School Daze...

As a 70th birthday present to myself, I ran away from home, enrolling in a small liberal arts college that was mainly populated by female art students. My dorm room held three other roommates, two girls, one boy.

From my first day there, I was mobbed. All the kids thought it was so cool to have this old guy full of tattoos going to college with them. Telling them wild stories about life. They hung on every word and I quickly became a campus celebrity, a Pied Piper.

Everybody wanted me to come to their parties.

We painted with watercolors under huge oak trees, accompanied by impromptu music sessions. We smoked a lot of pot and would lie around in the dorm, casually nude, discussing philosophy well into the night, while a few of the girls squabbled over who would get to groom my hair.

All of it was so much better than the little I could still remember of my first college experience 50 years prior.

Then the rain woke me up. Chica, our smallest dog who gets to sleep on the bed, had her ass turned almost into my face. I needed to pee immediately, and was still mouth breathing with a cold that wouldn't go away.

I had to be at work in a hour.

Now I'm wondering if there is any way for me to get back to school again tonight. I don't want to miss any classes, and my hair needs some serious TLC.

Unfamiliar Paths...

Stairways that led to once familiar paths are now obscured by the cluttered layers of time. Each dusting barely perceptible, as the daily celebrations of life leave behind 

layers no more substantial than a spider’s web. 

Successive years, 60 by my count, slowly bury the past,

 even as the ongoing dance celebrates that very thing.

Sun-drenched hills that played host to beggar burros and skeletal dogs in coats stretched too tight, now dominated by expansive homes they like to call haciendas, 

offering a revisionist dream of a time long past.

Dirt blackened, a crippled man drags himself, hand over knee,

down a side street gutter. 

Whimpering odd imprecations in a well-practiced pitch,

on stage for his nightly crawl, weeping gibberish for the crowd. 

Tourists coy, surreptitious with their half-hidden phone cameras, attracted and repelled, chasing a perfect shot without looking like a traffic accident gawker.

Twenty steps behind, on the same street, colorful Mariachis blow lively brass.

Cripples, musicians, a man 60 hats high, food carts perfume the air. Ladies squat comfortably on bright blankets tucked into heavy stone corners, an explosion of color as they hold up bright fabrics and send their toddlers into the crowd with trinkets to sell.

Everyone on stage.

Coming in from all directions at sundown.

A promenade 400 years unchanged,

walking down to the plaza.

Like an old friend, I remembered the face of the Cathedral dominating the square. 

It remained stoic and unchanged even as the many paths leading to its massive doors have become the buried, embellished, and almost unrecognizable descendants,

 of the streets I once walked as a boy.

Interlude

Home Is Not A Building...

Home is not a building of wood or stone.

We often  question our own existence. 

Spending a lifetime looking for what we already have, 

filling our pockets with possessions, 

like a hamster stuffing its cheeks.

Our wealth doesn't come to us in things that we inevitably leave behind, 

a house filled with minutia.

I know that I am as rich as any man has ever been. 

My reason for being sits now to my left,

 on a sun-drenched wall, in an unfamiliar town, 

watching the passing crowd.

There, or anywhere, with my family, I am home.

All Along The Watchtower

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants, too

Outside in the cold distance 

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl

Bob Dylan

If I turn into “that guy” ...

You know, the guy or lady in the grocery store, who stops their cart in the middle of the isle, neither left nor right, oblivious to the fact that people traffic is trying to go up and down both sides, most of us programmed to stick to the right... They weren’t allowing access for others to pass, they picked dead center. Apparently it never crossed their minds that someone, or several someone’s, may be behind them and want to get by. Carts parked in the center, backs, asses, and elbows on both sides, studying, evaluating, meditating, over a can of crushed tomatoes on one side, and some Mac and cheese on the other. Of course I can speak up, to whatever degree, but that's not the point.

I swear right now; I'm not going to turn into those people.

It was worse at the entrance to the store. Two older ladies had pulled their carts out of the horizontal stack, and met in the middle of the doorway. Past friends, seemingly engaged in an over-the-top love fest of “when was it” “low long” “we need to” ...lots of gushing. Those of us who were trying to enter started to stack up. I'm sorry to be so negative, but just how fucking clueless can people be? It was the fucking entrance to the store!

I bet a nice stun grenade would clear a path.

Then there was the older lady in the express check-out lane. you know, ten items or less. Her purse was the size of most carry-on luggage, and she wasn't sure where she hid her wallet in there. After digging for what seemed like an eternity, she found it in a small compartment, inside a larger compartment. Apparently she was out of cash and didn't really know how to use her credit card properly so she had to write a check. Where is that checkbook anyway? Two forms of ID please. She produced the necessary check and IDs in excruciatingly slow motion as I wallowed in evil thoughts and an urgent need to pee. When all of her transactions were completed and paid for, the lady in question couldn't simply push her cart out of the way and put all her checks and IDs back in their respective holders elsewhere so the express lane could move again. No, she had to do all it at the register, just to make sure that she held the bottleneck tight for as long as humanly possible.

I've never beaten an old lady before (she was probably my age, everyone my age looks old to me) but I can definitely understand the attraction and entertained myself with that fantasy until she was done.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel better, venting and all, but still, if I turn into that guy, or maybe pull a Bruce Jenner and turn into that woman, please humanely euthanize me.

Print out this post and consider it to be a permission slip. You're welcome.

More Alike Than Different...

“My heart cracked wide open with love tonight.” 

She messaged me.

Ruth and Andrew held a birthday party at their house for the mother of the Syrian family that Ruth sponsors.

That family has come a long way in the last year. The five of them, fully vetted, spent months in relocation camps before winding up in their two-bedroom apartment in San Diego. With Ruth’s help in translating and deciphering the rules of their new country, they’ve gone from being homeless, jobless, non-English speaking refugees to the opposite of that. The kids are flourishing in school, the family is bright, educated, and no longer feeling so displaced by the horrific conflict in which they had no part to play, other than victim.

Ruth has helped them navigate the waters of their new world, and helped to quiet the voices of hate that could be overwhelming if they didn’t see firsthand that we’re not all like that.

Mostly, they’ve worked very hard to prove themselves worthy and to provide for their family. Everyone pitches in. The kids don’t have to be asked to help prepare the food, serve or clean up. That’s how they roll.

Each visit is an occasion to celebrate with a multi-course meal. Please eat. Sit. Relax. Tell us about your family, your parents, your work. Tell us everything.

They hang on every word.

They were so grateful for the invitation to come see Ruth in her own house. To spend time with Andrew and Lilly, to meet some of Ruth’s friends.

She probably gains more from the relationship than her Syrian friends do, and it is huge for them.

I look at these pictures and am reminded that we are all more alike than different.

I think of the hate that’s been directed toward them, victims of a war they wanted no part of, and I’m reminded of a quote I saw recently:
The greatest form of ignorance is to condemn something you know nothing about.

Most of all, I look at these pictures and am reminded how simple it all is when we embrace our commonality and reach out a hand of friendship, you to me, me to you.

That’s the real answer to world peace, and it is so simple, when we let it be.

Doppelganger...

Ruth and Hannah made this life-mask of me some twenty-five years ago. They saw the idea in one of their home-school books of suggestions for family projects. Anyway, the two of them decided that I was the best candidate for the job of head Guinea Pig. Their idea. I wasn't consulted.

We mixed the plaster, they coated my face with Vaseline, stuck two straws up my nose, jabbing into tender sinus cavities, and then lathered on great gobs of white plaster goo. The girls did an excellent job of spreading it out just so, speaking to me in slow, reassuring tones, as if to a deep sea diver, sketchy about breathing when cut off from normal air flow. And I was. This is not a great project for the claustrophobic.

Everything was fine until it was mask removal time 40 minutes later. Seems we hadn’t paid enough attention to the section of the instructions that urge heavy application of Vaseline to the hairy parts, eyelashes and eyebrows. We applied none there.

As I pulled the plaster away from my face, my eyelids stretched out taught, firmly anchored by lashes that were now encased in hardened plaster. Fortunately, the eyebrows tore loose quickly, but the eyelids were a bigger problem. I had to squeeze up underneath the face-mask with a pair of blunt mustache scissors, trying my best not to poke my eyes out while snipping the outstretched eyelashes in half, equal shares.

If you look closely, you'll see both eyebrows and eyelashes embedded permanently in this life-mask, more “me” than was originally intended.

Holding the plaster  doppelganger in my hands, hefting the weight of a vivid memory when two girls.ages 6 and 11, watched their Dad almost pull his eyes out of his head and rip his face off right in front of them. Wrestling with that plaster mask, the three of us together, Me, pulling painfully at what felt like an alien trying to eat my face, while the girls helped by screaming and jumping around, unsure if this was the best thing they had ever seen or a reason for them to immediately call 911..