The introspective humdrum life of an eccentric hexagenarian.

Visit my other blogs: "Elderberry Bike Rides of Delaware
," organized bicycle rides for families, senior citizens, and anyone interested in getting back into biking; and "Cloister Voices," the collected thoughts of modern and ancient hermits, eccentrics, solitaires, wanderers, mystics, and others who inhabit the monastery within.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The Coats of Many Colors

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

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

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

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

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



photo by Pardes


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

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

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

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




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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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



photo by Pardes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Diskgrinder, All Together Now

photo collage by Diskgrinder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reg said, "Most people think of the mind as being an intangible halo around their head, from which they call facts from the hot sponge in their skull. Like the brain is a bunch of liquid and dirty meat that keeps track, but the mind is this pristine glow that sees the track. But a recent theory is that the mind is Extended into legs and arms and maybe notes you write on the fridge, thinking's done within a yard. Your mind is in your fingers when you touch, in your local motion when you walk, there when you sniff. Which is why scent evokes memory." As Reg once said, "If your mind is in your head, why do you see everything outside, and not contemplate scenes inside?"
~~ Diskgrinder Tweets 2009



Art by Diskgrinder


Meeting a hermit
by Diskgrinder 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q. The accidents?

A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size ...

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

Q. It looks like a glass of water.

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


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

Q. Haven't you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?

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

Q. Isn't this just a case of the emperor's new clothes?

A. No. With the emperor's n
ew clothes people claimed to see something that wasn't there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.

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

Q. When precisely did the glass of water become an oak tree?

A. When I put the water in the glass.


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

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


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


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

Q. But aren't you the only person who can do something like this?

A. How could I know?


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

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


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

Q. The process of change?

A. There is no process involved in the change.

Q. The oak tree?

A. Yes. The oak tree.


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

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

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


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

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


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



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

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

* Download the latest GTD application to your iPhone


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

* Download OmniFracas

* Marvel at its intuitive interfac
e

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

* Zero inbox your inbox

* Read every email in the trash


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

* Realize you're not a twat

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

* Send yourself increasingly sweary post-dated emails


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

OR

* Keep on keeping on

* Occasionally apologise for not havi
ng done whatever the fuck it was

Oh, and change your pants
~~~

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



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


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



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




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




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

Sunday, January 11, 2009

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, January 10, 2009

A Dragon Teaching Pardes to Sing


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Call for Papers

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, January 5, 2009

The Women's Gallery of the Shul


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

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

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


The Women's Gallery of the Shul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Pardes 2006 ~
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Meme Eccentrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the morning, he was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~


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


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

For previous blog entries, see the "Blog Archive" on the top right of the web page.