Not again 'mit Custah.. oh, that's another joke...

The smashing success of last year’s predictions (0 for 0; ain’t that 100%?) has forced me to do it again. As William Inge once said, “Kansas ain’t no ‘Picnic,’” well, neither will 2009 be. These things (gong!) will come to pass:

In an attempt to verify her claim that she has been involved in a long term romance with George W. Bush, a female White House aide, Nayla Postman Dayley, turns a stained dress over to the FBI for analysis. The stains turn out to be nothing but tobacco juice, mixed with traces of mescal worm and Clarence Thomas’s special barbecue sauce.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has one of his rapper friends write a song that he calls ‘The Bunghole Twins of the Repulsive,” about Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter that is sung to the tune of a traditional anthem and now contains such lyrics as “Man, I’s ha’ seed the sorry ass that comes from living large.” Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Andy Dick, etal, denounce the song as vulgar, racist, and tasteless when they receive their copy on Independence Day. In an uncharacteristic fit of repentence, the Reverend calls for a conference with Ellen Degeneres, Regis Philbin, and Michael Jackson (because they’re the whitest people he knows), who recommend that he go to rehab for treatment of his tendency to be black.

Eight month old Tess T. Rohn manages to fall out of her crib and on the way down snags her toe into the trigger guard of her dad Miles “Strawberry“ Rohn’s pistol, which he had momentarily placed on Tess’s Big Wheel, and on impact with the floor, the gun goes off and shoots Strawberry dead in the head. Tess is caught with her toe still on the trigger. She will be held in a foster home run by convicted pedophile, Hyme Loyerdup, until she is old enough to go to a juvenile facility to await trial for murder. In response to the ensuing outraged cries for gun control, an NRA spokesman says, “It’s not the gun that kills; it’s the baby. And if law-abiding citizens can’t have guns, only the 8-month-olds will have them.”

Maddona discovers the secret of life with the pactice of the Kabbalah and retreats from the world into a cave above the Dead Sea that costs her 100 million dollars to remodel. She will be accompanied by only twelve young male attendants. In her parting interview, she says, “Ikh hob dikh lib, mayn khev’reh!” to which one of the reporters says “We’re all verklempt, but aren’t you being a little ayngebildet, even for you?” to which she says, “Mayn du cyslemen zikh di mame-loshn, meshugener! Rats tsu ale!” and Mel Gibson who came to ask Madonna to forgive him for calling her a kike (or something that sounded like it), shrugs and says, “A dege hob ikh?”

In the tradition of transformational Oscar-winning roles by women begun by the fabulous Linda Hunt as “Billy” in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” Mariah Carey gains 100 pounds to audition for the lead role in “The Orson Welles Story” but comes in second to Oprah Winfrey who has to lose five pounds for the try-out. Mariah goes into rehab for an addiction to Twinkies and prednisone; Oprah starts doling out hybrids to members of the Academy.

In a stunning move, the “Big Three” car manufacturers move their whole operation to Bangladesh where the cost of building a car comes to $54. All shipping has been contracted out to a firm in Somalia headed by the now king Disole Bak Aneer whose profits from oil have disappeared at the current price per barrel of $2. In the U.S. President Obama keeps a promise to the UAW by unionizing the remaining auto makers and forcing them to make vehicles that only burn ethanol, thus keeping his other promise to “green” businesses. With ethanol going for $30 a gallon (and corn $1000 a bushel), refineries can’t make a profit so they quit producing gasoline. Automobiles fall below $50 apiece, and they are pushed out of car lots by victims of foreclosure who find them a comfortable alternative (if unattractive) to sleeping under overpasses.

Basing his economic mandates on the policies of Mitt Romney and Vlad Tepes, President Obama makes it obligatory that every American buy his own cemetery plot before he is of voting age and to insure it against flood and archaeologists—and disgruntled heirs seeking to exhume their mom or dad on suspicion of intrigues by ambitious step-parents—with an AIG affiliated company. As part of a three-pronged employability plan, college courses in tombstone design, grave landscaping, and snappy eulogy and epitaph writing will be offered at half-tuition to out-of-work real estate agents; with probation to ex-CEOs in drug rehab; and total free ride for basketball players.

The net continues to close in on Osama bin Laden. A massive task force has circled the woods just west of Newark, and when a reporter asks what the smell is coming from inside the woods, a young boy from the crowd of onlookers says, “It’s camels. There’s hundreds of them. And goats. I got a part time job milking them.” The FBI figures out from user information turned over to them by internet search engines that bin Laden and his cohorts might be surfing the porn sites. Osama is thought to be playing Texas Hold ‘em online using the tag “Four-Flusher.”

Mexico begins to build a fence along the border to keep Americans from entering illegally and taking the jobs that nobody else knows exactly what they are. Serial rapists, murderers, and embezzlers fleeing from justice will no longer have special privileges, since Mexicans now have developed a full capacity to create their own low-lifes.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visits Baghdad and an Iraqi reporter takes off and throws his goat hair loin cloth at her in a news conference. Apparently it is a sign of great respect in Iraq to throw codpieces at visiting dignitaries. In the spring, when love is in the air, young Iraqui women have to scurry between alley ways to dodge the brown paper bags being flung at them by moonstruck Iraqi Romeos.

Happy New Year.

Noe.

Behold the child...

If being born on the 25^th of December was a gift, then for Little Nate it was one wrapped in a question for which there were no easy answers. His mother often told him he was blessed. He didn’t feel blessed. Most of the time he just felt confused—and a little bit hungry. Nate was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, but by the time he was born, even the next youngest—a sister—was married and gone, so that Nate was raised more or less as the only child to aging parents, and that sort of blessing can’t possibly be deserved. His mom and dad just barely made it over the border into Texas before she delivered him by herself in a barn roughly ten miles from the Rio Grande before her husband returned with help. Juán José and Mariána named their child Nátividád like her father who had also been born on Christmas day, and who had never seen his grandchild (and namesake) despite insisting, in a letter sent sometime after Nate was born that he was on his way to Texas from Jalisco where they (except Nate) were all from. So old Náti had been expected any minute now for six years.

With the help of a cousin of his, Juan Jose and Mariana found a niche in the upper edge of the Rio Grande Valley in a spot so isolated that when Nate started school, he had to be bussed thirty- five miles.

It was a quiet life, but a good one. Water was scarce but there was enough food. Juan Jose rode fence for one of the smaller ranches that hadn’t been gobbled up by the King Ranch and those. The family took up residence in an old line shack a little farther out from neighbors than what Mariana would have wanted.

Now with la navidád getting close, she especially missed the customs of her homeland: las posádas, las piñátas, and the bedding down of the Baby Jesus ceremony which she had never felt good enough to perform on her own but had always witnessed at the home of her friend, Doña Ramóna.

Nate, on the other hand, was acquiring new traditions. He asked his mother, “Did you put up a tree before Christmas for Santa Claus to leave a gift when you were little?”

Mariana said, “No. We put our shoes on the window sill on el día de los réyes for the Kings to put a gift in. If we had no shoes to put up, then we might get them for a gift. We always wished for something that we needed, and we didn’t always get those either. We were told not to wish for too much when we didn’t have much to give back either.”

Nate explained to his mother how he’d helped his first grade class decorate a tree with paper chains and handmade ornaments in the manner of Americans who put one out in their homes for Santa Claus to put gifts under. And he said that he really didn’t need anything, but that if he could get something, he would wish for something that played music. Because Nate couldn’t speak English very well yet, but he loved music, knew the words and the tunes to all the songs that they sang in class.

Mariana told him, “I always thank the Virgin for what I have. Praying to Her helps me understand things. I only pray now that you get to see my father, your grandfather.”

Nate turned to his father and said, “Have you ever had a wish come true, Father?”

Juan Jose smiled, and said, “Every one. How big a tree would you want?”

That night before bed, Nate knelt before the Virgin and asked her, “Is there a Santa Claus?”

And that is how Mariana found herself staring at a small hackberry tree that Juan Jose had dug up roots and all and brought inside in a dirt-filled keg, and that Nate decorated by himself, she wondering what she was going to put under it when the socks and shirt she was giving Nate she had planned to give him on the 5th of January.

Her problem was solved (in a way) when a donations group came by with a car trunk full of toys and told Mariana to pick one out for her son, and Mariana, embarrassed no end for having to accept charity for the first time in her life, reached in and pulled out the first thing she touched, said “Thank you!” and went into the house.

On Christmas morning, Juan Jose and Mariana left the house to attend mass at the small church by the main ranchhouse which was a good two-hour ride away on horseback. They had already told Nate about it so that he wouldn’t wonder where they were when he woke up.

But Nate had hardly slept, and he saw them through the window as they rode away, when he made his way to the Christmas tree to see if Santa Claus had indeed come.

He was still sitting on the floor staring at what looked to be cropduster’s goggles attached to an elf’s walking cane when a tapping came from the door and an old gentleman peered through it, and seeing Nate sitting on the floor, he walked in and said, “¿Natividád?” and Nate said, “Sí.”

Then the old gentleman said, “I am Natividád, too.”

Nate stood speechless with wonder holding his gift in front of him like a boy shepherd with his staff at port arms in front of the old man.

Then the man who called himself Natividád, too, said, “And what is that you’re holding there?”

Nate said, “I don’t know.”

Because of all the toys that Mariana could have chosen for a boy who had never seen the ocean nor a stream bigger than a drainage ditch and lived at least fifty miles from any lake or puddle wider or deeper than the trough that his father pumped water into for livestock, she had picked up a snorkle.

Old Natividad said, “Well, it looks like an object in search of usefulness and a name,” and he took the snorkle from Nate, who gave it up not only willingly but with a surprising sense of hope.

For the next two hours, Nate sat on a log by the woodpile in front of Natividad who sat on another log separating the snorkle into its component parts and then whittling away at the tubular piece, jamming wood chips in stations inside its length and then two corklike pieces that he’d shaped with a pocketknife to plug the open ends. All the while, he regaled the boy with stories of people that he’d met along the way, and of the deserts that he’d crossed, and the wonders that he’d seen. Nate took it for granted that Natividad was his grandfather.

When Old Nati was done, he had an instrument with seven holes in a line along its length and a mouthpiece that he’d also carved from wood and fixed solidly into the shorter arm of the U-shape, and into which he encouraged little Nate to blow with his mouth, showing him how to vary the tones by placing the fingers over the holes and then removing them. He said, “The glasses will be useful for crossing windy deserts. May I keep them?”

Little Nate was delighted not only with his gift but that he’d been able to return one. And he played and played. When he saw his parents coming down the road, he ran to meet them and played a tune on the fláuta for them, telling them, too, the story behind it, but when they reached the house, the old man was nowhere to be found.

That night, Mariana and Juan Jose lay in their bed contemplating the events of the day, deciding when the right time would come maybe next year to tell Nate the news that had come through Juan Jose’s cousin (who had just gotten back from a trip to Jalisco) that Old Natividad had died not even a year after Little Nate was born and that he could not have possibly appeared that day. In that moment, they heard the sound of las mañanítas played quietly on a flute, wafting through the night. To their knowledge, it was a tune that Nate had never heard, at least from them. And the goggles were nowhere to be found.

Then in the darkness, they heard the shuffle of boy feet on the earthen floor toward the altar in the corner where they heard Nate say, “Sí, Vírgen. Sí hay Sánto Clos.”

_______

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; William Wordsworth

Merry Christmas.

Noe.

'Ow d' ya doo one o' them thar "silo-jisms?"

“The Round Table” never meant to take itself (nor to be taken) seriously, because in the beginning, during the 50s, all it was, was a group from the city desk sitting down to a few beers after work on payday and having a conversation in real English without the constraints of grammar, sentence structure and Style, The Chicago Manual, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of, notwithstanding. Most old time, small town newspaper people didn’t get paid enough to think of their jobs as sacrosanct, nor as civic duties. A lot of them moved on to factory jobs when the benefits there started to look attractive during the late 60s and the 70s. The ones who stayed with the paper quit attending the Friday beerfest when the new blood showed up. The newcomers entered with their BAs in journalism practically tattooed on their well manicured fingers. Most of them could actually type. Job requirements started getting stiffer—and the job itself more coed than it had ever been. The conversation went through the years from sports and lawn care, war stories—to Machiavellian theory, pre-Aristotlean thought, and the division into Rationalism and Empiricism by Kant of western philosophy. Some of the lawyers and other professionals who formed the core of newsworthiness in a small town began to attend, too, bestowing the respectability on local journalists (and maybe themselves) that had always been a little suspect. The times, they were (Sorry, Bob!) a-changin.’

Mose became a friend of the cub on the police beat through a series of unusual circumstances.

While walking to his car from a performance of “I Remember Mama” at the community theatre, David Grey was blindsided by a pair of hoodlums on a rampage for drug money. He woke up in the hospital with no idea of what had happened to him. The police told him the story. He was lucky to be alive. And he owed his life to the most unlikely of heroes.

Mose had been a town oddity long enough that there didn’t seem to still exist anyone who could recall when he began to haunt the purlieus of this un-extraordinary Mid West town. No one remembered ever having heard him talk, or take a drink, or smoke, or eat. No one knew where he lived. He didn’t work, and how he survived was as big a mystery as where he slept at night, a secret likely to arouse maybe only token curiousity in a world growing daily more and more self-obsessed and less than concerned about somebody apparently as low on the bottom of the scale as you can get. The most readily evoked conjecture was a rumor that Mose had appeared in town at about the same time that the state governments, in a belated concern for the civil rights of human beings with mental problems decided to throw open the institutions and let them loose into an environment only just less Dantean than what they were being evicted from.

David didn’t meet Mose until the trial. The felons, fearing an attempted murder conviction, copped a plea so that nobody, including Mose, had to testify. A cop had to point him out to David and David had to run to catch up to Mose outside the courthouse.

David could hardly be blamed for his inordinate sense of gratitude, And from then on, he would seek Mose out and take him home for holiday dinner—and then for his kids’ birthdays, because Mose taught them words in Spanish, how to “walk the dog” with a yo-yo, and (of all things) origami. David would oftentimes take him in out of the cold and sit him in a corner (during “Round Tables”) with one of the bar’s sandwiches (which he would take a single bite out of) and a cup of coffee of which he would take seconds. For a long time nobody could get Mose to talk and there were some (not including David) who inevitably thought the worst.

Camp, one of the ubiquitous sportswriters, said one day, “Does your friend talk, or is he mentally challenged?”

David said, “I don’t think Mose has ever found anything worth saying.”

“Are you saying that he’s smarter than we are?”

“I’m not saying anything of the kind.”

“Does he understand what we’re talking about?”

“Most of time I don’t understand what we’re talking about.”

Convinced that nobody with a brain would have the self-discipline to avoid being lured into their brilliant debates, and annoyed that David would defend Mose, Camp began to try to draw Mose out, maybe to show David a thing or two about the propriety of “bringing a gelding to a stud show”, as he put it.

Camp asked Mose, “What college did you go to, Mose?”

Mose just smiled.

Drake, the city reporter, chimed in: “Maybe he went to the “school of hard schmucks.”

David said, “Now, guys…”

Camp said, “Ah kin saw, state ‘u. Hah, Mose?”

Drake said, “That would make him a latter day Diogenes looking for a pot to piss in.”

“That would be too much work for him. It takes intelligence to beg a boot to pour piss out of.”

David said, “Guys..,” when he felt a hand on his arm.

Despite obvious disuse, Mose’s voice possessed (as would that of a man who could overpower and subdue two drug-crazed mugs) a stentorian quality: “Intelligence as a concept is a human presumption. Its fundament is subjectivity. A human being is only as smart as he pretends to be.”

The pause was cut as short as possible for fear of betraying awe. Camp sputtered, “If intelligence doesn’t exist, what does?”

“Philosophy 101, evidently.”

“And it doesn’t count?”

“I don’t set the standards for those sorts of things.”

“It sounds like you’re still trying to figure out the wheel.”

“Somebody should—before the world gets covered with asphalt.”

Drake said, “The working destiny of the only intelligent life on earth will not always manifest itself in the most attractive forms.”

Mose said, “It is arrogant of one creature to claim sole custody of the intelligence on earth when he has all but guaranteed not only the extinction of his own presence on it but probably of all other living things.”

“We don’t read the signs the same way evidently.”

“They’re not signs; they’re symptoms: half of the world commits suicide by gluttony while it starves the other half to death.”

“What? And doing nothing absolves you of complicity?”

“It takes less fuel and oxygen. Doing nothing might be the most selfless charity of all. It might buy everyone else a few more minutes of life.”

Now while “The Table” was trying to figure out how they actually got into academics with a homeless person, David hurriedly took Mose out the door and on the road.

David never attended ”The Round Table“ again except once three months later to say farewell. He quit the newspaper business and went to work for a foundation that funded (among other things) safehouses and meals for the indigent and the homeless. David’s enthusiasm for the job brought him to the attention of the higher-ups and they created a position for him with more authority (and more money than he would ever have made in the newspaper business) and decision making. His understanding of the problems of those in dire need is universally admired. His own source is never very far from him (He offered Mose a job. Mose refused. Mose’s wisdom is free.).

On most Sundays and on holidays, David can be seen with his family serving groups of people at one or the other of the shelters in his territory. Mose and the kids decorate the tables with paper figures: turkeys and pilgrims on Thanksgiving. David’s wife went through a bad period when he gave up the decent paying job for this one, but now, she pitches in with a fervor that sometimes outshines his. She says, “We don’t do enough for these people.”

There’s always something to be thankful for.

Noe.

Birth of a nation...

Leah Ordoñez Cruz was born the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter▬which means nothing! People see her hanging at the edges of McArthur Park and wonder why some individuals seem to have no meaning in their lives, no value, no purpose (and certainly no gift of the kind to which there are those who believe a seventh son is born endowed with). Life came at Leah like a freight train and she never saw it coming. She was married at thirteen, the union arranged by her parents in an effort to lessen the burden on the family’s purse strings, and the first in a long line of mistakes bordering on catastrophes in Leah’s life even if this one was not at all Leah’s doing.

But the second one was having children. She only had three, two boys and a girl, and the decision (if it could be called that) to stop having them was made for her, too, when her husband came home drunk and beat her into miscarrying the fourth. She became incapable of carrying another. And her husband, Nacho, an avid cocksman, lost all interest in her anyway. Floundering in a world she never made, Leah sought solace in (or got duped into) a lover’s arms (a third mistake), and when Nacho found out about it, he threw her out of the house.

Living alone in a distant relative’s backyard tool shed, Leah, hardly trained in the art of survival, was forced to steal to eat▬and she got caught. So, anybody keeping score might have concluded that at just short of sixteen years of age, abandoned and disowned, thrown out into the world naked, made barren and corrupt, and now institutionalized in the Texas system of corrections, Leah’s life was as good as over. But for all the bumbling uselessness of society’s (and the law’s) efforts to rehabilitate the wayward, it sometimes helps those less likely to reform, maybe because reformation wasn’t the issue to begin with. Leah had never had a chance to form, let alone reform! She blossomed in the reformatory!

She graduated from high school behind bars, and under the watchful eye of the probation people, went on to college and became a teacher. But the seven years that she spent teaching the first grade in a small Valley town, removed from genetic discord and most traditional social relationships, were only a short recess from the train wreck that had always been her life.

In ’69, she received a letter from (of all people) a sister-in-law in California who was asking for her help with troubles that Leah’s daughter Willie (Wilhelmína), who she hadn’t seen practically since birth, was having. It seems Nacho had moved the family west some ten years before. Leah was more than willing to go to California to help her family and reclaim whatever ties she still might have to them.

It wasn’t a happy reunion. The two boys, Jerry (Gerónimo) and Gus (Agósto) were already in some kind of gang training, and Willie’s problems were of a darker nature than were free to be aired in polite company in those days, although they were to become a cliché in dysfunctional family matters in later years. Willie kept running away from home.

Leah wasn’t qualified to solve child problems any deeper than a runny nose or a playground bruise, but she still had a mother's heart. She took a sabbatical from teaching and took an apartment close to Willie, but the conditions under which she and her daughter tried to bond might have been too pathological for even a last chance. Nacho and his sister might just have been looking for a scapegoat for the ruins that they had made of Willie's life. She disappeared again one day, and this time, she burrowed deep and would not be found. LA is a long, labrynthine street. A thirteen year old girl was lost in it.

Lea spent over a year searching, rousting social services, the law, the church, the street gurus, but she felt trapped in a dimension from which her cries for help went unseen, unheard, unheeded, as if she had been buried herself behind a wall of glass through which only she could witness the indifference of the world she’d always known.

One day, Leah walked out of her apartment in East LA with her bag packed and stood for a minute beside the taxi that she’d called to take her to the airport, and then paid the driver, waved him off, and walked on down the street. About a block away, she righted a grocery cart that had been laying on its side on the sidewalk, dropped her gear in it and pushed it along into the maw of the city, and vanished into it.

No one came looking for her, although she’s easy to find. But she looks into all other faces with care: the one that she picks up out of an alley where she lies dying of an overdose and she takes to a hospital; the one on the side street that she bandages with rags to keep her from bleeding to death where her pimp has slashed her; the one that she props up and props herself against on the way to find medical help where both have been beaten senseless, the girl for resisting, Leah for trying to keep her from getting raped in a back lot. She herself has lost count of the times she has been raped, not as often now that she has gotten old. How many times has Willie been beaten and slashed and raped? She’s still out there somewhere, thirteen years old, and tired and scared. Leah will never give up the search, even if she herself is kind of thirteen years old, and tired and scared. She has never known any other way to live…

Noe.

…all my souls be Emparadised in you─in whom alone I understand, and grow, and see…

Most of the Mexican kids then, before any of us ever saw a television set or had much access to magazines or books─except what dribbled in through the public school system in a small town─were good at art; but Kelly was more. The rest of us drew representational forms, as close to the real objects as we could, and some of us were more than fair, but by the same token, we knew Kelly was better, although at the time we didn’t know why.

He would draw a tree, and it didn’t look like a tree the way the rest of us saw it, but you knew it was a tree─because you could see its soul.

In the fifth grade, when the teacher asked for volunteers to decorate the walls and windows of the classroom during the holidays, Kelly didn’t raise his hand, but the class, which was about a good third Hispanic, voted Kelly in anyway.

Christmas had a different look in the fifth grade that year. The reindeer, drawn on a large sheet of newsprint and cut to fit across the window panes, were wraith-like and pale blue. And because none of us had ever seen snow in southern Texas, Kelly parked the sleigh on a rooftop made of woven twigs on which doves nested. Santa Claus wore patch overalls and a panama hat and handed out peanut butter sandwiches to kids. As backdrop, the Spirit of the Season was a galactic event in silver both smokey and luminous at the same time: impending, growing, reaching out, and winged with gold and emerald tendrils like the flares from a Benevolent Sun.

Our sixth grade teacher wasn’t as progressive as her predecessor. The next year, the girls decorated the classroom.

Taking into consideration the traditional Mexican-Irish affinity, people would ask Kelly throughout his life how much Irish he had in him, to which he would just shrug his shoulders and say, “None.” He was born Candelário Acósta the youngest son in a family of four boys and one girl, Maureen, who was a year younger than him and who explained it often enough before she learned better that Kelly got that name from his brothers because they used to make fun of him when his father would pull a good sized specimen of quelíte and strap him with it for spending his time weaving garlands of flowers and grasses for his mother instead of picking cotton. They’d make fun of Maureen, too (whose real name was Mariána Luz), because she defended his dreamer ways) and they called her “moron” until their mother objected so they switched to the thinly disguised euphemism that was close enough phonetically to be unmistakable in its intent. The names followed Maureen and Kelly through their life.

Kelly didn’t make much of a splash in high school either in academics or in art, and in all those years, the only drawing of his that was ever exhibited in those halls was during Art Week in his senior year, of a girl done in every possible shade and hue and nuance of brown.

It didn’t look like any girl the way the rest of the world saw girls, nor like Maureen the way they saw Maureen who was in her junior year; but those who saw it and who knew Maureen, knew it was Maureen. Because you could see her soul.

Kelly joined the army right out of high school and went to war. He did two tours. Maureen used to have drawers full of his drawings: of street scenes in Asia, of vendors and snake handlers and prostitutes, soldiers on leave. But he’d do drawings of the front, too: of perplexed villagers living on rationed food and rationed land and rationed years, and soldiers, constrained by war and boyhood to show nerve and verve, yet visible to at least one witness as frail beings treading the fine line between unwavering defiance and total surrender to their fates.

Kelly and a buddy stayed back once to cover the retreat of their platoon, and showed up in camp half a day later, Kelly’s buddy on his back, both shot to hell. It took Kelly the rest of his hitch and a year of civilian life again to recover from the six bullet holes in his body. But he never recovered from the death of his mom and dad in a head-on crash with a drunk driver, a boy just mustered out of the army. There is no end to the casualties of war.

Maureen, who was married with children now, tried to take him up north to live with her and her husband, Cláudio (Claude), a childhood friend of both of them. But Kelly couldn’t tear himself away from his ancestral home.

And the thread to that faculty that had given him his vision into the depth of things was severed, maybe by one of the bullets, or maybe by the fatal grind of Detroit steel. He said his hands were useless. One day, Kelly disappeared and was never seen alive again. He was found two years later by a crew clearing out some woods not five miles from his parents’ house, dead of natural causes, they said. Maureen and her family and two childhood friends were the only ones at the burial. She paid for all of it.

Her kids grew up with as little opportunity for art or accessibility to it as she could manage. She couldn’t bear it. Cánde (short for Candelário), her youngest, had distant but finely etched memories of the gentle soul who had drawn his portrait in pencil a lifetime ago, a picture that Maureen kept under lock and key in a chest among a twelve inch stack of Kelly’s work that she’d collected through the years.

One day, Cánde, on a field trip to the art museum with the fifth grade, turned a corner and came to a halt in front of “The Wheatfield,” which held him transfixed for the remainder of the tour.

That night at home, Cánde took possession of the kitchen table right after supper, and drew picture after picture of anything and everything until sometime before midnight when he went to bed. And Maureen came in from the front porch─where she’d been sitting fighting back tears for hours─and sat at the kitchen table in front of Cánde’s last drawing while the rest of the family raided the refrigerator one by one, and who all (three boys, two girls and Claude their father) agreed that the picture in front of Maureen didn’t look like a man the way they saw men, nor like Kelly the way they remembered Kelly, but they knew it was Kelly. Because they could see Kelly’s soul.

Noe.

...carried into Babylon: nothing shall be left...

Iris was born in New England and lived there until she was in her teens, one of the two daughters of a woman who developed late in life a distaste for lengthy marriages, and. a fascination with skiers. The mother followed one to Colorado where she found her philosophy of life quite apt amid a smorgasbord of downhill racers. But the gypsy life and its seasonal abruptions left little time to mold two young girls in any other way but the wrong one. The youngest went back to New England to live with her father, but he wouldn’t take both.

Iris was pretty much on her own at fifteen, and without question at eighteen, when her mother left (with a surfer) for California. She was already a seasoned waitress, but she’d do just about anything to survive during those months when it wasn’t winter. That is how she found herself working in a sugar factory one September in the Colorado outlands, and she met her first husband.

Galdo Hernandez and his brother Plácido used to come up from Texas every autumn to haul sugar beets to the plant in their trucks. Iris and Galdo were an unlikely match. She was the prototypical WASP with an almost redundant shock of flaming red hair; he was Mexican, tall and hulking, and ugly. Those drivers going day and night racing against time with little sleep and bad food sometimes seemed like a romantic lot—and Galdo offered her something that no one had ever offered her before: marriage. One thing that Iris didn’t learn from her mother was that you can’t account for taste.

Galdo took her to Texas where in the short course of a year he made her pregnant with twin girls, gave her the clap that he caught in a whorehouse across the border (because outside of Iris who was immensely knocked up for a long time, Galdo couldn’t get sex for free anywhere else), took physical custody of the girls, and threw her (literally) out the door, blaming her to clear himself, some say. In that year, Iris went from being known as a girl with a progressive life style around the ski resorts of Colorado to being known as the town tramp in a dump of a small town in southern Texas where the highest point is maybe a foot below sea level.

On the timeline that takes us from early Bangor to late Aspen, the Mexican-American border in 1969 is just a decade or two to the left of the last ox-cart out from the gates of Babylon. Enter Jimbo.

Jáime Lúna was a twin, and in a time when they were taking just about anyone and everyone who didn’t talk with a lisp, Jimbo was the one who got drafted in ’63 and finished his tour in of all places Viet Nam. It was just like Jimbo’s luck to have his share of conjoined fate be the thinner slice. Jimbo was the kind of guy whose pants were always bunched up around his shoes because they’d be at least three inches too long. His shirts would balloon out at the waist where he tried to tuck them in. His hair was unmanageably long and greasy and would never sit still for a ducktail (the rage then), and the military’s only real contribution to Jimbo’s sense of self was to cut it all off. Even the sleeves of his Class A’s went down almost to his fingernails. But Jimbo did two hitches. During the first tour of Nam, he fell in love with a party girl from one of the bars in Saigon, and he didn’t have enough time in one tour to convince her to go back to the States with him, so he re-upped and went back. He came back from Viet Nam with maybe a little fruit salad, but neither scratch nor scar to add to his resumé. They don’t give purple medals out for broken hearts.

Jimbo met Iris during furlough after he got back and it was again just luck that he did. He was wearing his uniform, and she picked him for being the cleaner of the two who were trying to get friendly with her, for being the only one in the bar who didn’t know that she was already past the point of being able to afford to be choosy. After he was released, he went out looking for her. He wooed her as a soldier, and a good thing at that, because after they got married, you couldn’t have told that he had ever left the Valley or ever seen the inside of a barracks. Jimbo had just spent seven years of his life at the risk of losing it so that he could have a suit to wear to his wedding: a wedding that not everyone necessarily approved of, nor believed was socially or morally acceptable. There did exist those times.

But in one year, Iris went from being the town whore to being a happily married red-haired mother of twin boys. Jimbo never stopped treating her like the girl of his dreams. He got a job driving truck for a lumber yard, and stopped drinking and smoking. Iris stayed at home and blossomed! She kept his hair cropped short and his pants hemmed.

What can the world possibly have against two losers finally winning one? Connect the dots if you can. At least two of the tires on Jimbo’s car were slashed once a week no matter where it was parked. Their house windows kept getting rocks thrown through them. Their garage mysteriously caught on fire one night. One day when Iris drove the car to the store, she came out with her groceries to find the front seat totally smeared with human feces. Most of us call it shit. Iris and Jimbo called it enough.

They moved a few miles up river when the twins were six months old. Laredo wasn’t then the abbatoir that it became later when the trade in illegal drugs came to crisis level. But there was a market for other things. And murder was at respectable numbers on both sides of the border when Iris and Jimbo became the day’s statistics—given one standard deviation a little to the left—when they were discovered shotgunned to death together at close range inside their rented house. The twins were never found.

The soul sometimes stands as mute before a plague of humans as a cowskull being swept through by a river of sand.

Noe.

...passion of the moment...

The following is a response to a local column in my hometown newspaper which in so many words blamed--by agreeing with the Reverend Wright--the US for bringing down 9/11 on itself, and said that America is lost, can't think for itself, and that our alliances (especially with Israel), our behaviour, our commercialism, etc., piss Islamist extremists off, and that their agendas are clearer than ours. The column falls just short of condoning the attack. My answer was quickly written (maybe a couple of hours) and maybe more passionate than cerebral, but I let it ride. What ran in the paper was a snippet that didn't do justice to the issue. Here is the whole shmear:

05/05/08

Editor;

The suggestion that the attacks of 9/11 were even remotely justified is not only misguided but dangerous▬and implying in so many words that the murder of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting, hardworking civilians was brought upon themselves by their own behavior as free Americans, is grievous. Coming out of the mouth of Jeremiah Wright▬whose use of rage and invective as a tool for raising consciousness, in this more liberal age has largely outlived it’s validity as an instrument of reform▬it is surprising that this sort of arbitrary judgement evidently maintains its effectiveness among those who should know better, yet who insist on forwarding it as exegesis toward those who are perversely receptive to such calumny (There’s some truth to be found in Wright’s ranting, Sunday, 05/04/08). Senator Obama as a public servant might be in the peculiar position of having to take Wright seriously, but there can’t be a rational human being either Black or White who isn’t shrugging him and his rants off at this moment in American history. The “blues” as political lament have become tiresome to everybody; the senator couldn’t have been the only one sleeping through those sermons, although that only makes him guilty of being in the same league with most American males.

And as of last notice, Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11, had not been conferred with the chairmanship of any government with an international agenda nor any significant religious or cultural group except for a frenzied minority whose chief aim seems to be the murder of innocent people, including a good many of their own blood. Buying the lives of vulnerable young men with nothing to lose, with promises of seven virgin wives in heaven (or that sort of thing) hardly seems the work of a leader or a statesman, or of a creditable minister of God, of somebody with a rational expectation for the future of those he professes to have concerns for.

At the heart of every great religion (including Islam) are grounds for an intractable but benignant individualism that adheres to the faith that if “I,” “You,” or “He,” become a better person, not only I and you and he but the whole world will benefit from it. We see nothing of that in the actions nor the words of Al-Quaida, whose appetite for taking lives and the reasons for it have gone far beyond “spurious” to criminal. And if even plausibility, for egs., the health generally of other Islamists, was ever articulated by that bunch at some point, it was unintelligible (and laughable coming from those who espouse the oppression of women under a hideous, medieval orthodoxy where even execution is possible for minor social mis-steps) to those of us who were paying attention.

To put American motives: the spread of democracy and free markets, popular access to medicine and personal security, etc.▬in the same class with those of Islamic extremists: the complete annihilation of others including Islamists who do not believe as they do, is not only ludicrous, but sad.

And using physical law as a rationalization for the horrors that monsters of bin Ladin’s ilk commit, is over-reaching. Associating WWII (and presumably the rise of Hitler) to Diocletian policies defines “cause and effect” too broadly to retain any meaning of it. The quest for power and the effects of its use appear to be self-generated and more or less a consequence of individual fates, and of coincidence▬a roll of the dice. Humanity in dire need is a Petri dish not only for (the cultivation of*) saviours, but for psycopaths who seem to appear sane under those conditions. Osama bin Laden apparently responds (as can be suspected Hitler did) to the same kind of voice that Son Of Sam did. It’s not every country that is blessed with a Ghandi. The physical world raining down and spinning through time and space is indifferent to what we as men do to each other, good or bad. It is men who should care about the lot of other men; and Americans have always shown that they do: the fact that an almost identical number of Jews (a highly persecuted group as we all know) live in the U.S. as do in Israel is one example that attests to this.

Putting aside religious, historical and demographic kinships▬although some may argue, Israel alone of the Middle Eastern countries does not fund nor sponsor or shield terrorists nor carries out acts of terrorism against innocent civilians of other nations. Israel’s efforts towards economic and political (i.e., peaceful) self-sufficiency could serve as a model of democracy to the rest who are manifestly bent on it’s total destruction without bothering to offer an acceptable explanation as to why this should be so. America’s “unyielding support” of Israel is hardly “ill-considered” and far from “ridiculous.” There is more than a passing suspicion throughout the world that if not for American influence over Israel, much of the Middle East would be in danger of becoming little more than a mound of ashes. Because up to now, despite continued atrocities by its enemies committed upon its (Israel’s) treasured population, Israel has been nothing if not restrained. Americans’ admiration for those relatively few who stand their ground against terrific odds as gallant sentries to what at least 2 billion people consider the most sacred soil on earth, is no big mystery; American love for the Jewish people that live here in this country and in Israel should not have to be explained.

And America is light years from itself being destroyed, from within or from without. “The same, warmed-over, failed liberal policies,” the platform of the “loyal opposition” (if you will) who has spearheaded the fight for the cultural, political and economic growth of our ethnic populations and of women, who once helped save countless young lives by in effect stopping a fruitless war; and has tried to feed the homeless and the hungry, heal the sick and the victimized▬will still be here to at least try to ensure that when the leaders of this nation make sweeping commitments in the interests of its citizens, they will have the “consent of the governed,” who have not yet lost their ability (Thank you very much!) to think for themselves.

* the only addition I made for this blog.

Noe.

Hector

Hector became a local celebrity by accident and pretty much against his druthers. When Carla came barreling down the Gulf in September of 1961, its surge put his house under water, at least up to the floor, although he and his brother, Victório, and his father, Ismaél, lived 15 miles inland. But the Valley’s highest point is only a foot or two above sea level, and what isn’t sea level─as almost every square acre of it is─is in the minus category, which probably their house was.

The day after the hurricane, there were groups of people all over the Valley surveying damage, interviewing victims, sight-seeing, taking pictures. Ismael had stripped off every stitch of clothing and gone out hunting in water up to his waist for any of his critters that might have survived. Victorio and Hector joined him in every respect. Their timing was perfect. A photographer from one of the papers spotted them and took several pictures, a single one of which ran in the next morning’s edition with Hector's name in the cutlines; most of the photos couldn’t be used in those days.

Hector was fifteen that year, Torio was thirteen. Neither one remembered his mother, or knew his father all that well either, for that matter. They’d been raised mostly by their grandmother, who died five hours after Ismael came home from Korea with bad lungs, after ten years in the service, including a year in WWII. In 1961, Ismael was not forty yet, and publicity was what he’d least expected and wanted even less. He was on the run from the health department for having fled the sanitarium where he’d been institutionalized with a killer case of tuberculosis.

Five days after Carla, men in white coats and face masks came for Ismael. Heck and Tory were left by themselves in what has to be the most desolate spot in the Valley─the so-called Culébra grant, just west of San Juan de Carricítos─the last remaining Cavázos maybe of the line of the original grantees, and maybe not. Even after the courts (litigation having been brought not by Ismael but by a party who claimed blood kinship with him) decided who had legal ownership of it, they never bothered to chase the boys away because the land wasn’t worth anything.

Heck had dropped out of school right after the sixth grade but Tory was still going. A bus came and picked him up every day and took him to the nearest high school twenty-five miles away. It’s hard to assess what the greater miracle was. But Tory collapsed in gym class one day, with “a hole in his lung the size of a silver dollar”, Heck said. After emergency care, Tory was taken to the same hospital that his father was being kept in with much cajolery and not a few threats. Then a strange thing happened: Ismael found religion and a job in town; Tory dreaded going back home and the hospital folks liked him so well they trained him and gave him a job. Tory and Ismael took good care of Heck, but they never could talk him into leaving the Culebra.

Six years later, Heck was forced to wait on Beulah all alone. There were no more critters on the place now except for two dogs, and he brought them into the house. He figured they could fight the coyotes and the snakes together, and whatever varmint Beulah would drive toward shelter. But Ismael was there before Beulah hit. Heck went to sleep lulled by a driving rain, convinced by Ismael that this storm was no more than an autumn shower. In the morning, Heck found Ismael’s shoes and clothes in a pile on the front porch, too wet for the five foot rattler curled up beside them to sleep on. The water was scarcely an inch from pouring into the front door. Heck then stripped down to bare skin and went off in search of Ismael. He returned home half a day later by himself and was dressing on the front porch when a newspaper photographer took a picture of his backside--again. Later, when the men came looking for his father, Heck just said, “He’s gone.”

Eight years later, Heck faced Allen, too, all by himself. He didn’t have anything by then that any hurricane would want, but the photographers did. Heck’s fame had grown. Not wanting to disappoint anybody, he stripped down to nothing and went out wading through the aftermath of the greatest storm to ever hit southern Texas and had his picture taken. Later that day, when Tory went to check on him, Heck said, “Dad was here.”

“Dad was?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Out there,” Heck said, pointing toward the Gulf.

Heck waited eight years. By then Texas had put in a freeway not a quarter of a mile from the house, and the land had become valuable. People wanted him gone. Gilbert took care of that for them. There wasn’t a trace left of either the house or of Heck the next day, and if you were a superstitious man, you would believe that Gilbert dipped into the Valley just to pick him up. The photographer from the paper didn’t even go out into the field this time. Maybe he was just getting old. He ran a stock photo of Heck’s backside in the next day’s edition. That’s just how much faith some people had that Heck would always do his part.

A hurricane makes a cleaner cut than a judge’s blade. There was never any arguing with Gilbert’s decision, nor Carla’s, or Beulah’s or Allen’s. In the end, we all know who the land really belongs to. A man who has lived in the path of the storm all his life knows what it’s like to sleep in his own grave.

Tory disappeared from the hospital on the 21^st of August of 1999. Brett slammed into the Texas coast on the 22^nd.

Noe.

Ah gotcher political correctness raht here...

Runners are in a class all by themselves. From the sub-four minute mile sprinter to the five hour marathoner, they share an indefineable quality of completeness, of the perfect meld of the physical with the sublime, the animal with the artiste─over-achievers almost to a man─or woman, and a source of inspiration to other runners, and to non-runners both. How many have failed to be impressed by the performances of Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, “Pre”? Who hasn’t been awed by the image of Michael Johnson at full speed, or the sight of the breathtaking stride of our gorgeous, tragic queen, Flo-Jo?

Runners seek, not only in themselves but in others who run, maybe that elusive thread to the world that all of us became gradually separate from when we began to let machines and metal conveyances and electronic images and lines of cable come between us and reality. But there’s something missing.

This, despite getting up at the crack of dawn to run with deer as they move in front just outside of the tree line below the reservoir; to run amid the haunted voice of the loon, among the flapping of giant wings and the splashdowns of Canadian geese and the hiss of walleye breaking the surface of the water.

How awesome is nature in harmony with itself!

We would be one of those creatures flying in graceful formation, or running in fluid stride, effortless, untiring, united.

But what we are is what we see on the news being led away in handcuffs, what we see on Jerry Springer fighting over a faithless, graceless mook, what comes out on the street toward us holding a ragged hand out for alms─and we are the man with the warm coat who curses him and denies him a cent---and the guy who thinks Rush Limbaugh has a point. (Concededly, there is some of the noble in us, too).

Figs (who knows?), one of the wags who gather in the mornings at Tony’s and sit at the counter telling stories─either true ones or those which have outlived the truth─says, “There’s never a better man than the one who does something the first time. Like the guy Old Hickory that climbed Mount Eveready, or the guy that swam the English Channel.”

“Or the guy that invented the hamburger, too, Figs.”

“No, I mean it. Take that guy Chick Yoder, that broke the speed of light.”

“It was the speed of sound, Figs. And his name is Chuck Yeager.” The “Old Hickory” thing is a little too complicated to pull together.

“Yeah, that’s it. And the guy that broke the four minute mile, Ronald Barrymore.”

“His name is Roger Bannister.”

George has been drinking his coffee and eating his sweet roll quietly to the side as he always does. When he finishes, he digs in his pockets and counts what he pulls out of them and then pokes his head in the door to the back and says, “Hey, Tony! I’m a little short today, about a quarter. I musta left most of my change on the dresser. Can I owe you ‘til tomorrow?”

Tony walks out of the back and says, “Sure, George. No problem, kid.”

When George goes out the door, Dean the counter man counts the change and rings it up and says, “He was more than a quarter short.”

Tony just smiles. Somebody asks him out of curiousity where George works and Tony says, “I don’t know. He walks in that direction every morning,” and points north, and says, “then sometimes in the evening I see him walk that way,” and points south. He says, “George is a good kid.”

Nobody doubts it. Tony’s a good judge of character. George emits an aura of dislocation, of wanting to belong, to be part of something, and he is always friendly, always smiling. He’s what white people call a “good nigger,” which wouldn’t sound as heavy-handed and condescending if they’d just call him a regular “nigger,” because George is a nice fellow, and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything else, but if George looked more white than he does black─because he’s half of each─people would probably call him “white trash,” because that’s what they do. Take it from someone who is neither but has been called both because people up north don’t really know how to dig deep and come up with the really scurrilous forms of the words for “Mexican,” like the people further south can.

One day George ran all the way down the middle of the five downtown blocks of Main Street. People heard the commotion and saw him coming, chased by some cluck who ran out of breath and threw up right in the exact center of town. There was a small crowd following them. The rest of the business district came out onto the sidewalks to see what the hell was going on. George didn’t look all that extended until the guy shouted. “Shoot him! Somebody shoot him!” and George held out his hands, waving them, shaking his head, “No. No.” And then he really took off.

A hush fell over the people standing outside the line of shops. George’s footfalls on the pavement, subtle as dusk, in the quiet sounded like a heartbeat breaking in from the far reaches of the universe. It was like a gorgeous wind moving on, flinging itself along by the coiled strength of matter itself, graceful, untrammeled by the need for breath or fuel, in synch with the motion of the stars. You could hear your own exhale. That’s what it means to want to live!

It is that property that gives meaning to the things that any one person does, that gives beauty to his motion, because no one should ever take his life for granted. There are those who are born at war, who can never stop running for their lives. It is the nature of us all to judge others by their differences, and then to claim their more noble qualities as part of who we are. But there is where the real difference is. Not everybody has to work all that hard to show their humanity. We should all be that lucky.

Noe.