Lessons in Black

Lessons in Black

           

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November 28, 1969. The corner of 42nd ave and Central in Los Angeles was a familiar place to me, a place I had made my way to weekly for three years in a long city-crossing series of bus rides from UCLA to the heart of what then was called “the Ghetto.”  On that block stood Operation Bootstrap, a unique self-help community center and vocational school started by two former civil rights workers. I had begun volunteering after the Watts Riots in 1965. On this night however, the school was closed and I arrived driving a dilapidated Chevy station wagon, at the end of a caravan of Communist Party members that had been summoned by the Black Panther Party. I was 21, still a student at UCLA, still a roamer of beaches and hills and not a Communist. And barefoot for some reason I cannot now recall. But it allows me to remember now the feeling of the warm city sidewalk under my feet as we walked toward the open door, nervous young Black Panthers with rifles and berets manning both sides of it. They gestured up to the roofs of the buildings on the opposite side of the street and, with a start, we took in the rifles extending all along the Central Avenue roofline held by men lying on their stomachs. The Los Angeles Police Department was massed in force. Inside, we were shown the entrance to an upper room where seven or eight young mothers with infants in arms had been attending a class in new baby care when the confrontation began. We had been summoned to escort them home, and, one by one, we did. I dropped off the woman and child I was assigned and drove home without incident.

I did not then take in the real peril all of us were in - a peril the Black Panthers were to face in earnest two weeks later. I found myself in the company of Communists because I had chosen that night of all nights to find out for myself what Communism was direct from a comrade’s mouth. Somehow I had located their offices in LA and driven there in my old Chevy from the North Hollywood apartment I shared with my father. For two hours, an eager young man, not much older than me, had done his best to explain the theories and imaginings of the Communist movement. A cell leader working to find converts in local factories by day, he was eager to tackle  a college student studying history. He was filled with idealism. And I had been primed, oddly, by the far right of the Republican Party, to want to hear him.

Some time during the 1950’s McCarthy hearings, not so long after the birth of television, these men, those  most terrified by the threats posed by the rise of Communist ideology after WWII,  held a series of televised giant “educational” events in a football arena filled with people in which they tried to explain to Americans in detail their opinions of the false promises and dangers of this movement. It was the first time my child’s brain had ever tried to follow abstract thought. And, ironically, all I took away from watching  was that Communists wanted to help poor people. That sounded nice.  Later, as a fifth grader I even undertook to teach myself Russian. Studying in secret, I  managed to memorize the alphabet and finally say “Shto eto? Eto karandash.” (What is it? It’s a pencil)  before I lost interest. Later, as a college student, my curiosity was renewed when the Great Leap Forward in China was being promoted on college campuses all over the nation as a glorious thing, said to be liberating millions from feudal suffering. Mao’s “Little Red Book was passed out for free on college political tables leading to the UCLA cafeteria. I read of the dramatic idealism of the fighters in Red Star Over China and was moved by their passion to make this world fairer. Listening to the earnest young man, however, I grew more and more troubled by the future he painted.

“But when is it finished?” I interrupted him. “When do we stop being revolutionaries and begin being free people again? Free to do other things?  Like art?”

“Never,” he blurted. “The revolution must constantly be renewed.”

“But what mechanisms are there to control the leadership if it becomes corrupt?”

“That could never happen. All power will belong to the people.”

“All poor people are not saints,” I pointed out.  “ How will the Communist system prevent the rise of a corrupt strong man?”

And so we went on until we could go no more and I became and have remained ever after, dismayed by this unique human experiment, despite its admirable first goals to rid the world of very real injustice. Indeed, even then my doubts were proving valid as events of the sixties and the nationwide purges under Stalin and Mao unfolded. So I thanked him, ticked Communism off my list of interests and was about to leave when the call came. “The Black Panther Party needs volunteers!” someone shouted across the room. “White ones.” He went on to explain they needed young people they thought the police would hesitate to shoot, because their LA headquarters were surrounded.  What made me turn back at the door and go with the Communists? That is easy to answer. I considered the Black Panther Party, though I did not know them well, as my neighbors.

In the segregated world of the sixties, I know that too needs explanation, so let me go back four years from that night.  In August of 1965, when  I was seventeen years old, newly graduated from Santa Monica High School, I was living in Malibu with my mother, her second husband, Charlie Farrell, and my then seven-year-old brother, Chris. Malibu was not yet the series of gated communities of celebrities and the hyper-rich that it was to become, but it was rich enough - Charlie was a well-paid engineer at Hughes Aircraft -  and we counted several actors as our neighbors. The days were mild and clear, the sea clean and blue. The beaches were much wider than they are now, and not crowded. We lived squarely within the California Dream. What a puzzlement then, one day, to see smoke rising from the heart of Los Angeles on our far horizon.

“What’s that?” I remember asking.

“There is a riot in Watts,” I was told. I frowned. This was a place name I had never heard before. “The Negroes are burning their ghetto.”

The fires and the riots went on for six days, and I had more questions. “What are Negroes doing in LA?” I remember asking. “What is a ghetto? Why are they burning it?” I had barely glimpsed people of other races in my cloistered world. Looking back in my high school year book, I now see dark faces,  but they led separate lives in the early 60’s. And for me, their presence had never really registered. Put to the question, I would have said that  “Negroes” or “colored people” as descendents of African slaves were then named, all lived in the south.

  I did not know it yet, but I suffered from a learned myopia that was nearly universal among northern whites of my generation, even in liberal families. The world I grew up in was saturated in the attitudes of the Jim Crow era. In school my US history textbook informed me that slavery had been a good experience for most Africans, providing them, not only with civilization and religious instruction, but free food, and rent,  not to mention a steady job. I do remember wondering if that could really be true. Hadn’t I also heard that slaves often tried to run away? But in fact, I and most of my peers were almost comically out of touch with the history and realities of race in America as the Civil Rights Era dawned. I did not know people of color were routinely excluded from the hotels we stayed at, even in California, nor that most of the restaurants we patronized did the same, as well as the companies hiring for the jobs which supported our middle class lives. I was shocked to discover a couple of years later that even the purchase agreement of our Malibu house stated that the property could not be sold to “coloreds.” My mother had always declared that Negroes were equal. That we should never ever discriminate. She did this so vocally and so predictably whenever someone “colored” came into view, even in their presence, that I always became acutely uncomfortable as if I were being told not to look at or question a person with some terrible disability. I can only imagine how keenly the person she was talking about must have wanted to get out of her range. And yet, with my step father, she signed that lease. It was required by the real estate office and they really wanted the house. How could it really hurt anyone? She never noticed when, at five,  I picked up and repeated the childhood rhyme circulating around me when we played hide and seek, “catch a nigger by his toe, if he hollers, let him go.” It was how she had learned the song. It was how it had always been sung. There was no malice in it, but no awareness either. Just as we played cowboys and Indians and always shot down the Indians. We were walking blind in a moral minefield and never noticed any of it.

I had heard nothing of the racism and police brutality African Americans regularly suffered, nor the family ordeals generated by being “last hired, first fired.” Interracial marriage was a felony in most states. Interracial dating created apocalyptic levels of shock in every person who walked by, of either race. It was almost unheard of. What I thought I knew about the lives of African Americans, came from glimpses of white actors in black face on vaudeville stages,  from the aw shucks jiving of the characters on TV’s Amos and Andy, or the  “Yassuhs”, and “Yassims” muttered by actors posing as self-abasing slaves who opened the mansion door for their white masters in movies about the old South. These were always shown as broken clowns of human beings, demonstrating in every gesture what “slavish” means.  In fact, these grotesque screen portrayals fit well with the propagandized history I was receiving in elementary school. Those who think there has been no progress in America might do well to dig up some of these old films. Gone with the Wind, saturated with racist myopia as it is, looks positively enlightened by contrast.  Movies about Africa were worse and they were an endlessly popular genre.  For years my child’s  image of Africa was lines of gibbering simpletons wearing clothes like diapers with boxes on their heads, following behind handsome resourceful white men in neatly ironed khaki. At the first sign of danger, these diaper men would throw down the boxes and flee in terror, gibbering in a higher register. When the movie “Zulu” was made in 1964, of the South African battle of Rorke’s Drift in which a trained regiment of highly coordinated Zulu warriors attacks a British military station, it was a revelation.  In high school, and even in college, the history of Africa was presented almost exclusively as the history of white colonization. We have indeed come a long way, however far there remains to go. 

I - and most of the rest of “white” America - were at the beginning of that journey in 1965. But I was keen to start. When Watts went up in flames, I asked my father if he would drive me there so I could see for myself. He drove me through quickly once the streets had opened again, doors locked and windows up, and I remember only flashes of what seemed then a foreign country. Traffic moved steadily but broken windows still lined the streets. I did not notice the residential areas behind the grim boulevards, thousands of row houses, many as neat as a pin with well kept gardens. Or see the Sunday parade of elegant older ladies in large flowery hats on their way to church that I later became aware of. So much of Watts in those days was populated by a generation of law-abiding country people who had escaped the old South. They carried with them values of hard work and family loyalty and hope. But those hopes were being dashed as they fought to make a living or realize any kind of personal dream in still racist California. And they were losing their children to the violence and despair of race-based gangs. The Slauson Street Gang. The Crips. The Bloods. They were all started in those years.

Several months after the start of my student life at UCLA, a small notice caught my attention on a library bulletin board. Operation Bootstrap, a black self-help organization in south central Los Angeles was seeking volunteers. My curiosity about the riots still strong, I decided to go. It was a long journey from perky Westwood to Watts on a city bus in those days. I needed three buses to get there, if memory serves. The streets grew ever more functional and drab as each bus drove farther south, hundreds of blocks of factories or small poor businesses, empty, littered vacant lots, liquor stores on every corner. Gradually the color of the passers-by on sidewalks grew darker as we passed through Asian neighborhoods, hispanic neighborhoods and finally neighborhoods that were exclusively “Negro.”  Those getting on the bus looked tired and dispirited. There were young women with a long day of menial work behind them and a whole life of it ahead. There were young men who swung into seats,  edgy and miserable from their endless fruitless search for any job that would last more than a few days. Grey-haired men and women, old before their time, gazed blankly out the windows, illusions gone. And there was anger to be seen through those windows. I remember a sudden flare of fury as women outside a liquor store began to fight, screaming insults, dragging each other down to their knees with hands buried in their opponents hair. A drunken young prostitute staggered diagonally across a major street, her shirt ripped, yelling obscenities at passers by. To me it seemed a fearful, alien planet. I was nervous even to walk a block by myself in those early days.

But I soon had friends. Operation Bootstrap itself, on 42nd and Central Avenue, proved to be a large cinderblock building with a sizable central room and several smaller ones. My offer to volunteer was greeted warmly by the three men who started it.  Bob Bailey, Robert Hall and Louis Smith and been involved, only months before,  in the Freedom Rides to help bring voting rights to blacks in the South. In Los Angeles, their goal was to lift residents up “by their  bootstraps” by offering them free skills-based education right in the neighborhood.  The idea was that students would quickly be able to make a real living from learning keypunch or going into the arts or helping to build a toy factory, funded by Mattel, that made black dolls. Teachers from local universities and businesses volunteered to offer free classes. Lou Smith was also in the midst of a concerted outreach to educate and involve college students like me. He didn’t just want to get jobs for a few people. He wanted to change the culture. It was his notice on that bulletin board at UCLA that had brought me so far.   And so my education in black began in earnest.

As I worked at the front desk as a receptionist, he began with short lectures. I learned about the realities of slavery, about the old South and the new 1960’s version, the cattle prods, the jail house beatings, the realities of Jim Crow for the people who lived there. I learned about “field negroes” vs “house negroes,” a schism created in the antebellum south, that was still poisoning attitudes within the black community. Those with darker skins, more African hair or features, were not seen as attractive. But that was changing even as I absorbed the lessons he was teaching me. Stokley Carmichael had arrived in Watts for a series of evening harangues and at long last “Negroes” were hearing the novel idea, “black is beautiful.” “Black” became their proud new identity.  It was truly a movement of consciousness for a whole nation.

My own mind was moving as well, peeling off layers of unconscious bias as if I were an onion.  Lou’s lessons sometimes took effect days after I received them.  One I remember particularly. At UCLA one day, I attended a science fiction film made in Japan. A space ship landed and aliens from Mars emerged, a prince of Mars and his many robed attendants. Science fiction was in its movie infancy in those days. Such improbable characters were routine. But the audience and I began to laugh out loud. The reason? The royalty from Mars were all Japanese! And then, mid laugh, I stopped. And for the first time, realized.

I remember the same lesson coming home as I really looked at the graphic in my UCLA anthropology textbook one day. The Evolution of Man was illustrated, starting with a monkey, rising to brute, to ape man, and at last to glorious  homo sapiens. I had never before noticed how odd it was that this pinnacle of creation was always pictured as a robust white man with reddish hair wearing tennis shorts. Of course he would be white. The European version of mankind, I finally realized with real shock, was exclusively what my culture had always presented to me as what “human beings” looked like. All others were exotics, variations from this norm,  odd people always being studied by scientists who shared photos of them in National Geographic Magazine.   And that final image was male because of course women were a specialized variation too, not the main event of the species. When the Japanese put themselves forward as aliens who looked like human beings, what I experienced for the first time was the shock of cognitive dissonance.

There were other revelations, some perhaps more than Lou even intended. In the garage behind Operation Bootstrap, once a week, “encounter sessions” were organized. College professors from USC and UCLA, a sprinkling of young volunteers like myself, and some 30-40 neighborhood people, speaking to each other with passion, love, despair, and sometimes fury across the racial divide. Lou or Bob started it off and young men stood to harangue the professors with the stories of the police brutality they had endured and all that was wrong with America. The crowd swayed and amened and people called out supportive comments.  The professors were conciliatory, eager to learn. For they carried what all whites in those days carried, a keen sense of guilt for the injustices that were all around us then, even for slavery itself. In the sixties there were still people alive who had known people born into slavery. This was not ancient history. And the terrible aftermath of Jim Crow was certainly not over.  I struggled with that concept. White guilt. I still do. It may have been a necessary part of the healing process in our society then. I am not so sure it is now.

As the lessons continued,  black Americans grew to impossible stature in my mind, handsome, powerful, daring, worldly wise in ways the whites my own age could not hope to attain to. I found myself frowning at the “honkey” boys in college. They now seemed meek, ungraceful, unmasculine, even childish. It was black men and women who had my attention, and because of Lou Smith, my trust.  This false image itself became one more layer of my onion however.  One night, after such a garage encounter session, two men I didn’t know, but Lou did, invited me to coffee afterwards. One, I later learned was Bunchy Carter, founder of the LA Chapter of the Black Panthers, the other his friend, Wilbert Terry.  I remember no unease as they drove me south, deeper into the ghetto, and finally stopped at their apartment. The conversations sparked in the encounter session  continued on a friendlier level, though I can’t now remember what we said. It was Terry, mainly who talked. It was Terry, who, an hour after i got there, pulled a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me. “Do you know what this is?” he enquired, clearly curious what I would do or say next.

I frowned at the small silver object in his hand. “It's a piece,” he informed me, puzzled at my lack of comprehension.

“A piece of what?” I asked him. Confused by this sudden turn in the conversation.

“It’s a gun, bitch.”

The statement seemed to hang in the air, but I finally got it. And the fact that the gun was pointed at the middle of my chest. This was producing a most remarkable sensation. My body had gone cold, then riveted on the line the bullet would take. It felt as if all my organs were moving, congealing at that point into a ball of ice. “What are you doing?” I asked him, finding it hard to concentrate on anything but those physical sensations.  “You’re scaring me.” 

“Go into the bedroom,” Terry commanded. “Take off your clothes.” He was confident, clearly on familiar ground. I would obey with a gun pointed at me. That is what one did after all.

Instead I sat down on the couch. I had never had a gun pointed at me before, never experienced violence or coercion of any kind from my fellow human beings. I was 20-years-old and, entering the fugue state of emotional shock, still could barely take in that my hosts had become so uncivil. I continued simply to argue, and to refuse. For some reason still mysterious to me, Terry never took the next step. He didn’t hit me or take my arm or try to move me by force. Instead he began to talk. He talked for almost another hour, waving the gun at me, unleashing all his fury at whites. He demanded to know why it was okay for white men to molest black women, but now that I was in his neighborhood, I thought I should be exempt.

Carter interjected a few comments, and, oddly, seemed to be on my side, or at least not on Terry’s. From time to time he attempted to shift the conversation to a kind of banter, an invitation. He suggested I  join their “stable.” They kissed the women who prostituted for them he assured me. They were emotionally supportive pimps. For a college girl whose head was still full of over-the-top historical romances, this was not a strong argument. To this day I wonder at the profound loneliness of any woman who would think it was. They had clearly found it a successful recruiting message in the past. So I continued to sit on the couch, rigid, refusing all suggestions and commands, but I did not feel the full shock of fear until suddenly, when Terry wasn’t looking, Carter took away and hid the little pistol he had set down on the mantel. Was I then in real danger of being murdered? He knew his friend. Was Terry crazy enough to do that? My frozen mind and body began to emerge from its shock. I stood up. When Carter, still arguing with Terry, brusquely gestured to the door and said I could go if I liked, I slipped out into the hall and down the stairs. I couldn’t hear whatever arguments Carter used to stop Terry from pulling me back in. I just got in my car and drove.

At home, my father was still out. I went to bed, shaking in every limb,  and never told him of my near escape, though, much later I did tell Lou.  He grimaced, but said little. And in April, 1968 came another lesson when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember Lou pushing me out of the building and into my car minutes after the news first came on the radio. “Drive!” He commanded. “Go now!” I remember angry hands slapping my car at intersections as the electrifying news spread across LA on the radio. I drove and made it home and followed the news that night as activists and LA police barely stopped Watts from erupting once again. Across the nation 110 other cities burst into riot and unrest.

 For over a year, any thought or mention of that night with Carter and Terry made my hands shake uncontrollably. A inch wide swatch of hair on one side of my head turned white. And yet, thanks to the grudging intervention of Carter, I was not raped, and not physically harmed.  It makes me admire, today, the  courage of young people in inner cities who often experience multiple episodes of such armed bullying in their teens. It was far more than I could handle at age 20.

I never talked to Carter or Terry again. I often thought of them with anger, but I was shocked when I learned it was Carter who was gunned down a year later, with John Huggins in an event hosted by the Black Student’s Union at UCLA. A member of the US organization led by Ron Karenga (Bootstrap’s neighbors on the other side) took offense at something they said and shot them both. Reading his biography today, I have learned that Bunchy Carter is credited with starting the Black Panther organization in Los Angeles - something I didn’t know when I met him, and before that was a leader in the Slauson Street Gang with the nickname “Mayor of the Ghetto.” I am almost sorry to reveal that, according to what he said to me that night, he was also a pimp  because the BPP he led was truly trying to move beyond gangs and create a political movement that lifted and empowered black youth. They offered classes, free community breakfasts, and role models who tried to protect others from bullying police. He had been rapidly evolving, from gang member, to prisoner, to Black Muslim, to community activist and leader.  Where he would have ended up if he had not been assassinated, no one can say.  Nor what the Black Panther Party would have become if its leaders all over the country had not been assassinated or imprisoned  by  the FBI, as they were over the next years. Reading today the memoir written by Elaine Brown - one of their last surviving leaders - I can see the immaturity, as well as the earnest courage, of their ideas. They carried guns and postured in sexy black leather and demanded respect and obedience, but they also really tried to help. I believe now that their self-righteous approach was destined to skirt closer to fascism than the communism they were accused of. But they were so young, in their early twenties. It took real courage to do what they did in those Jim Crow tainted days, learning everything for themselves from the ground up, putting their lives on the line, and fighting with each other as often as with those outside. It was those internecine struggles the FBI encouraged that lead to Carter’s death. Of Terry, I never heard more, nor wanted to.

Thus it was that the (hopefully) final layer of my personal onion came loose.  I looked down one day at my yellow-toned freckled and tanned arms and began to object to being labelled “white.” It was not just that the color was inaccurate, I began to bristle at the idea that my identity was a color. Calling any person a skin color tells you almost nothing important about them as a person any more than the color of their eyes or hair. It may hint strongly at a history or a social status, but it also may not. The label “white” was used to make assumptions about me that were rarely true. “Black people  know all about white people,” I was told repeatedly in those days. “All the movies and TV shows are about white people. We know you. You do not know us.” But I have never seen a TV show or movie that comes even close to the life I personally lead or the thoughts I personally have. I did not know the people around me at Operation Bootstrap perfectly, but I had made tremendous efforts over three years, and some progress, in doing so. I finally woke up and realized very few such efforts were being made in reverse. For most at Operation Bootstrap, excepting Lou Smith, even after those three years, I was still, first and mostly, only a color.

From the lessons at Bootstrap and from reading history, and most of all from the years of world travel that were to follow, I have learned that “white people” are not unique, not even in their racial blindness. To think they are is to show ignorance of the experience of oppressed groups in almost every country and time - Koreans in Japan, untouchables in India, Tibetans in China, Muslims in Tibet, Shia in Iraq, Tutsi in Rwanda, non-Communists in Cambodia, Jews in Germany and Russia, Palestinians in Israel, Armenians in Turkey, Rohingya in Myanmar. The list goes on. The European Age of Imperialism was real and terrible in its effects and attitudes, but to elevate Europeans to a status as unique monsters no other group will ever match creates a kind of racism in the negative. A silly idea. There is so very much impressive competition.

Meeting a person and taking their skin color as a critically defining characteristic, to me now, is the bottom line of racism. Being able to forget about skin color altogether, or take it as no more than a detail of personal appearance like eye color, or height, is the liberation from racism we all seek. Moving contrary to the dawning era of  “political correctness” I also began to push back against arguments for “white guilt.” Today I no longer accept responsibility for actions that took place before I was born, on issues I had no part of creating. Nor do I accept guilt for decisions I do not make now or for thoughts I do not have. What I do feel morally responsible for are my actions now, and for the thoughts I share. I still support efforts to repair the damage of the past, such as affirmative action in school placements and job placements, but not reparations. None of those alive now have ever legally been slave owners nor have any been their slaves by law. We do not owe each other money. Life is hard in myriad ways for everyone. What we owe each other is fairness going forward. We owe each other honest awareness of the lingering effects of the past and the need to ensure they do not persist or give unfair advantage. When abuses occur in our society because of current racist attitudes, we owe each other real listening, protection, just laws, and a just response - in both directions.  And there is another reason. Asking "whites" who are, for the most part, already struggling, to pay enormous taxes to provide reparations for the sins of their ancestors (regardless of when those ancestors arrived or what they personally did) cannot possibly bring about a healed or united America going forward. It would instead spawn a hurricane of aggrieved feelings, charges and countercharges. Have we so soon forgotten the effects of the reparations demanded of Germany after WWI? They devastated German's already war-damaged economy and spawned a generation of poor and bitter young people who felt unjustly punished for the sins of their fathers. Their solution was to idolize the man who told them to stop feeling guilty and be strong again. Take back what used to be theirs. Be supermen. And thus was Adolph Hitler enabled to bring hell on earth to a whole continent. 

As I see each new generation of “black” American youngsters wake up to the horrors in their history, I can acknowledge their anger, maybe even accept their need to aim it at me for a time as they come to grips with it. But in the end I have come to agree with Morgan Freeman’s revolutionary conclusion: “The way to finally end racism is to stop talking about race... I don’t want to call you a white man anymore. Don’t call me a black man. I am Morgan Freeman.”  It serves up no justice to say, as I so often hear said these days, “It doesn’t matter if you personally are racist. You are part of a racist system.” By all means call out racist attitudes that are really manifesting in action or speech, but so often the people who are shaming others are guilty of exactly that same myopia. And “systems” consist only of people and the institutional rules they think they are following. So let’s really talk when things feel wrong. And really listen. And every person in the conversation maybe look in the mirror a little longer as we change together old rules and habits that still need changing.

I am Francesca, complexion light yellow-brown with freckles. Eyes blue. Wavy hair gone white. 5’6”.  Weight secret. Nice to meet you.

Did You Notice?

Did you notice?

That peculiar lack of ground beneath our feet,

That dust made of all the things that were

that girds our toes. It is the dust

that steals promises. It's clear now.
Form can never hold.

Standing in the last years of life

I look back at a story dreamed, and half told

and unfinished In every line.

I see my protagonists age and shift, disappear or decline

So many I loved, honored and emulated, I see now,

they do vanish in a day.

They were here, then they were distant

Sending messages from far away

I thought of them

I loved the bits of story we had made together

And then one day, a day like any other,

One of them was gone, and then another.

Stories become shattered mirrors,
shards of memory.

And soon enough, memory will fade to white.

Were any of us here at all? It is almost night.

The best of friends, a loving father,

teachers who swore allegiance til the end of time

So many gone

Into urns or stupas or white dust above a wave

Who can stand on this ground?

We cannot write our story and think it will stay.

"Life is a dream," Buddhist lamas told us

And then went the same way.

So I open my hands to the sun.

I watch the children pass, full of today.

In the end, what I hold to

Is love.

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 Becoming Cesca

High School Days

All my life I have been attracted to stories of the steppes of Asia, and the nomad peoples who roamed them. Scythians and Sarmatians, Parthians and Hiung-nu, Visigoths and Magyars. As an adolescent I heard some echo of their lives in the music of Rimsky Kosakof. I did not care if it was romanticized.  I tried to visualize stepping outside my yurt to behold seas of endless grass, or long trains of horses and camels and packed wagon carts, or the horse battles between archers with tattoos and braided hair, or the great trading centers at the edge of the deserts.  As drums found their rhythm and violins rose, I imagined horses at a gallop, and even fantasized centaurs, half woman, half horse with streaming long hair and tails, who galloped in fierce dignity next to our car as my parents drove. I imagined these creatures even somehow creating the Russian symphonies that enfolded them. They confounded the US military with their power and beauty and broke through attempts to encircle them in massed charges. On long trips I maintained this fantasy for hours.

Maybe this yearning comes from some lost past life. Maybe only from this one, for most of my childhood, we moved every year. At least, after my parent’s divorce when I was four, I moved. I looked forward to  it. At first they lived only blocks apart, and I trudged between them, pajamas in a pillow slip. As their divorce took hold, the distances grew longer. I lived with one or the other in places too many to mention, Westwood and Fullerton and Manhattan Beach with my mother,  Menlo Park and San Francisco with my father. When I lived with my mother, my father would come, as often as he could, to take me away on weekend adventures, to climb cliffs next to the sea, or ride horses in the mountain pastures of Arrowhead. He taught me to stop chattering and be still, as we listened to the conversations between trees  in a mountain forest.  He showed me how to climb down sandstone cliffs above breaking waves and helped me notice the tapestry of jewels slowly forming as we looked down on the city of Los Angeles in the twilight from the hills of Palos Verdes.

But as my parents began to settle into their adult patterns more solidly, our moves at last became rarer. In my high school days I moved with my mother into the first of three Malibu houses and stayed with her for several years. Living over  twenty miles from my high school, I rose each morning before the sun, hating the cold and the shock of it,  and went out to take the bus that ferried us an hour along the coast to Santa Monica High School. In the late afternoons I roamed the long beaches and dry hills of Malibu. With my brother Chris, then six and seven, we went out to lean into the Santa Ana winds that came each fall from the hills east of us, turning the sea flat and indigo blue and pushing against us so strongly that we could lean diagonally into it, our arms held out like airplane wings. Three more moves were made with my mother, but these came, not from any urge to adventure, but as my mother’s new husband, Charlie Farrell mounted the ladder of Hughes Aircraft promotions and invested in better houses. We remained in the same familiar area.

In the first one, on Malibu Canyon Road, I learned to play beach volleyball, babysat 10-year-old neighbor Christie Brinkley, and wore bikinis. At 15,  I gathered the admiring glances of older men like talismans, bits of secret strength I planned to use only when needed one day when I really wanted a man’s love, as if the power endowed by youthful beauty were ever something one could store.  For the time being, I remained as virginal as ever, an outsider to the coy games of young people. The sea and sky and dun hills were still my balance pole, my refuge.

     High school itself therefore came as a shock to me at 14, a cultural dissonance so jarring it almost shattered me that first year. I had always liked school. I liked carrying books and notebooks. I loved reading and new knowledge. I had had good teachers, and was even jumped by my elementary school teacher to fourth grade half way through my third grade class. One English teacher in 6th grade was so inspiring, I went home and manually copied our entire textbook of grammar rules into my own notebook, just to see the pages fill. She taught us English with real devotion, from diagramming sentences to punctuation to writing short stories. Every detail mattered to her. The foundation she gave me was so strong it gave me almost everything I needed years later when I in turn began to teach English to immigrants and try my own hand at writing.

A teacher in junior high invited me to come after school for lessons on the philosophy of Plato. For the first time my mind examined philosophy and understood there are questions to be asked, a bigger picture to stand back and see.  How are two differently shaped tables still a table? How should a leader of men be trained?  When I was 13, my algebra teacher turned out to be a survivor of Auschwitz. She told us she had maintained her sanity as a 16-year-old there by working out theorems in her head. With her stories and emotionally charged understanding of math, she made every formula feel important and elegant. They had saved her life after all.

But my first memory of Santa Monica High School is sitting in some risers with a hundred other freshmen, being trained to follow the school cheers for the football team by a male cheerleader. All around me other novice students roared with faux enthusiasm, on cue, for a school we had all just entered a few days before. Their bodies swayed in unison, their hands clapped on command. The young man in front of us howled and spelled out words and strode back and forth, orchestrating our responses with total self confidence. I sat stunned. Every fiber of me was discomfited by this elaborate charade of emotion, fake passion for a team I had never seen, a belonging I did not feel. I seemed to be alone in my alienation. Young people swayed and followed the choreographed hand gestures and chatted all around me.  When we were released,  I went to the ladies room and took two aspirin for a headache.

In the halls, as bells rang and students surged between classes, I felt buffeted in the current. I remember lockers banging shut all along the walls as I stopped to retrieve the books for the next class, struggling with my first  combination lock. In “home room,” speakers blared with announcements and more false camaraderie. Listening to the hectoring urgent voices, I came to understand I was now a tribal member of Santa Monica High School. Samohi. Meant to be dedicated to screeching encouragement as our “warriors” overcame our enemies on the field of play, triumphing in debate clubs and spelling bees, obeying my roster of teachers, following the dress code like a supplicant.

            My headaches became daily occurrences and in the third week something broke. If found myself walking outside of class, when all around me were rushing the other way. I came to the school’s edge - there were not yet walls around Santa Monica High School - and I kept walking. An odd hazy state had invaded my mind. I did not know why I was walking and did not want to think about it. I went a mile and then another, and found myself at last in Palisades Park, the  mile long strip of green lawn and palm trees that runs along the top of the cliffs above the sea in Santa Monica. I found a phone and fished a dime out of my pocket. I came to understand how desperate I was only when I burst into tears and found I could barely get the words out. “Hamp, come and get me, please.”

What my father did next, I will always be grateful for, and even more for what he did not do. He did not take me right back to school. He did not read any riot acts. He did not even frown at my truancy. Instead he arrived to rescue me in his latest dilapidated Cadillac, leaving his much needed  job to take care of his daughter who needed him even more that day. He gave me a giant hug, and then took me to a most remarkable place. The Fellowship Temple on Sunset Blvd is a vast parkland with a quiet lake in the middle. Speakers hung from the trees and played soft classical music. A charmingly overwrought Hindu temple graced the far end. The discrete boxes placed here and there on the trail contained little cards with helpful quotations.  It was in fact my first exposure to eastern thought in any form and it soothed me back to sanity that day.

I dutifully let myself be bused back to Samohi the next day and found I could bear it a little better. My English class in particular offered a place that came to seem like refuge.  This teacher did not dither over grammer, but rather enthused over Thoreau and Emerson. I was asked to ponder the Oversoul. And marvel at the simple crystalline life of Thoreau on Walden Pond. He planted beans. He fished. He sat in the sun for hours, simply present to the world. His life was a Buddhist meditation, though neither he, nor I, nor even perhaps my teacher knew it at the time. Still, it healed me to hear about him.

I had other good English teachers as the years progressed. One in particular introduced me to William Faulkner. I was assigned The Sound and the Fury and went on to read almost all his other works on my own. I moved in a Faulknerian trance for months as I did so, transported by his fierce clarion stories of indomitable southerners, the diamond hard core of courage and dedication to memory found in the shabbiest of his human characters. And the language! The words just so, resplendent or plain, as the stories needed. I tried to emulate him in torrents of purple prose and even gained an honorable mention for a story of a southern boy in a shack - a world as far from my own experience as it would be possible to imagine. I do wish now my teachers had been a bit more exacting of those novice errors, but it was a beginning.

When the second  year of school rolled around I hadn’t yet made the lifelong friends I would soon find, but I had begun to take an interest in school activities. We had frequent schoolwide “assemblies” in which we all waited, pleased to be out of class, for whatever our earnest young principal had planned for us. The first one was an account of his own adventures as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. I have not forgotten the highlight of his talk even today, five decades later, for he told us about his tapeworm. When it was last removed, departing from his corpus inch by inch, it was over a yard long, an image that brought shrieks of horrified delight from even the most stoically cool teen among us. 

 But the following assembly, in November of 1963, was even harder to forget. It began as simply odd. An over-weight middle-aged man had been invited to demonstrate his skills as a typist, typing away on an old Underwood in front of a thousand restless sophomores, a microphone set next to the keys as he kept time to a Beethoven symphony. Whether he had more than that to dazzle us with I do not know for he had barely gotten through a few bars when the principals’s assistant came to the mic and stopped him. “Our President, John F. Kennedy,” she announced in a shaky voice, “has been shot in Dallas. We are waiting for news but….” I am sure she had not intended us to leave. But we knew who Kennedy was. We were teenagers, but we had experienced his dramatic election. We had shuddered through the Cuban missle crisis with him, understanding, for the first time in our sheltered lives, that the danger of a nuclear war was real and not just a mockery-worthy exercise in squeezing under our desks once a month. Defying his own advisors, John Kennedy had steered us through this darkest passage. He had spoken in Germany and challenged us to ask ourselves what we, the young people,  could do for our country.  Most of us idolized him. Against the protests of teachers who tried to stop us, we simply rose as one body and began to exit, most weeping in shock, blindly headed out, away from this bearer of terrible news. Many of the boys in that class were soon to become the first casualities of the Vietnam war, then just starting, but on that day almost none of us knew anything of death. It was our first bereavement. And like everything else emotional at 16, it hit us like a grenade to the heart.

 Like the others, I walked out of the auditorium and kept going, and wept, and stayed at home in the days that followed as the whole nation joined in an immense  spasm of sorrow. I think there were none who did not stop what they were doing to watch the slow procession of horse soldiers escort his casket up Pennsylvania Avenue to his funeral. Something more than a great president was passing. We could all feel it.

My life grew larger when I found my first real friend in high school, Kathy Epling. She was new to everything at first, even more than I had been, for her first years of puberty had been lived in Japan with her military family. She was a pretty girl with a slight build and flipped blonde hair, courtesy of her adamantly conformist parents, still wedded to the fifties. But she was enthusiastically friendly, so very glad to find someone to talk to, someone who loved nature and books as she did. She invited me to her home and showed me all her pictures and told her stories. She read aloud to me her outstanding poetry. And she shared her enhusiasm for the books she read, constantly and widely, more than me. It was later revealed (by a counselor driving outside the lines) that Kathy Epling had the highest IQ in our high school of 3000 students. Our friendship, though we did not know it yet, was to become one of those rare sisterhoods of spirit that last a lifetime. We did not always live so close by as we did in those days, but she became the sister I did not have and stayed that way until her death in 2016.

Together we began to change, as the world around us entered a time now known as “the Sixties” though it was already near the middle of that decade. It began, for me, with a song that came one afternoon on the radio, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles. Aside from learning how to do the “Twist,” I had barely noticed the dawning of rock and roll before that song. I knew nothing of the rise of this still obscure English rock group. But their song seized my mind like a visitation. Today I listen to the same song and wonder at the karma of its effect on my generation because little of its power is left for me now. But in 1964 I found it simply riveting. I wanted to listen to nothing else for days, playing it over and over. There was another herald of change in those weeks. A boy appeared in the central plaza of the high school with his hair to his shoulders - a style that for us simply meant “hair like a girl’s.” It was such a startling thing to see, we gathered around him a hundred strong, wanting to know what on earth he was thinking. I cannot remember his answers, but soon others were following.

Girls, including myself, began to role up our skirts at the waist, and to ask why we were never allowed to come to school in pants. I remember the school’s first reactions. A  group of girls known as the “girls’ council” was delegated to examine miscreants like myself and decide on punishment. I remember kneeling on the floor in front of their line of chairs, as they checked to see whether or not my skirt touched the floor. It failed the test and I frowned at their authority over me, though the punishment was only an hour of after school “detention.”  But the dam did not hold long. Soon there were special days in which girls were allowed to come in pants. Hair was growing over shoulders everywhere and was back combed into buffants above. Make up was reaching levels of application that Cleopatra would have envied, and even I explored the magical powers of false eyelashes.

The main event in high school is, of course, falling in love. Solitary child of nature that I was in those days, I was still no stranger to this emotion. I had fallen in love with someone every year since the second grade, where my heart was first broken by seven-year-old Steven, who invited me to be his partner in the circle dance, “Pickin up Paw-paws, Put em in the Basket.” The very next week, however, Steven fell under the Jezebel spell of my best friend Debbie. I was left to take my chances as he heroically shielded Debbie with his own body in our daily dodgeball games. Though I did develop a certain agility she lacked.

In the spring of my second year of high school, I was taken aback when a handsome senior named Bob Hensley began to flirt in the biology class we shared. He was blonde and tall and athletic, naturally graceful. I ran around the track in PE, my head pivoting to keep Bob in view as he worked on pole vaulting. Though I was still a sophomore, he invited me to his prom and held my hand as we, and several thousand seniors from throughout the LA basin, were given the keys to Disneyland for “senior night”. It was thrilling to walk by his side in that shining place, something new to me to stay up all night and be “a girl on a date with a senior.”  But somehow, I was simply too immature to go even the smallest step further. I found myself unable to kiss Bob good-night, or let myself be kissed. I was nervous about it to such a degree that, after a few more puzzled efforts, he gave up at last. Oddly, the next boy that asked me out got that first kiss without a fuss. Strange karma. The last I saw of Bob was after his graduation that June. He declared he was going to go by a new name, Chad. He was going into military service, excited to be flying the next week to an exotic place called Vietnam. I never learned if he survived it.

The next year a remarkable young man named Eric Thiermann sat next to me in Mr. Freed’s Spanish class, and returned my smiles. The sangfroid of the current generation was not much part of ours, or at least it was not a remotest quality of mine.  When the Spanish teacher gently teased me about my apparently obvious infatuation one day, I was so mortified, I buried my head in my arms and would not look up until the bell rang to release us from the class. Eric was made of sterner stuff though. After class, he invited me to that year’s prom. I accepted before I even noticed the words coming out of my mouth.

Eric came from a large and uniquely active and creative family. His father was a leader in the Quaker movement, his mother an artist. They lived in a large rambling house with at least an acre of trees and brush in Topanga Canyon. Here Eric had perfected his skills as a magician, with the cooperation of a long suffering dove. Indeed demonstrating those skills made up the bulk of his speech when he ran later that year for Student Vice President and the dove lifted from a top hat to fly about the auditorium.  His opponent’s campaign promise to push for a pickle in our cafeteria hamburgers did not hold a candle. Everyone began to adore Eric, both that year and even more the next when he became class president. 

That first step into stardom had not yet come for him when he invited me out, however. Though he didn’t show it, I think he was as nervous as I was, for he revealed the fact that he and his father had rehearsed the procedure of the whole evening to come, even making reservations at an elegant Mexican restaurant in downtown LA where I was to be treated to a post prom dinner. As for me, in the days before, my mother took me off to a salon for evening gowns. I don’t remember ever truly dressing up before that, and I had no opinions on style yet.  My mother purchased an alarming gold extravaganza, so stiff and voluminous it pretty much stood up by itself if you set it on the floor. Living in Malibu, we had several near neighbors who were well-known actors and even more who were Hollywood support professionals. A make-up artist who had given Joan Crawford her thick eyebrows was invited in to do my make up. My long red brown hair was coiffed and sprayed for the first time in my life. My eyebrows soon rivalled Joan’s. Red lipstick  was liberally applied . My beach adapted feet were coffined in shiny black three inch high heels. I was still staring at myself in shock in the bedroom mirror when Erik rang the doorbell, orchid corsage held up in mute offering.  As I came to stand before him, he looked in dismay at my gold satin bosom, where he was meant to pin it, but my mother and a cousin stepped in to help. Then it was a great relief to leave all the fluttering adults behind and get into his old car. We drove south on Highway 1 in stunned silence for a time and then, as I myself had rehearsed, not wanting to appear shallow, I opened the conversation by asking him his thoughts on death.

The evening did improve however. When we got to the venue, I made a beeline for the ladies room. I pulled my hair down and let it hang down my back to my waist. I washed my face free of most of the congealing make-up. I put my high heels in a corner and went out to dance. My dress still quivered like a giant bowl of golden jello, but we did have fun. Then it was time to go to the restaurant.  Here the manager informed us, to Eric’s mortification, that in the evening the restaurant was also a bar and underage persons could not be admitted. But it didn’t matter. Neither of us was hungry. We drove instead to the grass hills of UCLA and ran under the moonlight in our finery, laughing. A night to remember. Unfortunately when the next school dance came around, a “girl ask boy” dance,  my chronic shyness again hobbled me. I struggled for two weeks to gather my courage to ask him to go with me but could not. Another girl asked him, and he accepted. Linda Deutsch, who played the violin beautifully and had soulful dark eyes and bobbed black hair, became his girlfriend for the rest of our time in high school.

My mind shifts through the long forgotten photo cards of memory for more of those days and finds only flashes.  Pairs volleyball on the beach, and my ace serve that knocked men back on their heels, if they stopped it at all, silent punishment for the condescension they so often showed women athletes in those days.  “Good girl, you got it!”  For a time, in Malibu, and later in college, I was indeed an athlete, playing serious volleyball 20+ hours a week. Outplaying the casual male players who showed up, certain that no woman at any level of skill could out-do them at anything, was my recompense.  I remember trying out for the lead in the school play, Sound of Music. For days I had practiced alone the soaring lyrics of “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music.” I was ever more confident my mezzo soprano voice would impress them. I had, after all, sung musicals alone, playing all parts, for years, when no adults were home. When I stood up to sing before others in an auditorium, however, things went awry. The directors indeed seemed impressed with my first lines. But they noticed what I had not, that in learning the song directly from a record, I had learned it with Julie Andrew’s British accent. When they asked me to sing with an American accent, I was so undone, only a squawk came out, and no amount of sympathetic urging could unfreeze my vocal cords.

Odd how these roads not taken come back to me now, as I enter the last chapters of my life.  At 17 almost every day is a crossroads, though you do not recognize it until later. So much that happened then shaped my life. But so much more that was to form me was still to come. College and the full sea change of “The Sixties”  lay straight ahead. And life offers no re-dos.

Facing Samsara

When I feel overwhelmed by the horror of the fate that has overtaken certain people in the news today, certain groups, or certain animals and even ecosystems, it helps me sometimes to walk my mind toward it rather than away. We have been born into a reality in which everything and everyone is impermanent. There is no person or animal that will not die after enough days have passed, most often in discomfort and fear. Samsara is a rough neighborhood. Looking around me, I remind myself that every single person i see will experience death within a hundred years. Most in far less. Every single cute toddler, wagging puppy, noble elephant, whispering pine. Every friend will be lost, or will lose me. Every bit of my youthful beauty, my possessions, my wealth will be lost. Even the memory of me in the mind of others will fade and disappear. It is the way this place works, the reason the Buddha left his palace, the first Noble Truth. He went out to seek an answer to the terrible realization of the suffering all around him. He finally grasped that holding tightly to whatever has come to feel precious and safe cannot help anyone in the end. What does? Loving others. Helping wherever we can. Seeking wisdom that is bigger than one lifetime. Gaining the rare and difficult power of focused attention. What else is there to do after all, with this time here we have been given?

When Monsters are Real

It seems I almost died four weeks ago now. Though that realization has grown on me only slowly. A stomach ache came and went over a weekend in late September and then started to grow in earnest. An ambulance came to collect me on Monday night. I left behind my 95 year old mother with my cousin Patricia and went off to place my life in the hands of strangers. The monster I had dreaded since reading in my teens a vivid description of a medieval man's miseries with gall stones was now upon me. My doctor had actually warned me I had stones in there, but I had had them for years with no consequence. It seems 30% of Americans carry them. Not all, fortunately, will have to meet the monster. 

Oddly, there is a certain peace that comes with acute crises. One lives utterly in the moment, intent on the drip by drip revelation of new experiences.  "Beginner's mind,"  Zen priest David Suzuki called it. Curtains were drawn around me in the ER. I watched the staff appear and disappear as I listened deep inside to the ruin afoot. The nurses in the ER were brusque,  ever busy and matter of fact,  but also kind. The pain was growing. And nausea began. By the time i received a room, I had entered the full anguish of pain and vomiting brought about by an unknown foe. But even then, some part of me was able to simply watch, dispassionate and intrigued. Was it Buddhist training? Or what all people experience? I listened in the night to the mysterious sounds of my acute care unit, of others, unknown but nearby, suffering as I was. On the other side of a rigid plastic wall divider,  a woman next door moaned and then made phone calls to a lover and then a friend. I could feel the thick fabric at my shoulder shift as she moved against it. I vomited again. In the end, though we had listened for hours to each other's misery,  I never saw her. 

The drugs began Monday night after nurses had struggled to gain entrance to my apparently vein free arms for an IV connection. Bruises and blood.   Anti-nausea medication eased the worst then, and Dilaudid for pain. When they were administered in sequence, I floated and slept. But it was when I woke and lay with my eyes shut that the strangest part of my experiences there unfolded.  There were images behind my closed eyes, almost but not quite as visible as they would have been if my eyes were open. Several times I did open them to check if some shadow or change in light was affecting me but the answer was always no.   When I kept them closed, and focused my eyes on the imagery that came, I had a frontline seat to Dante's inferno.  Or perhaps, one friend suggested, the universal unconscious, or was it the bowels of creation?  I would very much like to know, because I was not causing these images. I had never seen or imagined them and indeed i could not change them even when I tried. The strongest element was  texture, darkly sparkling earth, or kelp or shag carpet or cliffs of moving dark tendrils. Water poured out everywhere, foul or muddied, torrents of excrement, mud with small rocks, or simply water. And everywhere there was heaving movement, fecundity, primal creation or decay. Half made faces emerged from the moving earth, pink flesh lumped and unformed with only an eye or a nostril fully made. Skulls, fantastically lined elderly faces with eyes closed, copulating couples, infants, demons, animals and innocents. The moving earth or waving tendrils of grass or fabric folded them ever deeper into crevices, or writhed slowly open, revealing them. The images were of intricate dark beauty, detail beyond detail. A goat appeared purple and blue, and then a fox with a fantastic fringe of carved ivory rising from his ruff. Faces dead or those being born, I could not tell. Eerie in  the luminous dark, like  the  cocaine dreams of a great artist.  What on earth was I looking at? Once the dark purples and blues and reds and blacks,  the muted greens, were replaced with imagery entirely of bronzed gold. A hill of sand lit by a hidden sun. Figures rose from the sand, made of sand, and the wind rose and blew them once again into non-existence, back into the hill.  These images occupied my mind for much of the time I was alone and awake in the  room. I could not make them stop and wondered if I was seeing the bardo. If I concentrated on changing them or even just lightening them, faint sparks flickered deep in the distance, that was all.

All was not grim, however. My nurses were kind. One in particular, Bob, is an old friend, a fellow Buddhist who is a nurse and has cared for my father on previous visits. His gentle humor and help with the temperamental IV made the suffering much less.

There were tests on Tuesday. A surgeon, Dr. Brian Waddle, appeared with brief questions, and disappeared. "You are so lucky," Bob assured me. "He is the best." I later learned I was to be taken into surgery on an emergency basis on Wednesday morning. Blood tests showed the battle against infection was rising to critical levels in my body, though I had no fever yet. It was still contained, but now felt like something about to break open.   The surgery on Wednesday morning showed why. I was put completely under, unlike my joint replacements. As I came back to consciousness, there was no sense of time having passed. I only remember the staff muttering about how bad it - my misbehaving gall bladder - had been as they repositioned my limp body in the recovery room.  Indeed though no stones were blocking any ducts, the whole organ had been black and gangrenous. A word to strike fear indeed, the name of my monster.  Dr. Waddle, returned briefly the next morning, and assured me we do not particularly need gall bladders, and that mine was now gone, incipient stones and all. Amoxicillin was prescribed to deal with the left over infection and so it has.

They sent me home Thursday, so weak I could barely walk, following the hospital's new early release policy in the age of MRSA infections and merciless insurance companies. I was frightened to leave so early, but, indeed, it lifted my spirits and dimmed my Hieronymous Bosche eyelid show to sit on my front porch in the sunshine a while. In my absence, Patricia and George had managed, with considerable strain, they later shared, to keep my mother going for two days. But it was my brother Chris who arrived like the cavalry and stayed to save the day. After telling them he could not help, he had changed his mind and flown to their rescue all the way from a job assignment in Pennsylvania. For eight days he stayed with mom and me, a perfect kind carer for both of us, even while maintaining his work schedule as a computer network tech from my kitchen table. He endured with perfect calm and kindness mom's dementia eccentricities (she often thought he was an old boyfriend) and incontinence and my inability to help for several days.  This was a brother, an ally, that I did not know I had. If this illness brought anything good, it was this above all, to regain that severed connection.

So that is my story dear reader. There were more tumultuous days before it all settled down. Wildly oscillating blood pressure, a drainage tube that left a pain in my side for days when it was removed. More monsters scuttled under the bed for those days and left me sleepless far into restless nights. Would one of them emerge to become real? Twice I reached a level of panic that believed one had. But in the end, after a visit to the Land of Medicine Buddha they all receded. Bodily strength and health returned. Hieronymous is back in the museum where he belongs. And I am left with my life, and apparently even my health, and great gratitude to all who helped me recover it.