Silhouette

What are you saying?

In a white circle in a field of jet black, you depict a man's silhouetted head in profile, downward bent, against a guard tower and barbed wire.

You have multiple representations: the head has hair or is bald; eyelashes and lips, or nothing protuberant; head flat or round; forehead prominent or perhaps back of the head elongated; chin rounded or jutting, but the nose always prominent.

The guard in tower is sometimes clearly armed, sometimes just an upright figure. The barbed wire, is sometimes a single, sometimes a double strand, barbed or just strung on a post.

Among black flags, you are not the jolly roger, not the black standard of Muhammed, not the no-surrender banner of certain Confederate units nor the U-boat signal at the end of the second war, not the Italian fascist nor the anarchist flag, not the flag of German peasants in revolt nor the counter-Nazi flag of Strasser's Black Front nor the anti-Zionist flag of the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta, not the flag of the Finnish armored forces nor the Swedish Pirate Party, not the flag of public mourning nor the 'Live Free or Die' flag of the doomed Catalans of 1714 nor the flag of ISIL waving today over parts of Iraq and Syria.

Other flags make assertions of sovereignty or express ideals, but you make a promise: you, despairing and lonely prisoners, you are not forgotten, not abandoned. But what if the prisoners you refer to no longer exist? What if they are an empty set? Who then is your perpetual commitment being made to? Other prisoners? Future prisoners? We ourselves these many decades later?

Several times a year, you are officially displayed just below the national flag, taking precedence over local and other flags, and many facilities fly you all the time

So, year after year, like Poe's raven, you haunt our skies, whipping and snapping over over the heads of generations and peoples not yet disconsolate who may wonder why that sad black banner yet waves.

Free

'Is this the Prelude? It doesn't sound like William Byrd?  If not, then what are they playing? Is it this on the program, Heralding? Now I'm all confused. What about the Prelude? It's right here in the program.' 

So you, sitting next to me, chuntered on through the performance. The 'musical intermission' must have been a typo, except there was a piece for trombone quartet up in the the balcony while the house-lights were up. That must be this in the program, but it lists four sections; why did I only hear three?  

'They always do such a good job here, I wonder why the program's screwed up tonight. And I think they've spelled the name of the soloist wrong, a 'v' instead of an 's', or else I don't know what's going on. 

'What, the Prelude was twenty minutes before the concert? I got here ten minutes before. Well, why didn't they put it on the website so I could have been here early?

Meanwhile serried trumpets, trombone choirs, teams of horns, a herd of tubas flow on the stage to make modern mass brass music. Young people with good training and good lungs made the hall ring. And all for free.

'Wait, this doesn't sound like Hansel and Gretel. What's going on? This is impossible to follow. Okay, it's really the fourth section of the trombone quartet. Well, I don't know why they have to arrange it this way. It's really hard to follow. 

'You know, there are so many free concerts in this area that I hardly know which ones to pick.' 

There

Twice she had seen at the intersection of Carver and George on foot and heading into town. Nobody goes out there. A lot of old  and derelict houses backing onto a wood that Carver cuts through on its way out of town. A little rundown strip mall with its fair share of empty storefronts, a bodega, a tat parlor, a packie, and some other establishments with murky fly-blown plate windows. So where had she been? Why was she there at all?

Greg had been skateboarding down George on his way to Nat's house one Saturday afternoon when he saw her walking in her slow careless way across the road. 'Hey,' he called as he zoomed by to catch the green light. She looked up startled, smiled and waved.. A couple of days later, Christa called out the window to her as her mother drove her to the dentist. This time she wore a big floppy hat and sunglasses, almost disguised, but still recognizable.

Her circle of friends pressed her at lunch, but she brushed away their suggestions that she was looking for drugs or, and this was Melanie's barb, an abortion. 'Yeah, I'm just checking it out  in case you need it, Mel' she laughed. And then she started on one of her long meandering stories about, this time, an almost extinct deer discovered in the jungles of Vietnam just a few years ago called a 'saola.' 'Did you know they call it the Asian unicorn?'

'Come on, we're not in class now,' said Greg, 'you don't have to be the good little student anymore.'

'Yeah, who gives a damn about the deer there; it's the fighting that matters,' said Nat. 'There's a great video game about the war, full of ambushes and tunnels. I love it. I have relatives who were there, but I don't know exactly who. Probably happy to shoot the damn deer and chow down, better'n this slop,' as he tossed the school lunch.

'Anyway, unicorns are like My Little Pony, for little innocent virgins' sneered Christa, 'not for any of us.'

That was the thing about her. She joined in one whatever we did, in fact almost the life of the party, but instead of talking about herself, she told these stories about the weirdest things. She never snitched even when there was trouble; in fact, she was nice to be around when the others weren't there, which was not very often, but still when you got her alone, she always seemed to be thinking of something else.

Then, one day about a week later, she came into school waddling. She tried to hide it but anyone could see she was in pain there. 'Maybe I was right,' said Mel. 'Our little goodie goodie girl has been keeping something from us.'  But when we asked her who the lucky guy was, she only scoffed at the thought, and since she never complained, the girls started to get angry with her. After all, we'd all shared stories of our exploits; why should she hold back?

The next day, she was surreptitiously scratching herself there when she thought no one was looking, and still she wouldn't own up to anything, so Mel and Christa made a plan to get her to talk. After gym class, when the girls were showering, they snuck into the shower stall and snatched her towel. She called out and asked for it back, or for another, but they refused, only telling her to 'Come clean.'

Eventually, she came out and walked naked to her locker to put her clothes on wet, meanwhile keeping her back to the girls, which only infuriated them more. Christa stepped forward and pulled on her shoulder, demanding 'Look at us.'

She turned and looked them in the face, but their eyes went to where they thought they'd see signs of some medical procedure that would confirm their suspicions. Instead what they saw on the bare skin of her pubis was a tattoo of a horned animal in profile. It had two horns which almost looked like one, and the long muzzle with white (untattooed) patches along the nose and down the jaw, and a big bovine eye with white (untattooed) eyebrow looked out, mild but mysterious.

'What's that,' demanded the girls.

She took a piece of paper out of her backpack with a drawing. 'This is what the artist and I came up with from the photos, and it took about four hours to actually ink. It's a wild, shy animal and I figure over time it will disappear into the jungle. Listen to this that someone wrote: 'Put a saola, even a saola you cannot see, in a forest and the forest, as though it held a unicorn, acquires an energy that cannot be described.'

She stepped forward, took her towel from Christa's slack hand, and proceeded to dry herself and dress. Then she said, 'Let's keep it our secret.'

Lend me your ears

from Idols

Through falling snow, and past The Eternal Presence, we walked up the steps of Abbotsford, the Roxbury puddingstone-built mansion housing the National Center of Afro-American Artists, and found within the open doors, the lights out.

The caretaker, a bearded man with tall knit hat over a Rasta hairdo, seemed taken by surprise, and perhaps a little miffed at our being there. An ancient Nubian tomb, some rooms with assorted pictures, including at large oil by Robert Freeman, whom we'd known years ago, and a show of collages by Renee Westbrook entitled 'Idols in the Mirror: Postcards from the Scene of the Crime,' on the theme of colonial exploitation.

But, having made the circuit and strolling into the lobby, I fell into conversation with you, caretaker, member of  the museum's umbrella organization, and artist in your own right. Rather I fell into listening as you told me about the place the projects, the history of The Eternal Presence, the huge Olmec-inspired bust erupting out of the grounds, the neighborhood and its freedom from natural disasters, 'reform' as a diguise for revolution, the essential creativity of people as expressed in kids, and his daughter in particular, and on and on.

'The Eternal Presence'

I turned this way as if to go, that way to fetch my wife but you wouldn't let me go. Your eye grew brighter and your voice more excited, your hands more expressive on the counter behind which you sat. It was interesting to learn that John Wilson the sculptor of the Presence worked on it for 20 years until his daughter brought home a friend whose face was what he wanted to depict. Patience is the lesson, alert waiting.

And my daughter, you said, when young had painted a picture of a woman identical to one made by her cousin, and they'd worked independently, and 'Let me show you,' as you took me through a door downstairs to where some framed artwork hung on the walls. 'This is my stuff,' you said, 'but that is the picture my daughter made,' a large headed red haired figure.


Then you let me out the basement door and said, pointing to a large head made of welded strips next to the side of jthe building, 'That's mine also.'  Even outside in the snow, the rust red work was striking.

How we need listeners. You had a lot to say, and the stream of it was stronger and more authoritative as time past. How long had it been in you waiting expression? Nobody likes being cornered by a talker, but don't I have things to say I haven't yet found audience for?  Haven't I sometimes apologized to some stunned listeners for being so enthusiastically voluble?  Where was I going that I couldn't arrive a few minutes later and give you the difference?

Lend me your ears, is all we ask. At the end, I was happy to give you mine.

Undiminished

Tottery old man in the black suit, sparse white hair on a pink head, one hand on cane, the other on the arm of a young girl, you moved slowly to the grand piano, sat down carefully, composed your long, white hands on your lap, waited, waited, then lifted them to the keyboard.

Russell Sherman

Your 85th birthday, 70th anniversary of your debut as performer, but the passion you put into the Appassionata, after the Sonata #30 and the Fugue and 15 Variations, was muscular and marvelous. From the balcony behind your surprisingly broad back, I could watch your hands moving side to side, forward and back, toward and away from the same hands reflected in the black lacquered backboard behind the keys.

Precisely controlled and modulated: left hand busy creating the complex bass line, sometimes reaching across the right into treble territory, sometimes exploding up from staccato chords; right hand, rocking, trilling, walking up and down, the fingers working separately or in unison; from crashing to whispering, frenetic to flowing, thrilling music poured out and filled the packed hall.

Then, the hands went back to the lap, and the hall rose as one person cheering. On the third curtain call, the audience began to sing Happy Birthday.

That frail body, that mighty music. My wife and I have listened to you with delight over the years: Schumann, Liszt and so many others. Tonight you gave us the master with mastery. Impressive.

In the family

Time to clean up. An ordinary titanium alloy block from the family storage unit on A468 delivered to my living pod. Most of the stuff I had hit the button to sent to disposal--what was it used for? who used it?--but this  object had a geometric elegance that made me hold it and carefully examine it. I ran my finger over the surface until I felt a minute depression and pressed. The block split into two parts, yawned open, and bent back flat on the lexan table surface. Inside a recording device they used to call a book.

I picked it up and found it sealed with a tape upon which a message: Don't open until 2000. We're well past that, I thought, and with my laser blade slit it open. The writing style was archaic but I was able to read it.

'If you've opened this before time, I beg you read no further but destroy this. Otherwise, do what you want, everyone who might believe will be dead anyway.

'It was 490th election and there were just two of us in the final round to be chosen Supreme Being for the next 27 years. The departing SB, just hours from joining his predecessor living gods, looked at us from his exalted throne. 'What sign can you show?' he thundered.

My people, those who had supported me all the way to this final test, stood lined up at the side of the arena, watching intently. Those of the blacksmith stood on the other side, equally rapt.  I nodded to him and he proceeded to dance in a slow circle, singing and wailing, until his voice changed, became deep and resonant, and blood began to come out of the pores of the skin on his back and chest. 'So will the earth always feed you, blood from stone,' his impossibly deep voice said, before he collapsed the ground, twitching.

'I stood stock still through all this impressive display, and then suddenly voices could be heard in different places in the arena, now from above, now from behind a pillar, or from over the shoulder of the outgoing SB. At first, the voices were mere susurrations but then words could be heard behind spectators, who would turn an ear, then blush or hang their heads. The whispers melded into a wind-like sound that spoke the mystic name of the Spirit of the universe.

'All eyes were on me, but I didn't move or flinch, looking at the outgoing SB, who acknowledged me with a nod. I stepped forward and received the ordis mundi from the one who walked away to join those in Elysium whom I would also join a quarter century hence.

'My devotees knelt and bowed, as did those of the blacksmith whose blood was still staining the dust. I sat on the chrysolite throne as curtains like veils fell successively in front of me, hiding me from the people forever. To the throne they would pray for safety and good harvests and health of their sick ones, and, in fact, they got some of what they asked.

Here followed a list of positive interventions: deliverances, healings, bumper crops.

'The people kept my priests amply supplied with all kinds of food and luxurious materials to enlist their help in praying to me, prayers I sometimes listened to, sometimes not, because--this is what must not be told, lest I be expelled from the list of those sojourning among the graduated former deities in Elysium--I have no divine powers. It was ventriloquism, simple voice throwing (learned from the old men of the forest tribes), and some canny snooping into the private lives of the onlookers at the test that got me the throne.

'Maybe the blacksmith years ago did in fact show genuine signs of deity, but I have to confess to some generation in the future that I'd didn't. They called me Supreme Being, their leader, their benefactor, kind and gentle, powerful and just, and according to them, I was.

'When the pantheon list is recited for however long we are remembered, let my name be on there, a good enough god.'  Then he signed his name, my family name.

I put the book back in its box and closed the lid. Every school child has to memorize the list of early gods which are revered as the geniuses of our nation. The family tradition was that the one in the pantheon who had our name was one of us, deity ran in our family.

I pressed the button and the block slid through the opening in the wall on the way to the fire

Momento

The occasion was unpleasant but the day was pretty, and since I was early, I took the opportunity to spend a few minutes in the old brick library that holds aloft the name of one of the early worthies of this town. Plenty of parking available on the wide Main Street. I strode across the ample grass verge to the sidewalk and the stone stairs, past the columns, into the high ceilinged foyer. I ook a deep breath of cool air that had picked up the scent of books.

I love old libraries, and this had been a place of calm and reassurance when I'd been head of the school down the street. Now, looking forward to the hearing up at the court house in a few minutes, it still had the power to put things into perspective. The institution that we'd run had done good work, necessary work, difficult work. That we'd lost our funding was not justice, as some said, but a tragedy. Who was going to take care of the kids no foster parents wanted?  Had the state made them magically disappear?

And Jennifer Cogden, who surprised us by running away so far and so fast that we weren't ever able to find her and get her back, was just one of those. I remember her well, we all do. She could turn on a dime from sweet and gentle to bitter and violent. Smart, insightful, she won the hearts of all (or most) of her teachers by what seemed to be her genuine interest in their subjects. She had a way of listening with head-cocked to one side, her long red hair falling across her forehead, her chin in her hand, eyes, those intelligent hazel eyes, open, receptive. The science teacher Steve Issicar would tell her story after story, set up special demonstrations, bring in specimens just to feed the well of curiosity he found in her.

But press her, push her, try to get her to commit to anything and she would balk, wriggle, resist and finally rage. All of the hurts, slights, betrayals of her pitiful upbringing along with the failures, derelictions, bad faith of each of us and the school and the state and everyone would be slung about her like an axe wielded by a beserker cutting off heads in a wide swath around her.

We had to restrain her, as we sometimes had to with other girls, and confine her, so we wouldn't injure herself. I don't like to medicate but it was hard hearing her howl. How she cut off her hair, her beautiful hair, the night she ran away I don't know. She could have chewed it off, she got so frantic.

She had so much potential, but nothing about tomorrow trumped how she felt today. Over and over, we made plans for her, with her, only to see them come to nothing when she felt the harness of discipline. She bucked and reared, and finally bolted.

Our security was pretty good, no one else had ever gotten away, but one night she found a way, and a pretty tricky one at that, and was gone. Another runaway, fresh meat for every pimp and trafficker out there.

I had a few minutes so went down the spiral staircase to the book sale area that most libraries have in their basement these days as they de-acquisition their collections. There are lots of relatively recent books on the shelves next to the children's books, the oversized, the textbooks and assorted old titles.

The simple pulling of books from shelves, perusing of covers, thumbing through of pages, and replacement  in the long lineup is soothing, especially considering what was coming. The fire that had broken out in the office the night she escaped destroyed many of our records, including hers, and now there was this young dead, disfigured woman, and was she our Jenny? How could we tell?

Just a moment to go, and I pulled down a book of botany. I seemed to recognize it and sure enough, on the side, was Property of the Cathcart School. Must have been Steven Issicar's, given to the town library when the school closed. I wondered briefly where he'd gone. Ah well. I tucked a dollar in the slot and walked up and out into the bright spring morning with it under my arm.

The pictures of the body were gruesome; the face was shattered, the body emaciated. Could it have been Jennifer? The coroner was long-winded on the cause of death. The district attorney said that witnesses had linked the girl to this town, and since no townspeople had missed a daughter in the last years, perhaps the school.

He looked at me accusingly as if I was the perpetrator. I'd been called that directly and worse in the past. No, I didn't have any dental records, or photographs, they'd all been burned. No, I hadn't failed to follow any state guidelines for collecting identity information. They were just gone, and that was that, I said, half rising and knocking the book on my lap onto the floor.

It splayed open, and as I bent down to close it and pick it up, I noticed a strand of hair between the leaves. As I brought it up to the stand, I peeked and saw a lock of red hair.

'Are you all right, Doctor?' the prosecutor asked snidely. 'You seem a little flushed. But if you're ready, one last question: are you sure there is nothing you can tell us which can link this unfortunate girl to your school and help us identify her?'

 What was he insinuating, I wondered. I closed the book firmly, looked him in the eye, and said, 'Nothing.'

Coming our way

Green! grass in places, pansies around the hotel looking perky, some daffodils, redbud trees here and there, glimpses of vibrant forsythia, and all along the roads and throughout the ubiquitous 'gracious-living' developments, great white globular Bradford pear trees shining forth under the palpably warm rays of the sun: what spring will be like here--one day. Shorts and T-shirt weather as we labored to clean up the my sister in law's house for sale.

As we descended into Boston, my window-seat co-passenger pushed up the blinds on to another planet, white ground, white snow in the air, grey water and sky. Had I come to a moon of Saturn, some satellite with its own chemistry, its own special physics? Yet this was you, my city, my dear city, still under the reign of the Ice Queen. I felt a pang for your long siege, not a Leningrad, trees all cut for firewood, all animals ravenously consumed, but still a stricture.

But when the shuttle dropped me in Copley Square, I could see people walking  briskly about undeterred by the snow. Later, telling the story of my trip over pizza at the Dogwood Cafe, I looked around at families, couples, big boisterous parties unconcerned by the weather. Today, as the wind blew gusty and strong, business carried on as usual. Nobody is languishing. When the weather gets warmer, it will meet us already in motion.

 My poor, truncated pear, stripped of its leaves last May by worms, has draggled, trailing branches broken by the weight of snow. Still Mr and Mrs Cardinal are back on the hunt in the bare patches under my bushes. The light lasts longer and meteorological Spring is not thundering, but cantering our way. 

Race Together

The campaign is the joint project of Starbucks and USA Today: Race Together. I've been in Starbucks pretty frequently recently and noticed the white on black stickers people can ask to put on their cups. The coffee chain was taking ome heat for the move, I'd read.

But when I saw the insert today  in the newspaper,  quizzes, history, projections, it seemed the two companies had struck the right note, focusing demographics and experience rather than rhetoric.

l said as much to the young high school senior (he seemed to me) behind the counter who said he thought so as well but that he took issue with the whole notion of race of a meaningful category of classification. Class is the really important distinction between people. Race, he said, is just a way of thinking which can disappear if we change the way we think.

I made some remarks about the challenge of changing the way people think, and then left, coffee in hand. I thought, though, as I walked through the door: young man, that's just a little too neat. To substitute class consciousness for race suggests that it's peoples' behavior or mindset, what they do, that we respond to, not what we project on them, attributions that, in the social realm create what they conceives and perceptions trump even genetics.

I know you think a change of language Would simply, even eliminate, the problem, but there's no way short of full open-eyed dialogue that won't be glib or ignore
history or buffer us from change.

The RT campaign provides some useful tools for starting conversation within and between groups. Good job.

Constraint

This is the anniversary of my commitment to write once a day for an entire year on the encounters of an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Granted two days were missed, one due to the difficulties of establishing internet connections in Scotland, another when I was just too sick. Posts these last few days have been more or less placeholders for a fuller exploration of a complex set of encounters occasioned by a family crisis. Recently some posts have been purely fictional or fictionalized.

The hope, dear reader (to use a 19th C politeness), was and still is that a compelling case can be made for the encounter, a meeting in 2nd person mode, as the basic unit of human value (underwritten by God-in-love's 2nd person encounter with the Beloved Other). I've tried to explore and illustrate this premise from my own life.

I've been the first needing to be convinced since I know it's hard for abstract ideas to learn to swim soon enough to survive the bottomless sea of day to day life, but perhaps you, reader, have also been skeptical not just of the conclusions but also the project itself. Life doesn't need to the interpreted, just lived.

Perhaps you're right. I've not looked to see if the 365 plus data points make any intelligible graph. These next days I'll try to do that, as well as explore direct and indirect and even fictional encounters.The project has taken taken on its own life. The discipline has been transformative. I've felt myself become more alert to what's happening around me, more sensitive in my contemplation of what I see,and  more creative in my expression--whatever I or anyone may think of the results.

Perec's novel Life A User's Manual which I've just finished is perhaps his masterpiece in the art of constrained writing, and my day in day out writing project has imposed on me the kind of constraint which has been more positive for me than I can fully tell..

You're probably busy just living, without time to think, much less write, as indeed has been my case this week engaged as I've been in a family crisis. Events and situations require action first, contemplation after. But my conviction is that our musings, ponderings, cogitatings have a downstream impact not only on what we do but what we think is worth doing. If the quantum of what matters is the encounter, then the impact of any encounter rippling through us, will modify us. I can see it has me.

De-boggling

From Sunday to today, a whirlwind of hard work and family drama. It has wound down from rage to reconciliation, but how this trip has challenged the basic ideas of this blog. The experience has been so simmer that I haven't been able to step back for the perspective I need to write.

I'm going to explore all this at greater length when I get back, but what occurs to me is how Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual applies to this journey: house invenentories and life stories, structure and flow. My reading is about my days. I need some time to de-boggle my mind.

You, my niece; you, my sister; you: the wizard with the paintbrush Amos; you, my mother, executrix for my former sister-in-law's will; you, my sister's partner; you, my niece's boyfriend; you, the neighbors; you, the shade of my sister-in-law: with each and all of you the questions of hospitality, friendship, exploration. I ask myself also about your presence, God-in-love.

This whole experience has been intense, hard and frantic, but not something that many don't undergo regularly, none of the components rare in everyday life. This is a fitting experience to explore at the end of my year-long commitment to this blog.  

Face-down

A contretemps, almost a slugfest, to wrap up a day of hard work cleaning and organizing. The face of one closed and arms crossed; the other pleading, red-faced with self-restraint. Like arm wrestlers they stared at each other, but each knew that one would win.

Escalation

Escalation. The dynamic has changed. More direct confrontation. Who you are, niece, is getting lost to me both because you have removed yourself in strategic protest and because all day the family team has been busy meeting with real estate folk, searching for temporary housing for you, washing, painting, vacuuming, doing everything necessary to move the house where you live to the market.

The actual development of a relationship long latent has taken back seat to consistent resistance. Some of us think you 'witchy', others see you as 'immature.' What's the truth? But, for me, family sentiment is not enough to create a bond. I think getting to know you better would be arduous but also boring. a terrible combination.

What we're doing that is to  ultimately benefit you seems difficult and possibly futile.

Maybe I'm just tired. Not all encounters are positive. You are Other in spades. How this will work out is a day to day process. Let's see.

 

Better late

It's not that I haven't known about you, niece, so what do I say when you ask why haven't I been in touch for 30 years?  It's an in-you-face question;  if I were writing it in a novel, it would trigger a tsunami of guilt. Instead I acknowledge,  but explain it's not easy to know what I could have done that would have made a difference in your circumstances.

So I'm in South Carolina (no snow!) with a team of family members (in fact, it's wonderfully warm!) for a week of cleaning up a house prior to sale as a part of managing your estate for your benefit, over your resistance.

You're like my brother in so many ways, and I couldn't deal with him. Distance, your mother's coldness, the enormity of the challenge of relationship daunted, not your grandmother, but certainly me.

Exculpatory prudence or cowardice as it was, here I am. Somehow recrimination seemed not to be the driving force of our encounter today. A week with hard choices and confrontations lies ahead, however.



 

Theft

Hello, Barbara. Look out your window, all the lobster pot buoys in the cove are gone. Somebody has taken them. The water is as clear as a mirror.

That can't be right, Phil. People don't steal buoys, or pots, or lobsters, for that matter. This is Maine. These fisherman are honest. I'm busy making lunch and can't go to the window just now.

But the buoys are gone. All of them. I don't see any.

Put on your glasses. You know how you shove them up on your forehead and forget you don't have them on.

Don't patronize me. My wife used to do it all the time, and I didn't like it then. I don't see the red and whites of Henry Adams' along the far shore, or the yellow and blues of Robby Ellis' in shore or any of the others at the mouth.

Okay, let me look. Gosh, you're right. There's nothing out there. Not even the tip of a buoy stick. Just water.

I think some tourist has taken them for souvenirs, thought it would take some time to get them all, and someone would see, like you or me, but then why, Barbara? Regular summer folk like us wouldn't do anything like that of course but you know these wild kids in their overpowered boats from down the coast.

I've seen the tide come in and the buoys go upright, but gone... You're right, Phil. It is strange. But theft? We would have seen or heard something.

Barbara, I think we should get the coast guard to send a cutter up here to investigate. Were they there this morning? Do you remember seeing them. Perhaps they were taken in the night. In fact, I think there's a market for them. There's a market for everything. Somebody's been cutting the pot warps and making the hard life of lobstermen even more difficult, just to make a lousy buck selling bootleg buoys.

Where they there this morning? I guess. But maybe I didn't expect to see anything else. But then why is everybody so calm down near the water? I can see from here the bench at the end of the dock, and those old codgers Amasa and Killian just sitting as they always do side by side, arms crossed, leaning back and not excited about anything.

You know how phlegmatic these Mainers are. They'd take their time to formulate a reply if you told them to duck. I haven't been around long enough to see this kind of larceny before, but perhaps they have. Perhaps there's insurance, and they don't care.

You know, no matter how much you think you know a place, if you don't live here, there's always something you didn't suspect. Let me call Mrs Beamis at the store and see what she knows.

Barbara, I'm going to get the police to call the coast guard. Someone's got to do it. It's my duty. It's unnatural all this water and no buoys. The cove looks empty as a looted store. If buoys aren't safe here, nothing's safe.

===========================================================================

Okay, Barbara, these officials also give you that 'let's wait a while and see what happens' treatment, and they never do anything. I harangued them a little though, and they're sending up a boat. Should be here soon.

Phil, Phil, look again. Do you see how the water on the opposite shore is over the top of the rocks, almost at the trees? This was a spring tide, extraordinarily high, according to Mrs Beamis, but now it's on the ebb. Can you just see the tops of the buoy sticks poking through the water? Oops, and here comes the cutter.

Crazy lady

Crazy lady: diminutive, red-headed, smoking a stogie, trailed by a dog, painting gear in a traveling box, putting a hat on my head. She lives alone in the Brewster Hotel, and often stops to greet me, but this!

Being a horse means often being forgotten, left standing outside at some hitching post, and if the sun is blazing, well, a hat, absurd as it looks to the people who walk by and snigger, is welcome relief for the burning head and the dazzled eyes. Yes, horses get hot too.

She patted me and looked into my eye and said, 'Old nag, you make me think back 70 years to the lively horse I used to ride with Lola. I, only about seven, perched in front of the saddle, and she, five times my age, would spur wildly along the lanes of Grassy Valley in California's Gold Country, our hair flying in the wind, hers black as black, mine red, both of us laughing uproariously. She lived in a small house close to the boarding house my parents ran, or rather my mother, since my father was either out mining or drinking.

'All the children would flock to her but it was me she took a shine to, perhaps because she saw the potential in me. She called herself a Spanish dancer, though she was Irish as were many of the navvies were in the workings, and she taught me a few ballet steps, her fandangoes, highland flings, everything she knew, except for her notorious spider dance--you know the one where she shook tarantulas out of her costume, and showed a good bit of herself in the process. Together we would practice the intricate steps over and over, swishing our skirts, tossing our heads, laughing. She had a quick step, but, really I was quicker.

'She taught me to sing ballads which we'd warble together, putting in lots of sassy innuendo. She taught me to ride and when I got a pony, we'd ride all over the forested hills together. She taught me to smoke cigars, which we'd enjoy with the fellows at places like the blacksmith's shop in Rough and Ready. I remember she plunked me down on an anvil and clapped her hands as I danced for the enthusiastic audience of tough men. 'You've got to come to Paris with me,' she said panting after the wild performance.

'I didn't know then any of the things going on her life then, her failing marriage, her murdered lover, or what had gone before, the mad love affair with the deposed king of Bavaria that had made her a countess, nor yet the disastrous adventure (no underwear, really?) she was about to have in Australia. Our time was just a short interlude in her hectic life, but how it changed me. She took a quick-footed little red haired girl with a merry laugh and a little talent and made me a performer of me.

'She had a ferocious temper, could be obstinate as a stone, and was by a self-destructive recklessness; if I'd gone with her, I'd have been exploited or abandoned.'

She patted my neck, 'Just as you and your kind have been, old Dobbin.'

'My mother, just as strong-willed, put her foot down. If I had talent, it was going to be managed by her. We moved forty miles away to Rabbit Creek where I learned jigs and reels, songs, and how to play the banjo from a saloon owner, plus some soft shoe from a Negro up from the city. My mother dressed me in green like a leprechaun and put me on stage. Not shy at all, I sang, danced, postured and chatted with the audience, and soon had all the grizzled and lonely men shouting appreciation and throwing money and nuggets on the stage--which my mother swept up into her apron and kept in a leather pouch.

'The star of the camps, the queen of San Francisco, the darling of the nation, they called me a lot of things: eternal child, mischievous, impulsive, unpredictable, teasing, piquant, rollicking, cheerful, devilish. They said I had the face of a beautiful doll and the ways of a kitten. I truly loved my audiences and they, me. My ever-prudent mother was in charge of my career and fortune, and I made the smart move of retiring at my peak.

'Lola, the word 'adventuress' was invented for someone like you. Sometimes almost ridiculous, never even remotely respectable, you were always on the edge, not at all tame. I knew you when you not as scandalous but playmate, a kind of big sister. What would she think of what I've become.

'Yes, old nag, the sight of you takes me back. How about this. I've given one fountain already to San Francisco--they love it--and I'll give another in my will to the working horses of Boston like you--a basin of cool water where on a hot day you can dip your velvety muzzle and quench your thirst.

'Bye for now, she said. 'I'm off to catch the light in Gloucester,' and she picked up her gear and walked off, dog at her heel, cigar smoke wafting over her shoulder.

Recessional

Your great white corpse flensed by the sun's spade, tried by the southern wind, your oil running thick in the scuppers of the street: you are dwindling before our eyes.

You're no longer burdening the bushes but lurking beneath them, fugitive. I look down on your drifts, not up to them. Markings high on the street poles and out into the sidewalks lines show your former reach. Heaps are fissured into peninsulas, eroded into tombolos, isolating into islands, reduced finally to patches of dampness.You are reduced to smutty bolsters perched on glaucous rafts of ice along the curb. Pebbles perch on the eroding pinnacles of granular, crunchy ice. Sand and grit congregate more and more closely as the snow matrix on which they were scattered disappears, as indeed the galaxies will when the space of the universe collapses. 

You're volatilizing, ablating, etherealizing almost visibly before my eyes as I run. I dodge streams of water gushing from under you across the sidewalk, dodge showers of water fall splashing from bridges. Pools of water appear to block my path. Glistening granules of  snow, glistering runnels of water. Along the verges and around the trees, strips and rings of dead, sodden grass are expanding. If, to steady myself, I thrust my hand into you, you feel warm and crumbly. If I step into you, I sink to the wet slush at the bottom.

In the playground as I pass, masses of exuberant children race frantically from toy to toy, shouting names and instructions, trampling your pristine whiteness into a slurry.

You're not longer impressive, except as mountains in the snow farms or massive ice blocks washed up on the Cape, but even in decay, you're interesting as you re-inhabit the sky, getting ready for new presentations. You've been such a major factor in all our calculations that your absence seems like a new life. Perhaps it is.

Jumper

I truly am an elegant creature, spring green, lanky but graceful, long, extensible, spiky forearms folded like a carpenter's rule in front, long thick abdomen like a gentleman's coat tails balanced behind, my thoraxes sprouting four long flexible legs beneath, pebble-sized head atop with magnificent  bulging compound eyes at two vertices and the terrible munching mandibles at the third No wings just yet since I'm just  in my sixth molt, not yet adult, but still worthy of admiration as I pose here like a centaur, head upraised and vigilant.

You want to see me jump, you pale gawking long faced thing? It's child-play to land on that black vertical bar you suspend in front of me.

Do you think I'm a grasshopper that launches itself and flies topsy turvy like a bean bag? Of course, I control my jump and do it without thinking, at least nobody had to teach me. Look. I turn my head to triangulate the distance. I curl my abdomen  back on itself as if it were a scorpion's tail. I raise my dangling forearms and stretch them straight out ahead as I thrust down my two pairs of legs. I'm launched, sleek, stretched graceful as a cat, falling forward but flying.

What you don't see, you snoop, is how I give myself a little spin at the get-go, then shift my various parts forward and back, left and right, around my center of mass so as to arrange myself for the landing: legs down, arms raised, body parallel to the bar. There, touch down at sweet spot at the base of my thorax, and a bear hug grasp with all my appendages. Simple really.

Again? If you insist. Abdomen curved, arms up, legs down, airborne. Oops, a little too far to the left. My legs hook the slippery shaft and I spin around, head thrown back to the circumference of the circle, arms extended uselessly above. Around and around, down and down, pole dancing till I drop.

Okay, I'm not perfect. But wait, what are you doing? What's that awful stuff you're putting on my abdomen that's making me stiff and inflexible, like a old man's spine. I can't jump with that. Alright, let's try. Up, up. Oh, no, I can't bring down my abdomen. I'm going to crash. Head on collision. Boink. Stunned, I bounce back and away from the back and down.

So you think you can laugh at me? Just because you hatched me and fed me on small insects and flies and perhaps one or two of my siblings, you can amuse yourself at my expense? This 'glue' you put on me will slough off, or I'll molt it off, and then I'll be fully once more what you can't hope of being ever: a deadly hunter with top-hat-and-tails elegance, a mantis.

Shelving

I hate more than anything my books higgledy-piggledy on the shelf: one book here and its sequel at the other end or several shelves down, books by a single author scattered through the collection, topic books in no particular location... When finding a volume is a matter of pawing through my entire library (modest as it is), I hate it.

Then there's the insult of the horizontals, books placed on top of the verticals beneath the shelf above. Books are not meant to lie flat on their covers but stand upright on their spines; they're books, for God's sake. Floor piles, unconscionable. Upside down volumes, an abomination. No! No! No!

I'm not a fussy man, ask anyone, except with regard to books. Mine are organized by author or theme and date of publication. Books that touch each other are related in some way. The whole is an expression of my mind--from the words I've read in individual works, to the selections I've made in possession, to the logical and aesthetic order in which I present them. I don't have that much space, but I use it judiciously, and the result, may I say, was elegant. Then came Sophronia.

My wife swears by her because 'she cleans, really cleans like nobody has ever done.'  She's not a kid, nor a matron, not plump nor angular. She has thick, black hair, a lower lip that juts out just beyond her upper, something like dimples at the corner of her mouth, and an eye that, turned on you, pierces or twinkles, and sometimes both at the same time.

I knew something was wrong from the moment I walked in the door. What was it? I turned into my study and stood in shock. The books which had been in their assigned places had been moved. In place of the 'skyline' that I admired and readily navigated, the books had been reshelved by size: the tallest ones on the end and the shortest in the middle, a sort of catenary.

Storming into the kitchen, I got the complacent reply: Sophronia's been getting rid of the dust. You know how sensitive I am to it. What a dynamo she is.

Dynamo. With my books on my shelves. If there's a problem with dust, I would have said something. But I hadn't said anything. And yet my book collection had been rendered as chaotic as rubble after a bombing.

She came twice a week so she wasn't to be back for a few days, which is what I needed to restore a semblance of the order she'd thrown to the winds, and leave a conspicuous note saying that dusting the books and the shelves was unnecessary and would she please not do it.

The note disappeared and a month passed without incident, until, coming home one Monday a few weeks later, the books were now in a new order: the tallest books at the middle of the shelves, and shortest on the ends, like hyperbolic curves.

And a note: Sir, there was dust, and it's gone now.

No sympathy in the kitchen. None.  'Don't say a work about Fronia, I'm in awe,' said my wife. 'I've wanted this house really clean for a long time and now finally I've found someone who'll do it.'  She turned on me, 'Don't say anything to make her angry, do you hear me? She can go anywhere and I don't want to lose her.'

'Well, if she touches my books again...' I blustered as I went back to reorder my jumbled library. It would probably be a few weeks before she dusted again, so I got ready to move my easy chair and a small but solid desk in front the the bookcases to block access and to tape onto each item a stern: 'No dusting.'

But she caught me flatfooted. The day before I thought she would be dusting, she dusted, and this time the books were arranged like smooth waves, up and down across the shelves, novels next to histories next to philosophy, no system, no order.

I was furious--fascinated, but still angry enough to try to booby trap the shelves. My idea was that when she took down one book, it would be attached by cords to others next to it so that books would avalanche onto her. I know, it's a desecration to treat books that way, but she was asking for it. I'd met her leaving a couple of times as I came home, and she had given me a corner of the mouth smile and quick look that said she wasn't anybody's person but her own. Well, nor was I. My bookshelves the way I wanted: that's that, even if she pulls the OED down on her head.

What did I find one day coming home? The books in square waves moving across the shelves, and the cords neatly coiled on my desk. 'You're not making Fronia upset, are you,' my wife asked strongly. 'What about me?' I asked. 'What about you?' she retorted.

Then I had a brainstorm. When she came the next time, I'd arranged the bookshelves into sawtooth forms, lines sloping gradually up to the tallest book, then dropping straight down the shortest, over and over. Had she dusted? I wondered, as I look at the shelves seemingly untouched as I'd left them.

The next time, I arranged the books into pulses--short, short, short, tall, short, short, short, tall--from left to right, and left them for her to admire. But when I got home, my wife flung herself at me. 'What have you done? Fronia's given her notice. You did it, I'm sure. I'll never find someone like her again.'

When I went into my study, I found that, using books from other shelves, she'd lain books across the tops of the pulses I'd created, and there, just a little beneath the ceiling--she must have stood on a chair--she had stood my shortest volumes in a row close together but not touching, like dominoes ready to fall in chain reaction.

I got the message.

Lar and the Hood

No banquet, no funeral, no wedding, certainly no birth celebration unless I'm there, right in the middle, in a place of honor, with my short tunic, my nimbed hair, up on tiptoes in dance, drinking horn in one hand, libation dish in the other, blessing all that goes on.

They said my kind represent the dead, but light-footed as I am in the middle of this family gathering, I look anything but defunct. As long as the family honors me, as it does with offerings every morning at my shrine, I am very much alive, looking to the life of the name, ensuring its prosperity, and perpetuity. Let the penates oversee the paltry affairs of the pantry; I look for glory.

Family lar 

There I was in Lyon, at the nine day celebration of Lucius Septimius Bassianus, first child of the distinguished Punic leader L. Septimius Severus, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, and his new wife, the beautiful and brilliant Syrian Julia Domna, daughter of Julius Bassianus, high priest of the Sun God El Gabal in Emesa.

The offerings were abundant, the prayers frequent, and, as the child was placed on the ground and then lifted by the proud father to the sky, I inspired profound feelings of joyous anticipation in all.

Then that Celtic killjoy the genius Cucullatus had to chime in. 'Blood,' he intoned.

'What are you talking about you, little gnome. This is no time to time to be gloomy.'

'Fratricide.'

Genius Cucullatus

'Look at me, you cowled creature. This is the time for the solemn dance of deep gratitude, not gnomic sayings of doom.'

'Assassination.'

Julia Domna

'Don't you see how the paterfamilias, still so young, is respected among the senators and consuls. He's a rising star. So cut the direness, you pointed-headed pipsqueak.'

'Suicide.'

'And the mistress, her beauty (oh, that thick, lustrous hair), and besides, her intelligence, her love of philosophy. See the intellectuals attending this happy celebration. If any child were smiled on by fortune, this is he.

'Ignominy.'

'Stop those grumblings growling out of your Gallic hood. You have responsibilities. As domestic spirits, our job is making sure the affairs of this household run smoothly and the name of the family continues generation after generation. If you can't say anything appropriate to the occasion, get back to looking after the herds and flocks, you genius loci'

The philosopher

'Let the larger affairs be my lookout. The deep thoughts, the dreams, the vaunting ambitions, let me look to them. Gravity, beauty, intelligence, all three bless this child. Who are you, Mr Countryman, to comment on these high and mighty things. Why, the master of this household could, if Tyche, goddess of chance (amazon that she is) is with us, could become Augustus--and you can't deny that.'

 Tyche

'Some will nickname the boy Tarautas after the bloody gladiator, but history will know him as the one in the hoodie, Caracalla.'


(Many thanks to the Mullen Gallery at BC for a great Sunday afternoon.)

Mystery shopper

Buongiorno, caro Gary, I say in my best Italian accent. It's 6 o'clock. Time for you to get up. Have a nice day.

Thank you, dear Silvia, he says in his hateful, superior voice. I'll be waiting for you again tomorrow.

Every damn morning. How did I get trapped into this?

There's a professional association of mystery shoppers, and the company I worked for was a member. That meant practice guidelines, codes of ethics, the whole nine yards. Mystery shopping gave me a bit of pocket money, fit easily into my schedule, and was fun. It got me to go to different stores, restaurants, offices that I'd otherwise never have visited to engage in a little bit of espionage. I got to pretend to be someone I wasn't--never lying but sometimes misleading, to exhibit an innocent nosiness, make disingenous requests, and, when alone, jot down surreptitious notes on my phone. Some of the situations I saw deserved to be reported, so it felt legit.

When my friend Davida at the business school asked me to help her  privately with a research project because she couldn't have enough funding for a licensed company, I thought, why not freelance? How else is she going to get out of the Catch 22 of young academics: no funding without findings, no findings without funding. If caught I could be blacklisted, but how could that happen? I was going to be simple, just a phone survey. I could do it from home. What made it attractive was that made use of something I'm proud of, my flair for accents.

From early on, I could sound like someone I wasn't, an old woman like grandma Beavis, one of the help like Marcie Mae, an Indian like the storekeeper Sajit. I could pitch my voice high  or low to capture different registers. I could tell dialect jokes readily switching from voice to voice. My mother was always asking me when I was a girl and she had her friends over for coffee, 'Sarabeth, why don't you show us how a Yankee gives directions,' and I'd stand in the circle of chairs on the lawn, strike a pose, put on a broad Maine accent that I got from an old Bob and Ray recording of my dad's with lots of 'theeeahs' and 'caaaan'ts', and send them into convulsions.

So I was able to make multiple calls to the same place sounding like different people to see if I'd be treated differently. My job was not to press them or trap anyone, but simply to get aggregate data. So, using Davida's script, I presented myself as just a voice, a name, a need and a story: Hello. my name is ... and I'm looking for a financial advisor.

It was a big project-David was a good friend--involving calls to nearly a hundred independent advisors--we didn't want offices--and three different rounds. First, I was Cora, a gruff-voiced middle-aged Haitian bus driver a little nervous about the pension the city promised her--'I don't know what kinds of games they'll play'--but with a little to set aside in a private retirement savings account. Then I called again as Gertrude who spoke in a thin, querulous voice about her husband had just died and left her some money but how much and where, it was all so confusing, and could he help her? Finally, I was Silvia, an expat Italian, programmer for a music portal, wanting to retire at 50: 'Enough of this work shit, you know. I want to live.'

Inwardly, silently, I found myself chuckling. Over an over they exposed themselves as Davida had predicted they would. They were all so serious, so solicitous. Even on the phone and after a few general inquiries, most of them-- 'grave old plodders, gay young friskers'--began to sketch in investment strategies that promised high returns (and security), and incidentally would net them generous transaction fees.

But it was when I was almost at the end of the third round that I got caught. It was Gary in Austin who noticed that--how could I have been so stupid, or the others so inattentive--that, though the situations were different, numbers I quoted were identical.

Have we talked before, Miss Spotelli?  His suave voice hardening just a little.

No, of course not. I've only just arrived here in the United States.

What is your town in Italy, may I ask?

This was not on my script. Bologna, I replied.

Ah, I love the province of Venice.

Yes, it is a beautiful area, but not enough...

Okay, miss whatever-your-name is, what's your game? Are you trying to entrap me?

I sort of sputtered, No, I'm interested in saving for my retirement.

Bullshit, you're no more Italian than my appaloosa. And all this crap about savings. I don't believe that for a minute.

I am telling the truth, I swear.

And don't hang up. I've got your number and I can trace you down. Perhaps you're fishing for something to blackmail me with. I know your kind. Tell me what your game is, or I'll report you to the Feds. Interstate crime, that's what you're involved in, and the penalties...well, you deserve them, you sneak.

I panicked. Stupid of me, but I did, and told him what the project was. What university, he demanded. Who is the head of the program? I couldn't think fast enough to invent a school or a name, so then we had, not just me, but Davida on the hook. Damn! Damn!

Okay, he said, pretending to be mollified, here's what we'll do. I'll let it pass...as long as you give me a cheerful wake-up call each morning in your lovely Italian accent. Ah, a personal signora. Just a few minutes, but it will be so pleasant to hear you live, dear Silvia.

Just wait. One of these days, some woman he wants to return to his bed is going to get to the phone before him, and then we'll see who is whose.

Slow mo

Close to the surface of the planet, the zone of most of our activity, thick, silent, monochrome, you are a persistent, implacable presence. Looking out my window, my backyard is hoisted as if on elevator shoes. Next to my walkway, you are a solid two feet thick.

Yet, inert as you seem, I've seen you evolve over the last weeks. New cotton candy on top doesn't disguise the incessant recrystallization going on, at your surfaces very visibly but also deep inside where light wastes itself into darkness. Molecules in formation and in touch trade, redistribute, and reform densified under the relentless tug of gravity.

Day: The dry air pops molecules from your surface. Liquefied one by one by the sun, the molecules trick down through the pack to the frozen ground, then out from under onto sidewalks: your 'blood' running out through your shoes. Leaves and twigs burn into glittery crusts on top of a fretwork of nooks and crannies. Gargoyle shapes are blunted, attenuated, unrecognizable, gone.

Night: The fluid becomes fixed. The jittery motion of molecules calms down. All processes slowed but nothing fully stopped.

You're compacting; your surface is flying away or falling in: a general slow motion vanishing.

But you're not gone, no, not even close. It will take a good while for your whale-like bulk to diminish to disappearance. Spring is two weeks away; the sun is warmer and longer. There's a conspiracy to reduce you from a thick treatise (very thick) to a slim pamphlet to a few torn scraps to nothing at all.

You won't be gone, of course, just transformed. In a few weeks, we'll step over you or around you. You'll speak with another voice, gurgling rather than slumping.

Water, this role of yours these last weeks, this pose you're holding now, is brilliant, impressive, applause-worthy. What a performer you are. 

Escape

Earth was my salvation.

What do you mean, Dad?

Before immersive virtual reality, before the big tablet googles hanging on your face, the motion-tracking sensors on the walls, the hand-held controllers, do you know how awful house incarceration was? There you were, stalking your rooms, looking out your windows, desperate to break out, longing to be somewhere else, if only for a moment, to breath other air. Pages and screens were flat and confining like slabs in a prison wall, unarguable, implacable; your body boxed.

Administratively, it was a cheap troublemaker management tool. An electric fence, a set of internet blocks and filters, a monitored delivery service, and they had you sequestered for as long as they wanted, and humanely.

I used to go crazy in stir. Nowhere to go. The same furniture, the same windows and views out on the same neighborhood. The sun rose and the sun sank, and I had gone nowhere, nowhere.

Reading, watching movies, writing, thinking--I gorged and was sick of it. Workouts? After a while, they seemed utterly, awfully pointless, in addition to screamingly boring. So I'd throw things or shout, and feel I was letting myself become what they wanted me to be.

Do you remember Google Earth?

That long ago, huh? 

How clunky and low-def it was. You could almost see the algorithms at work netting in the shapes. I'll tell you, though, it was my escape hatch, and I don't think I would have survived otherwise, mentally that is.

What could you do with something that primitive?

I first got the idea when in a frenzy of aimlessness, I started trying to make the earth spin like a top. I looked for my house, and zeroing in on it, imagined myself under that roof, sweltering in idle solitude.

Then, on a whim, I swished over to Kamchatka, the long fat-tail peninsula hanging from the end of Siberia. As a boy, I'd been taken by its exotic remoteness because, limited as I was to only the books in my local library, there were only scraps of information available, mere encyclopedia entries, dry, uninspired fact-cakes with square mileage, population, chief exports and so on.

Now I was able to skim over the peninsula, follow the contours of the coast, track the courses of the rivers, plot the positions of the volcanic peaks that had made it such a glamorous place.  And then--silly, I know--when I tilted the image, I seemed to be seeing the landscape from flying carpet angle. I zoomed around Klyuchevskaya Sopka, a beautiful conical volcano, highest at 4750 m in the peninsula, going closer to get a sense of the cindery slopes and imagine myself climbing up to the steaming top. Looking over the shoulder of adjacent pyramidal peaks, I could dive in to see where what trail I would take to get close to the base for an ascent. Pulling back and circling, I could see the peak from another angle, over a snow-filled caldera. Beyond, looking north, over mile upon mile of forest, other peaks in the spinal range of mountains.

I made sketch after sketch of the massif from different angles, just as I had done when actually outdoors and climbing. On my wall, my watercolors seems like trophies of an actual journey. Just images they were, and of obvious artifice, cartoonish even, but somehow exhilarating.

Oslo. I'd ever been there. I 'strolled' along the side of the fjord, looked down on red-roofed houses. And, what's that? A camping area at Ekeberg with a ferris wheel across the street, maybe temporary as such summer fairs often are, but I could imagine myself strolling across the field in the evening. Downtown much more confusing, much easier to get lost, which was delightful. How lost could I get in my house. I hung out at the Toyen T stop, at a park where, on the solstice, strollers must be walking until midnight. As I zoomed around, the images of the tall rectangular blocks assembled before my eyes. If I hovered, peering over the fringe of my carpet, everything was composed. I could see where people live, could see the streets down which they walked, could see the docks where they moored their fishing boats. I felt like a free person in another place.

Oslo? Nobody sets any VR tours there. Probably because it's so boring.

What was missing? Lots. Clouds, cars zipping by, shadows. But the topography of the terrain, the structures, all there to be seen. My imagination could roam around sculptural objects that photographs only presented a single view of.

Or for a change, an Indian ocean archipelago, the Maldives. No relief, virtually at sea level, only shapes, rings of dots, each with a name. As if in a boat, I cruised from atoll to atoll set in clear blue water. Over the islands, on the horizon beyond, the coast of Kerala.

Maldives, aren't they underwater now? I think there's a VR sunken city adventure that may be the Maldives--or some other drowned place.

Perhaps they never learned of the secret cartographic escape I made from their clutches day after day. Maybe they didn't care. Now I'm released and can circulate freely, can get up from this porch right now and go anywhere I want, I don't feel I possess the whole globe as fully as I did then, desperately etching it into my memory just to stay sane.

Well, Dad, I don't understand, but I'm glad it worked for you. Got to go inside now and meet my buddies. I think we're fighting an evil civilization on Mars. Hope you're here when I get back.

Caterwaul

Oh, Jean, it's snowing again  I'm so tired of it. Wish I was with you in sunny San Diego. I'm afraid to let my cats out for fear they'll sink in a drift and be lost until spring. At least Tigger would. He's such a baby. By the by, have you heard of cat music? Send.

Don't you guys ever get enough? It's in the news all the time. 'And another storm is aiming for...' Any time you want, I'd love to have you. What's this cat music? The awful caterwaul the toms make outside when my Blossom is in heat? Send.

No, something very different. Not what you expect. It's music for cats to listen to the same way we do. Send.

You've got to be kidding me, Moira. Cat music? Cat concerts? What are you talking about? Send.

I'll send you the link. Some scientists and a composer came up with musical pieces that cats love to listen to. Give them Bach and it's 'meh,' but give them this and they rub themselves against the earphones as if it was preparing dinner for them. Send.

Cat music, what for? I mean what's the purr-pose? Sorry, bad, bad pun. Tell me more. I've got a couple of minutes before I head off to bed. I'm just stretching out here on my wild red sofa, you know the big soft one, and wondering, 'Will Moira sing me a cat lullaby?' Please do. Send.

It's getting worse outside. Visibility is way way down and it's accumulating quickly. I still have to feed my strays, but I don't look forward to going out in this storm. No, it's weird music designed for cats. I've heard three 25 second 'songs.' They're in the frequency range of cat vocalization. One sounds like a piano turning into a dulcimer with a overlay of bird chirps. Another sounds like Arvo Part music with purring. The third sounds like a rapid heart beat with little random chimes. The notes tend to slide from one to another. There are supposed to be suckling noises, but I don't hear them. Heaven knows what cats think when they listen.

Prescott, stop it. Sorry, he's pouncing again on my feet. You know, hunkering down, waggling his butt and jumping, and his claws go right through my socks. Ouch. Let me take him out to the other room to where Tigger is. Send.

And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out 'Oh, rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! 

That's from Browning: the rescued rat reporting on the Pied Piper's tune. Is that what cats hear in the music? An invitation to dinner? Send. 

Who knows? But both cats love it. Prescott sits next to the speaker, head cocked just like the RCA dog, and Tigger rolls over on her back. I find it, not eerie, not unpleasant, but strange. Anyway, I have to sign off. I should go now before it gets worse, and it's getting worse. Love you. Send.

Do stay safe. I want you to see you here soon. Love you too. Send. 

The room, so cozy and warm, but the wiry sixty-something woman was not to be enticed. Snow pants on, boots on, parka zipped. She put on her hat standing, as always, in front of the mirror, crushed her short faded red-blonde hair down to her scalp, framing with the earflaps the narrow weathered face with the deep lines from nose to chin. She peered into her own eyes fiercely: 'Get going, girl.' After scooping a bag of cat food from the bin, on a whim she stuffed her phone and a portable speaker in her pocket. 'You be good to Tiger,' she called to Prescott sitting on the mantle as if contemplating a drop on the unsuspecting victim below. 

Outside, it was crackling cold. The normally empty air was filled with slivers of snow, glinting in the streetlight, making their way down to join the myriad already on the ground; there seemed hardly any room for darkness between them. The air was cold but just a few gusts now and then whipping white dust into her face. The road, not on the main plowing routes, already had inches of squeaky snow for her to shuffle through down the road to the bottom of the hill at the back of the stores.

The feral cats, this year's litter, black and beautiful, sheltered somewhere behind the store, and wouldn't be out now but Moira knew they liked to leave their shelter and prowl at different times in the night. The plate of food would be a nice treat for them. She put the paper bowl down in the lee of a phone pole and filled it with dry food. She stood up straight and looked around. 

No houses right here, but even so the neighbors complained that she was actually feeding the skunks and possums that were showing up on the street. Nonsense, and anyway, who was going to feed these poor cats if she didn't. Nobody else cared. 

No traffic, no lights in any of the houses. Pulling off her mittens, she looped the cat music on her phone and Bluetoothed it through her speaker, loud, as she trudged home. The music competed with the occasional whoosh of wind, and won. 

In the dark bedroom, coiled on the quilt, on top of the electric blanket, on top of the flannel sheet, on top of the flannel nightie, on top of the toasty, gently heaving bosom of Arlene Krill, a calico cat suddenly spread the slit pupils of his eyes, turned his head, climbed down from his perch, walked over the window sill, sat, and looked out into the light darkness, listening. 

Cards

Number cards are no account, but Cavendish had gazed enough at the court cards to invest each of the twelve with a special character. He pondered why the spade and heart Jacks in profile and looking one over the right, the other over the left shoulder, seemed so bitter- the Jack of Hearts holding the wilted leaf still wincing, and the Jack of Spades gripping the infinity scepter defiantly resigned. Why was the spade Queen the only one looking left, and the only one armed? The long-faced Queen of Hearts with turned down mouth seemed to Cav somewhat Yankee in aspect and expression. Why, he wondered, was any king committing suicide as the King of Hearts seemed to be?  Why was one king in profile, the King of Diamonds, and none of the queens?

The four families had dominated the steppe for years, Cav remembered, their low, sprawling ranch houses under towering ombu trees only a dozen or so miles apart. One family, the Spayeds, had come from England; the Hards were Scottish; the Cloughs and the Dimins, local stock, had lived there forever. In each there was an eldest son, a daughter a few years younger, and another boy: what are the odds of that?

The children were the royalty of the prairie, riding on their grand horses the circuit between each others houses into a rut, besides ranging far and wide over the grasslands, up the rivers to the mountains, down the rivers to the sea. The farm workers looked up from their herding or shearing to see them, sometimes three or four, sometimes all twelve, flying away at a gallop morning or evening over the crest of a rise. House parties, picnics, fishing and hunting expeditions: they were never at a loss.

It was expected that, just at the peak of their glowing youth, the first born of one, the heir, would marry the second born of another, and so interlocking dynasties would be created. Second sons would live in a state of perpetual congratulation.

All the court cards, Cav pointed out, are symmetrically reproduced upside down. So the fortunes of the pampa grandees. The Spayeds fell out with the Dimins when the 'king' caught the 'queen' by the riverside alone and had his way with her. The first son of the Cloughs gunned him down from behind a tree, a point of honor, then ran away to the the city to join the army, only to die in a duel. His brother, the so called Jack of Cloughs, fell in love with the Spayeds daughter, Maria, hereafter known as Black, and was ambushed and castrated by the eldest Hard boy, boon companion of the murdered rapist.

Boiling up in the capital, a rebellion against the dictator led to a pitched battle from which fleeing soldiers streamed over the grasslands. The second Hard boy joined a band of marauders leading them to the house where the second Dimins son was hidden. He looked away as the soldiers, adept at the deed, slit his white throat. The Dimins daughter, almost near term, screamed herself into miscarriage, and bled to death.

Did you know, asked Cav, the court cards were originally supposed to represent famous kings, Charlemagne, Caesar, David, Alexander, of imperishable memory. The Hard line came to an end as, his sister fleeing famine for the city, the eldest ate a pistol barrel rather than the nothing that remained in the desolate countryside. Who in which battlefield where the second son found his grave?

Who knows what happened to any of the others? The great houses, once bustling and adorned with trophies and striking objects, are unroofed now. Thistle bushes as tall as trees grow where girls and their beaus struck poses and provoked each other.

Not all the houses.

You're right, my dear. I never once thought this lonely bunkhouse for raw cow wranglers would become a place as cozy a place as it is for the two of us this cold winter night. Have you ever noticed that cards...?

Enough of all this talk; just deal.

Right away, Miss Mary, right away.

Acute

'Easy there,' I said as the technician somewhat roughly pushed the first of my new eagle's eyes into my right, then my left socket. She said nothing, but bedded them, then warned me to not speak as she carefully reached in through the ports in my temple to attach the special curvature-adjusting muscles and connect the extra thick optic nerve she'd threaded through the foramen with the nerve stumps severed when the birth eye was extracted.

Later on, the doctor told me how to care for the visual processing chip embedded in the back of my  brain. 'Don't go hitting your head on, say, stove hoods. The chip could detach and we'd have to go back in again, with reduced chances of success. In the meantime, you might find your vision going a little..'

Doreen led me home to wait, bandaged, until the nerve growth factors I swallowed three times a day completed the meld of the bird's neurons with mine.  Night after night I sat on the sofa next to her listening to the TV shows she watched, and narrated. She was beautiful when we made love in the darkness. How much more beautiful to the eye, to my new eyes, would she be.

Finally, the day. As the doctor peeled away the bandage, I saw a bar of light growing in intensity left to right till I was blinded in one eye, then right to left in the other. Tears rinsed the raptor corneas as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. So sharp, wow!, this was high definition. Everything detailed and clearly visible: minute stains on the walls, tiny dings in the lighting fixtures, the incipient stubble on the doctor's chin. Over at the mirror, the yellow eyes seemed to shoot out of my face like thrusting rapiers. I could see every finest part of every scar on my face.

'Hey, you look sharp, ' was the doctor's standard punch line; then, 'You'll need to be careful until you adjust. It will be quite a change having eyes five to eight times more acute.'

As I walked out, my vision plunged to the smallest details: the finest hairs in the nostrils of the old man in the waiting room and the peeling skin in the scalp of the old woman, the worn places on the furniture, the flaking paint on the window. Doreen held my arm as I stepped carefully down the short flight of steps. It was hard to focus so close. The mansard-roofed mansion on the other side of the street so rich in particulars: the windows, the locks on the inside of the windows, the dead flies next to the locks, the shingles, the curling edges of the shingles, the chimney needing repointing, the bird on the chimney, the eye on the bird looking now at me: I saw every, every teeny tiny thing.

Turning the other way, beyond the line of trees down the street, the brown hills, every fold, gully, rock and hummock sharp as a tack. And was that something moving? Under that clump of grass?

In the car, it was exhausting seeing everything near and far as we zipped down the road, so I  looked at Doreen driving. Beautiful lustrous hair, smooth clear skin. She turned and smiled at me, her teeth shining between her plump lips, oh, those lips. But I couldn't help but see tartar on those teeth and discoloration of her gums. No matter, But the lips were fissured and the lipstick slopping over the edge of the lip line. Her eyebrow hairs were thick as snakes. And her skin, freckled, mottled, speckled. Her nose, I seemed to be able to look into her commodious pores welling with oil. Her neck... Why had I never seen that huge lumpy blackhead before? Ugh.

She gave me another glance and said, 'Don't look at me like that, Phil.'

'Like what?'

'Like you're inspecting me.'

'I'm not, not really. I can't help it.'

'You'll learn.'

We've made accommodation. I've taken to wearing dark dark glasses indoor because everything is dirty and disintegrating, and Doreen not least. What my fingers know as smooth and sleek, my eyes know as rippled, creased, pimpled, multi-colored... I don't want to know. I don't want to see. No!

I spend a lot of my time on the deck outside our bedroom looking at the treetops, the mountain tops, the tops of towering clouds. I run my eyes over the mare of the moon; I see the Milky Way resolve into a cascading river of stars. My eyes have room to roam.

Then I put on my glasses, and go inside to my blunted life. 

Convictions

Your opinions, friend, sometimes seem paradoxical. You feel deeply for those who suffer, as if all such are victims. At the same time, you're impatient, even angry, with those who fail to capitalize on opportunities, don't upgrade, don't invest, don't do something with profits or returns.

But those who suffer may have failed to make use of opportunities, and those who don't display your energy in enterprise may simply be satisfied.

There's something deeper than logic here. These are primary pre-logical perceptions and motives. Logical deductions from commonly self-evident premises may lead to rational and useful conclusions but they lack the 'fire in the eyes', as a student put it, that gets us to begin things, overcome things, endure things. Of course, logic is a necessary disciplinarian for all our convictions, but sometimes, not in yours, it provides the figleaf of justification for opinions already settled.

I wouldn't have you otherwise. Who would you be without your very-definite views? Indeed, I agree with much of what you say. But do opinions less trenchant get your attention? The perceptions and motives of others are sometimes less sharp-edged and primary colored, sometimes have to, in fact, be discovered, teased out of the abundance of thoughts and experiences, but no less real for all that.

You care a lot about people; you do listen, if with growing impatience, to rambling expositions of exploration. And you've found yourself at times baffled by how to manage what your ur-convictions have led you into. It's complicated sometimes being as generous as you are.

Who am I to speak, whose vaguenesses have produced so little?



 

No excuse

Dear Prime Minister,

Allow me to express my condolences at your recent demise.

I've been feeling poorly and don't want it to turn into something (I don't want to join you), so I've decided not to attend your funeral. I'll be sending the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in my place. I'd send the There will be no shortage of dignitaries paying their respects. I'd send the vice-president but I want him close--in case anything happen. Also, why is he angling for the assignment?

l know all of world is grieving the passing of what journalists have called 'the man of the century.' It's only 1965. Perhaps they're jumping the gun; there's plenty of century left. Who makes that determination anyway? The press always has to pump up the most recent event, whatever it is, into the greatest, the most significant. 

Your bulldog image is certainly burned on the imagination of the world, but if we're considering greatness, what about FDR, whose funeral you managed to miss. 

I was just a congressman for Texas when that leader passed from the scene, the one who had been beacon of hope not just through the same war you earned  your reputation in, but the depression that preceded it. At the helm of the greatest nation through not one but two of its greatest crises back to back when the outlook was, as we say in Texas, 'dark as the inside of a wolf': that seems to me as just as worthy, perhaps even more so. 

And you couldn't find the time to publicly honor the one man who more than any other pulled you chestnuts out of the fire. Where I come from, you get back what you give. 

Still, the press have been raising hell with me over this. The whole kerfuffle is a news reporter's dream, all pageant and not problems, and they won't allow anyone to stay away; and besides, they're out to get me anyway. 

So have a good ceremony and burial. There's be a lot of time for rankings to settle out. And you won't miss my tears; I cried them all in '44.

Yours, POTUS

An epistolary exploration of an indirect 2nd person encounter. Was it interesting? History can be a straight jacket. Reply?

Dear POTUS, 

I once thought FDR a comrade in arms and companion in aspiration. Later, I realized he didn't love my country as I did, or me as I did him. Our friendship cooled to cordial. I had a war to run and your people grieved enough for us all. He was a good partner, but at the end tired, unreliable. Still, perhaps I should have come. 

Internal confict: more needed. Interpersonal sparring: ditto. Facts chasten imagination. Okay, let's look further afield.