria Esteban: Why?

Frank: Because I’ve told her.

Gloria Esteban: What!

Frank: I’ve told her you’re coming.

Gloria Esteban: You’ve told her about us!

And you expect her now to welcome me aboard.

Frank: I didn’t tell her we were lovers

Gloria Esteban: So what did you tell her…

That a beautiful young dancer

You happened to know

Might come along to entertain the kids?

Frank: They’ll kill you if you stay here

I don’t want to come back

And find you dead

Gloria Esteban: You underestimate me

How do you think I escaped under Trujillo?

He killed all his lovers, didn’t you know?

Frank: How did you?

Gloria Esteban: The same way I’ll escape now

Frank: Which is

Gloria Esteban: I’ll tell you when you return…

But here my daughter’s coming…

(enter Maria Elena)

Maria Elena: Mama, they’re bombing Santo Domingo

Wessin y Wessin

He’s going to bomb us here too

We’ve got to get out to the country

Gloria Esteban: I know Wessin

I’ll call him

Frank: It’s war, mama

General’s don’t take calls in war

Gloria Esteban: Wessin will take my calls

Besides he’s a Colonel

Maria Elena (looking askance at Frank): Why is he still here?

I thought all the Americans were to be out

There are Marines at all the intersections

Gloria Esteban: Ask him.

Or rather I’ll tell you myself

He wants me to go with him

Frank: And leave us behind?

Gloria Esteban: That’s what I told him

But I’m not going to do it

Maria Elena: So Frank, why don’t you leave her alone

Why don’t you get out now with your family

Gloria Esteban: I think we both know why

We all do, don’t we Frank

Because you love me

Because your honor won’t let you just walk out

Your Anglo-Saxon, Calvinistic, white knight honor

Won’t let you sleep back there in Gringolandia

Knowing you’d left your lover to her fate

Well maybe she wants her fate

Frank: I don’t know why you’re so bitter all of a sudden

I’ve only come for your sake

Gloria Esteban: And now he adds the moral capstone

It’s all for you, my dear

You’re the protestant pastor again

Rounding up the flock

Well save the sermons for them

Go back to your wife and then go home

Frank: I love you, you know that

You said you loved me

I don’t want you to perish

Gloria Esteban: Perish!

Perish, I shall not, my dear

Mi alma y mi amorsito

I’m not in the habit of perishing

Maria Elena: Mama, we have to get to the country

Gloria Esteban: We have to go Frank, before they roadblock everything

Wave to us from the chopper

(she kisses him on the cheek, takes her daughter by the arm and walks out)

Scene 2 (main house on mission campus)

Sharon: Take that silver spoon, no leave it

Gosh where’s Frank?

Oh, Lydia, my mother’s china

It’ll all be gone when we return

If we return

I don’t think we’ll ever return

Lydia, did you find the children’s passports

They were under the cake pans in the pantry

Or by the Crisco cans or somewhere

Maybe in the medicine chest

Oh, where’s Frank?

(Frank walks in)

Oh, there you are Frank, where’ve you been?

The radio station’s down, nothing on, kaput

Lydia thinks its been bombed

And we can’t find the kids’ papers

Where have you been for so long?

I’ve been worried so, my hair’s turning gray

By the minute

Frank: I was in town

Checking on some nationals

They say the Marines are at the crossroads

Sharon: That’s a good sign, no?

Frank: That’s a sign the Marines are at the crossroads

Sharon: When will they send the helicopters?

Frank: I don’t know, has Hal been on the radio?

Sharon: I told you, they shut it down.

Frank: No, I mean the ham radio…

Sharon: I haven’t seen Hal.

Tammy was here about an hour ago

A nervous wreck

She was still in rollers, her slip half off

And dashing about like a chicken

Who did you see in town?

Frank: Some nationals, they don’t want to come with us

Sharon: Why should they, they’re not in danger

Frank: We’re not in danger

Sharon: Oh, Frank, how can you say that?

They’ve already attacked the Americans

At the Jaragua Hotel and at the Embajador

People just like us, missionaries,

I heard it on the radio

Before they bombed it out

Frank: Where are the kids?

Sharon: Upstairs, they’re packing

I told them one suitcase each

And just for clothes

Well, one toy, but that’s all

Frank, you took so long

I was worried

Lydia said they might have taken you

I was worried sick, I couldn’t decide what to do

Do you think we should bury the silver?

We might never come back

I don’t think we’ll ever come back

We could always send for it

But we’ll have to tell one of the natives

So they can unbury it

Frank: We could ask Ramon

Sharon: I don’t know if I trust him

Frank: He’s a Dominican pastor

He’s come to Christ

Sharon: I know, but we’ll be gone by then

And there’d be no one looking over his shoulder

And silver’s silver

Even Christ was tempted

Frank: But He didn’t yield

Sharon: Of course, he’s God

Still we shouldn’t just leave it out

In plain sight of all the natives

And my mother’s china and the crystal

Oh Frank, I can’t believe this is all happening

It’s so fast and they won’t even give us time to plan

Frank: We’ve had thirty years to plan

Sharon: What do you mean?

Frank: Thirty years the rich have had it good here

Sharon: Whadda ya mean, Frank

We’re not rich

We’re just ordinary Americans

Frank: We’re fabulously, unimaginably, appalling rich

To them

Sharon: To who? To the natives?

But what do they know

About riches?

Scene 3 (a professor’s office at the University in La Vega)

Raimundo: It’s not just students this time

The Army’s had enough too

Most of the Constitutionalists are Army

Diego: But not the higher ups

Not the Wessin y Wessins

Raimundo: The big shots can’t do anything without the rank and file

The young officers and their men are with us

Diego: That’s what they said when they killed Trujillo

Raimundo: Listen, go back to your classroom then

Go sit in a closet and wait till it’s all over

Diego: I’m just making the point…

Raimundo: Don’t you see that it’s either strike now or be stricken off forever

Here’s Mario, ask him if you don’t believe me

(enter Mario in full combat gear)

Mario: They keep landing Marines

They’re thousands and thousands now

They’ve got every intersection in Santo Domingo

And they’ve made a cordon from the airport to the US embassy

Diego: That’s normal if they want to get their people out

Mario: You didn’t believe that, did you?

That they just came to snatch out their people

They mean to split us in two

That cordon divides the Constitutionalists right down the middle

Those in the center of town

Can’t speak to those outside

They’ve cut the phones

Diego: So they’re taking sides

Mario: Of course they’re taking sides

They’ve been taking sides for a hundred years

Only it’s not our side

(The phone rings, Mario takes it, speaks nervously and then hangs up)

Mario: Now they’re extending the corridor

It’s up through the university

They’re chopping all the hot spots in half

They cordon them off

Then Wessin bombs the hell out of the middle

They’ve also got Marines up at San Isidro with him

Probably flying his sorties too

Raimundo: And Diego here is still debating the political question

Shouldn’t we write a nice article to the papers protesting

Mario: Look, Diego, if you want to do something

Go arrest someone important

Someone we can hold for ransom

Diego: Who could be held for ransom?

Raimundo: That old Trujillo girl for one

That high-priced call girl

The one who teaches dance and writes poetry

She’s friends with Wessin and all the Americans

She’s been sleeping with the head of the mission here

And all of them are CIA

Diego: Why don’t we take the missionaries then?

Raimundo: And get massacred?

They’ve got helicopters buzzing all around there now

Lifting them out to their ships

Mario: Is she with them?

Raimundo: No, she’s playing both sides again

She’s at her country house in Baní

Plotting her next move

Mario: Diego, this is just the job for a suave sexy

University professor who wants to

Do his bit for the future of mankind

Diego: I don’t even have a gun

Raimundo: You don’t need a gun with Gloria Esteban

At least not the kind that shoots bullets

(in a Marine helicopter)

Pilot: We’re going to take you to a staging area near the coast

Then they’ll off load you to a warship—the Boxer

Frank: Where on the coast?

Pilot: Can’t tell you, sir,

But if you sit up here you should be able to guess

If you know the country

Frank: I know the country

Been here 22 years

Pilot: Oh yea!

Spreading the good word?

Frank: The Gospel of Christ

Are you a believer?

Pilot: Are you kidding, I’m Southern Baptist.

My Daddy’s a preacher down in southwest Tennessee.

Frank: Then you know all about missionaries.

Pilot: We support lots uv’em.

Have ‘em in all the time for their little talks

Africa and all them places

Frank: Been in the Marines long?

Pilot: Two years as a pilot

I’m slated for Vietnam next month

Until this little thing started up

Frank: What do you know about this little thing?

Pilot: Dominican Republic?

Well, just what they told us on the way in

Some hooched up political mess

With the commies just sitting back

Waiting to gobble up the place

Something Castro’s hatched up, I guess.

Frank: Is that the word you got?

Pilot: Look, I can’t talk too much about the mission

I just ferry ‘em around

Haven’t seen no shooting yet

Frank: Are you picking up many natives?

Pilot: Yea we got some this morning from San Cristobal

The old generalisimo’s family and a bunch of cronies

Set them down on a ship directly

Them and their loot

Frank: Their loot?

Pilot: Well, I don’t know what they had in there

But it weighed somethin’ godawful, them trunks

If you’ll pardon my language

Scene 4 (country house outside Baní)

Gloria Esteban: Why don’t you just tie me up

And toss me in the back of your jeep

Diego: Listen, I’m a professor of philology

I don’t toss women in the backs of jeeps

Gloria Esteban: What can’t we talk about here

That we can in La Vega?

Diego: They just want you back there

Gloria Esteban: Who does?

Diego: The constitutionalists

Gloria Esteban: The Consitutionalists!

Since when do they run the country?

Diego: They run La Vega for the moment

And soon the whole country

Gloria Esteban: You’ve somehow failed to notice

That those whirly birds

Chopping away up there

Don’t, for some reason, seem to be flying

The flag of the Constitutionalists!

Diego: We are for a legitimate return to true democracy

Gloria Esteban: Oh, yes, and when did we have the pleasure

Of being truly democratic

Diego: For a brief period after Trujillo

If that name rings a bell with you

Gloria Esteban: I can see that gaga land

You get paid to teach in

Hasn’t taught you some basic truths about political life

Like the source of real power

Which is never the people

Diego: I’m not here to debate the source of power

I’m here to ask you to come peaceably or to bring you otherwise

Gloria Esteban: Then bring me otherwise

(he hesitates)

Gloria Esteban: Oh, I can see you didn’t expect that.

You’re not used to bringing women otherwise

You’d be useless as a source of power

Diego: You should be glad it’s me who’s come

The others wouldn’t have been so nice with you

Gloria Esteban: I would have rather enjoyed that, I dare say

Diego: Are you coming or are you not?

Gloria Esteban: What do you think?

(back in La Vega)

Raimundo: You’re useless, Diego.

You’re worse than useless.

You let her off and now she’ll be

Twice as hard to find next time

Diego: Did you expect me to tie her up

And throw her in the back of the jeep

Mario: If necessary, yes

Diego: Well, you sent the wrong man

Raimundo: That’s obvious

Mario: Just go back to writing out your Marx

And Lenin on a spotlessly clean blackboard

Come, Raimundo, let’s go get the whore.

(Gloria Esteban’s house in Baní)

Gloria Esteban: Come in gentlemen

I’ve been expecting you for a while now

Who was that milksop you sent earlier?

Mario: Brash as ever, now you’re coming with us

Gloria Esteban: And waste this coffee

I’ve been brewing for you

Por Dios, you’ll both drink it

If you want anything from me

Mario: You’re in no position to make demands on us

Gloria Esteban: Given your position in Santo Domingo

You’re not either

Raimundo: We always knew what side you were on

Gloria Esteban: I don’t take sides…

If you don’t take sides you never lose

And you keep your head

Which is more than I expect for you

Mario: We know your past with El Chibo

Gloria Esteban: El Chibo, now that’s a name

‘The goat’

He did have quite a horn

Mario: You’re a disgrace

Gloria Esteban: You’ll spoil your coffee

And that of your hostess

With language like that

Now, drink up

Down the hatch

(they drink in silence)

Raimundo: You have connections

All kinds

And that could be helpful for all of us

Gloria Esteban: You’ll use me as a hostage

Let’s shoot straight

So do it here, arrest me in my house

And drag me there in chains

Before the whole world

Mario: We think you can help sort some things out

Gloria Esteban: What things?

Raimundo: Why the Americans have come in against us

Gloria Esteban: Against you, are they? How so?

Raimundo: They’ve split our lines and are letting Wessin bomb us

Gloria Esteban: And how am I to stop that

I don’t know a single American

Mario: You know Wessin

And you know plenty of Americans

Especially a certain Frank in La Vega

Scene 5 (at staging area somewhere near the coast)

Frank: I’m going back with the pilot to La Vega

Sharon: Frank, are you crazy?

We just got out by the skin of our teeth

Whatever for?

Frank: I need to check on things

That everything’s OK

I’m the leader of the Bible school

I need to check on the natives

Sharon: You’re not going back, this is madness

Frank: I’ll come right back

There’s no danger

You saw for yourself

No one shot at us

Sharon: Think of your children, Frank

Lydia, talk to him

I know you’re a native

But the only people he seems to listen to

Nowadays is natives

Frank: Pilot, can I ride back with you to La Vega for the next pick-up?

Pilot: If you wish, sir

There’s only three more to pick up

So plenty of room

Sharon: Frank, I’ll never forgive you for this

How can you leave us here alone?

Frank, if anything ever happens to you

(she bursts into tears while he steps into the helicopter; they take off)

Pilot: You’re leaving a lot of sobbing females down there, sir.

Frank: That’s one thing a man has to steel himself against…female sobbing. Behind every successful man is a good woman

But behind every man whose success is shattered

Is usually a sobbing one.

Pilot: Yea, I’ve made a few sob in my time.

So it’s back to the farm again for you?

Frank: No, not exactly.

I was wondering if you could put me down

In a town nearby La Vega.

It’s called Baní.

Pilot: Not a problem, sir.

Will you want me to pick you up again from there?

Frank: No, that won’t be necessary.

I’ll find my own way back.

Just tell those sobbing females

That I’ve stayed at the Bible campus in La Vega.

That’s where I’ll be making my way back to in the end.

Tell them there’s no danger

I’ll be joining them soon.

And make sure they get ferried over to the Boxer as soon as possible.

Pilot: Righto, sir.

(Gloria Esteban’s house outside Baní, a helicopter approaches)

Mario: Take cover it’s the gringo’s.

(Mario and Raimundo dive for cover, Gloria Esteban runs out to greet the helicopter, without touching down it delivers Frank into an adjacent field and then rises and disappears in the direction of La Vega)

Gloria Esteban: Frank! Madre de Dios!

What in the hell are you doing here?

Frank: You know the reason.

I can’t leave you. I won’t.

I love you.

Gloria Esteban: Frank, you crazy beast!

You hopeless awful beast.

And you thought nothing of having yourself delivered here

In a US Marine helicopter…

Right into the middle of a rebel stronghold.

Frank: I didn’t know Baní…

Gloria Esteban: Never mind. Come in

I have some guys you have to meet.

La Vega 9

2012-02-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

His death is the loss of something irreplaceable.

He had an amazingly gift—that of captivating all he came in contact with. None, in all the hundred lands he visited in that busy life, failed to come under his spell—the old, the young, children, men and women—especially women.

El conquistaba a todas.

He was different from every one else, an outsider, the non-conformist, but always invested in the lives of those around him.

And more than anything else, he loved his children.

He left an impression of greatness wherever he went. Not only by his physique and features. It was his person. His eyes as they gazed on you. His questions. The curiosity and vast range of his mind.

He died, as he would have chosen, on the open road, in the wide spaces he loved—fearless, free and irreplaceable.

Wichita Vortex Sutra

2012-02-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

by Allen Ginsberg

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it's Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows--
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when our trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a matress--
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white smooth abdomen down to the hair
between our legs,
It's not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack--
fear that we aren't the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita--
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me--
On the bridge over the Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language--
on the frosty broad road
uphill between highway embankments
I search for the language
that is also yours--
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from Junction City across the plains--
highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
lanes curving past Abilene
to Denver filled with old
heroes of love--
to Wichita where McClure's mind
burst into animal beauty
drunk, getting laid in a car
in a neon misted street
15 years ago--
to Independence where the old man's still alive
who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness
and made the body universe a place of fear--
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no giant demon machine
visible on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge
I claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in Kansas or other universe--Joy
reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
half closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer of battlefield illusions
million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate One
Jahweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I chant to--
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate it own delight
let the President execute his own desire--
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery--
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my very thought
accomplished in my own imagination
all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from Wichita
near El Dorado,
The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
in every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord--
Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower
where Florence is
set on a hill,
stop for tea & gas

written 1966

La Vega 8

2012-02-08T00:55:00.001-08:00

What do I love?

Riding a bicycle in the evening as the shadows lengthen by a still canal, with my children riding ahead and the dogs running at their side.

Creating a story from some uncertain idea shimmering like a mirage; writing and re-writing until it’s right, the characters now friends.

Sitting at a restaurant table, waiting for the food, my nose deep in a book. Then finishing the meal and plunging back into it as I sip coffee and munch a Belgian praline.

A pear, cool and crunchy, green beans topped with bacon sauce, neuf-cereals bread toasted with melted cheese.

Standing in the Gare Lille Europe on a wintry morning waiting for the TGV to Paris, a steaming coffee in one hand and a flaky, just-baked croissant in the other.

Chicken in a saffron sauce, roasted chicken, chicken Brazilian-style with lime squeezed on top.

The first sip of a good wine.

The brown eyes of Arab women, with all that unseen simmering behind them.

The sharp wit of a young Jew…the wise wit of the older Jew.

Chocolate! Chocolate melting in the mouth. Chocolate as it’s stirred. Chocolate as it oozes from the center of a moilleux.

Getting out of the shower after a long run.

My daughter’s teasing eyes and quick laugh, her lithe and buoyant figure bounding here and there, mistress of all she finds.

My son’s voice, its tenderness and pain and searching. The way his mind winds about an idea, slowly descending on it in tightening circles.

La Vega 7

2012-02-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

La Vega 6

2012-02-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

Château du Jardin, first moments

The tired old sclerotic manor limped into view at the end of a tediously long drive hedged in by ancient box. It had seen better centuries. The roof was in the style of Mansard. Its shingles—what shingles still remained—hung bedraggled and depressed, some by only one nail, three stories up.

There was an octagonal tower built into the center of a sugar-cube structure with tall, fer forgé-barred windows. That saved it, those majestic windows. There were seven of them at every level on both the front and back of the sugar cube. Twenty-one on the front, twenty-one on the back. Forty-two jewels. It would surely be luminous inside.

The double doors of the entrance were of ancient oak, heavily laden with carvings and painfully arthritic. It took two hands and a stout back to budge them. The left one was afflicted with crepitus and the right, stubbornly cog-wheeled.

Once inside the true extent of the mansion’s decline was evident. Bird excrement streaked the walls. Furry creatures scurried about. A huge slab of ceiling, which someone, in apparent desperation, had tried to re-plaster, had dehisced and fallen, sending debris down on the bust of Molière.

Stunning bibelots, statuary and Louis XV meubles were scattered in disarray, as if frivolous children had thrown them madly about. Throughout the entrance hall all was wet and moldy and green, literally organic, oozing a foul putrescence.

The floor retained its sober dignity. It was checkered marble, black squares alternating with white. Exposed above my head, though, was a huge oak beam. The fallen plaster had unveiled a horror beneath it: rampant infection of dry rot. Square, scaly gray blocks, fissured by black trenches, were all that remained of that noblest of trees.

The beam was split in two by an open compound fracture with no hope for it but amputation. Having lost all cohesion it hung precariously in midair. One imagined the whole house might fall in at any minute

With vague misgivings about my own safety I tiptoed gingerly through the détruis of the hall into the stately dining room, presided over by a stuffed boar hung high above the door. Half of the parquet floor was gone and the other half seemed to be swimming in a giant decubitus ulcer.

A water pipe had broken in the adjacent kitchen and no one had thought to turn off the main. It had obviously dripped for months and was still at it. My feet must have disturbed the equilibrium of what remained since suddenly and without warning another slab of parquet slats slid out of sight, as if ashamed of the incontinence.

There were still cast-iron radiators hanging like skeletons chained to a dungeon wall. Curious, I gave one a tug. The beast came to life. Water gushed from both ends and inside there was a gurgling like a death rattle. This grew into a drum beat and then into a cardiac gallop. It crescendoed, fibrillated, then fizzled. A tense, ponderous silence followed and then, with a sharp intake of air and a high-pitched hiss, the thing blew its top in a geyser of oily water, crashing off the wall and into a pulsating heap at my feet.

I fell in love with the place.

It was so alive and malignant. Fungus had metastasized to every bone in its edifice. Every organ would need transplanting. Every patch of sloughed skin would have to be re-grafted. Every fracture set.

But she would not be allowed to die. Not on my watch. Not if I could goddamn help it.

Arizona Border Police

2012-02-06T04:41:00.000-08:00

But at the Arizona border they stopped us and said Turn Back, and I sat in a little room with barred windows while they typed.

What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies).

How long have you known him? (I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies).

Did you sleep in the same room? (Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant, also our bed is green).

Did intercourse take place? (I sat down under his shadow with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste).

When did intercourse first take place? (The king hath brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love).

Were you intending to commit fornication in Arizona? (He shall lie all night between my breasts).

Behold thou art fair my beloved, behold thou art fair: thou hast doves eyes.

Get away from there! cried the guard, as I wept by the crack of the door. (My beloved is mine)

Better not try any funny business, cried the guard, you’re only making things tough for yourself. (Let me kiss him with the kisses of his mouth).

Stay put! cried the guard, and struck me.

Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 1945

La Vega 5

2012-02-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

Sweet Deceit Comes Calling

I knew more about any one of my patients than about her. Spoke more words with my nurse on any given day than ever with her. Yet Zośka would not leave me all that fall.

Winter came. The first hard frost and a deluge of leaves. Then a second, and the trees were stripped bare. The wind was so cold and sharp it cut the chest when you breathed deeply. I hurried across the Grand Place, a blouse of Bruges lace under my arm.

I’d heard from her that morning. The letter had arrived inside my medical journals and had slipped to the floor. It lay there unseen until the end of the morning when I happened to notice it.

It was short and quirky and I loved it from the moment I opened it.

I confess my always remembrance of you and our short time. For your poem—so much loved—much thanks. Awaiting in the inn of my heart lies your room, flower-strewn and bathed in the scent of longing. Fond tenderness, Zośka.

That was it. The reason for my heartache throughout that fall: ‘bathed in the scent of longing’, ‘fond tenderness’, ‘flower-strewn’, ‘my always remembrance’. She’d felt the same.

The letter also contained an etching and a score from one of the Polonaises we’d heard at Zelazowa Wola.

I wrote back saying I wanted to see her. Anywhere she chose. I wrapped and sent the blouse.

She wrote back inviting me to Łódź, to have Sunday lunch at her house, to meet S. and her girls. ‘I want them to see you. I know they’ll love you too.’

My heart fell. So this was her sort of love. But I went, knowing it would be a disaster.

The house was magical, wood everywhere, built on several levels, with cathedral ceilings and immense windows, bordering on a forest and a frozen lake. S. was tall and so slim he was nearly gaunt, younger than Zośka and very handsome. I felt uneasy with him from the first instant.

She’d cooked roast chicken and wild rice. He made little ceremony of the wine but his choice was excellent and it loosened my tongue. Throughout the meal he was quiet as Zośka and I chatted away. We were chatting away our nervousness. At one moment she got up to serve us dessert. I smiled at him and my unease came back.

He seemed intellectual, diffident, borderline aesthetic. He was listening closely to our English, appeared to understand every word and seemed interested in me in an honest, unassuming way. I knew he knew nothing, suspected nothing.

After the meal we went for a walk around the lake. The dog frolicked in the drifts and Zośka ran after Paulina (Angelica had not come, she had exams). S. and I followed them, watching Zośka in her slim jeans and ski jacket, her beret falling as she chased a wayward child and dog.

The sparkle of the sun on the snow, the red cheeks and billowing breath of the frolickers, the quiet, gracious host beside me, the memories of such outings with my own children, the auburn hair and lithe figure of the one whose heart was an inn—all this left me giddy, confused and strangely weak.

Back at home S. took me upstairs and showed me his collection of cars—antiques, Formula Ones, Porsches, Ferraris. Then we thumbed through his English magazines—Car and Driver, Speed Age, Road & Track. None of this had ever interested me, but I forced myself. All along I was wondering, what are you doing? what are you doing here?

Then abruptly he announced he was tired and would like, with my permission, to take a nap. He said he took one every Sunday, the only day he ever drank wine. I said of course and he walked me downstairs.

By then Zośka had changed and was in the kitchen reading to Paulina. She asked me to sit at the table with them. The story was a fairy tale in English but Paulina couldn’t understand a word. I felt sorry for her. She kept yawning and asking what was happening. Zośka finally gave up and put her down for her nap.

When she came back she served me tea in the room looking out over the lake. She was wearing the blouse. It fit her very well. Through it, in the light of the winter sun, one could see the lace of her bra. Her eyes, which had been sad during lunch, were now just like the evening at the château.

We drank without saying anything. She would look at me and then out at the frozen lake. Then down at her tea and back at me. Her skirt was short and her long tanned legs were crossed and lay so close to me that I could have touched them.

‘You look sad,’ she finally said.

‘I feel strange.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No, just out of place. I didn’t imagine this. S. is very kind. And I always imagined Łódź as grey and grimy. This is a garden.’

‘Do you feel uncomfortable…with him?’

‘No, he’s a perfect host. But I should go while he’s asleep. That would be best.’

A pained expression crossed her face. ‘Why? Why now? Now we can talk.’

‘Zośka, I’m in your home. How can we talk?’

‘We can talk here about anything, everything. He’s asleep. They’re asleep.’

‘We can’t talk about anything that’s important…. Not here.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’

‘No, of course not. What would he think?’

‘Why are you sad?’ she asked again.

‘Because, all this fall, I haven’t been able to think of anyone but you…all this time.’

‘That’s why I had to see you. I can’t think of anyone but you.’

‘But why here?’

‘I thought it would be best.’

‘It couldn’t be worse. I didn’t know what to say to him. Do you know how dishonest I felt? I feel?’

‘I thought it would straighten things out, my feelings.’

‘I don’t feel right like this, coming into a marriage, a family. And this won’t sort out our feelings. Has it yours?’

We sat in deepening gloom and finished our tea.

‘Please call a taxi for me. I’ll go back to my hotel.’

‘I’ll drive you.’

‘No, a taxi’s best.’

She called me that night.

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Is he there?’

‘He’s upstairs bathing Paulina.’

‘No, I’m just confused.’

A long silence followed.

‘Does he know who gave you the blouse?’

‘No.’

‘And the poem?’

‘I keep it at work.’

Another silence.

‘But you must love him?’

She didn’t answer.

It pleased me, this silence.

‘You were beautiful,’ I finally said, ‘running in the snow.’

I though I heard a soft sob.

The next morning she came to my hotel. She was wearing the lace blouse and the jeans. She’d taken the day off.

‘I couldn’t let you go like that,’ she said when I opened the door.

She was in my arms before I could close it.

And for the rest of the morning neither of us spoke aloud.

Later, in a steaming tub, she said she was sorry.

‘What an idea? I must have been out of my mind.’

‘Didn’t you think he’d find it strange?’

‘I told him that you were a colleague everyone liked, that I wanted us all to be friends.’

‘And he never suspected?’

She leaned back deeply in my arms. ‘He doesn’t see me anymore. He hasn’t looked at me since Paulina.’

After that there were a long series of cities: Helsinki, Vienna, Bruges, Gdansk, London, Barcelona. Wherever there was a medical congress we arranged to meet up.

In Helsinki she wore a dress her friend had just designed. It was summer, the first after we’d met, and Helsinki in the summer was all Zośka could imagine of heaven. Blue sea, brilliant sunshine and warm black rocks overlooking the water. Plus no one in the world who knew us.

The dress was beige, cut open in front with straps at the shoulders and a blouse underneath. The blouse was fluffed and gathered in a way that drew the eyes. The skirt was split in stripes as wide as one’s hand all the way around, split right up to her hips so that if she twirled (which she didn’t dare) she would have quite exposed herself. The effect was tropical and teasing, though the blouse was slightly old-fashioned.

When I saw her walking towards me in the lobby I didn’t recognize her. I was so struck by the skirt that I didn’t see the woman. The only thing I could think of was Josephine Baker and her banana dress. Then called out to me and I recognized her. ‘Zośka!’ She was happy as a child and even more to have caught me so off-guard.

In Vienna we spent the evenings in Grinsing, always catching the last tram back to the Zentrum, usually more than a little tipsy. We ran down the hill, hand in hand, and leapt on as it pulled away. We were like kids, panting in each other’s arms, kissing as the tram swayed, smiling at the few old couples—staid and Austrian—who stared at us (and usually smiled back!).

In Bruges we stayed at the Jan Brito where they claimed they’d been waiting for us for centuries. We biked to Damme and then, still following the Zwin, on to the sea. Sitting on the dunes she asked me to tell her a story in only fifteen words. I puzzled it out in the sand.

Pivot, aim, two leads whiz home. Both sovereigns topple down. So ends their people’s mutual enmity.

‘What’s “enmity”?—and that’s sixteen,’ she counted.

‘Bad feelings between two groups.’

‘So why do we need “mutual” then?’

That’s how we came to fifteen.

That’s how we’d end all wars.

Neither of us dared ask questions of the future. Our clandestine trysts were, in that sense, a curse. Long anticipated, in charmed settings, endowed with secrecy and the lure of the forbidden, they were our curse. Tenderness lingered for weeks thereafter, sating the need for love or permanence. By the time it began to fade we were planning the next one.

End of Sweet Deceit Comes Calling

Previous episode, Into Every Married Mind
Ending with The Scent of Her Lingers

La Vega 4

2012-02-06T03:35:00.000-08:00

ici, si loin

je pense que à toi

des choses les plus banals

plus oubliées, plus rein

des flaires de toi

des trucs minables

sont ceux

qui plus me hantent

toi qui ne bouge

et toi inquiète

toi femme

la mienne

toi qui me possède

qui m’a perdu

qui m’appartienne

oublie

pas de nous deux

oublie pas de nous

mon oxygène

mon ADN

ma chaîne alimentaire

tu traine mon nom sur toi

tu l’a écris

en sang

entre tes seins

tu écris ma vie

La Vega 3

2012-02-06T02:54:00.000-08:00

Once there was an English actress named Diana Dors. She was the Marilyn Monroe of her day. Her real name was Diana Mary Fluck, but, when she went into films, they insisted she change it. I suppose they were afraid, she once explained, that if my real name was up in lights, and one of the lights blew...

One day, long after she was famous, she returned to her home town of Maidenhead to open a festival. She was to be introduced by the local vicar and, while having lunch with him, she requested that she be introduced by her real name. The vicar was completely flummoxed at having to pronounce the name and could hardly finish his meal. Finally the holy man screwed up his courage, rose and spoke these immortal words:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our star guest. We all love her, especially as she is our local girl. I therefore feel it right to introduce her by her real name; Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very lovely Miss Diana Mary Clunt.

Roll over, Freud!

La Vega 2

2012-02-06T02:34:00.000-08:00

No Choice

He had no choice. The calf was flayed open. He’d already pulled a hot fragment from it. In the process the hand had been badly burnt.

Paul had been caught in a soggy cow patch west of Mons under a hail of German mortars. In India he’d seen such wounds suppurate in only hours. Then gangrene would creep up. Once it reached the groin you died.

The rest of the British Expeditionary Force was in pell-mell retreat, units mangled, everyone scrambling out before the German juggernaut rolled over them. He could join them, on foot, and then would come the suppuration and the gangrene…or he could hunker down, let the wave roll over him and, once the leg was mended, straggle to the coast, jump a ship and live to fight another day.

He had no choice.

His hiding place was behind a chicken roost in the back of a loft in an abandoned Belgian barn outside the town of Frameries. The farm was empty, except for a dozen hens, whose eggs would keep him alive from that day, August 23, 1914, till…well, until he died, in his one-hundredth year, in 1995.

He spoke hardly a word of English for the better part of 81 years and, by the second war, had lost his mother tongue completely. It had been replaced by French…and a love that would keep him at the farm those 81 years.

Wivene found him early on the morning of August 31st, after the juggernaut had moved on and she’d returned, heartbroken, from Maubeuge. She’d lost her parents and her brother, first taken hostage after the battle of Le Cateau and then shot in the wave of German reprisals against civilians suspected of being francs-tireurs. She herself had been raped. She was fourteen.

She caught him poaching her eggs early on August 31st, his nineteenth birthday. Neither spoke a word of the other’s language. She saw him and was afraid. For her they were all the same. Soldiers and murderers.

He showed her the wound. Somehow he convinced her he wasn’t like the rest. That if she would feed him until the wound healed he would work. He could work on the farm and be her savior from the war, if she would hide him.

In reality, neither had a choice.

She nursed his leg and hand. She taught him French and hid him and he stayed to his room, even after he could take some halting steps. And then she gave him her father’s work clothes and he began to work.

They grew to love each other…so he saw no reason to leave.

He had no choice.

By early September, 1914 Frameries was heavily invested with Germans who needed the coal of the Borinage region. Escape now for him was not an option. But staying was not easy either. Special troops were constantly in search of young men to send to Germany as slave labor. She hid him again and again when they came to search her house. There were no more rapes but she was with child from the one in Maubeuge. When a little girl was born the next May he took her as his own.

He had no choice. They would eventually have six more.

His regiment had listed him first as ‘missing’, then as ‘presumed dead’, finally as ‘lost in action at Mons’. No family could be found to receive a condolence letter. His father had died down the mine and his mother had passed away from cancer the year after he’d gone out to India. He’d been an only child.

In 1929, on his only trip away from the farm to the salient at Ypres, he had the occasion to read his own name, engraved in Portland stone, on the huge arch at the Menin Gate.

‘Known only to God’ was he now, and he wondered at the truth of it.

Seeing, around his, the names of friends he’d known, he was stirred by a torrent of emotions.

He saw now he had no choice.

He returned to the farm, never to leave again.

Beauty Like a Tightened Bow: La Vega 1

2012-02-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

The first thing that must be said is that La Vega is not a shortened form of Las Vegas. The two couldn’t be further apart.

La Vega is a provincial capital in the Dominican Republic a little over half way between the capital, Santo Domingo, in the south and the second largest city, Santiago, in the north. Connecting the three cities is the principal motorway of the island, Autopista Duarte.

It was here we came as missionaries in 1960. I was seven and had just finished first grade.

Like Istanbul, like Tehran, La Vega is shaken to ruin every few centuries by a monster quake. A 9.something. Again and again as a child we got warm-ups for this, and we learned the warning signs. First the china in the cabinets would begin to tingle like cymbals, then the kitchen light would sway. This lasted for about three seconds before the sonic bomb hit. It was like a bomb. By then you’d better be standing under the frame of a door or be outside. With practice we could make it.

Over the years our reactions to an impending earthquake became as automatic as spinal reflexes. The legs were moving before there was any cortical impulse. But at the beginning, just after we’d arrived in La Vega, we would sit there wondering at this strange orchestra of triangles and the metallic smell in the air. The boom caught us napping and it was quite an awakening. Since these were small quakes (on the order of Richter scale 5 or 6) and since our house was made of wood no one was the worse for wear.

Certainly one would get ‘all shook up’ and usually it was difficult to stand during the shaking phase, or even sit upright in a chair, but no one got hurt. Dad used to swear we’d never live in a brick or block house while we were in La Vega, and never in one with an upper floor.

The shaking would last about thirty seconds, although it always seemed longer. Then came the aftershocks. They were almost worse, because for days you kept anticipating them and bracing. A sudden flutter of leaves and you’d reach out for something to hold on to. Then you’d smile. It was only the wind in the lemon trees.

It was nerve-wracking and you understood why people live outside for a few weeks after a major quake. Lying on the ground in an open space, away from buildings or live wires, seems the safest place to be, but you can hardly live your life this way.

The big one never came during the years we lived in La Vega. It hasn’t yet in the fifty years since.

Miami 10

2012-02-05T23:15:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

How do you prepare yourself for death?

By walking with the Lord. Everything’s in his hands. ‘Ye know neither the day nor the hour.’

That seems to be the whole purpose of Christianity. To prepare you for death. Everything revolves around it. Christ died for us. Then he rose from the dead. He raised the dead Lazarus. We may get eternal life—but first you have to die to be eligible. It’s a death cult.

You can say things like that to me, but to others it’s heresy. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone else. I hope you don’t really believe this.

I took her hand.

It’s not a death cult. It’s a way of life. It’s the truth. ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…whosoever believeth in me shall never die, but have Eternal Life.’

Judaism and Islam are ways of life. Sets of rules. Buddhism is a way of mind. But Christianity is a very clever way of steeling you against the day of your death.

Sometimes I wonder how you come up with these ideas. Not only do you put our faith on an equal footing with false ones, but you act as if it’s inferior. Ours is the truth faith. The Truth.

That’s what the followers of each of the others fervently believe.

Well, they’re wrong. They’re misled. You know that. If we don’t hold on to the truth what else can we hold on to.

Each other.

But the others are idolatry.

How can we be so sure ours is the truth?

It’s a matter of faith. You believe in our Lord Jesus, don’t you?

I’ve been taught to believe.

But you do believe?

My parents gave up their lives for it. To us kids they said, ‘would we do this if it weren’t true?’ So if we didn’t believe, it was a kind of betrayal.

I asked do you believe?

Yes, I must. I’m here. I’m with you, a true believer.

Don’t fall into the same trap as with your parents. You don’t believe in order to be able to be with a believer.

So, I believe, there you have it. I guess so.

You guess so? You have to know so. Once you really believe He comes into your heart and assures you beyond all doubt.

You’re talking of a transcendental experience. One that millions of people who’ve never heard of Jesus have had.

They’re misled. This is basic stuff. You’ve preached the Gospel so many times to many people. How could you be doubting now? I’m really confused.

You’ve read The Varieties of Religious Experience, haven’t you? The emotions religion elicits are universal; they’re essential to life.

The Devil can disguise himself as an Archangel. He was one once, remember.

We’ve been steeped in this stuff. We’re both missionary kids. From our mother’s breast we’ve heard nothing else, so we can’t imagine anything beyond. We’re like fish who can’t imagine a world of air.

Who are we to question the truth?

You’re starting with that assumption. I’m just starting a step earlier.

But it’s the basis of our whole life.

Maybe a flying fish, who’s seen the world of air, would be called crazy by those who are water-bound.

I’m confused.

I’m not trying to distress you.

Well in that quest you’ve been unsuccessful.

Ideas and questions should not be so threatening. If they are it’s a bad sign. It means the foundation’s rotten.

They’re dangerous. They’re the worm holes that start water seeping into the ship.

Then it wasn’t a good ship to begin with.

Worms can eat through the strongest wood.

Questions are not worms. Questions are how we get to the truth in everything.

Maybe the holes weren’t made by worms. Maybe they were drilled by a mutinous sailor.

I’m not mutinous or apostate. I can’t help thinking of these questions any more than I can help breathing.

Then maybe we need to get you some help.

Don’t be ridiculous. That’s what the Inquisition said…Torquemada is just helping you back to righteousness…now where do we light this bonfire?

She laughed and we walked on.

So how do you prepare for death?...and let’s leave everything spiritual out of it.

Well, you write your will and put your house in your children’s name and prepay your funeral…why are you frowning at me?

Do I look like I’m interested in the technical stuff?

Well, I’m a practical woman.

You can prepare for childbirth through all sorts of exercises…ritual panting and peritoneal squeezes…but when the moment comes the events overtake you. Maybe death is the same.

Then why pose the question? Live for today and ride it out later. Eat, drink and…

Doesn’t sound too Christian to me.

You know what they say to expectant mothers: millions have gone through it before you, so you’ll pull through. Well, look at the cemeteries: millions have gone…

Once you get older, you have to give thought to the morrow.

And you want to know how best to do it?

Just how to do it.

But you’re still young.

I’m one of those flying fish who’s seen the unseen.

Well first you have to imagine the world without you. You’re now ash in an urn on a mantle. Or sprinkled on a golf course. And life goes on completely heedless of your absence. You’ve not changed the world a bit. It hardly noticed you were here.

As per Voltaire, we shall leave this world as foolish and as wicked as we found it on our arrival, or something like that.

You need to imagine the state of dreamless sleep you were in before you were born. Nothing hurt you, nothing penetrated. A bomb exploded over Nagasaki and you didn’t even blink. The state of non-being.

The state of most being, if you consider how long we spend in it.

Of course this counts Christ right out of it. Those of us in Christ…

Now you’re cheating.

You can’t leave the spiritual out of any discussion of the afterlife.

This is an academic exercise.

And we walked on…

Jonathan and David at Ben Lippen

2012-02-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

And he hurdled down Sliding Rock and, tumbling, took a knee out.

And I nursed him in the van with his hair clotted and pulled the shredded jeans from the wound. Night fell across the Carolina hills. Moon on the tumbling waters. But I would not let him sleep for fear of something someone had told me once to fear.

And the clotted hair hurt as I combed it out, so I fetched water and washed it, drying it with my shirt and keeping the wolves from his bleeding knee and the curious little foxes from telling him stories.

And there was no light to chase away the cold, and he shivered as the spirits moved across the deep. In the night he finally slept but the bouncing Appalachians curves hounded him awake and I held his smooth face in my arms. He was always the daredevil and the he-man. Kenya-born, Yankee-blood, he was the Africa of last century.

And his smooth moves on the court and his souped-up Mustang and the smile of a woman on the face of a beautiful man and his soul knit with mine.

And the knee was a bitch and weighed him down like ballast. He was never one for stillness. The moon is following us and the little foxes.

And I asked him, Why do you always have to take the odd way down? The out-of-bounds? He smiles, the tails of comets teasing in his eyes. He’d tried the sheer descent, roped off and over rocks.

And now he has my belt between his teeth and grinds the opium from it. Bouncing and lurching, he groans, my David. I call up to the driver, ‘Hea, wachit!’ His eyes have crossed the frontier into agony. The angry bees move up the leg, it shakes. Menisci hang like vines in Babylon. He had to take the hard way down.

And now I see there is no hinge remaining in that flopping leg. My shirt splint is no match for mountain curves. I shiver and blow comfort on his hands. My chest is cradle to his sweating brow.

And now we slow, the city lights, it’s 2 AM. Soon morphine will be singing him to sleep and by his bed I’ll wait the full night through. I’ll offer him my robe, my sword and bow.

And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

2012-02-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

Stuck in the gluey muck of everyday, an elbow in the eye from Hal in billing, a razor shin from cubicle front left, the finger from a lover as goodbye (her thanks for picking up the bill last night) and now your own best friend, a turncoat and a mutineer, unfriended you at Facebook and won’t Tweet, supposed to come next weekend…now fat chance, your ex in recent years would always come, two stones in hand, two hands to stone, and now he’s joined her ranks, and you’re alone again.

Miami 9

2012-02-05T08:05:00.000-08:00

Every leader is a manipulator.

Recent studies of suicide bombers have pointed out the typical profile: he is usually a young man who is very much under the thrall of a charismatic and manipulative leader, to whom the youth is afraid to say no. The leaders, much as they espouse the virtues of Islamic martyrdom, would never dare strap explosives on themselves. They try to stay as far away from the action as the generals did in World War One.

My experience with business leaders is exactly the same. Most are masterful cynics and controllers who’ve made it their life study to find and exploit the weaknesses in others. You can spot them if you look carefully at their faces, especially the eyes.

Watch the way they look through and past you, the details they focus on and the things they turn away from, the things that bring a smile to their faces and the things that make it fade.

I see in my mind’s eye one particularly cagy executive whose smile looks as genuine as Christ until you wait for it to fade.

All genuine smiles are like the sun. They emerge at predictable times (a familiar face, a funny remark, a pleasant surprise), rise as a function of the intensity of the experience, reach a crescendo and then slowly recede and disappear. If they come unpredictably or without appropriate stimuli or if they stay longer than usual, something’s wrong. Some other motive is at play and you’d better watch your wallet.

The manipulator’s smile pops out full-blossomed whenever he spots an opportunity. It reaches its crescendo too fast. Then it stays. It’s forced to stay. The smile often shifts from the first object to the surroundings, but doesn’t fade regardless of what it sees. It may start to fade but then it re-climaxes, willed so by the smiler. All the while the eyes are playing about the object taking in every detail. They may look briefly away, but only because a snare is being set…a plan quickly hatched. Then the eyes come back, confirming the presence and desirability of the object, sweeping in ever more details.

This is all done quite unconsciously by the manipulator. They’re hard-wired this way. They will deny, to their dying breath, any malfeasance or untoward motives. But this is the way the human race is run from top to bottom. It is the nature of leadership.

Recent studies have confirmed it. Most of our leaders have more traits in common with psychopaths than with normal individuals.

In no arena has the race been more ill-served than in its leaders.

Miami 8

2012-02-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

I saw her in the picture of the stairs, framed there and frozen for the eternity of my short life in evanescent and angelic, windswept, star-entangled ether, gazing at some chocolate munchers in the kitchen. Come have a piece? a boy cried out. She bounded down the two remaining steps and brushed past me, not knowing that her image had, like Jacqueline at Jack’s pyre or Allende gazing up at the planes or Che in that revolutionary pose, been fixed forever and forever.

Miami 7

2012-02-05T07:48:00.000-08:00

Long live Original Sin!

Most people do not believe the old truism about human nature applies to them. What is it? That each of us is a hopeless jumble of subversive, tyrannous, lying, stealing, murdering sinfulness mixed in with saint-like generosity, selflessness, tenderness, nobility and compassion. And the mixture does not lie side by side like a yin and yang sign. It is more like Play-Doh after a child’s been at it for a while, a lump of colors all meshed and bled-together.

And it’s not just you and me who have such contradictory impulses, but Mother Teresa and the Dahlia Lama and the nicest, most loving person you know. Your mother, for example. Hitler and Saddam Hussein had as much of the good in them as any of the rest of us, unpopular though it may now be to say so.

(The more anathema a thing is to say at any time and place, the more likely it is to be true.)

And why is this important to recognize? Because none of us seem to do so. We all believe we’re mainly good and wholesome and honest (unless we happen to be clinically depressed and suicidal). And we seem to take for granted that the other guy’s got much move evil in him than good.

This universal deception has survival value. It builds self-confidence and that’s a key attribute that gets you through a particularly bitter winter; gets you off your duff and out to gather firewood or hunt bison; that makes you go for the prettiest girl instead of settling for Plain Jane. It also makes you wary of the competition, more keenly alert for deception or betrayal, less squeamish about dispatching your neighbor if it comes to that.

But it is not an objective view of reality, for it does not plumb the depths of men’s hearts. Therefore it is a dangerous deception, one that leads to disputes and litigation and wars and all other sorts of crimes. It also does not lead to good novels, for there is nothing more boring than a totally good man or an irredeemably vile one.

Marshall Frady once said of the novelist Jesse Hill Ford: ‘Like most who are authentically taken up into the obsession of writing, Ford…worked out of an older understanding of man—that primitive, profoundly reactionary, pagan vision in which virtually all true story-tellers have probably been working since Homer, which has evolved not an inch since Ecclesiastes: that the race is basically unimprovable…’

Miami 6

2012-02-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

Into Every Married Mind

When Zośka walked into the room, and I saw her for the first time, the sadness I was to know followed and enveloped her like a cloud.

She was a tall woman, tanned, poised and well-dressed—beautiful in that strange way the French call belle laide. She turned heads and was used to that.

She wore a cream satin dress with a broad Parisian belt and black designer shoes. The accessories were a small matching bag and an Italian scarf.

She was far from young, but her hair still caught the light luxuriantly.

It was the eyes that betrayed her.

I was able to guess (correctly it turned out) that she had traveled widely, had had children, probably girls, and took very good care of them and that love had seeped out of her marriage, frightening and confusing her. It was also obvious that she loved the sun.

Zośka smiled formally as she greeted the other doctors. She would exchange a few words but then seemed to tire and would step back and let the others banter.

My eyes could not leave her, though she had not yet seen me. She was with another woman, an older, stouter woman, and the two presently left the first clutch of guests and moved on to the next. Men stepped forward and shook Zośka’s hand first. Women cast glances back at her.

Was she arrogant or simply timid, no one could tell.

‘She’s a pediatrician,’ someone whispered, ‘and the older woman is the head of the Children’s Hospital.’

Zośka had auburn hair, cut in dégradé style. She moved with gliding steps. Her head was always high and she spoke softly. Her smile seemed distant. She dances well, I told myself, or is an accomplished horsewoman.

The older woman was something of a battle ax. She laughed loudly and seemed more a man than most of the other males present. Zośka though had a slim figure and her dress fit so perfectly I knew it must be handmade.

Much later, after I’d met the designer (who was to become one of Poland’s fashion leaders) and after the three of us had become much more than just friends, and I’d seen their bodies move in and out of so many lovely dresses, I remembered this moment and that satin dress with its perfect cut, her ballerina figure inside its caress and the large black belt they’d chosen to set it off.

Finally she arrived before us.

The eyes were a soft and reverent hazel as she held out her hand and said her first words. They were in English. Someone had tipped her off I wasn’t Polish. She quickly broke off my gaze and stepped aside for the other lady.

Zośka’s eyes, almonds in the center of a perfect forehead, were traitors. They had a Graves-like fright, a disarray in the otherwise perfect lattice of the irises.

‘My pleasure, pani-doctora,’ and I kissed the older lady’s outstretched hand, as the Poles will do.

Zośka was looking away, into the distance. I immediately wanted to comfort her. To sit with her and listen to her and let her cry.

They’d seated us next to each other at dinner. I took this as God rolling his dice.

A ballroom had been converted into the dining hall. We were some forty kilometers from Łódź.in a baroque château filled with statues and fountains and surrounded by stately parks. It sat at the end of a long gravel road, the only building of distinction in a squalid little town one street long.

All the town’s houses faced onto the street. All life seemed to be lived there, between its two rows of white birch. Children ran freely up and down and across, oblivious to the cars which passed at astonishing speeds. The street was just part of the road linking Łódź with Warsaw and most drivers probably had no idea it crossed a town. I saw several near-misses during my stay, each nearly stopping my heart. But the children and their parents took no special notice.

On the ballroom ceiling were sculptured angels playing amongst roses and grape vines, sexlessly provocative, their wings erect, the tips painted with feuilles d’or. The vines wound up through their legs and around their budding breasts. Eyes stared out at the heavens in frozen pleasure. I almost felt embarrassed to look up.

Across from us on the walls were tall dark paintings. Most were of Polish kings and noblemen. Each one seemed to be named Stanisław or something similar. Bolesław the Curly and Władysław the Spindleshanks. They were always with dogs and swords and magnificent horses, all looking at us with a dour and uber-serious gaze. Beautiful women stood beside the thrones—even that of Spindleshanks—their arms around dour children. One queen had eyes as sad as Zośka’s.

‘Do you have children?’

She seemed visibly relieved I’d broken the ice.

‘Yes, two girls. And you?’

‘A boy and a girl. What are their names?’

‘Angelica and Paulina.’

I laughed. ‘My youngest is named Pauline too.’

Warmth came into her face and she turned halfway towards me. ‘And your son?’

‘He’s Daniel. He’s six years older than Pauline. Sixteen and she’s ten.’

‘Mine are nineteen and three.’

‘You’ve got me beat on both ends.’

‘Angelica’s already away at university, so it’s like starting again.’

‘That takes courage.’

‘It’s easier the second time. I’m a children’s doctor, so I should be used to it.’

Soup was served. A creamy mushroom with thin white slices floating on the surface and bigger chunks towards the bottom.

‘Nas drovia,’ she said, raising her wine glass and looking up at the cherubs. There was clinking all around.

‘Smacznego!’ I said, smiling at her.

‘Bon appetit,’ she answered back.

I watched how she folded her left arm in her lap as she ate. She had the hands of a mother as well as a doctor. Hands that have held feverish children in the night and sewed lacerations without flinching. But still delicate and graceful.

I saw how she tasted the soup off the tip of the spoon. How she signaled me with her eyes that it was good. Neither arrogant nor timid, I concluded. Just sad.

And sad women have always been your downfall, I warned myself.

‘After all, children are the reason for our existence,’ she said, out of the blue.

‘The crown of life,’ I said, rather grandiosely, ‘but still there’s much more to life.’

Her face clouded. Now I felt sure about the husband. I too had known that feeling, to die for love and then see love die.

‘Yes, the crown of life,’ she repeated, looking away.

Then came the venison, a dessert and then the coffee.

Someone suggested a walk in the park. It was fall and the coats were brought out.

Zośka was immediately accosted by another doctor, an internist who had made quite a show of his vegetarianism. He’d eaten only the soup and, when the venison arrived, had chided the rest of us that animals should not eat other animals.

Everyone was offended. Someone suggested he go lecture lions if he felt so strongly about bestiality. Unfazed, he just laughed and lit a cigarette.

The internist turned out to be a great talker and Zośka, as I was to learn, was a very indulgent listener. He held her arm and whispered into her ear for the better part of the walk.

At one point the path turned left and we had a look back at the glowing lights of the château. Everyone was mesmerized. She saw her chance to make a break and thereby arrived by my side.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked her. Her lips seemed to be trembling.

‘Yes, a little. This coat is not made for long walks.’

‘Does the park go on much farther?’ I asked, wondering what the gravel was doing to her Italian shoes.

‘No, I don’t think so. We’ve reached the forest; soon we’ll turn back.’

‘Did he rebuke you for eating venison?’ I asked mischievously.

‘He was a bit drunk,’ she whispered, glancing over at the internist, ‘and he kept stepping on my toes.’ She tried not to laugh. I took her arm to steady her on the path. She looked like a schoolgirl in the reflected light.

‘I was thinking of our earlier conversation...’

‘Let me guess. You’re wondering about my children’s fathers. Yes, there were two of them. Angelica’s father left me when she was eight and then some years later I met S. Then Paulina came along. I thought we were too old, but those things happen. Tell me about your wife.’

I peered into the blackness and saw the tops of the trees looming ahead. We were at the forest’s edge. Until then we’d been on flagstones or packed gravel. But now the gravel had softened.

‘She and I don’t live together any longer. Not since Pauline was three. She fell in love with someone else. Now Pauline’s with her and Daniel’s with me.’

We both knew how that happened. Over time one or the other no longer brought tea on Sunday afternoons. No stoking pot on a platter onto which were piled chocolates and sugar and cream. No long talks and laughs about the kids and stolen kisses. Instead there became race cars and football and a scattered newpaper as he snoozed.

(Every death of love is the same.)

No more long kisses at the door before leaving for work.’

(Every unhappy marriage becomes unhappy by degrees.)

No more gazing at her intently, curiously, lovingly as she tells something she’s done or heard or finally found after so much looking.

(Only the details change.)

A few more steps and the group stopped. Someone spoke in Polish and everyone laughed. Then, almost like a herd of cattle, they turned to go back. She and I turned as well, bringing up the rear. She suddenly slipped in the gravel and her hand reached out for me. Righting her, I gave her my arm and quickly put my hand on hers so that she would leave it there.

We walked back that way, chatting softly about our children.

‘I think my son suffered most by the rupture.’

‘Angelica says she didn’t, but she doesn’t talk to S. the way she did to her father.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m over it. It took years, and for a long time I thought he was right. But I had good friends, and they helped me through it. Especially my best friend, a designer, the woman who made this dress.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Were you the one who left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I hope you didn’t tell her things.’

‘Like what?’

‘What he told me. That it was my fault. That he was leaving because of me.’

‘No I….’

‘Then one day love just isn’t there any more and you don’t feel anything.’

We walked in silence for a while, her hand tight around my arm. The chandeliers reflected on the water and seemed to glide past us like swans.

The beauty of the night turned our conversation lighter, more amusing. I asked her if the battle ax were married. ‘What?!’ and she almost stumbled from laughing. She asked about my patients and I told her of an Ethiopian I’d seen who was externally a male but internally a female.

Her arm was still in mine as we walked up the steps and through the double doors.

‘Do you want to sit by the fire and warm up?’ I asked her.

‘I need that.’

We ordered a pot of tea and propped our feet up on little stools, pointing them towards the fire. The night had been surprisingly cold and with the tea came warmth and comfort. We laughed together at the pomposity of the vegetarian. She told me about her young girl and the little chieftain she’d already become. We stayed chatting away comfortable and confident, as though we’d known each other for years, and soon an hour had passed. All the others were already up in bed.

‘I think I’d better go now,’ she finally said, ‘we have a full day tomorrow.’

‘Would you like another cup of tea beforehand?’

‘No, I’m a bit tired,’ she replied. ‘I worked all day and after that walk I’m ready for bed.’

She slipped her shoes back on and turned to say good night. She shook my hand formally. The eyes were as I’d not seen them before, shining and softly grateful. This time she held them fast to mine. I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it.

Then she was gone.

I stood there thinking of the moment. The moment when you ask whether you will cross a line. Whether you will resist the voice inside that says no, don’t be foolish. Whether she will let herself be taken.

I stood there thinking about her. Another premonition came: she loved the first moments of love. She believed in that moment as much I did. It was, as well, what one lived for. What also crowned life.

The next morning we went to Chopin’s house at Zelazowa Wola. I wanted to sit next to her on the ride but the older lady had already claimed that seat. As I passed them in the aisle they both greeted me formally and asked how I’d slept. Zośka told me through her smile that she was happy to see me, that we would see each other again. Her eyes held tight to mine.

The only seat left on the bus was next to the vegetarian. I plopped down.

He was a pudgy, unhealthy-looking specimen who began immediately trying to impress me with his mastery of English. I listened to the story of his trip to New York, his time at the Joslin Clinic, his fascination with a President I detested. Finally I closed my eyes and pretended to nap.

Just as we were leaving the bus he took me aside and whispered in my ear that I should be careful of Zośka. She’d slept with her university professor and had gotten her medical degree that way. ‘Such things were done in Communist time.’

I walked away from him. Bastard, I said under my breath, Assassin of lady’s names.

The rest of the day was lovely and musical (we had a private concert) but there was no chance to be alone with Zośka. Once or twice I caught her stealing a glance in my direction, and she must have felt that my eyes rarely left her. But she was always surrounded by animated conversationalists, and it was always in Polish.

Our goodbye at the end of the day was no different from the other goodbyes, all in a large huddle around a waiting bus. She slipped her card into my hand.

‘Can I call you?’ I asked, but she was too surrounded to answer. Into her eyes the sadness flooded back. A minute later the only thing I had of her was the business card and a view of the back of a bus.

I walked back to the château. I would spend that night there alone before flying out of Warsaw. She was back in Łódź, that strange, gray, moldy, Jewless city that once had been so magnificent.

End of Into Every Married Mind

Continued in Sweet Deceit Comes Calling
Ending with The Scent of Her Lingers

The Winner Takes It All

2012-02-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

Die Jungfrau, Gustav Klimt 1913

The Winner Takes It All

by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus

I don't wanna talk

About the things we've gone through

Though it's hurting me

Now it's history

I've played all my cards

And that's what you've done too

Nothing more to say

No more ace to play

The winner takes it all

The loser standing small

Beside the victory

That's her destiny

I was in your arms

Thinking I belonged there

I figured it made sense

Building me a fence

Building me a home

Thinking I'd be strong there

But I was a fool

Playing by the rules

The Gods may throw a dice

Their minds as cold as ice

And someone way down here

Loses someone dear

The winner takes it all

The loser has to fall

It's simple and it's plain

Why should I complain

But tell me does she kiss

Like I used to kiss you

Does it feel the same

When she calls your name

Somewhere deep inside

You must know I miss you

But what can I say

Rules must be obeyed

The judges will decide

The likes of me abide

Spectators of the show

Always staying low

The game is on again

A lover or a friend

A big thing or a small

The winner takes it all

I don't wanna talk

If it makes you feel sad

And I understand

You've come to shake my hand

I apologize

If it makes you feel bad

Seeing me so tense

No self-confidence

But you see

The winner takes it all

Girlfriends, Gustav Klimt 1907

Miami 5

2012-02-04T05:11:00.000-08:00

She had a very distinctive walk, a very forceful swing of the arms, her slender white legs pumping to keep up.

I recently found a picture of her. She is facing the camera but her eyes glance to the side as if she’s spied someone. Her lips are pressed together in a sly smile as if to say, you got me that time but I get you back. She loved to be teased. It made her feel loved without getting too close, without unwelcome intimacies.

The picture is her. Hair blond and windswept. Eyes alive and vulnerability. A need for self-assurance. A love for children.

I loved you desperately

with one of those now hopeless loves

that women throw themselves from windows for

I loved you sadly

as one loves a country

dreamed of for a lifetime though never seen

I loved you madly

in anger, cursing out your name

which I would wipe from ledgers for all time

And in my loving you

in every moment through the years

from which you were the only thought I had

I made the first acquaintance

with my life, with doubt, with pain

with poisoned words and struggles to explain

It’s easy now to think of loving you

strange how such sad and desperate things

can later sign a treasoned peace with one’s own soul

A wild and untamed thing

this love for you which only comes in dreams

though one unknowing sleeps beside me in my bed

ere past my eighteenth year

I loved you, forty years now flown

there is no changing in the time that’s passed…no passing really

I write, I think, I see

with the same eyes as on you lay that day

and love you still with all that distant desperation

The other day I called your name

passing a pretty corner of my town

along a rainy avenue in Paris you came back

Your old green coat

your girl-without-a-father’s eyes

your orphan-out-of-Africa strange weariness

And once again

I loved you desperately

Another of those silly hopeless loves…

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.” Song of Solomon 8:6,7.

The Day Before You Came

2012-02-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

Die Tänzerin, Gustav Klimt 1916-18

The Day Before You Came

by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus

I must have left my house at eight because I always do

My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due

I must have read the morning paper going into town

And having gotten through The Editorial, no doubt I must have frowned

I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine

With letters to be read and heaps of papers waiting to be signed

I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so

The usual place, the usual bunch

And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained

The day before you came

I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two

And at the time I never even noticed I was blue

I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day

Without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away

At five I must have left, there's no exception to the rule

A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school

The train back home again

Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then

Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame

The day before you came

Must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so

And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go

I'm sure, I had my dinner watching something on TV

There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see

I must have gone to bed around a quarter after ten

I need a lot of sleep and so I like to be in bed by then

I must have read a while

The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style

It's funny but I had no sense of living without aim

The day before you came

And turning out the light I must have yawned

And curled up for yet another night

And rattling on the roof, I must have heard the sound of rain

The day before you came

Danae, Gustav Klimt 1907

Miami 4

2012-02-04T04:14:00.000-08:00

Sixties in Due West

Life as a young teen was not always dreariness and religion. There were always sports. My favorites were basketball, golf and baseball. I could use my height and quickness on the court and at first base. Through golf I escaped to a private realm that was both bucolic and soothing. I could forget the world around me. It deserved forgetting.

There were weeks in the late 60’s when the losses in Vietnam were appalling. Every night I saw the boys writhing on stretchers as they were hoisted onto choppers. In 1968 Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and I felt it almost physically. China was stabbing itself to death in its worship of a megalomaniac. Then they shot Robert Kennedy.

That morning I had promised to mow our principal’s lawn. It was a huge lawn and, with my push mower, usually took four hours. Everyone I knew in the South had always hated the Kennedys, including my parents. I had to keep my admiration under wraps. He’d been shot during the night, in Los Angeles. He was dead when I woke up.

Bobby Kennedy was going to end Vietnam. He would stop the slide into chaos. He might heal the racial bitterness and help young people find meaning again. And now he lay cold in an LA morgue.

The principal’s wife brought me out a glass of lemonade. She asked me if I’d heard the news. I said I had and turned away. Something was welling up. I pretended I had sweat in my eyes. She asked if I wanted to come inside. We sat down and looked at the television. There was nothing to say or do. It was all bla-bla. He wasn’t coming back and America would never be the same.

I hasn’t been.

My basketball coach was a screamer. He would lose all control and yell at the top of his lungs in front of the crowd at any offending player on his team. He would scream full in the face when he thought you’d made an unforced error. The abuse was so brazenly that people began to accept it as a normal mode of coaching. But it was painful to be on the receiving end. One of the reasons Ben Lippen was such a relief was it meant no more of him.

Curiously, some years later on summer break from college, I got a job working for a construction company. We were to build the new high school in Due West at which the same coach had just been named principal. He was still young and vigorous at the time and decided to come out and work with us digging trenches and pouring foundations. I took the occasion to speak to him of Christ and this unleashed the most hysteric tirade I’d ever heard from him.

Apparently I’d been his hope for a winning team. He’d invested three years in me and then, between my sophomore and junior year, I cut out on him, go to some highfalutin missionary school and then come back after it’s over and talk to him about Jesus and His love…now that’s just fucking rich!

Such was the hellhole from which I emerged.

To outsiders Due West must look quite charming. There are rolling hills. There’s a small college with a campus that takes you back to the days before the Civil War. The girls’ dorm is built in plantation style. Statues of Southern heroes are scattered about.

In the 60’s there was a small post office and a drug store with a jukebox and a soda jerk. Inside you could get Coca-Cola floats made by hand while waiting for a prescription. Across the street was a country doctor with a waiting room that was always full. His manner was somewhat gruff but he was a good diagnostician and was loved and trusted.

There was a small golf course connected with the college and located in the center of town. It was there that I learned to play. I was out on it almost every afternoon between the ages of 13 and 16. It had only six holes, all par-three, ranging from 90 to 210 yards. Adjacent to the course were tennis courts and, across campus, an outdoor swimming pool and an indoor gymnasium.

Surrounding the town were small farms and subdivisions of trailers where the poor lived. The glitterati—and such towns always have their handful—lived in pre-Civil War splendor in large antebellum homes set back from the Main Street. They had huge yards filled with ancient oaks and maples. The mansions all had open porches with columns and gables on the upper floors. Here lived professors, businessmen and, of course, the local clergy. Most of the houses had been in the same family for generations.

My uncle was police superintendent in the town. There was only one deputy to superintend and no crime. The two spent their time patrolling the sleepy campus and flirting with the girl who made Coke floats. You never heard their siren unless someone had had a finder-bender backing out of a drive. My uncle had four beautiful daughters who epitomized southern charm. They could sing, draw, write and tease. They were the prettiest girls in town and, of course, off limits since they were my cousins.

I biked or walked to school every day. I always managed to get study hall as my last class of the day and would walk home early to catch some uncensored television. The World Turns was the soap opera of the day and I sneaked a peak most afternoons. People listened a lot to the crooners of the day, Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. My favorite was Perry Como. My brother and I shared a bedroom.

The only conversation about sex I ever had was with my mother. For some reason she got worried that some man might put his hand on my leg. If it ever happened I was to get up immediately and never sit next to him again. Such men were sick and would make me sick too. She repeated this three times, and looked searchingly into my eyes to see if I’d got it. It all seemed so stupid and improbable that I wondered if she blown a gasket.

There was never a word about conception, desire, intercourse, masturbation or homosexuality. Wet dreams, or the normal process in which hormones lead one into adolescence, was also unmentioned. When I began to feel attraction to a girl I had to ask my best friend Moffett if it was normal.

He said it was, but that I would get over it.

Miami 3

2012-02-04T01:18:00.000-08:00

1967

Our lives were intimately tied up with a little church in the near wilderness of the deep South. Asseville Baptist. To this place we drove three times a week: Wednesday night for prayer meeting, Sunday morning for the main service and Sunday evening for a more informal one. The ride was an hour and a half roundtrip and the services lasted from an hour and a half (Wednesday) to three hours (Sunday morning). So you could say that our lives were quite wrapped up in this little congregation. Eleven hours a week it consumed, without counting the time dressing up or preparing our Bible lessons.

The building was a tall structure, shaped much like the churches drawn by children. It was made of wood, sat off the ground on brick columns and had a tall slender steeple with slatted openings which birds scurried in and out of in springtime. The whole of it was painted white, including the bricks. There wasn’t a trace of other color to trim or set it off. It sat in its white purity in a picturesque grove of pecan trees at the top of a hill. You approached it by a one-lane road that wound its way through green alfalfa fields.

Inside it smelled of shellac and wood smoke, for it was heated by a huge chimney set in the middle of the worship area. The chimney had once been embedded in the center wall of this former antebellum mansion, but the wall had been removed leaving nothing but the fireplace. The wood floor sagged and was pitted by cinders that blew out of the chimney whenever the wind was up. The whole of the place was wood and it was a perfect fire trap.

At every service, there would be singing and the taking up of an offering. Sunday morning service always ended with an ‘Invitation’. The pastor would invite anyone who was either unsaved (in the Baptist sense of the term) or had backslidden (again, consult Baptist dictionary) or had other burdens weighing down their soul to come to the altar, kneel and confess. What in a Catholic church is done so privately even the priest doesn’t see the confessor, is here performed before the prying eyes of friend and foe.

Kneeling beside the sinner, the pastor will pray with him, reciting his sins out loud. By the time they rise to their feet and announce to the congregation what has happened, the existential problem will had been solved. This takes a while if the sins are many or the sinner long-winded. So we sing on, waiting for the kneelers to get back on their feet. There are Sundays when we go through all the stanzas in ‘Just As I Am’ five times.

But another soul has been saved, praise the Lord. These things are all-important in the Baptist faith. In fact, a pastor or lay worker (a member of the laity who spends time trying to save souls and is therefore known as a ‘fisher of men’) will keep a careful count of souls he’s led to Christ, much like soldiers keep body counts and fighter pilots, their number of ‘kills’. God, of course, is keeping count, but it never hurts to have a back-up tally.

Occasionally one would get a real shock. Someone who’d been in the church for years, even a lay worker with a solid record of fished-men, would come to the altar and confess they’d never really been saved. The story would usually be that in a moment of weakness he’d sneaked a sip of beer or smoked a cigarette or gotten in a fight with his wife and then suddenly realized he might be a lost sinner after all and never really believed in Jesus. How fragile and ambiguous this ‘saved’ experience must be that even veteran soul-savers are tormented by doubt and accept Christ as Savior again and again to be sure. Hell fires were too tormenting to take chances.

(In my years as a doctor I’ve seen that these people die poorly. The fear mounts right up to the end.)

These Invitations were the most psychologically traumatizing moments of my youth. My brother and sister and I, and even my parents, were of a mental cast that prevented us from ever going forward. To do so would be to admit that we as missionaries were not a model of Christian behavior, were not walking with the Lord, were not in communion with the body of Christ. It was inconceivable to admit such a fatal weakness.

And yet the appeals were so emotion laden that guilt hung over every head. The music beckoning you to confession. If you stayed in your place you were haughty. High ‘n mighty, as they’d say. Everyone knew we were professionals, college-educated, white collar. The only ones there. Not coming forward was putting ourselves above the farmers and millhands and single mothers around us. The pastor’s plea was ‘humble yourself and come to Jesus’. Staying put we were not only denying our own sinfulness but insulting the working class.

But we stayed put…out of sheer cussedness. In the breast of all five of us there churned this contradicting, excruciating ambivalence. But we didn’t budge. I was an emotional wreck afterwards.

Apart from the Invitations, the sermons themselves were not bad. The pastor was a rather handsome second-generation Italian immigrant named Frank. His father was also Frank, also a pastor. Little Frankie and his beautiful buxom wife had a handsome olive-skinned little boy, Frankie the Third.

The Frankie gang always seemed friendly and kind, had us to their home for dinner, let us use their pool. But they turned vile and threatening at Invitation time, waiting, along with everyone else, to see if the Strauss family would stay in their seats or come forward with their heads bowed. I remember on two occasions I finally did break down and go forward. It only took a second of weakness. After taking that first step you can’t turn round.

I only confessed to backsliding. That’s as much as they’d get out of me.

One of these occasions corresponded with the 1967 Six Day War. During that extraordinary week we were having our annual revival, meaning we went to church every evening and there was an Invitation every night. Each day's political events in the Middle East were dissected by Pastor Frank and fitted into his apocalyptic vision of the end of the world. It was necessary for Israel to attain certain military objectives in order for the prophesies of the Book of Revelations to be fulfilled. The battle of Armageddon would then ensue.

Those objectives were being achieved, according to Preacher Frankie, every day in front of our eyes with breathtaking speed. And this could only mean that the second coming of Christ was imminent. Everyone who was not saved, not absolutely sure he was saved, should come forward immediately. It might be only minutes before the end.

Only thirteen, awkward, tormented at school, ignored at home—I was not a difficult subject to spook and, in the troughs of this panic, I went forward. I had been feeling such trepidation during the six days of that nasty war, fearing that Christ would come at any minute and I’d be lost, that I couldn’t sleep at night.

My parents knew nothing of these fears, though the climate of the times might have given them clues. When a pastor claims the world might end before the service ends, it stands to reason children will be frightened. If anything they aided and abetted the hysteria that was afoot those days.

It didn't end, of course, but the neural traces remain deeply carved in the fear centers.

Fear-mongering has been a standard ploy in churches for generations, since the time of the Anabaptists and the Great Awakening. Indeed it goes back to the catacombs of the early church. It works, especially with the young and vulnerable, even though there was no second coming, no Armageddon, no crumbling of the world as we knew it.

But their little shenanigans took its toll on my stored capital of belief. Seeds had been sown.

Miami 2

2012-02-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

Winning when it’s stacked against you

There was no settling in this family. No oasis. Removed from the war in the tropics we plunged directly into a hellhole in the South. The only glimmer I saw was my grandparents, but their Great Gatsby life was inaccessible to us of little money.

All the evil that has been written about the deep South, with none of the charm or culture, was to be found in that hellhole. A prejudice against all things foreign. Willful stupidity that rated intelligence as an effeminate, unnecessary trait. The glorification of gladiator sports. The rigidness of the fundamentalist. The turmoil of the sexual revolution in a proto-Victorian mindscape.

My intellect was my biggest handicap. It was apparently too obtrusive for the taste of my classmates. I was not afraid to speak out in class and usually knew the answers, and that set the other students’ teeth on edge. (As well it should, except that no one had told me I should shut up and play dumb like everyone else.) Tacks began to appear in my desk and had the disturbing habit of ending up in my bottom whenever I sat down. Spitballs had the same fondness for my face.

It was just the opposite at Ben Lippen. There were only curious looks to see who this upstart was. In history class we read the original papers of the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss case. I knew instinctively what the political and psychological issues were, and why it was important we understand them. It was our window into the Cold War. The dark underbelly of America.

The teacher, a mustachioed man with droopy eyes not unlike those of Alger Hiss, was so delighted that he forgot himself and began lecturing at me directly. Later, catching himself, he decided to stop me from answering questions in class until the others had had a chance to think through the issues. ‘I can’t have this lesson turning into a one-man shop’ he explained to me privately. Then he plunged into an hour-long exposition of why he thought Hiss was lying, knowing I would be the only one who’d listen to it.

But it was just the tonic I needed.

I finally felt alive again.

Miami 1

2012-02-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

If it was Miami, it must have been Donna. Hurricane Donna blew in just as we were about to fly out to the Dominican Republic. We hunkered down in a Miami bungalow belonging to the West Indes Mission and promptly were all struck down with diarrhea. Donna still holds the record for retaining major hurricane status (Category 3 or greater) for the longest period of time, nine days, September 2 to September 11. I’ll let Wikipedia tell the rest:

Donna left a path of destruction across the entire peninsula of Florida, including destroying 30% of the state's grapefruit crop and leveling over half of the mangrove trees in the Everglades. Donna was the most damaging tropical cyclone to impact Florida up to that time. At least 364 people were killed. The day after the storm hit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared a disaster area from the Keys up to Central Florida. Because of its devastating impacts and the high mortality associated with the hurricane, the name Donna was retired, and will never again be used for an Atlantic hurricane.

The diarrhea was explosive and no one had the strength to even walk. We crawled, one after the other, to the bathroom—often not making it in time—for days on end. My brave mother succeeded in staying afoot long enough to boil some potato soup which we slurped down in agony. No sooner was it in than it re-emerged. My sole memory of those days consists of that: howling winds shaking the house and rain blowing horizontal out the window and us crawling pitifully across a shiny hardwood floor towards the toilet.

I can imagine the nervous excitement in my family as we all emerged from the devastation of Hurricanes Dysentery and Donna. We were three children by then: my sister, two years old; my brother, five; and me, seven. I had finished first grade four months earlier and had been held out of the opening of second, while we made our way to what must have seemed the end of the earth at some moments and the Great Adventure at others.

I remember sheets of corrugated tin roofing hurling through the air during the height of the storm. A man was out, bent nearly double, with his raincoat blown over his head, being dragged down the street by the wind. He was still on two feet but he couldn’t stop his movement. Passing a telephone pole which was leaning at 45 degree angle he caught his arms around it. The sheet was heading straight for him. We watched fascinated. Something in me wanted to see him cut in half. I wanted to see blood spurt. I wondered how long the legs would hold up his torso if the head were suddenly severed. I was almost disappointed when the sheet changed its angle, gained altitude and soared over the pole. The man’s grip weakened and the last we saw of him he was sliding down the street on his bottom disappearing into a black swirl of water in the distance.

It was noontime but the streets were pitch black. There was no electricity. There was no water (which made flushing our foulness down the toilet impossible). Fortunately my father had thought to fill both bathtubs with water before the storm struck and from this we drank and cooked for the better part of a week. The highest winds are around the eye, but the storm surge came before and the torrential rains came after. Tornados came throughout. We could see them forming for days out on the water. Spouts we thought would suck the bay dry. Several came crashing around us, and they were more frightening than the sustained winds of the hurricane. They were unpredictable with the winds coming form everywhichaway and our ears popping as they passed over.

A body floated in the street behind our house. We thought at first it was the man, but later we saw that it was wearing a skirt. They said it was an old lady from up the way who went crazy during the first wild night Donna made land and went running out into the teeth of the storm. Mom wouldn’t let us gawk at her too long. A man went swimming out to it, once the winds had died down, and poked it with a stick. I guess he wanted to make sure it was dead. They came later with a police dingy and fished her out. Almost turned the dingy over getting her aboard. Finally a police diver went in and hoisted her up. She was all swollen up by then. We watched from another window when Mom wasn’t looking.

Everything was messed up in Florida for a long time after that. Our departure was delayed while they cleaned up the airports. Dad took me with him to some church outside of Miami where there was only sand underfoot. It was a country church and all I remember was being frightened by the preacher. He said things about the United Nations and a man called John Birch and that we had to do something soon or they’d plum take us over. He told us what they’d do to us when they took us over and that was kinda scary and then he told us what we had to do to keep them from taking us over and that was scary too. I remember riding back in Dad’s car and asking him about it and he said there were a lot of crazies in Florida and that that man was one of them. And I asked him why we had to ask for money from people like that and he said that’s what missionaries did, they went around asking for money.

It was often like that when I went to churches across the south with him. The church people were always kind. They offered me iced tea and fried chicken and lemon meringue pie but most of the preachers were unhinged.

Columbia 11

2012-02-03T01:22:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

My Dad was a Canadian…he was delicate as a man. Africa was just too wild for him. I think he knew he would die there. My mother says he could never dress for the place. He never wore short trousers or a missionary hat. He always dressed up, always impeccable.

How did he meet your mother?

She was American. They met at a Bible class. He was the teacher. It was his first time teaching and there were almost all women in the class. Mom says several of them were prettier than she, although I don’t believe it. She’s so beautiful in her pictures from back then.

Still is, from the pictures I’ve seen.

But she won him!

How?

Why do you want to know?

Might work on you.

She smiled at me, her eyes slightly narrowing.

She invited him for lunch with her parents. They were missionaries too. My granddad was a veteran of China. He took my Dad along to a few of his meetings. He would show magic lantern slides of the old coolies and the women with their bound feet. He was so conversational, and he knew all the old stories—Hudson Taylor and the pioneers of the China Island Mission. You always felt like you were chatting by a fireside with him. I think it was Granddad who won him for Mom, and, of course, her home cooking.

Was he far from home?

Saskatchewan. He’d left for Bible school at 18 and then both his parents got killed in a motoring accident. He never went back. He and Mom married and were in Africa before either of them was 21.

We walked on a little further…

Africa will always be only at a half-step from my thoughts…

She looked away at the river beneath us. It holds my father’s bones.

I knew when she talked of him she was in another world so I only listened.

It’s so complicated a place…he loved it but he never fit…my mother fits, she’s never left…she’ll be buried next to him…they’ve probably come further faster than any other continent…in only fifty years they’ve come from the Stone Age to where we were in 1900…we never give them credit for that…you should see pictures of him in a pin-stripped dandy suit surrounded by naked kids…it was a sunstroke that did it…what else, of course…he hated pith helmets…the missionaries still wore them when he first went out…he couldn’t stand looking at one…reminded him of Leopold II in Congo…Mother was more reasonable…cotton dresses, no nylons…we kids always wore sandals and the windows were always open…we lived in a place of winds, a picture book of Africa as one might imagine it…the land falling away in three slopes…huge acacia trees and a large veranda…even some Southern plantations would envy it…of course there were the mosquitoes and some years the crops failed…but there were no wars and no wild animals…just nothing but peace and beautiful black people…whenever I go back I’m always shocked at the silence of the place…no noises for hours except for the chickens pecking…and not even that in the hot hours…the modern world has just passed it by…but we did have a radio…Dad only played it in the rainy season…he didn’t want to waste petrol on the generator…the rainy season meant floods and he had to go pick up people in his canoe…we were on some of the highest ground in Niger…it’s a desert country you know…only a half a heartbeat away…that’s how I feel it.

We walked on a little further…

Two Christmas’s ago we skied across a large part of Saskatchewan.

Cross-country?

Yea, ski du fond. It’s the best place in the world for it.

Who did you go with?

My cousins. One of them is an instructor and he organized it. We did about 30k a day and stayed in any house we found along the way. That’s the way it is in Saskatchewan in winter. No one will turn away a skier. They almost fall over themselves to pamper you. Hot baths and saunas and homemade soups. I took a lot of pictures.

She handed me the album.

How deep was the snow?

The drifts were over your head but we stayed on routes that were already packed down. They have a lot of snowmobiles and we occasionally met mushers and their sleigh dogs. That was fun, playing with the huskies.

I saw one of her rolling in the snow with six dogs licking and frolicking about.

You couldn’t go on unpacked snow except with snowshoes, and we could never have made 30k a day hors piste.

Were you tired at the end of the day?

Exhausted, but in that really wonderful way, feeling healthy and refreshed. I also trekked in the Sahara and its strange how similar that is to Saskatchewan. The same feeling at the end of the day. And the eagerness to get started the next morning.

What did you think about on the way?

We didn’t talk too much. We just looked around us. You get in a rhythm and it’s trancelike. You don’t feel the aching in your muscles. You just go along dreamily until someone says it’s time to stop for lunch and you realize you’re starving.

But what occupied your mind?

Everything. Nothing. My father, of course. My mother in Africa. What I was going to do with my life. The eagles. We saw so many eagles, and it was weird when they circled over us. We must have been near their nests, since we saw thousands. They’re nowhere near extension. It’s interesting you should ask about what I thought? It’s true I never reflected on it. My mind was so relaxed, so much at one with the world around. I think it was almost like going back in the womb…blissful, unconscious…

We walked on a little further…

Columbia 10

2012-02-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

Ben Lippen

We listened totally engrossed to Doc day after day. We always left the chapel and walked down the slope to our classes feeling slightly shell-shocked. Wondering how we’d ever live up to the challenge he’d set for us, but feeling privileged for having been set it. This was remarkable for an adolescent audience in the 1960s.

We were passing from the 60s to the 70s with all the upheavals of 1968 and its surrounding years. We were in the worst of Vietnam. The Cultural Revolution was ravishing China and the counter-culture was rocking schools and campuses across the world. But ours was a small private high school in North Carolina, Christian to a fault. Revolutionarily Christian, a city of light on a hill over Asheville. But the counter-culture seeped in like a poisonous fog, like a breath of fresh air…for it was both.

We felt its freedom. The music spoke to us. The beat was in time with something primeval in every breast, especially of the young. And they handled it wisely—the faculty. They let the best of it in but tried to spare us from its excesses. Drugs and sex and rock-n-roll were out. But the new thinking was in. We read it, discussed it…and there was margin for different opinions.

The proof is that many of us from Ben Lippen retain a revolutionary outlook forty years on, while those who reveled in the revolution were either devastated by it or sold out later.

Most of the students were from missionary parents and a missionary kid is either a tiny version of the original or a rebel out to remake the world. The former constituted the bulwark of the school, a solid cadre of convinced soldiers of Christ. Confident, athletic, squeaky clean, polyglots. Comfortable in their skin, as the French say. Then there were the rest of us.

It was in this atmosphere, rarefied and elite though Spartan, that I made my first acquaintance with her. When I see pictures of her now she seems such a little girl. So innocent and timid, pale with skin so transparent you could see the blue veins coursing beneath. But in her eyes there is already the determined unshakable faith of her fathers.

She was scrappy and indomitable, but with an air of loneliness about her; everyone knew she’d lost her own father from a sun stroke. Everyone knew she had no self-pity and wouldn’t stand for anyone fussing over her, that she was cheerful and loyal to her missionary family, but still she had the look of someone who’d lost North on their compass.

Yet she had more radiance than any other girl. There was humor. She came alive when she was teased. For me it was a breath of life I’d never known before. Until then I'd known the dust of a tropical wasteland. Tuberculosis and a civil war, and the despair of a father who failed at his ultimate vision. The desperation of a young wife saddled with three children in a life she could not live and in a place she could scarcely understand.

Columbia 9

2012-02-02T23:53:00.000-08:00

Ben Lippen

We have two classes before 10.30 and then it’s chapel. English, World History and then God. First we sing. A member of the senior class leads it. There’s a piano if it’s a hymn, guitars if it’s a ballad. Then someone is called on to pray. It could be anyone. You have to pray out loud and extemporaneously. Everyone must be prepared to give it a go. Hearts pound. The silence is unbearable. A name is called. It isn’t me. You breathe again.

The announcements follow and are usually about sports since we are quite a renowned soccer school. After that the headmaster will speak unless there is a guest speaker.

Doc’s talks are so memorable I can still bring them back, words and feelings—especially feelings, forty years later.

You can deliver any message, even Jeremiah, if the people know you love them. Doc loved us. He smiles and scans across his audience before he says the first word. His eyes squint as he looks out. Sometimes he shades them from the spotlights with his hand. He’s lost his wife to cancer this last year. She left him with four children to raise. In his now empty bedroom, those eyes have cried him into tenderness. This man. This oak of God. This sternness turned to tenderheart. This bulwark against the flood of all the 60’s—poised to engulf his flock of teens—now philosophic, almost bemused.

You will all, he begins, wake up one morning and find that everything you’ve ever built has come crashing down to dust. It may be that you’ve been betrayed by your best friend. It may be that the church you built has been burnt down. It may be that after a lifetime of translating the Scriptures, you are being kicked out of the country just as you’re about to publish. Or it may be that, as in my case, you wake up one morning and realize you are now without the one person you loved most in your life.

This will happen to all of you, at some time in your life, make no mistake. None of us is spared. And how you react to this tragedy will be the measure of your character as a follower of Christ. That is why you’re here at Ben Lippen. That is what we want for each of you: to be prepared for such a moment and to face it triumphantly because of the principles you learned first here. Ben Lippen is proud of its great soccer team, but that is not why we’re here. We couldn’t be prouder of your SAT scores and the fact that almost all of you will go on to great colleges, but that’s not our final mission. If we have not prepared you for those moments when it all comes crashing down we have not done our job.

For those of us sitting under the gaze of this man, under his aura, under these burning words, it could never be forgotten.

Unperfect Actor

2012-02-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's 23:

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

In an excess of feeling—fear, distrust, weakness, tongue-tiedness—love is still-born. Recourse thus to the written word and to what silent love hath writ.

Flakes have fallen now for forty years, obliterating the landmarks. Great masses of love can’t be hid but edges disappear. She is a sandstone statue worn gentle and pudgy-nosed by the wind and rain.

I want to protect her against me…even today. I know the consequences. That, and not temerity perhaps, forced me to hold my hand. I never have been a wall flower…yes, that’s the trick.

God held the hand of Abraham when raised over Isaac. She is the God of the last-minute, and only the lost know Her mysterious ways.

I saw her on the altar, face framed in fagots and wild roses. Her golden hair all tangled up in briarwood. Her child-like face staring at the dagger of God’s loving will and, as it reached its apogee, She reached out and stayed my hand.

The channel of my happiness was her martyrdom. Her happy sort cost me a sea of tears. Thy will be done, on Earth and Mount Moriah. I’d bound her hand and foot upon the altar, but angels brought a ram and set her free. A ram will butt and bite and ram. A ram is utter-less and serves only for eating. Once eaten one remembers what one’s lost.

On her unmangled body I spread my cloak of loving forgetfulness. From her unspilt blood I claim remission of sins. On her faithfulness I seek atonement for my profligacy. Her moans of marital bliss are celestial chansons, provoking the heavenly hosts to sexless copulation. Each paid for by my crucifixion.

I’ve never heard her moan, never undressed her. I never touched her face nor stroked her hair. Never even laid on a hand.

The trapdoor of my telltale heart is jammed. It’s blocked with raven’s down and nevermores.

Your Rock

2012-02-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Here’s another one for your collection.

It came from the top of Montgo, at the easternmost tip of Spain, where it juts out into the Mediterranean. On a map you’ll see it as that pointy thing between Valencia and Alicante. In 1955 a British plane crashed into it. The pilot thought he’d follow the coast down from Barcelona to Gibraltar and didn’t count on something as intrusive as Montgo rising up out of the sea. At the beginning of the 10th century the Moorish Caliph, Abd ur Rahman the Third, made a special trip from Cordoba to collect over a hundred medicinal herbs from the slopes of Montgo. There are 650 species of flora and eight species of birds of prey.

The reason I know all this trivia is that I wrote the Wikipedia entry for Montgo. And because it looms over my home in Javea like a huge, craggy, nosy aunt. I should say ‘trunky’ aunt, since Montgo has the most astonishing resemblance to an elephant. You couldn’t have sculpted a more exacting likeness. It rivals Mount Rushmore for detail, and that was made by man.

It’s not just that it has an eye like an elephant or a forehead and a trunk; it’s that the eye has a perfectly elephantine shape with a lid to match and that the eye blinks languidly just like an elephant in the afternoon sun. And then there’s the texture and color of the forehead with its pachydermian wrinkles and the fact that the trunk slopes down into the sea as if it were sucking water up for a bath.

In case you know someone who’s a total nerd and gets into this sort of thing, I’ll attach the Wikipedia link here.

I trekked up Montgo this morning. Started at seven and was up and down again—a couple of sweaty liters lighter—at ten. Three hours. That’s the same time I took to climb it in the blaze of summer a couple of years ago, so I must have slowed down a step or two after all.

I wish you’d have been there to climb her with me. We’d have had to walk for a mile or so from the place we left our car to the base where we start the climb. That’s a good thing. The walk towards the mountain gives you the most gobsmacking look at her and serves to scare away the faint-hearted, which probably means fewer helicopter rescues for the local crew. You walk towards her like a matador towards a bull. She rises up as if to say, how dare you! And the walk back on level ground after you’ve conquered her is a just reward after doing battle with her rugged, razor-sharp, lunar surface.

Anyway I wish you’d been there. It was pitch black when I started out. She was white in the setting moon, her crags bleeding deep grey rockslides. I was already half way up her northeast slope when the sky began to lighten. In minutes the landscape below me had come alive. Undulating folds of blue pine, the golden sheen of Denia, the smoky hills of the Bernia range and the rocky peaks of Marina Alta. And beyond all this the sea. A vast indigo fringed with purple trim spreading out forever.

There is no feeling like being alone on a mountain at daybreak.

Montgo is sacred. Even people who believe in no god know that. You can’t live near her without feeling her presence constantly. There’s nothing like her. Nothing around her but a vast plain. She has the whole of this part of the world to herself.

Montgo seen from the Arenal of Javea

When the sun sets and you see her blink and a white shroud envelops her top and swirls down like a veil and then rolls back and uncovers her head and the eye opens again and you feel its gaze on your neck, you know you are in the presence of the divine.

I wish you were there.

For the better part of an hour you’re switchbacking higher and higher, stepping from one large rock to another, trying to avoid the loose gravel in between so as not to slip or become entrapped. Then suddenly, you’re out on a ledge and there’s nothing below but air for miles and miles. Javea lies before you like a sleeping girl.

Then the trail turns sharp right and sharply up. Here you become a climber. Here hands are just as important as feet. You grip the granite and pull yourself up. The trail has disappeared. Or rather there are many alternatives up and none looks any easier than the other. Here is where the faint of heart fall back. The higher you go the easier, meaning the harder it gets. Because it’s harder you know you can’t go back. Everyone knows it’s more difficult to descend a mountain than to climb.

Hand over hand, testing each foothold.

It’s this way for the last hundred and fifty meters to the summit.

I wish you’d been there when I topped out. If you had I would have taken you in my arms and given you the kiss of your life. It would have been our first, and probably last, but we’d have remembered it. If not hypoxic from the climb, you would have been from that kiss.

But at the top and without our kiss, I began looking for your rock. I knew what I wanted. It would have the shape of an elephant’s head, with an eye and a lid to boot and a sloping forehead with wrinkles. And it would be the half of another rock which you could someday look for and fit together if you ever climbed Montgo with me.

This rock must exist and I looked for it. I knew it had waited seventy million years on the top of Montgo for this moment and wouldn’t miss its date. Across all those millennia, since being thrust up by some tectonic evisceration, it had weathered storm and earthquake and bird shit waiting for my touch.

And there it was! There at my feet! I kicked it free from its twin and blew the dust from its bottom and saw its eye wink and its forehead wrinkle. I kissed it for both of us, slid it into my pocket and started down.

And here it is!

Waking in Barcelona

2012-01-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

There are few cities I prefer to be in as she awakes than Barcelona.

This morning I did what I always do here, run at six AM down to the port and back. Wherever I’m staying I always manage to find my way to Plaça de Catalunya, run directly over the star in the center and then head down the Ramblas to the statue of Columbus.

At the top of the Ramblas you always find the all-nighters walking off their drinks and at the bottom, the prostitutes still stalking for tricks. In the middle is the market where everyone is hustling in their fish and fruit and whatnots.

I pass a couple twice, going down and then back up. She’s huddled in his arms, a furry parka against the cold, with the hood almost covering her head. She’s young and pretty and in love. They’ve been out all night and she’s done for. She leans her sleepy head on his chest and his left arm holds her up as they walk. Her eyes are closed. Her long, blond curls tumble out of the parka. You barely see her face. She’s an angel. She looks like my daughter. He’s tall with a kindly face. He looks like my son.

I’m down and back in the hotel in half an hour, nearly a record, and probably too fast for a 58-year old. I’m sweating even though this is the last day of January. I hang up my clothes to dry. My meetings start at nine and the things won’t be dry by then. But anything’s better than nothing and I hate to stuff wet running clothes in my luggage.

A long shower, shave and a quick check of The Guardian on line. The usual. I close my Mac Air. Breakfast in this hotel is 15 euros, and even though the company will pay for it, I think that’s highway robbery. I decide to go out to a café. On the street I stop and buy El Mundo. I find a café open.

Just inside the door a young lady drinks coffee at the bar, a crumbly cupcake on her saucer. Four Arab men in painting clothes sit further down, talking loudly. I walk past them to the opposite end and order café con leche and a croissant. I sit down at a table.

Behind me is a table with five middle-aged women. They are talking about the circle of life. A friend of theirs died yesterday. The same afternoon her daughter gave birth to a little girl. One laughs quietly at this while the others wipe tears from their eyes.

Two young women walk in. They are dressed in business suits. The first says hello to me as she passes. The second smiles and passes on. That’s why I love Spain. They order coffee and begin at once to talk about their children.

I open my Mundo. The usual political shite. The usual crimes. An older woman and her two granddaughers have been bludgeoned to death not five hundred meters from where I sit. It’s vague on when it happened but it must have been recently since they will do the autopsy today. No one knows who did it. One of the girls is sixteen. The article makes a point of how pretty she is. Was.

None of the other bla-bla in the paper interests me. There is an article on Katherine Hepburn. A book has just come out by a pimp in Hollywood who used to find tricks for the stars. He found women for Katherine—dozens. He says he can write it now since all his clients are dead.

I fold up the paper, pay and walk out. In the twenty minutes I’ve been inside everything has changed. Now the streets swarm with life. Children are going to school, accompanied by mothers or grandfathers. Sweepers have been replaced by scooters and skaters. The sky is brightening. Earlier I’d run under a black vault. Now I know it will be a crisp sunny winter day.

That’s why I love Spain.

Columbia 8

2012-01-30T00:38:00.000-08:00

Columbia has entered my life more frequently than any other city. Four times. Like a dream you can’t stop re-dreaming.

Columbia 1955. In the first of my four stops, my father is entering Bible School. My mother delivers us my brother just as I’m approaching my second birthday. We will stay here four years; by then my sister will arrive just short of my fifth birthday.

A row of red brick apartments. Hendley Homes, they’ve christened them. (Mercifully, they are bull-dozed down some decades later.) Everyone who lives here looks like us: recently married; poor as church mice; snotty kids; scrambling for the rent every 31^st.

It is Columbia Bible College for Dad. And party time for us. Just me ’n Mom, the best times of her life, she once whispers to me—at least for the nine months that Bobby gestates. She feeds me like a prince, reads to me, takes me out on the town, teaches me to pray and in general makes sure I increase in knowledge, comeliness and the fear of the Lord.

Dad meanwhile plows his own furrow, as usual, sometimes to eccentric effect. Once he tests the effect of a passenger door on an index finger and finds out the hard way Ford makes tough trucks. He faints at the Ford’s feet, as it were, and has to be carted away by ambulance. When he finally limps home, clutching the largest bandage I’ve ever seen, it is like a Russian intellectual returning from the Gulag. We have a picture of him. His wire rim glasses are askew and he has that lost boy face that’s sometimes painted on Tiny Tim when he sees his father carted away on Christmas Eve. When it heals, he shows us the V-shaped scar to scare us. It is still staring up at me from his withered hand as I hold it during his last days.

Columbia 1965. First geopolitical awakening. We’ve been plucked from revolutionary Dominican Republic by a Miami-bound DC-9. I know there’s been a war on around me, but I only realize I’ve come from hell when we get back State-side. First glimpse of El Dorado and a cream Moon Pie.

Television and Churchill’s funeral live. The first time I hear of the great man, he’s being put to rest after an astonishing 90 years. For us it’s furlough and more pan-handling for Jesus. A squat red brick house on a randy lane near the college. (More Bible College for Dad. That’s how missionaries take their vacations.) Tarzan on a neighbor’s set and, Tuesday evening, Combat. (At home our rabbit ears is only for the news and ‘good’ movies, as Dad calls them.)

Baseball and my first glove. Little league.

Columbia 1971. Columbia Bible College for me! The worm has turned.

I had wanted anthropology at University of South Carolina but Mom and Dad, Inc. have other ideas. Post-Mission Field. Post-Ben Lippen. Post-Tet Offensive. Post-pubertal.

Those six years between ’65 and ’71 see a different me settle into a red brick dorm and attack the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures. I’m convinced of their truth and inerrancy. Mom and Dad have done their job well.

Columbia 1979. Post-Spain. Post-loss of faith. Post-virginal.

Columbia Bible College wants nothing of me now. Red brick married-student housing just up from the Carolina Stadium. My new Colombian (NB the spelling) bride. Sciences. Humanities. Evolution. Liberal Education. Them’s fighting words. The refuge of the apostate, as they say at the Bible College.

Scrubbed and rubbed

2012-01-29T12:31:00.000-08:00

A clap-board gritty cold hard-scrabble life

With hand-me-downs and water drawn from wells

And cotton fields and nails worn to the bone

An outhouse by a patch of honeydews

With lace and silk and chocolate amandines

A thing of tales in books and fairy dreams

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Share-cropper on his borrowed land, her Pop

Answered to none in his proud servitude

The flinty eye, the half-curled Elvis lip

Unbeat-at-checks, card-sharking, horseshoe champ

Toothless, a ladies' man, sharp-shot, fathered a brood

Signed his name X with a florid hand, spat tobaca

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Seven brothers, three sisters, uncounted cousins

‘cross the deep, unreconstructed, lost to god South

Antreville, ville of the ants, the flea-bit rump of the world

But they were happy, walked to school and were never hungry

The brothers went to war, surrounded in the Bulge

Frozed, but unharmed in ‘45. The eldest shot himself.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Married a city slick, an outsider, a college boy, rich folk

But behind his back they laughed, did the clan

‘With so much learnin’ you’da thought he’d got more sense

Can’t hitch a mule or pitch a shoe or look a man in the eye.’

He was full up of ‘vangelical and missions overseas

Wanted to drag their Eva off the save the heathen.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

She thought it must be love, but how was she to know

They said to live for Christ and die to self

It felt like love in any case, but who could tell

They said the husband is the head of wife and home

At least she loved the kids and that’s enough

They said go into all the world and preach.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

She came back to Antreville after he broke

Back to the sagging porch and well and honeydews

Dingue and malaria now in her veins, TB in lungs

A thousand words or more of twangy Spango on her tongue

A thousand Caribbean nights or more of dreams

Illusions shattered, health in ruins yet pride somehow intact

Scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

… my mother of McConnell clan.

Past, Present & Future

2012-01-29T03:40:00.000-08:00

PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

by Artie Butler, Jerry Leiber & George "Shadow" Morton

(The past), past, well, now,

Let me tell you about the past.

The past is filled with silent joys,

And broken toys,

Laughing girls and teasing boys.

Was I ever in love?

I called it love.

I mean, it felt like love.

There were moments when,

Well, there were moments when...

(Present), go out with you?

Why not.

Do I like to dance?

Of course.

Take a walk along the beach tonight?

I'd love to.

But don't try to touch me,

Don't try to touch me.

'Cause that will never happen again,

Shall we dance?

(The future), tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow's a long way off.

Maybe someday I'll hold

Somebody's hand.

Maybe somewhere,

Someone will understand.

You know I used to sing,

"A tisket a tasket

A green and yellow basket."

I'm all packed up and I'm on my way.

And I'm gonna fall in love.

But at the moment it doesn't look good,

At the moment it will never happen again.

I don't think it will ever happen again.

If you were every European, maybe no war again

2012-01-28T01:29:00.000-08:00

If you were every European, maybe no war again

On the Isonzo in the Alps

They mowed the young grass down

Le préfané, la première coupe,

And when reborn as foin

They mowed the new growth down

As risible today as war

Between the internauts of Neuss

And hedge-traders in the City

Over airbusers of Toulouse

Was peace in those forgotten days

From Waterloo to Sevastopol

In Ypres’ stenching trench

They stacked the muddy human carrion

The Hun, The Gaul, Perfidious Albion

A thousand years of blood

Our peace was bought not by this blood

Blood only buys a mother’s tears

It had not to be spilt!

By men too old to go themselves

Too weak and blind and small and mean

But that’s behind, beyond repair

A thousand years we’ve ripped apart

This peaceful continent

The current peace as shocking new

As the innocence of its young

Who think it always was and will thus always be

Christ and Crusades are only piles of stone

--Cologne and Reims, Durham and Zaragoza--

Which we rush past in iPods for the tram

And Charles Martel chased out the Infidel

At Tours--So why those veils on girls?

You can’t imagine war, can’t even mock it up

You did Erasmus just a year ago and fell in love

Scot with a girl in Piemonte, had a kid just now

And settled down upon the coast of Spain

To grow mistela in a valley of Levante

And that this land was scorched not eighty years ago

By Franco’s Moors and Lincoln’s lite Brigade

And that those bullet husks you dug up yesterday

Went through a European heart and soaked in European blood

Your patch of vines…that…well, beyond imagining…

Columbia 7

2012-01-21T08:16:00.000-08:00

Wonder if anyone else feels like he’s talking to an empty box when he prays.

My roommate’s praying out loud for 30 goals this season.

Why do we ask for things a child would be scolded for and pretend it’s for the glory of God?

My pimples are awful today. I popped one last night. I was sick of it and now it’s a crusty smudge in the middle of my face. I wish I could just stay in my room today.

I slept through Quiet Time this morning. Couldn’t get my mind on what I’m reading. I’ve been skipping all around the Old Testament trying to find something worthwhile. Tried Amos…dull as dust.

I’ve got zits worse than any other kid except Neil. He’s got huge pus things across his back and shoulders. And scars like moon craters.

Everyone else finds it easy to believe, or maybe they just never think about it.

Fran sits next to me in English and crosses her legs. Her skirt rides up right in front of me. I wonder if she wants me to look.

I hit the cliff with a kick yesterday. The ball was rolling straight at me and I caught it clean and dry. Kicked up dust when it hit.

In golf I’ve hit screaming drives with an effortless swing. You just have to catch it right. So my kick.

I need to wash clothes but I don’t have any more dimes. Someone is selling Amway soap for a quarter.

I’ve never read anything like Schaeffer. He’s the first one to make any sense. I’d love to live at L’Abri. I may end up believing after all.

I can run up The Killer in practice without any problem, but in the meets I get so nervous I’m already pooped before we start. My mouth goes dry and I feel so drained in the first hundred yards that I fall back immediately. Why does this happen to me and not the others?

I can’t believe I didn’t make the cut for Choir. They let Jacob in and he sings worse than I do. It’s because he can play the trombone and they need one.

I feel so much better here than in public school. It’s like another planet.

Here Christ’s not like in the Baptist churches back home. Here it’s low key and cerebral. Here it’s lived, not ranted.

I’m afraid I’ll wake up someday and it will be like back home. I almost go around on tiptoes.

Jeff wrecked his car yesterday. Turned it off to save gas while coasting downhill and didn’t realize the steering blocks that way. He went off a curve and down a ravine. Lucky idiot, didn’t get a scratch.

All the rules about girls keep them estranged from us. It turns them into sexless maidens on a pedestal. I wonder if they prefer it that way.

Funny, I feel no sex drive here…I’m ashamed when I wake up with a hard-on.

The food is decent, except for the carrot salad. They put raisins in it. No one likes it so it goes around the table three times before it’s gone.

The faculty respects us and treats us like equals…almost. There are no discipline problems and everyone listens and takes notes in class. My history prof is obsessed with Alger Hiss. He’s making us read all the original transcripts but he won’t tell us why it’s so important.

My suitemate, Quentin, is full of gripes. He’s calls us into the bathroom after lights out and bitches about everything. He wants to get himself kicked out. He’s going to do something dramatic and self-destructive. He’s going to shave all his hair.

The invisible ones are the black cooks.

Doc is a force of nature. He scares me. I prefer his sons. Derrick is a good friend. He’s a little fragile now that his Mother died. He’s expected to be happy and victorious, like his father. No emotions. But he’s just not strong enough, or he’s too human. His fragility is just what I like about him.

His brother Francis is too good to be true. He’s 3 inches shorter than me but he gets every rebound. He’s been teaching me a leaping exercise. He jumps over a bench, first right then left. He does it like a rabbit but I can’t do it even once. He smiles and pretends it’s not important but I feel like a nobody next to him. He’s so kind that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I can’t reciprocate so I’m a confirmed absolute inferior.

I think my first impression of Doc will be my last. It was the right one.

He told us that when he teaches night class at UNC-Asheville the girls with mini-skirts spread their legs and show their underwear. What a reflection to make in chapel in front of a group of teens! I wonder what the girls thought of that one.

The war is hotting up, and so are the protests. I can’t get the Kent State Four out of my mind.

My Dad never writes. My Mom always says the same thing. She’s praying for me. Why does she think that will make me feel loved?

I wonder if we’ll get to go to Burger King on Saturday night. I’m going to order a Whaler.

Everyone’s afraid Ben Lippen will not prepare us for the ‘real world’. Almost everyone goes to a Bible college when they leave here.

The God Who is There makes sense.

The only subject the same here as in public school is math. It’s even easier here.

I can’t stop thinking about Miss Jensen. She crashed her car on a mountain road and got out and knelt down on the pavement and then died.

Columbia 6

2012-01-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

Love at Ben Lippen.

Sports at Ben Lippen.

Studies at Ben Lippen.

Discipleship at Ben Lippen.

That’s the order of priority for most students here, although the faculty would claim, of course, an entirely opposite one. The hearts of teens are hardwired and no amount of wishful thinking can put that different.

I was the only one in history class today who knew about the incident in the Tonkin Gulf. I was embarrassed to raise my hand and give the answer, but how can we understand how we got into Vietnam without that, so I did. I felt eyes drill right through me, but I don’t know if they were admiring or condemning. I’m used to kids in public school hating me for that.

Also when the teacher asked why people climb mountains, and there were no takers, I gave the answer Mallory did: ‘Because they’re there.’ His face opened out in a broad, approving smile. Again, eyes like daggers. Most of the kids in this class have been together for 2 years and they must wonder whom this new kid thinks he is showing off before he’s even paid his dues.

I don’t mean to show off. I just know the answers and it’s unfair to just sit there silently when no one else answers. I think I do it sometimes to keep the teacher from feeling a failure.

There’s a school choir. If you get in it you don’t have to go to Church on Sunday. Well, you go but you sing the whole time and don’t have to listen to preaching or go to Sunday School. That suits me just fine. I’ve had enough preaching for a dozen lifetimes. You get to travel to a new church every week, sometimes two different ones the same Sunday, one in the morning and one at night. (This place just keeps getting better!)

I sang in the chapel choir today. It’s a great feeling to sing with 60 other people. Like entering a huge organism that swells and soars and has a life of its own. I try out next week for the school choir as a baritone but I need to improve on my harmonizing.

I’ve been writing poetry but for no one in particular. Just for myself. I throw most of it away but some I keep. I think I’ll sneak one of the better ones into my English essay and see what Miss Barrett thinks. I could pretend it’s quoted from an obscure poet and see if she trashes it or not.

My times in the mile are improving. 5.50, 5.43, 5.44, 5.39 and yesterday 5.32. I wonder what they do with these records. Someone is always writing them down and filing them away. He’s an ace at it. He keeps everyone straight even when there are seven or eight crossing the finish line in a bunch. Maybe it’s for the coach to see who might be promising for track in the spring. I’m playing baseball, though, no matter what they say. I brought my first baseman’s glove and that’s what I have my heart set on.

There are several really nice girls. We rotate tables in the dining room every week, so by the end of the term you’ve had a chance to sit with everyone at least once. They always put seniors at the head and foot of the table and they’re supposed to make sure everyone eats everything. All the food must disappear. First the serving plate is passed around left to right and everyone must take at least a table spoon-full. Then we eat. If anything is left in the serving plate after everyone’s eaten it’s passed around and again everyone must take a serving, although I’ve noticed that the spoonful rule isn’t followed strictly on the second round. Sometimes it has to go to a third round before it’s all gone. At least it makes the washing up easier for me.

They seat you at the table girl/boy, girl/boy. When you first sit down you have to pull out the chair for the girl on your right side and seat her. The girls who’ve been here before are experts at it. They begin to sit down just as you’re sliding the chair back in and everything comes off like clockwork. But the new girls haven’t got the hang of it yet, and they either sit down too soon and almost fall to the floor or they are still standing while you’re pushing the chair seat into the back of their knees. Someone should take them aside and give them lessons.

After the meal we can go to the ‘store’. That’s a big word for it because it’s just a door in a wall with the top half open and someone behind to take your money. They have flavored potato chips (my favorite are paprika and onions) and the most delicious chocolate ice cream cones you ever tasted. They’re topped with nuts. Though, if you’ve eaten all your meal, you’re really not hungry afterwards. We just congregate there because it’s the one thing around here that is not regimented for us. A slice of liberty. (I was going to say ‘home’ but that’s the one place I don’t miss. In fact, the best thing about Ben Lippen is that it isn’t home…no parents!)

Another after dinner passion, at least for the guys, is playing table soccer. There are three to a side with rotating rods and little wooden players. We slam around a white marble ball, which is about twice the size of a large marble. It’s been beat around so much that there are pieces chipped off the side, so it doesn’t roll true, which just makes the game more interesting.

There are some real aces here. I am a nothing compared to them and wouldn’t dare take any of them on. But there are usually ten or twenty guys standing around watching the games (they always have two tables going at any time and there’s a lot of whooping and macho talk). The girls usually don’t play table soccer, although there are a couple who do. One is tall and really cute. She’s from Florida. The other looks like an Amazonian and I don’t know where they dragged her up.

Most of the girls just stand around and chat, or go out on the porch to watch the sunset or the lights of Asheville, or just go back to their dorm to study. I noticed some guys just hang around the girls and joking with them. It’s usually the same ones. There aren’t as many cliques as in public school but some clumping is inevitable. I usually just hang back and watch. It’s the one time of the day when there’s nothing we’re expected to do. I’m rubbish at these board games anyway and I’d really like to meet a few girls and chat with them. But the ones I really like always seem to disappear back to the dorm before I can get a chance. I’m not sure if I’d have the courage anyway, even if they stayed behind.

There’s one guy who can play the piano like he invented it. His name is Zack. He plays purely by ear. Wouldn’t know a written note if it clobbered him. Sometimes I just stand around and listen to him play. That’s usually what I do these days in fact.

Love, Sports, Studies, Discipleship. I’m not even sure what that last one means. They go on about it but it seems more nebulous than the rest. At least you can sink your teeth into the others.

Columbia 5

2012-01-19T10:34:00.001-08:00

First I’m told our schedule.

Monday to Friday:

Wake up, shower and dress 6.30. Quiet Time 7.00 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 7.30. Domestic work (I’m assigned to washing dishes) 8.00. First class 8.30. Second class 9.30. Chapel 10.30. Third class 11.30. Lunch 12.30. Fourth class 13.30. Fifth class 14.30. Dress for sports 15.30. Sports 16.00. Shower and dress for dinner (tie required)18.00. Dinner 18.30. Evening study hall 19.30. Break 20.30. Second evening study hall 20.45. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Saturday:

Wake up, shower and dress (jeans allowed all day) 7.30. Quiet Time 8.00 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 8.30. Domestic work 9.00. Free time 9.30 (must stay on campus, study hall obligatory for those with C’s or worse). Lunch 12.30. Free time 13.30 (visits off campus allowed with written permission and chaperon, detention hall for those with conduct demerits). Game begins 15.00. Dinner 18.30. Evening Social 19.30. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Sunday:

Wake up, shower and dress (coats and ties) 7.00. Quiet Time 7.30 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 8.00. Domestic work 8.30. Buses leave for Sunday School 9.00. Sunday School and Church 10.00. Buses return from Church 12.15. Lunch 13.00. Quiet time 13.30 (must stay on campus, reading allowed but no studying for classes, letter writing). Dinner 17.30 (entrance ticket is letter to parents). Buses leave for Evening Service 18.30. Evening Church Service 19.30. Buses return from Church 21.00. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Even if you want to be wicked it’s hell finding the time.

The schedule is the basic framework but there are other details. Sports in the afternoon begins with a timed run. Boys must run the mile (four laps around the athletic field) in 6 minutes 30 or faster. Girls in 7 minutes minimum. I ask what happens to those who can’t make these times. Everyone does, I’m told. Otherwise you run it a second time. I ponder the logic of this and then pound out my first Ben Lippen mile in 5.52. Someone writes this number down and motions me on to formal sports practice.

I’m starting on the junior varsity soccer team at right fullback, even though I’ve never played the game. (In the Dominican Republic baseball is the national sport.) Someone’s noticed I have a fairly decent right leg, though I can’t even connect with the ball using my left.

In the fall the Saturday game is soccer though there is a cross-country team (which only seems to attract loners and philosophers). In the winter it’s basketball and lacrosse and in the spring, baseball and track. But soccer, basketball and baseball are kings. Especially soccer.

Boys’ varsity games take precedent over all others, but there are girls’ and boys’ junior varsity games scheduled just before the boys’ varsity games. Those on sports teams spend all weekday afternoons in formal practice and sometimes Saturday morning. Those not on teams spend their afternoons playing volleyball or tennis or doing calisthenics. No one gets off without sweating. I notice there are no plump kids.

The Saturday evening Social runs the gambit from sing-alongs to skits to slap-stick. They are usually held in the gym and are the one time in the week when we can really let our hair down. Discrete flirting is tolerated. Teasing faculty members can be done openly and they seem to enjoy it. Everyone is in a good mood, regardless of the score in the afternoon game or the amount of undone homework. Everyone’s in jeans and t-shirts. The evening is one long laugh and it melds the student body into one in a way chapel (or even the games) never can.

Everyone has domestic work. None of it is too demanding, but it keeps costs down. There’s only one hired man who does the big tasks on the grounds (cutting trees, for example) and maintains the boilers and other large items. Faculty members drive the buses. Black ladies come in to cook. Those of us doing domestics in the kitchen get to know them. They love to chat and tease us. None of them has ever been out of these hills and they think of us missionary kids as some exotic species to be interrogated about all sorts of things.

Sunday lunch is the gastronomic feature of the week. It usually involves turkey or roast beef, special sauces and dressings and a huge dessert. We wallow back to our dorms after this and collapse on our bunks. The Sunday evening meal, as a consequence, is a cold one with chips from bags, sandwiches and paper plates. This is the only meal off during the week for our black cooks.

Much is on the honor system. Quiet time in the morning is supposed to be spent in silence either praying or reading the Scripture on your own. But when you put down your head on the desk, no one knows if you’re talking to Jesus or catching a few more zzzz’s. No work is to be done on Sunday except your domestic duty, but if someone curls up in the bed with his school books and studies for a Monday test, no one will ever be the wiser Otherwise, study must be confined to Monday through Saturday.

Every hall has a hall monitor. Ours is a senior whose main task is to make sure there’s no rough-housing in the halls and no noise after lights out. He usually walks the halls in his socks around 22.10 listening at the doors. He lives on our floor, so we know to wait till we hear his door close at 22.15 before beginning to whisper. He knows this (having done the same himself the year before) and often closes his door but stays out in the hall to listen. If you’re caught doing something against the rules he’ll usually just ask you to stop, but if it’s something flagrant (like fighting) or it’s the second time he’s told you, he’ll write you up.

This involves jotting down your name, the offense and the date and time on a pad with carbon paper. He’ll give you the carbon copy and send the original to the faculty member who’s head of your dorm. It’s up to him to decide on the punishment. Usually he calls you in for an explanation and then gives you his sentence. It’s often a demerit. Once you have three of these you have to stay in on Saturday and go to a special study hall where you pass the afternoon in total silence with a faculty member glaring at you.

I determine never to get a demerit. I don’t mind the studying, but the shame would be impossible to live down. Tim, who’s been here for two years longer than we, tells us about the three types of students at Ben Lippen. He claims there are just as many ‘holy rollers’ in Saturday detention as ‘sinners’. The holies, he says, just don’t have much common sense and get demerits by accident. The sinners are street-smart but with so many rules and so many spies around, you’re bound sooner or later to fall foul of the law.

Warren shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t care. As long as he can still keep scoring goals.

They’ll never kick you off the team, I reassure him. You’d have to shoot the head dead first.

He’s jumping again, trying to touch the top of my head.

Columbia 4

2012-01-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

My first day.

As I move in I start meeting students. The difference startles me. They aren’t brain dead. My roommate, Warren, learning I grew up in the Dominican Republic, speaks to me in Spanish. His accent is as native as mine. After Dad leaves we sit around and chat. Amazingly, he knows about the SALT talks and what happened last year in Prague and about the Tet Offensive. He shrugs it off, as if everyone knew these things.

I’m not, for the first time in three years, afraid of being bullied by someone who hates smart kids.

Warren is also a missionary kid, recently of Chile. Allende’s Chile. He’s short. Sleeps in the bed below me. Laughs when he stands next to me and loves hopping up and down when we talk. It brings his head up to my shoulders. He finds this funny. He finds everything funny.

Warren loves soccer. How well do you play? I ask. OK, he replies. I’m soon to learn what that means. So is all of Ben Lippen. We are a soccer powerhouse, and have been for a generation, but the school is about to see its best dribbler ever.

Soccer is a sacrament at Ben Lippen, much as the religious founders may deny the fact. We are the best in the state of North Carolina, and arguably one of the best high school teams in the country. There is no American football at Ben Lippen. Most of the students are missionary kids who’ve played soccer from childhood. Most of our opponents came to the sport much later in life and only after failing to make football try-outs. Every Saturday in the fall means soccer at Ben Lippen. All four school buses ferry the entire school body to away games. Attendance is voluntary, but no one misses a game.

We have cheerleaders with knee-length skirts and bobby socks. None of them does cartwheels. Our stands are as loud as at any secular school but there’s no swearing or raucousness. Opponent’s goals are politely, though tepidly, applauded. (They don’t occur often.) First team varsity members are revered. This unfortunately does not include me, but it does Warren, at center-forward.

Warren attracts no attention from the crowd that first day. Only the coach, who’s seen him in practice, knows what’s coming. From this day forward though and over the next two years, every eye will be on Warren in those last minutes before a match starts, especially the eyes of the defenders. But this day he is just a wee fellow with long sideburns and baggy trousers kicking the turf from his cleats outside the center circle.

At halfback is the legendary Ronald Tapps, an exception even at Ben Lippen. He’s never been oversees. He’s a North Carolina boy with a slow drawl. He has short blond hair and the handsome, chiseled face of a movie star. He’s short but has legs of steel. His quads ripple when he walks and his free kicks are cannon shots. At twenty-two minutes into the first half he scores from the half field line. He’s been fouled and the ball sits squarely on the chalk line on the far side of the field. Then a bullet explodes towards goal, never rising more than 10 feet above the pitch. It starts out at the left goal post and the goal keeper lunges in that direction. Wickedly it slices back across the face of the goal and the keeper loses his footing as he reverses direction. The ball, never touched, slams into the net just inside the right post.

Of such kicks, legends.

Next it’s Warren. At the thirty-eighth minute he steals the ball from an opponent on our own touchline, turns upfield and dribbles back the entire way, past six defenders. He stumbles just at the end when the last defender, a fullback, tries a desperate sliding tackle. Regaining his footing at the touch line, Warren lures the keeper out, then niftily taps the ball right just out of his reach and continues his dribbling right into the net. He doesn’t stop to celebrate but scoops the ball up and continues running back to his position at midfield while Ben Lippen players swarm towards him in joy. They’ve never seen such a display. Warren sidesteps them too and, arriving at midfield, plucks the ball down in the center spot and regains his position, jumping up and down like he does when he’s talking to me. His wide grin, smiled to himself, and his cocky nonchalance towards the crowd (going mad) show that he’s used to all of this.

Of such drives, legends.

It’s two-nil at halftime. There’s more of the same in the second half. An opponent’s handball leads to a penalty kick. Tim converts it easily. A sloppy own-goal is engineered by the same fullback who tried to tackle Warren and then another soaring drive leaves Ronald’s foot towards Warren. He takes it on the fly, just off of left wing, and immediately lofts a soft lob into the air right in front of the goal and into the path of our streaking halfback. He leaps and heads it into the back of the goal.

Five-nil at final whistle. A typical day in Ben Lippen soccer.

Columbia 3

2012-01-18T07:21:00.000-08:00

Nothing Compares to You
by Prince, sung by Sinead O'Connor

It's been seven hours and fifteen days
since you took your love away
I go out every night and sleep all day
since you took your love away

since you've been gone I can do whatever I want
I can see whomever I choose
I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant
but nothing
I said nothing can take away these blues,

'cause nothing compares
nothing compares to you

It's been so lonely without you here
like a bird without a song
nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling
tell me baby where did I go wrong?

I could put my arms round every boy I see
but they'd only remind me of you
I went to the doctor guess what he told me
guess what he told me
he said girl you better try to have fun
no matter what you do
but he's a fool

'cause nothing compares
nothing compares to you

All the flowers that you planted mother
in the backyard
all died when you went away
I know that living with you, baby, was sometimes hard
but I'm willing to give it another try

nothing compares
nothing compares to you

I believe in love at first sight. I know it firsthand. I remember the instant.

She was descending a stair at a party and looked into my face. She looked through it as if it were empty space. Then she glanced left and right and there leapt in me a recognition that predates existence. She was to be the apple of my eye from that moment on.

I was18, my first year at college.

I had known her two previous years, but my memory of that time is vague. I do remember watching her play basketball in high school. She was on varsity but not a terribly good player. She played with grim determination. Tense and unsmiling. She made few mistakes but always seemed to want to get rid of the ball whenever she had it. Her brother had been an ace at soccer. He was three years older and already graduated when I arrived.

I wanted to impress her with my basketball, but I was hopeless klutz under pressure. In practice I was as good as anyone but with the stands full I was glued to the floor. She, by contrast, was a scrappy, jaw-set street fighter. Often trapped, she never lost the ball.

During school days she wore long woolen skirts, like all the girls, and a V-neck sweater with green trim. The student body was divided in three types: the saints, the sinners and the middlers. She was of the saints, almost radiant in her paleness. I was a middler. It was the last year of the sixties. We were all 16, going on 17. Her roommate was a girl I had a mild crush on. A missionary kid who’d grown up in Central America and for whom I wrote a love poem on the back of Renoir’s Girl with a Watering Can. I wonder if she ever showed it to her roommate.

Strange after 40 years I am unable still to live a day without her in my thoughts, in my unconscious life constantly, like a hot spring welling. How much easier it would have been without her. How much more impoverished.

One can only write in two directions: backwards, based on memory, or forward, based on imagination. One’s degree of earlier suffering determines which it will be.

Our senior year, at the end-of-school outing, she was the only one to brave the mountain waters and ski. The lake was barely unfrozen but she went out without a wetsuit. We all stood on the bank and gaped at her. She was flying across the wakes, leaping over each wave, skirting the buoys and wooden jumps, a grim determination on her face. She knew we were watching her but never graced us a glance. I knew then this was the most unconventional, courageous woman I would ever meet.

Here began the battle between love and unworthiness—fatal attraction and never feeling good enough for her.

Each of the women I've been with since has known about her sooner or later and each has feared her. Feared the intensity of my loss. If she ever comes back, you’ll surely leave me.

Here is the reason for my productivity. For my unreliability. For my profligacy. For not caring. Because I couldn't have her I didn’t much care whom I had. I was careless in my choice of partners.

Thank God we didn’t end up together. How I’d have made miserable her life! Dashed it on the rocks. One always falls back on how one was raised, the neurosis of a father, the narrowness of a home. I was unable to court in a normal way and love in a tender lasting fashion. The scars of that childhood mark us and bar us from the bright uplands.

She was a kitten—playful, graceful, distant, a glint in the eye. Teasing and loving to be teased. If you probed deep enough you could feel the pulsating unconscious sensuality.

She's been nothing if not gracious to me. Twice I've contacted her. Once, by letter, more than 20 years ago. Second, by eMail, seven years ago. Both times I’ve felt the hiss of the tomcat behind her, especially the last time. His tone seeming to say, this time I’ll make an exception, but it will be the last. I heard it and there will not be a third.

She however was as gracious as a Victorian lady, which she is: one of those exceptional, spontaneous but still straight-laced Victorian ladies who ride horses sidesaddle, march for women's suffrage and write gothic novels; but whom you’ll find every Sunday in the first pew and whose dresses reveal no more than a shapely ankle. Her answers had a cheerful lithe: a newsy letter with pictures the first time and then an eMail that almost sounded flattered.

Columbia 2

2012-01-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

The peaks are low and covered with blue pine. Gray clouds, ragged and forlorn, drift between them. The interstate said Greenville, then Hendersonville, then Asheville. We exit. A road winds away from the city, climbing into the hills. Smoky mountains. Blue haze and a grid of city streets on the horizon. My father is driving. We’re climbing through hills, leaving public education behind forever. A sign says ‘Ben Lippen’, a sharp right turn, a steep long hill, a hairpin turn left and we slide into a parking lot. Before us lies a large brick building with a long porch. The porch runs the full length of the building and is covered by a roof held up by eight white columns. Ten gables are perched above. We’re there. It’s 1969. Early September. I’ve been 16 for one week.

Dining Room
Ben Lippen School
circa 1970

For a minute we sit in the car. There are minutes, instants, before life changes, pages turn. I know when I open the door nothing will be the same again. I want that. I’m sick of before and will do anything to escape it. I open the door.

At first we see no one. Dad says we should go find the head. The headmaster is tall and olive-skinned, well-built. Dad calls him ‘Doctor’ and whispers to me that he’s Greek. There’s something intimidating and tender in his eyes. I feel it from the start. He’s silent, strong. He looks me over head to foot before saying hello. I’m stooping and turning red. I’m sure he’s seen my faults already. That I don’t always level with my parents and that, despite my height, I’m a lousy rebounder. He smiles warmly and takes my father’s hand; then puts his arm around my shoulder. ‘You must play basketball, then, with your height. What is it? Six foot six, already. And only sixteen. My boys play too. They’re tall, but I think you’ve got them beat.’

I knew already I would disappoint him.

Columbia 1

2012-01-15T05:20:00.000-08:00

Beauty like a Tightened Bow: Columbia 1
If I thought you'd ever change your mind
by John Cameron

I would bring you flowers in the morning
Wild roses as the sun begins to shine
Sweet perfume in tiny jeweled caskets
If I thought you'd ever change your mind

I would take you where the music's sweetest
And feed you winter fruits and summer wine
Show you things you've only read in story books
If I thought you'd ever change your mind

I would bring you happiness
Wrapped up in a box and tied with a yellow bow
I would bring you summer rain and rainbow skies to make your garden grow
And in the winter snow my songs would keep you from the cold

But what’s the use of flowers in the morning
When the garden they should grow in is not mine
And what use is sunshine if I'm crying
And my falling tears are mingled with the wine

I would bring you happiness
Wrapped up in a box and tied with a yellow bow
I would bring you rainbow skies
And summer rain to make your garden grow
And in the winter snow, my songs would keep you from the cold

I would bring you flowers in the morning
Wild roses when the sun begins to shine
Winter fruits and summer wine
Sweet perfume and columbine
If I thought you'd ever change your mind
If I thought you'd ever change your mind
~
Few places are more agreeable than a small town with a college. Not only was our town so blessed, but the college was the small and venerated Erskine. Erskine College first opened its doors in 1839 and since then has only closed them once, during the four years of the American Civil War, when its entire class volunteered for the Confederate Army. The college has had the most renowned literary societies of any small college in the South and was one of the first to enroll women. It is located at the highest point in the quaintly-named town of Due West, atop a gentle hill, surrounded by elms and century-old oaks.

Attached to the student center at Erskine is a large carpeted room where we would stretch out for hours and read. Moffett and I. Twice a semester this room was bedlam, on the first day of classes when everyone was buying their textbooks and on the last, when everyone was selling. But otherwise the only noise one risked hearing was Otis Redding on the dock of the bay.

The bookstore, adjacent to this common room, was stocked with a large range of paperback novels and felt more like a library than a place of business. It says something of the two of us that our favorite hang-out was this bookstore. The manager liked us and didn’t mind us camping out there most afternoons with our pile of used novels. ‘Just don’t bend the pages and don’t break the binding.’ He didn’t have to tell us twice.

There we met the greatest essayist, Macaulay. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Conrad and Cervantes. Hemingway was my favorite for months, but Moffett wouldn’t be caught dead opening anything by ‘Papa Fraud’, as he called him. Also anything required for school we wouldn’t touch. In fact both of us got ‘C’s’ in English, despite the fact that we probably knew more literature than the teacher.

The jute box was just on the other side of the wall in the student center and I can still associate certain songs with certain passages. ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,’ with the scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls when Robert first makes love to Maria and they feel the earth move beneath them. The Early Beatles with ‘The Lady with the White Dog’ by Chekhov.

Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her. And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day.
This and ‘Love me do’ are inextricable.

I went to Moffett’s house every Friday and Saturday during the four years that he and I were best friends. I only stopped when something terrible happened to his mother. On my first day there I fell in love with her. She was teaching us how to tie a neck tie which our school required for graduation from middle school. We’d both bought red ones sprinkled with white stars and trimmed in blue. She said she’d teach us just like she did her husband when they were first married. First she did Moffett’s, then she came to me and stood behind me and put her arms around my neck, helping me weave the silk into its dimpled knot.

Mine wasn’t dimpling and she kept craning her head around to inspect it. I felt her chest against my back each time and then everything seemed to come alive. The hair on my neck stood at attention, my skin prickled and a general swelling moved down my spine and settled squarely just where I didn’t want it and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I was aflame with embarrassment. I was sure she had seen it and would send me packing as a little pervert. But she just kept on chatting, encouraging me to do it for myself, hanging over my shoulder and pressing her warm breast to my back. I thought I would have to run away or else explode with desire right there. I finally got it right and she beamed down at me. I was only twelve but ever after I was willing to kill for her.

She died of cervical cancer the year before we graduated high school.

Augusta 8

2011-12-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

The Israelis are building more settlements.

I know. I was there last year. I saw them. They’re so different from Arab houses. Much better.

He who builds, stays.

Of course they’re staying. What would make them leave?

They’re obliged to, by international law.

Who makes those laws?

The UN.

But at the UN it’s mainly the Arabs who vote in those laws.

No, lots of other countries do too. The Europeans, the Canadians…

Yea, the same Europeans who tried to exterminate them. Besides Jews don’t care about UN resolutions.

You mean the Israelis.

Same thing

No. Not at all. I’m from Jewish blood and I’m certainly not Israeli.

You’re against Israel?

I’m against them building on other people’s land, and expropriating their homes.

If they don’t put down roots somewhere they’ll get exterminated again.

I think they use that as an excuse. A pretext.

Everyone needs a home of their own.

Not when it used to belong to someone else.

It once belonged to them before someone stole it away.

It has to stop sometime, all this stealing.

It’s just desert, most of it. I’ve been there twice and it’s only the Israeli’s who know how to make it fruitful. The Arabs just run herds over it and leave nothing behind.

How would you feel if your house was taken?

When did that happen?

1948,,,al-Nakba.

Ancient history. They’re always fighting for something centuries old. Talk about pretexts.

1948 isn’t centuries ago.

In Iran they’re still miffed at Alexander the Great. Can you imagine that?

We walked on a little further…

When were you in Israel?

On my way to Africa last year. I stopped over for six days.

Where did you go?

Everywhere. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Ashkelon, everywhere…Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, the Golan Heights, Gaza City.

So you were in the West Bank and Gaza.

Yes, they’re so different from Israel proper. Like night and day.

Yet they’re brothers…Semites.

Really far back…and a lot has changed since Abraham.

You really don’t like them…

They make me nervous. They’re provocative. They always want to pick a fight.

It’s a fairness issue.

You can’t judge from this far away. It gets clear when you’re really there. The differences are so stark. One group’s a builder and the other just wants to tear everything down. You should see how trashy their houses are. Gaza’s a dump.

With a million enslaved people.

One group is made up of innovators, the others are cry-babies.

You’re pretty stark.

Just go there, you’ll see.

We walked on …

Augusta 7

2011-12-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

I’m rumored to be Luther’s incarnation.

I teach, I type, I tutor. Anything to advance the cause of others. To make them succeed. I take the student body as my flock.

Before each exam I hold review sessions. I write everything since the last exam on the chalkboard. I organize it so everyone can see the whole from start to finish. I use classrooms with wrap-around boards.

The tutorials start with a couple of friends and end up with standing-room only.

Implicit is that I’m head boy, top of the class…which is far from true. No one has asked me. No one’s authorized. I’ve made myself into an icon and there are those willing to bow down. Like all cults.

She comes. She comes to the early sessions. She’s a good student, says little, takes angelic notes.

I’ve found my reason for living. I’ve discovered I can do something others can’t and am damn good at. I know the proof is in the pudding—if they score better they’ll continue coming, if they don’t they’ll stop.

Attendance grows till I have to switch to a larger classroom and then hold double sessions. Once even a teacher shows up.

I thought the novelty, the audacity, would stoke her imagination and I’d catch her eye. At least this was my unconscious wish.

Instead she probably thought it was awfully nice of me, but that such behavior was for saints and hermits, and what woman goes for the likes of them. Either that or she hated my zits.

I’m devastated when she walks out of a session early.

For a time the flame burnt on my forehead. I was possessed of the Spirit and couldn’t miss. I was walking on rocket shoes. I was elected president, spokesman, leader of this and that.

Then, and only once, Midas gave me dross instead of gold. The teacher departed from the class notes in writing the exam questions. Everyone who came to my session scored lower than those who didn’t. The charm was broken.

I took time off, exhausted with saving the world.

Weeks later I started back, and my classmates returned, but the numbers were never like before and my infallibility could no longer be assumed.

By then my heart wasn’t in it anymore. She never came back. She’d not been awed. In fact, she ignored my existence as much as ever.

Augusta 6

2011-12-25T09:26:00.001-08:00

We had only been on the ground in Boston for fifteen minutes when the National Transport Authority went into status epilepticus over us Syrians and started barking orders and that went on for three days during which we never left the airport and besides they talk so fast you can't understand a word they say and all because there was a green paper and a white paper but no one told us to fill out both so half the people filled out the white one and half filled out the green one and when we got to Immigration and Border Control they told us none of us could go through and since we didn't understand what they were saying they started talking louder and louder and finally it was just screaming and barking and pushing us back like cattle until they got us into a room by ourselves where everyone was given new sheets and told to fill them out and then we went back to Immigration and Border Control and they told us that we had written above the line and not below the line so they sent us all back again and here we’re talking about a hundred or more Syrians crowded into a small room for an hour and a half to do it again and still no instructions so most of them just did it any old way knowing it would be wrong again but not caring and already a message had been passed among us that our bags had been removed from the carousel and that they were being opened and inspected and that buses had been lined up to take us back to an airplane which would take us back to Damascus and we were forbidden to use our mobile phones and sir would you just turn that thing off sir Sir SIR can you hear me turn that fucking thing off this instant or I’ll have your butt in jail so fast what you can’t understand me you bastard get that motherfucking thing away from your ear and get those hands up Security SECURITY and so we settled back in the room minus one of our group and started filling out our forms again this time below the line and checking the fact that we did not take part in any National Socialist activity between 1933 in 1945 and had nothing to do with the Armenian massacre of 1915 and were not sympathizers with the American Indians or Marx and Engels or Marks & Spencer or any other terrorist group who bomb children in order to save the whales and that we were grateful and obliged for the welcome given us in the USofA and would not brew moonshine without a license but then they came for our cell phones and we had to give them up along with our passports and had to wait while they went through them and saw what calls we’d made when calling was still possible and having brought a gift of chocolates and seeing that the children were tired and hungry and some were crying I walked around and passed them out and was surprised how many smiles were still on faces though some of the old women looked so haggard and broken down that I hugged them even though they already had husbands to comfort them although they’d not done such a good job of it up to now and when we finally got word that the buses were waiting for us and we’d get our phones back on the plane along with our passports though it wasn’t true because two people never got theirs back and one man never saw his phone again but hours later we were relieved to be leaving that place that I never want to see again and when I felt the jolt of landing after four sleepless days and saw the sun was up I felt so tired that I fell asleep in the taxi on the way home and we were there before I knew it and before I could answer the driver who was asking me how I’d liked Boston and I told him that the airport toilets had bowls so big you could wash a dog in them and he laughed at the same time I did.

Augusta 5

2011-12-25T09:25:00.000-08:00

Papa had a spectacular lake house out on a pond in South Carolina. You had to drive from Augusta, Georgia over the Savanna River on a long bridge festooned with lampposts, then trek up a nearly endless hill into North Augusta, South Carolina. After that it was out towards Clearwater onto a dry alluvial plain with sand underfoot. You could find sea shells if you scratched with a shoe under the pine needles.

The house started out as a long cabin on the top of a hill, but when the lake burst its banks, they dammed up the creek in the valley below and moved the house lock, stock and barrel down the hillside using a moving crane. It was a wood-paneled cabin, with knobby pine lining all the walls.

Papa decided to build a luxury home around the shell of the old cabin. But things expanded. The cabin ended up just being the living room. Attached to it were a spacious dining room with French bay windows looking out over the pond, a kitchen with modern appliances (Westinghouse, of course), two downstairs bedrooms, an upstairs guest room and play area for the grandchildren. And, of course, a wood-working shop for Papa.

We lived in that house during our furlough, that year when missionaries must go around the country begging for money. Up and down the East Coast we drove—Augusta, Georgia to Augusta, Maine. Cheap motels, TV meals and endless pot luck dinners. One church after another, seven days a week. Selling ourselves and the salvation we were bringing to lost heathen. Seeking cold cash. Me and my cap-in-hand Dad.

During those months we were on the road I studied by correspondence course. I was on my own, my Dad hated doing work of any kind. I missed Mom’s chicken ‘n dumplings. The way she peppered them. The crispy crust. I missed her fresh-baked bread, with butter streaming out of warm clefts. I missed her arms tight at night, her bedtime reads. The tucking in, the tightened sheets. I missed the low hum from the other room. Her end-of-day recounting to my Dad. His deep low baritone. Her muffled laugh. The sing song that the Singer bobbin makes.

He wasn’t such a bad Dad in those days. He loved to drive. The open road befitted the anarchist in him.

I liked his lantern slides. A map of islands and the sea around. A view of peaks and desert folds. A forest canopy of Lincoln green. A serpent’s head. A swollen native boy. A land of bridges. Swaying women, bundles on their heads. And scads of naked kids.

The white church boys, in butch crew cuts, smell of cheap cologne. The men of aftershave and Old Spice. The 1950s. The girls sway back and forth in flowered pinafores. The back of ladies’ legs are traced in nylon lines.

America at worship, examines the great beyond. That stupendous other. That milling swarm of swarthy heathen…the lost.

We, Christ’s commandos, are the envy of the lot. They look on us with admiration and mild distrust. Weirdoes, Aliens, God Marines.

So these are the ones we’re giving money to.

Glad it’s not us that’s goin’ out.

We do the Lord’s work too, who sit and wait.

And run the lathes and weevils up the mill, and drive our souped-up Chevies, pay our bills and root the Braves right into bottom place.

Augusta 4

2011-12-25T09:23:00.001-08:00

Alone at table where the best meals of their lives were shared. La Mirabelle. He scans the list and finds her favorite dish. The menu’s changed. New plastic covers and the prices up. But her old plate is there, same after years. She’s gone now, five this spring. Alone where moments of their lives were streams of peace, each with a book, each lost in long meanderings of the soul. If she’s not there, it’s part because of him. If he had known the perfect alchemy for bucking spirits into better union she’d still be. But now he sits alone, sole witness to his own defeat. Married, they were…and in this very place! Nine years ago and four before she passed. He pointed her the way, she followed willingly. He orders his old plate. He looks across to her still empty one. Slowly she’d eat. Exasperatingly thumb at her book and nibble at mortality. She loved the bricks that make this place. Their general untidiness. The bumbling waiters. Kitsch umbrellas, hanging up-side down. The wrinkled bricks and rat-gnawed pebbly mortar. The grimy charm. ‘Charm’s what you make it,’ she would say. ‘The books I read have trapped me in fly-paper.’ The dreams their stories led them through. The silence. Peace in those rough-hewed fire-scorched walls. He put her in that grave as surely as he breathes. The food arrives and tastes the same without her. It tastes of minor Simenon, thrown off in three fast days of Liège fog (the usual time he took to write a book). It tastes of her and her of longed-for death. Of Sylvia Plath. Virginia Woolf. A grave before I’m thirty, she had vowed. She misvowed only by two slender years. He helped her to it, that he knows full well. There are worse crimes than leading one to death. When death is all the longing of the soul. He sees her wedding veil float past tonight. The one she laid out right beside the pills. The one her wrist then splattered with her blood. The food’s no different now than five years past. The candle niches glow on ragged walls. She is no ghost…no voice beyond her choice. He chose for her this path with a sure eye, a steady hand, a tranquil joyful steel-ribbed voice. ‘Go forth, my love, to lesser loss at last and fly this world before the longing’s past.’

Augusta 3

2011-12-25T09:22:00.001-08:00

At 90 Papa flew alone across the Atlantic to see me. He came through the arrivals door wearing red pants and a matching checked sweater. I remembered seeing them on him once before in 1972. It was 2001. They’d made him ride in a wheelchair, but he hopped out as soon as he saw me. He turned around and gave the startled man from the airlines a five dollar bill. (We’d been on the euro for a year already but in his heyday of travelling, circa 1960, dollars were the world’s currency and were snatched up everywhere like gold coins.)

He stayed two weeks with me in the château. One night he got drunk with me on whiskey (first time he’d drunk in twenty years) and when he stood up he just about fell over. He teetered back and I caught him just as he was on his way down. We’d been munching peanuts and sipping Black Label on ice for a couple of hours, talking about everything we always loved to talk about. The family. My father’s latest caper. Golf. My children. My nephews and nieces. Jane’s (my aunt and his daughter) ovarian cancer. His apartment. The antiques my grandmother had left behind. His woodworking. The family.

Family is so important in the South.

My grandmother (his wife) had been in her grave 11 months by then.

I’d gotten to know him first as a voice. We were in Dominican (he always dropped the ‘Republic’ when referring to the island, which I think he secretly detested) and he was a ham radio nut. He’d given my father a transceiver before we left for the mission field, and instead of missionarying around like he should have done, my Dad spent his mornings chatting away with his father back in Augusta Georgia. When he ran out of things to say he’d call the children over and we’d each get to say hello. I was so nervous the first time I did this, and so steeped in evangelical lingo, that after my ‘hello, how are you Papa’ I signed off ‘Goodbye. In Jesus Name, Amen’. It was a reflex. That’s how you ended conversations with unseen gods in my family.

He was a god to me. When I finally met him he was like no one I’d ever met. I’d never been pampered before. My mother and father couldn’t afford it, even if it had been in their character. I’d never been asked what I wanted…’would you rather have pound cake today or ice cream, or why not a little of both of them with a CoColar’. (That’s how they refer to Coke in Augusta Georgia.) It was that way whenever we were with him. My brother and I would get to go to Mary and Papa’s house for weekends from time to time and those were among the best moments of my childhood. He couldn’t do enough for us. ‘How about a new pair of shoes or a knit sweater? Ya’ll feel like a boat ride or shall we ride over to the Daniel Field and see if they’ll take us up in a Cessna? You boys pile in and I’ll ride you over to my office to meet the gang, then we’ll go for dinner at the country club. Kenny, you get to choose what we watch on TV tonight, and Bobby it’ll be your turn tomorrow.’ He was a god, In Jesus Name, Amen.

He was a tall man, well built, when I first saw him at the age of 10 (the first I can remember seeing him). He had come with Mary and my aunt Jane and her husband, to see me in New Orleans just after I was born. I was their first grandchild. The only thing he ever said about that visit was that Jane, who’d studied French for years in college, couldn’t even order in that language in the restaurants. ‘All that money for nothing,’ he’d sigh. There is a picture of me with the four of them somewhere in that sinful city. The other thing he said was that when they brought me back to Augusta, his mother, my great-grandmother, simply adored me. Thought I was the handsomest baby she’d ever laid eyes on, and wanted to hold me all day long. Mom and Dad didn’t object. It was her last great pleasure. She died the next year.

Papa was tall but already slightly stooped. My mother said it was because of his back operation at Mayo’s. (For years I thought they both made mayonnaise and fixed backs.) He had a great lion head, which, even on his outsized frame, seemed out of place. I’ve inherited it, in fact, and look more and more like him as I age. I’m even getting the stoop.

More than stooped Papa was bent slightly to the right. You couldn’t tell unless you looked at him carefully with his shirt off or watched him walk. He used to talk abut Mayo Clinic as if it were run by saints. They’d saved him from a wretched life of pain, probably from being wheelchair-bound. It was one of the few times he had a good word for ‘yankees’.

He had never been to Paris. Amazing, since, as Vice President of Georgia Power he’d been all over the world. So, at 90, he saw Paris for the first time. On the drive there on a misty drizzly October day (it rained every day for the two weeks he was in Europe) he suddenly sat up in his seat and said, ‘What was that?’ ‘What?’ I answered. ‘That just flew by.’ ‘Oh, that’s the TGV, the fast train.’ ‘How fast?’ ‘Oh, about 310, at full speed. Kilometers, that is.’

Papa started at Georgia Tech in 1926 when he was 18. Between his Junior and Senior year the Stock Market crashed. In order to finish his degree he had to ‘go Co-op’, meaning he’d work for 6 months and then study the other 6. With a father on the Georgia Railroad, the job that fell to Papa was welding locomotives.

A normal summer in Georgia means temperature in the 90s every day. Inside a locomotive, arc welding, you can probably add another 20. I have pictures of him after a day of welding, the soot and sweat plastered to his skin. He looks like a black minstrel in a music hall pantomime.

So trains fascinated Papa.

‘Do you think we can see it?’ he asked.

‘What, the TGV?...Sure.’

So our first stop in Paris was the Gare du Nord. He was like a boy with a sleek new toy. He walked up and down the platform gazing at it in silence. The locomotive, especially, with its tapered nose. Suddenly a whistle blew and the conductor motioned us to get on the train. ‘No, we’re just looking. We don’t have tickets.’ I quickly told him the reason for my grandfather’s fascination. He looked up and down the platform. Everyone had already gotten on the train. In one minute it would leave for Lille.

‘Come. Come quickly,’ he motioned us. He opened the cab of the locomotive and whispered something to the driver. ‘Quick, get up.’ He almost lifted my grandfather into the driver’s cabin. Before I knew what was happening, we were both seated in a cramped cockpit with dials and switches all around and a stick column not unlike that of an airplane. The TGV was off. We glided out of the station and whisked, almost soundlessly, through the arrondisments, crossed the Peripherique and headed out into the northern bandlieux of Paris. I watched the speedometer as we hit the countryside. 150, 180, 240, finally 310. The concrete pylons swished by, the trees a blur, a passing train hit us with a blast that shook the cabin.

‘Now you,’ the driver said…these were his first words. ‘Maintenant vous!’ he repeated. I looked to see to whom he was referring. It wasn’t me. For the first, and probably last, time ever, a 90 year-old man was at the controls of the TGV at full throttle as it entered the Oise Valley and approached the Somme. It was a moment in his life. For the next two days in Paris he talked of nothing else. I told this story at his funeral four years later and there wasn’t a dry eye after I finished. But I saw as many smiles as I did tears.

When we got to Lille the driver gave us two SNCF passes and told us to wait until all the passengers had disembarked and left the platform before getting out of the cab. The passes would serve as our tickets on the ride back. This same TGV would leave in 15 minutes and we’d be back in Paris 75 minutes from now.

And so it was.

We stayed at the Madison Hotel just across the street from Saint Germain, the oldest church in Paris. I chose the hotel for the neighborhood. All my favorite restaurants are within an easy walk. We went to the Lido to see the show with the feathers and magicians and chorus girls. It was the first time he’d seen ladies topless in a public place. He loved it.

I knew what else he would love, and it wasn’t art. So the only museum we went to was one for old cars. He had an engineer’s mind and loved anything well put together. The cars were arranged by year they were made so, from 1914 or so, he recognized the models and could tell me whom he knew who’d had one like that.

The two weeks flew by.

I took him out to eat every night. I tucked him in bed. I picked him up in the middle of the night when he fell out of bed (which only happened once—nothing broken). I helped him get out of the tub after his baths. I gave him glycerin suppositories when he was constipated. (Doing the honors myself, since he couldn’t reach that far back himself.) I stuffed two in at a time when one didn’t give him any relief. He apologized for the bother but I laughed and said, ‘Don’t you know how many times I’ve had to disimpact people as a doctor. Probably a thousand times, and that’s much worse than this.’

He was a boy during those 2 weeks, and when I took him to the airport to fly back alone to Atlanta, there were tears in his eyes.

Augusta 2

2011-12-25T09:21:00.000-08:00

During most of the decade from 2000-2010 I felt a homicidal rage against two men: George W. Bush and Anthony ‘Tony’ Blair. I was not alone. Millions shared my passion. Now both men have passed behind the curtain. Neither has been held to account. Both have written memoirs. I shall not be reading either. But I have tried to imagine what Blair might have said to assuage the rage. For example…

In moments of wrenching honesty, I must admit I was swayed by emotion and not reason, and my greatest enchantment was with power and the trappings of power.

To stride down that carpet into the Oval office with the world's eyes fixed on me.

To stand next to the President and explain in Oxford English what the Texan could only stammer.

To see the combined Houses of Congress standing and applauding wildly for me.

The media frenzy at every stop.

People walking away from Bono and towards me at Davos.

Every man would like to be as God. Every man, standing on the mountain top and seeing the kingdoms of the world spread before him, is tempted to sell his soul.

I am the Son of Satan.

Like the Gnostics I believed this world was created by the devil when God wasn't looking. Hence my willingness to master black arts.

With Bush I played Black Adder to Prince George.

If you could have seen his eyes—their wonder, their envy!—when I spoke.

He’d have given the twin towers for my tongue.

Augusta 1

2011-12-25T09:20:00.000-08:00

When I was two we moved back south to Augusta, Georgia. I have no clue as to why my parents soured on Denver so quickly or why the Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary didn’t suit. But I couldn’t complain about the geography. Augusta is The Garden City, and few places are more beautiful, especially when the azaleas are in full bloom. No wonder they play the Masters here in April.

My grandparents’ first names were Sam and Mary. They told us to call them Papa and Mary. She especially was insistent we never call her ‘grandmother’. My Mom said it was because she was afraid of growing old, and especially afraid of dying. ‘It’s because she’d not saved,’ she explained solemnly. I grew up wondering why Mary didn’t just get saved so we could call her grandmother and she wouldn’t be afraid anymore.

Both Sam and Mary were natives of Augusta.

My great grandfather, Joseph, on my father’s side drove the train from Augusta to Atlanta every day for forty years. So Papa grew up around trains. The one my great-grandfather drove is now on exhibit on the grounds of the Augusta Museum. Eventually Papa became a Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company, heading up the CSRA (Central Savanna River Area). This included the massive Savanna River Power Plant with its nuclear reactors which produces the plutonium for much of America’s arsenal. Savanna River was a direct outgrowth of the Manhattan Project.

Around the year of my birth, its reactors went critical for the first time. They began to generate electricity and hydrogen bombs. Still today Savanna River is the country’s only source of tritium, an essential component of nuclear weapons. So it may be said with some justification that my grandfather presided over the building of the most horrific weapons in human history.

It was the first large-scale commercial nuclear power plant in the country and much of it was built thanks to Westinghouse. Little wonder all the appliances in my grandparents house bore that name. Most of worldwide junkets Papa and Mary took during his 40 years with the Power Company were sponsored by this Westinghouse. It was a different age. No, it’s the same age we live in now.

My father was also born and raised in Augusta. He went, like my grandfather and all the Strauss males before him, to Richmond Academy, the main high school in town and the oldest existing public school in the South.

Our return from Denver, with its onetime hellion in the person of my father, could not have pleased my grandparents. The family was soon to expand to four with the arrival of my brother Bob. Augusta was a gentile town and hellions were not soon forgotten.

Gentile, of course, for those who could afford it. There were three types of people in Augusta. The country club set, of which Mary and Papa were proud members. The working whites. And the blacks. The three were forced to rub shoulders with each other every day but for decades (and to a large extent even now) they did not mix.

Papa’s hobby was woodworking. His best friend was a Greek immigrant named Nick, a master craftsman in wood. Nick saw Papa nearly every day. Papa would come to his shop to watch him work and Nick would give Papa tips and lend him tools. But they never shared a meal together. They attended separate churches. That’s how you know who you were in Augusta, by which church you attended.

Aida was a tall black woman who came every day to Papa and Mary’s house for over forty years. She cooked, ironed and kept house. (Mary was a socialite whose housekeeping never extended further than emptying her ash tray every evening into the fireplace.)

Every Christmas morning we went to Aida’s house to deliver her present. We all stood outside, she on one side of a chain-link fence and we, the white folk, on the other. The house was on ‘the other side of the tracks’. Our gift was handed over. She’d usually baked a Christmas pie for us. It came back over in the opposite direction.

I always wondered what was inside that clap-board shack. One day, years later when I had my driver’s license, I called on her one Christmas afternoon. (In the South you call on people.) At first Aida was startled to see me. We’d already come by and given her a present. For the first few minutes we stood outside chatting awkwardly across the fence. Then she saw, with some alarm, that I wasn’t leaving. She looked around furtively and, seeing no one, asked me to come in. The inside was spick and span as I knew it would be and there was the smell of wood burning. She sat me down in an old easy chair Papa had handed down to her and she took her place on a green vinyl sofa with a big crack down the middle.

Her daughter was up north in Philadelphia, she explained. She rarely came home. Don’t like it down South no more after seein’ all the goings on up North. But I got lot of friends here, and of course my church. That’s the red brick one down the street, the AME. And she made a vague motion with her hand. Been here all my life. Don’t know nothing else. Never been anywheres else. I’m getting on in years but I’ve always been a maid and wouldn’t change nothing even if’n I could.

Aida hadn’t been well that year. It was a feminine problem, she said. I was already a medical student by that time. Someone had mentioned cancer to her, but no treatments had been prescribed so she wasn’t sure what it might be. I already take water pills for my swolled up ankles and another’un for sugar and another’un for high blood.

I sat there much of the afternoon. She made coffee and gave me a piece of cherry pie with vanilla ice-cream but wouldn’t have any herself, on account of my sugar. Twice during the afternoon the phone rang. Once it was her daughter from Philly wishing her Merry Christmas. The second time it was a neighbor who wanted to bring her her present. Aida said she was busy just now but would call back as soon as she got herself good ‘n ready. When she hung up she told me I was the first white man ever to sit in this room, and she was mighty proud of it.

She died of endometrial cancer eight months later. I was also the only white man at her funeral. In the middle of the ceremony, and with no warning, the preacher called me up to give her a eulogy. Aida, I said in my first words, did me the honor not long ago of inviting me into her home and sharing her Christmas pie with me. She served my family for forty years and it saddens me to realize I never served her in any way.

Denver 15

2011-12-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

You're wearing something new.

It’s satin. She held out the sleeve.

Like silk.

It’s satin, man-made not worms.

Looks the same.

Silk is shimmery, satin is glossy.

Only a woman would know.

If you had to iron them you would.

I iron my own shirts but nothing’s silk

Silk is made by silk worms, it’s organic and strong and very expensive. That’s why I don’t have anything in silk. Satin is more delicate and has a dull backside, but it’s still very… and she sought the word…

‘Silky’ I suggested.

She smiled. Yes. Everything has a feel that’s wrapped up in its name: silky, velvety, wooly, lacy, cottony, jeany, nylony…

Not many guys appreciate that.

Each word evokes a feeling. Your fingertips know it.

What are your favorite clothes?

Underclothes, I love the lace in bras and the softness of the cups.

I like the feel of jeans on a Saturday morning. Feels like a day off. You relax just by putting them on.

We walked on a little bit further

I caught a mouse this morning. About 4 AM.

You have mice!

We’d seen droppings so a couple of days ago I put out a trap. The mouse must have heard me. He came out, curious-like. I could see his eyes. Just then the trap went off like a gun.

Were you started?

It was horrible. He didn’t die straight out. I heard him thrashing about. That went on and on and I felt like an awful coward. I knew I should put him out of his misery but I was afraid if I got too close he’d get out and bite me or something. It was so dark I couldn’t see anything. But I knew I had to do it, so I went off for the broom. When I got back I couldn’t hear him anymore. So I turned on the light and there he was. It had caught him across the nose, just in front of the eyes. They were still open but when I poked him with the broom he was all limp. I think I’m going to dream about it. There was a lot of smeared blood.

What did you do with him?

I put on some gloves and opened the window.

You dropped him out the window?

Well, it was 4 AM and there’s a stream below the window.

You just opened the trap and let him drop?

Stop making it sound so dramatic. I had to shake him a bit, it had bitten into him pretty deep and he wouldn’t fall off.

Probably crushed the cartilage in his nose.

Stop!

So what did you do with the trap?

I reset it, of course. Where there’s one, there’s three!

Did you wash the blood off?

Off the floor, yes.

Off the trap?

No, why?

You won’t catch another one unless you do…they're very squeamish about that.

We’ll see.

We walked on a little further…

Denver 14

2011-12-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

Harry Hopkins almost fell into the sea, while she leapt deftly from destroyer to destroyer. The she was Clementine Churchill. The observer and chronicler was Winston. Had he, had Harry gone down into the deep salt sea, what might have become of the world? For it was Harry, more than anyone else, who won the war…who won the peace.

Had she, had Clementine, not danced him into love, poor Winston too would have fallen by the way.
~
There was another woman and here is her story: She is not Clementine, but another striking beauty, who sits demurely in the audience on the morning after, her hair now dry. The matted strands set aright, the rivulets gone. Her dress had clung to her as we trekked up from the Marmara Sea, under the streaking rain.

She’d held her scarf over her head, inviting me to take the other end. Like prisoners of some medieval battle, we marched hands up in the flapping, pitiless gale, singing.

I guided her round puddles, over crumbling sidewalk, past pouring eves and prying eyes…my arm around her waist.

She was a strong woman, well-built, well-toned, just entering—comfortably and seductively—that age in which a woman ‘comes into flesh’. Quite untroubled by it and indeed, quite unaware.

Into the sinuous flanks of what was once virginity had creped a slight wave and roll, into which the fingers slid effortlessly.

I ran my hand up her ribs, and under her arm. She sang more gaily.

Later she signed off her first six emails with a different line:

1. What a glorious feeling,
2. I'm happy again,
3. Come on with the rain,
4. I’ve a smile on my face.
5. I'll walk down the lane.
6. What a happy refrain.

Her eyes follow me as I move down the row, greeting those seated ahead of her in the audience. Finally, we are face to face, me standing, she's gazing up charmingly, like a schoolgirl looking at her pet teacher:

Good morning.

Morning.

You’re changed.

So are you.

It's warmer here.

I wasn't cold, just soaked to the bone.

Sleep well?

Like a baby!

I heard dripping all night.

Shouldn’t have hung your clothes in the tub.

And she smiled coyly.

It was a nervous exchange, pas a l’hauteur de la nuit précédante, la veille au soir. But we had every right to be nervous. We weren’t lovers. We’d only sent spies into the other’s land.

We been drawn together by accident. The seat I’d originally had under the awning was directly beneath a leak. When the downpour broke the only seat still available was across from her.

From her and from them. She’d brought along a girlfriend with whom she was sharing a room. A strange, beguiling woman who began speaking to me first in French, then in quick succession switched to German then English then Dutch.

Her hair was dark and tightly curled, this Tower of Babel. I soon learned her mother was Cuban and her father, Basque. She seemed to be searching for a wavelength on which to tune me in. But she was turning the dial too quickly and getting only squelch.

Why won’t she just speak Spanish? I kept asking myself. That language we shared fluently. I couldn't speak anyway. I'd lost my voice. I was reduced to writing notes which I passed to one or to the other—to the two beautiful women in front of me.

The noise was deafening around us. Too many people. One hundred and twenty from our group alone. The rain didn’t help, nor the sloshing in my middle ear.

I began noting down all that intrigued me about this Babel friend of hers. In no time I had a list of 11 strange coincidences which the two of us shared.

Number and age of children (3: 27, 21 and 4)
Childhood spent on a Caribbean island
Residency during the ‘70s in a Bilbao neighborhood named Deusto
Victims and survivors of cancer (hers mammary, mine lymphatic)
Fluency in several foreign languages (me 5, she 6)
Residency in Waterloo during the ‘90s (both on the edge of the battlefield)
Episodes of exhibitionism (unabashed and usually comical; hers topless, mine total)
And most remarkably, both our dogs were named Higgins.

There were several others which I can no longer remember, but the Higgins thing blew me away.

Oh, yes. We were both telepathic for auto accidents. I felt one coming a second or so before a huge pileup on an underpass. It all happened below me, I couldn’t have seen it coming. I just felt it about to happen. She had been clairvoyant enough to raise her camera and shoot the car in front of her at 4.5 frames a second as it tooled around a curve and then plunged 200 meters down a ravine. There’d been nothing abnormal beforehand. What warned her she could not say. But she had 176 images with a fireball at the end. Five were burnt to death. Two who’d been thrown clear just continued rolling on the rocks and into the flames. This from a Nikon D90 which she’d only bought that day. She was on the passenger side fiddling with the camera and had just found the continuous high-speed mode. That’s when she felt it coming. Zapruder once said he felt the same thing as Kennedy’s motorcade came around the curve and he began to film. He felt it right up to frame 313 in which Kennedy’s head explodes.

At one point, she took my hands in hers and said, ‘Eres la austia! Qué tio, puta que te pario!’ Which, if you don’t translate too literally, is as genuine a compliment (and come on) as one gets from a woman.

I worked it out in my head. 176 divided by 4.5. She’d held the shutter release down 39.11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111… seconds. With 1’s clicking on into infinity. That must have been the driver’s sensation as his Mercedes bounced from rock to rock. 1’s clicking on into infinity.

But it was N…, who sat listening rapturously to her friend and reading my notes, who attracted me. One had been marked your eyes only: ‘You remind me of Meryl Streep in Julia and Julia, only younger and more beautiful.’

She’d folded it and slipped it into her purse. Later, in the rain, she told me that from now on whenever she felt blue she’d take it out and read it.

When she told me that it touched me. A lump welled. Even if I could have spoken, I wouldn’t have had the words. I bent and kissed her forehead and, just at that moment, her heel caught in the gravel and she tripped. My hand caught her and lifted her back up and then I realized that it was on her breast and her wet nipple squeezed between my fingers. It didn’t matter. She was as radiant as ever, dancing and twirling a streak of droplets from her skirt and singing in the rain.

‘Don't you think I have a wonderful friend?’ she called out to the howling wind.

They seemed to be more than friends, so often had they been in each other's arms that evening, kissing cheeks and gazing into each other's eyes. She claimed they'd not seen each other for months until this weekend. They rarely got together. Spain is a big place, and their flats lay at opposite ends of town.

Her friend’s malignancy was found by N. She’s a GYN nurse. It appeared first in a lymph node but no one could find the primary. For months, they looked, and meanwhile she took chemo. Finally someone noted a calcified spot in an old mammogram. They lopped the place out and then there was more chemotherapy, and the usual slide downward.

Hair loss, appetite gone, eye lashes fallen out, aphthous ulcers, depression, febrile neutropenia, hospitalizations, broad spectrum antibiotics, cultures from every orifice, no source found, more antibiotics, white cells timidly come back, home weak and weepy, more recovery, more chemo, more hair loss (including pubic), more fever, more hospital, more cultures, more and more and evermore.

She fell to a point where she won’t get dressed anymore and refused to see anyone, even her mother. (How could this be from such a vivacious, talkative, manic one? My cosmic twin who was crazy enough to name her dog Higgens and run around topless with all the windows open.)

She said N… pulled her out of it. Bought her a wig and made her take off the pajamas and get her butt out of the house. I’d watched them in silent awe and knew they loved each other in a way men can’t begin to understand.

N’s later e-mails made a reference to that evening, to the things we’d talked about together and, each time, to the walk back in the rain. Again she ended them with a line from the song.

7. I'm laughing at clouds.
8. So dark. Up above.
9. Let the stormy clouds chase.
10. Everyone from the place.

Then it all went massively wrong…hard to figure out why.

The conference where we met was intended for doctors and nurses and I happen to be one of the former and N, one of the latter. We were gathered in Istanbul to consider a thorny medical problem for which no solution had been found. We would propose recommendations and they would go out everywhere as standards of care worldwide. The group was selected carefully and came from across the globe. I was the selector. N was a selectee. I chose her, sight unseen, on her credentials, her publications, her standing as the best nurse in her country. Not on whether she'd let stormy clouds chase everyone from the place.

Her two children, I found out that evening, were both musicians. She teased me, in one of her mails, that with these two, my pianist daughter and the two of us singing we could form a quintet.

It was the kind of quip only those with spies in each other’s gardens could find funny, but it says many things.

The Suns in my heart.
And I'm ready for love...

That was how she signed off that eleventh mail.

It was the best time to visit Istanbul. Indian summer, tourists gone and the dust and smoke settled. There’d been forest fires that year which came all the way into the city and a horrible earthquake not far away. September is always the best month around the Mediterranean from Javea to Haifa.

Why does September.
Seems sunny as spring?
Why is each new task a trifle to do?
Because I am living a life full of you.

That’s how she ended her twelfth mail. I was wondering when the song would run out of lines and hated that she was now using them up so profligately.

How could something which started so romantically be spoilt so soon?

Well, I'm afraid you're looking at the specialist.

We both were married, that's one thing.

Both married, and happily so, as one last fiery exchange reminded each other.

Here’s the whole lot…

September 14.

N…,

I felt very bad about not saying goodbye to you. I hope your trip home went well, how did you find your musical children?

I saw that it was raining cats and dogs there. You can’t escape it anywhere!

What a good time in the meeting, no? Those were long days and everyone’s exhausted. I probably wanted to do too much.

I still haven’t got my voice back and I just realized you’ve never heard it. You only know me through my notes.

I was so swept away by our dinner and your friend. It was the best moment of the whole meeting. When I remember Constantinople (as you insist on calling it) years hence it will be of that…and our trek back in the rain.

Hugs to both of you.

K

Her answer came back that same night.

Dear K…

It certainly was very interesting session, and today at work I already started applying the new recommendations.

Our dinner with you was most entertaining and what I will remember with most affection.

I suspect it’s the same for my friend, who immediately sensed affinity and congeniality in our splendid conversations.

Congratulations on the meeting. The success was yours. To pull it off with no voice was a miracle.

We got such wonderful treatment from you.

Thank you again and we return the hugs.

N…

I replied immediately back.

N…,

Since you’re already applying the new recommendations I want you see the latest version (attached). You’re the first to see it.

Thanks for your reflections on our dinner together. I’ve thought much about it since then, and believe we had the same impressions and feelings. These things are rare and magical. Reincarnation is true... the only question is whether we were together in the past or will be in the future!

Another hug,

K

She answered:

Dear K,

Thanks for all your help and the new version.

I take advantage of this mail to send you another hug, and by the way a couple of kisses—since I didn't get them when we didn't say goodbye.

I dare tell you all these things because you are an enchanting person and very professional who is always interested in the opinions of others and always listens actively and sincerely.

Otherwise I wouldn't dare.

I continue to remember how nice that dinner was in your company. I'm happy again!

Strong hugs, N.

She sent me another mail before I could answer that one.

Dear K.

I want to invite you to my house if you pass near here, for dinner or lunch or any time else that you prefer, my house is yours and my family will be very pleased if you accept. Please call me if it's possible, this is my phone number.

Think about my offer. It would be fantastic!

Xxxx and xxxx. Xxxx and xxxx.

N

And then I ruined it.

Dear N,

Thank you for your kind, sweet message.

You remind me of the nurse who was heroine in my first novel.

Thank you also for the offer of coming to your house. I Googled your town and it is a little paradise between the mountains and the sea.

I’m sure now that you and I were either together in a previous life or will be in a future one. I feel stunned and privileged to have met a person I know I could love and spend my life with. It’s also very sad, because it’s an impossible dream (you and I are already with another). But still it’s wonderful.

Magic mustn’t be ignored. It ‘s a fire. Holy and as dangerous as it is beautiful. I felt it from the moment my arm was around you. Transported in time.

Bring the holy fire too close and it will burn all of us and hurt most those around us, so we must be careful and respectful of each other's lives.

Nevertheless, the feeling was wonderful and tender. It makes me feel happy to think of you as you were in the rain and remember your face and your lovely singing.

So, please keep this treasure safe for it makes life (in some distant future galaxy) precious and beautiful.

In the meantime, I send all my best to the ones you love— especially your talented and loving children.

In that future galaxy, I hope there is a landmark we can agree to meet at and walk hand-in-hand in the rain. Life is long but eternity is forever, so patience will someday be rewarded.

The rain on the distant horizon is pierced by golden sun and rainbow.

Big hugs, K

A line had been crossed. A secret garden entered and ravaged.

Her response was very formal. No matter how many times I’ve read it, the pain seems only to grow.

Respected Doctor,

Reading your mail. I see a great confusion has arisen with respect to our friendship.

I lament and excuse myself, because it is a great mistake.

I love my life, my relations and all the activities around me.

I am happily married and loved my husband and my children. I am not looking for any other relationship.

In Istanbul I enjoyed being able to laugh and talk on a relaxing night together in a restaurant.

I'm very sorry for the confusion. I have nothing to hide from my husband or my children, nor do I desire to do so.

I hope this clarifies our relationship as one which is totally professional, and that this misunderstanding does not harm our efforts towards those patients we take care of.

With regards, N.

I immediately knew all was lost. I kicked myself all over the room.

I answered back that same night.

My N,

I very much regret it.

I respect your feelings and share them 100%.

I know we can continue to be professional collaborators and also friends.

I don't want in any way to cause you harm, either you or your family.

Nor did I want to make you angry, as I see I've done.

I hope these black clouds part.

K

I got no response to this letter, so two days later I sent her the following.

N,

During the days since your last mail I’ve reflected on it with increasing sadness. I very much regret that we’ve blown out the candle that we’d lit together.

I want you to know I had no intention of proposing an affectionate relationship together, nor a hidden meeting. I do not want to disturb your excellent marriage.

I am not seeking such a relationship with any woman other than mine. I'm happy with her. We have a beautiful daughter and a lovely life together.

I was postulating some future life, some nonsense involving reincarnation.

When I said in my mail was that we should respect and safeguard our relationships with our partners it was my way of saying that I didn't think it was a very good idea for me to come to your house... my lady would not understand this, and I can imagine that your husband would also find it a bit strange.

I should have said this with perfect clarity instead of in phrases which were folkloric and merely suggestive. I was describing a dream... but it was only my dream and it was an impossible dream.

The only thing left for me to say is that I very much regret this. I have too much respect for you to cause you any harm, and especially in this cruel way.

You don't have to answer this mail. In fact, I prefer you didn't. It might cause more harm if I saw that you were still thinking in the same way.

Always your friend (and nothing more), K.

There was no answer to this mail either. I wasn’t expecting one.

I have seen her twice since then. The first time, several months after this exchange, she was attending a conference I was speaking at. I came in late and only spoke to her for the briefest of moments. We had time to exchange the two usual greeting kisses before I was hauled off to look at my slides. She seemed to grip me tightly for just a second before we had to split up. I gave the lecture and then left before saying anything to anyone.

About a week after this. I called her and spoke for exactly 1 minute and 30 seconds. She was with a patient and couldn't talk, but said that perhaps we could speak another time. She said the documents in the final versions I had sent were fine and that she had no new comments.

She seemed dry, hurried and slightly harassed by my call.

I saw her nearly a year later at another meeting. She was with another nurse friend. I approached them on several occasions during the meeting to chat. It was all very light and friendly and I wondered if the friend knew anything. N looked lovely and she made one or two jokes, which we all laughed at politely.

So this is the story in all its silly twists and perversions.

And I'm left with questions, reproaches for myself and the task of forgetting.

But I have laid it out all here for objective inspection.

Denver 13

2011-12-25T09:06:00.001-08:00

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love

Leonard Cohen

Denver 12

2011-12-25T09:05:00.001-08:00

She has seized the commanding heights of my heart and is raining fire down on the field below. The regiment is cut to ribbons. It has ceased to exist. Dead are strewn across the entrenched field in all the embarrassing, mesmerizing attitudes of death.

Survivors huddle. Half of them are out of their mind with shell shock. They twitch and jerk as they await each volley. A close miss sends them into apoplectic spasms. The stench of soiled underwear covers the field. Never have so many owed such suffering to so few.

The time of my own death approaches. Its finger is the shape of a funnel cloud. Its fist is the horizon itself, looming like a woman’s bosom. It has no hurry. It comes on leisurely, bearing the doomsday clock. The sky darkens and her enfilading fire slackens.

There are holy and unholy ways to die. And favored ways to kill. The kiss of Judas is more deadly than shell fragments. Than dum-dum bullets. Than the Tsar Bomba.

Her lips approach.