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I remember the climbing rose outside the breakfast window, climbing one and a half stories up the corner of red, matched brick, past the garage, up to bloom in the south-facing window near the black phone on the yellow wall with prefix and three digit code. The radio broadcast (my brother's choice) the war news or (my choice) the Saturday afternoon, Texaco opera. I read Gone With The Wind and Forever Amber while the war went on and on and on. The war began the day after my eighth birthday. What age was I as crimson roses exploded outside the sunlit window? I was still in love with my honey-colored, long, thick hair. Even then, I liked being alone at home to freeze apricots into ice cream while Mother, Sister Father, Brother went to the relatives (like going to the trenches). I liked to be alone even then. The war seemed remote, the opera exotic, the invasion of my privacy acute when others were present, but I gloried in the sunshine shining through my honey-colored hair. The summer mornings were many. |
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I remember the maple, so bright with yellow, that in the dark-forest-winter it seemed as if the sun had suddenly shown in my hall-like, walk-through dining room -- where we seldom ate. The windows in that house were im- portant. The solidified, low-ceilinged, lean-to construction of the kitchen ended in a huge, arms-on-the-cross- wide window that gazed out into silent hemlocks, burnt sienna and umber duff where needles fell from the forest onto the narrow path to the wood hatch covering the pump that didn't always work. That win- dow set my dish-washing style for life: warm water over morning-cold hands, gazing into viridian shadows waking the forest into the trilliumed dream of life -- before the sharp rose -scent of the crab-apples surrounding the garbage pit, our midden, filtered the spring air that began on April 26th each year, promptly. Could the year read the calendar? In the fall, John gathered leaves onto a blanket, haul- ing them, Hercules-like, to the forest to molder beneath Paul's Breton-bright |
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I remember there were no windows in the small, clean, furniture-less room we shared, nor did we ask why. It was cold, city-grimed snow- slush lingered at the hand-made-not -well-fitted doors. There were many uninviting passageways, steps, build- ing. But, the image that lingers was not from my arrival at Hwagehsa, nor from Sudoksa. Upon returning to Hwagehsa we attended the even- ing chant, all of us spilling out into the snow from the small, ornate temple where the Buddha sat, and the candle -light came through the paper walls. All the old men -- for it seemed that none chanting were even as young as I at fifty-four -- monks, in tailored grey robes, sang the same chant, but each with his own melody, variations grace notes. It sounded, except it was soft in the winter air, cacophonous to me. From this apparent cacophony, I was to learn later -- to learn now; right now; at present; daily -- there is no right way. O I had understood that ecumenically, but today I follow the thread of uncertainty assiduously, hourly, knowing no answer, there are no answers, there is what happens, what is spoken, written. Multi-faceted windows open to the world bright as sunset's glitter of rose, pink, gold, blue certainly explained by art, philosophy, science, romance -- re-explained each |
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I remember resting my chin on the sill of the basement window. I could see outlined beneath the midnight blue, four o'clock light, ochre, yellow, mustard, orange sun-rays caught like music in the flaming leaves of the poplars, towers dazzling, bright -- suspended under God and the sky. What does one do with such beauty? -- such towers of silence, such damp-feeling white walls in my small space shallowly excavated into the earth's crust. I had expected to not like my new home, sunken and dark. The rooms were large, but I felt buried up to the shoulders. But at night, when I turned out the light, crawled into my bed on the raise floor, felt the silence and the soothing warmth of surrounding earth, thought about being buried in the womb of the great ball whirling on and on through the blackness of space, I appreciated the protection, the bliss. Where was I to go? Why would I want to go? Like a seed cracking its shell, a white and thready root fingered its way down into the soil, the rock, met the water- table, drank. Later, much later by human standards, a year or so, flowers began to bloom: geraniums, scarlets, crimsons, blue |
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I remember being unable to sleep at Pacific View Drive above the City of the Angels. I'd watched 'til dawn at my all-window-walls imprisoned by the city lights' glitter. They sparkled, jeweled on a black carpet, laid toward New York. I dwelt on a cliff, atop a chaparraled canon, fragrant with Podocarpus. It's white catkins shagged along steps beside deep-sunk metal piers, which swayed in earthquakes, to where a door into storage, I mostly avoided, opened into darkness. There I endured a landlord whose medical son-in law, was as fanatical for his pound of flesh as Dubya, refusing to fix the running toilet. Finally it ran all day when I was at work. I came home to inches of water flowing down the open steps, soaking into the rug, brown-edging the toes of my Century Dictionaries. He was outraged that I objected to shit in the toilet -- not whatever he called it, but the fact that I called it "shit." I pitied his patients, no doubt petrified into a constipation as severed as his own. Odd that this is what I remember of that time of love, fame, success, designer clothes, a car, comfortable as a couch, big as a tank, where I walked as well as ran at dawn (until I knocked my four front teeth out), wrote two novels at so many pages a day before I went to my glamorous day job (full of present and future celebrities) and a dawning awareness of just how unhappy I was. |
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The foolishnesses of American radio goes on through the night, through the morning. Ten minutes hence we enter the sixth hour before Bushy's forty-eight hour ultimatum expires. It's just six hours before "Shock and Awe" bombardment can commence. Several early morning commentator, however, emphasized the madman qualified his threat, saying the in- vasion would begin at a time of his choosing -- thus implying "early" is a possibility. I sit quietly, with my milk/decaf coffee, in the paradise of my eyrie, listening to the noisy blowing of the ventilation system. I look through the vast windows to see the mountain, snow-shrouded, cloud-veiled, and the grey, somber medley of high buildings between the hills, on Lake Union's shore, a bowl of 21st Century capitalism -- less glamorous by day than at night. A commentator announces: Baghdad is silent. Those who can, have fled, others hide, only war correspondents walk about to broadcast their opinions. Deep in my heart a secret wish abides: that they drop five bombs and five fall on Saddam Hussein. For though he may be no worse than our madman, his death might just stop the madman's annihila- tion of the Iraqi people, who are no more guilty than am I, sitting here silently |
