Two Hearts

After detox and affirmations in Tacoma I accepted a new tennis teaching job at a Richland athletic club in the high eastern desert.

I lived between the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leaking toxic waste and a military high-grade uranium destruction site.

Sweet earth. Delicious water.

Glowing in the dark improved my writing visibility at night.

Clean and sober I wrote a small children’s book about trust and love.

Two Hearts On A Grand Precious Adventure has The Prince of Yogurt and the Princess of Chocolate on a quest for the beginning of the ocean. I self published it as an e-book.

I turned my attention to big work. I sifted through worn travel journals, old letters, faded yellow evidence papers, typed manuscripts, stories, fragments, poems, and photographs gathered from wandering Earth.

For two years I wove threads into a non-linear draft of epic adventures entitled A Century is Nothing.

I murdered my darlings and rearranged sentences in the farrago. They were stories about people telling stories about people in stories experiencing courage, transformation and impermanence.

I researched markets. I mailed out the synopsis with query letters. Fifty rejection letters from literary agents sang a refrain. “Sorry, doesn’t meet current mainstream needs. Too edgy. Needs more heavy, deep, real, personal Vietnam insight and growth. Fewer characters. Bottom line: I can’t make my 15% selling this.” Wallpaper. So it goes.

*

One morning I went to the Richland P.O. for stamps.

Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope they were named Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

I enjoyed a stimulating discourse with a young unarmed postal woman about the amazing galaxies and how incredible it was to contemplate them living five miles away from fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste left over from W.W. II seeping 130 feet down toward water tables along the Columbia River.

“Fascinating,” she said.

Editing material for my book I read a faded yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.

“It’s called Technetium, TC-99m,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as corporations vying for energy contracts with D.O.E. discussed containment options and emergency evacuation procedures.

Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

As the postal worker and I talked, a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps!” because at her precocious age, curiosity about the expanding universe developed her active imagination.

Holding a Nebula space dust galaxy in my hand I told the postal woman how we are a third the life of a 13.7 billion year-old universe. She handed me change and said, “That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before.”

“What happens next?” said Plot.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Ethnology Museum, Hanoi

Widow Remembers

In the United States of Amnesia it was all too clear to Marian sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen staring out a double reinforced storm window into spring’s garden.

She hadn’t slept well. Again. Last night was difficult with perpetual arthritic sore joints and eternal emptiness next to her in the brass bed. She’d stayed under the comforter reading longer than usual this morning. It was a clean sparse room with a thick Persian carpet.

Closets were crammed with clothing she’d give away.

While she had hardcover nonfiction stacked everywhere in the living room, her bedroom reading were intellectual monthly magazines and estate agent ads.

She sat on the chair where Richard sat for thirty-odd years in his frayed blue terrycloth bathrobe perusing the newspaper. He rose early to feed sparrows, bring her the morning paper and coffee, tease and laugh with her, talk and return to the chair.

She was shifting into another reality.

Sparrows arrived at the rusty bread pan feeder hanging from the split brown patio roof. The structure sagged toward earth. Jackdaws, jays and robins patrolled dew diamonds as light shaved crabapple, cherry, maples and elms. She needed to call the mower man. She needed to check the pressure on the old black pump down near the fence. It was going to be a hot day and it was wise to water early or late.

The hands on a grandfather clock above the yellow cabinet lined with medication bottles were dead just after one. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The key collected dust.

She didn’t know where she wanted to live the rest of her life. She was surrounded by memories and basement stuff.

Tons of tools, collectables and junk: lathes, hammers, chisels, planers, boxes of screws and widgets, papers, books, clothing, boxes of seventy-eight RPM records going back fifty years, canned goods stacked on dusty shelves, sturdy battered suitcases, moth balled suits, boxes of vintage wine, shoes, an old broken pinball machine, photo albums, European and Russian travel guides, a forgotten pool table, lumber, a black Singer sewing machine in working order, a crimson pin cushion, needles and spooled multicolored threads.

And that was just part of the mess down there. She never descended anymore. No need or desire. She’d seen it all, throwing up her hands accepting his passion for collecting stuff and messing around, resigning herself to inevitable destiny and retreated to the sanctuary of erudite literature and domestic tasks above ground zero in light and air. She prospered in the realm of intellectual property in life of the mind.

Thirty years is a long time to be with someone. Nancy, the hospice worker was a big help, her stepsons assisted make arrangements. A retired young brother lived north off I-25. He gave her connection and comfort.

Being Steamboat Springs natives they survived the depression in the 30’s by ranching, coal mining and power plant maintenance in Nucla.

Education formed their character. All of them escaped mountains for city schools. Universities gave them the opportunity to use their intelligence. They became engineers, teachers and geologists.

She was a secretary at ARFC in Denver when she met Richard a year after his wife died. She was a single mother and her son Timothy lived in Steamboat taking care of his grandfather until he passed on.

Timothy was in Mensa, had a degree in geology, built a Harley from scratch and resembled Custer. He was a friendly no-nonsense individual in the spirit of the West.

He worked long tough hours on the Western Slope as a supervisor for a mining operation dealing with poor maintenance records, inept management and the frustrations of trying to keep all the heavy equipment up to standards.

“It’s 8,000 miles to the center of the Earth and we’ve only drilled down 7.5 miles,” he said one afternoon to Geronimo sitting on a plateau as sunset light played across red, brown, golden sediment strata.

She knew everyone would help when she got around to making the decision. This chapter in her journey was letting go by accepting the fact she couldn’t stay here forever. The place was forty years old.

She’d sell it and get an apartment on a bus line near shops, a library and friends. She was only seventy and mobile. She didn’t need assisted living.

She missed knowing he was tinkering with something down there. She missed his dry sense of humor. It was going to be a long hot day.

ART Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Feed Love

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses

From the top of his wall

A thorn from that is still in my palm

Working deeper.”

- Rumi

“I almost wish it were true,” said my father in our final visit, April 1999. He was 77.

I opened a bedroom curtain so he could see a radiant blue sky and free birds.

Sitting in the garden I burned incense and fed sparrows as green spring blossoms gestured beginning. Calm non-attachment. No desire. Breathing in – out with diamond mind clarity. Love and letting go.

“May I have more ice please?” he said.

I needed to break it up. In his red tool box under the yellow shelf in the kitchen where I was half-beaten to death by a crazy woman in a wheelchair were steel crescent wrenches.

I selected the heaviest one with the widest aperture. It was well oiled and ready. The small wheel turned slow scraping my fingers down to the bone. I rolled destiny’s wheel closing the vise, narrowing space with bleeding fingers. Rolling The Wheel of Time.

Turning the cold steel wheel I remembered ceremonies in Bali: Painters creating on canvas, wood carvers chipping at unexplored rough textures and a wife weaving an intricate basket of reeds into an offering filled with sweet smelling jasmine flowers surrounding a mountain of rice. Lighting incense, she placed her daily ceremonial devotion in family compound corners to thwart demons and appease gods.

I absorbed daily acts of creativity and love in Bali. Everyday was a celebration in magic light. Twilight faded dark blue below pregnant skies. Rain slashed across jungles blasting calm surfaces of rice paddies. Runoff music exploded soil. A farmer stood in the deluge. His misty figure raised a wooden heirloom hoe into the sky. He released human thunder into wet soil. He turned over an exposed part of the planet. Rain slowed.

Shadow figures evolved from jungles chopping off paddy edges, hoeing soil, gathered dry wood and dead brush. Children sang on a dirt path going home from school.

Across a ravine on a mid-level terrace a farmer trailing oxen yanked iron in an arc turning beasts in a slow slog through mud. Flocks of white herons layered sky.

I dumped ice from a plastic tray on a small towel. I folded cotton threads as if folding a love letter, his bone white dress shirt and monogramed handkerchief. I curled fingers around the cold heavy wrench. I smashed crystals of frozen water into diamonds.

Everything collapsed. My daily celebration felt the heaviness. My heart accepted the doing and being. I hammered down, folded cloth, pulverizing cubes. I wiped blood on cloth streaking red. I funneled ice into a blue ceramic bowl. I put the wrench down and selected a small silver spoon.

I fed my father spoonfuls of clear white ice.

I fed him love. 

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Laos

Healing

Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.

“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”

Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.

Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.

“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”

“Rose. What’s yours?”

“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”

“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”

“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.

“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.

“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”

Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.

She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.

Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.

A Lao child carries the world on their back.

“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.

“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”

“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”

“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”

“May I see?” said a kid.

“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”

Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”

“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”

“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”

“You can indicate everything you see.”

“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”

A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”

“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”

“Are you one with everything?” said one.

“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”

“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”

“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.

“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.

“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.

“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”

“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”

“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.

“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Samuel's Truth

"The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities? What a marvelous world if all would - could hold this attitude toward life." - Edward Weston, photographer.

*

November 1969.

Leaving 101 into Eagle we passed white memorial shrines to dead Vietnamese. Farmers and boys grazed oxen near gravesites.

50,000 soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division lived at Eagle.

Mick drove along winding dirt roads past the main post office, barracks and a church. Buildings, clothing and landscape were brown. Eagle would be my residence for the next year if I survived.

Mick turned off the road and downhill to a small shipping container marked MAIL. I climbed wooden stairs to the company clerk’s office and commanding officer’s headquarters. The room displayed pictures of a president, defense secretary and hierarchy.

“Welcome,” said the first sergeant of the 265th Radio Research Company.

“Thanks, it feels good to be here.”

“I understand you volunteered for the 265th.”

“Yes. I looked at the 8th RRFS, talked to some guys and decided this would be more interesting duty.”

“It’s definitely more interesting. Not as plush as down south. Our mission is electronic code breaking, linguistics and traffic analysis. We provide critical intelligence to the Screaming Eagles at headquarters and in the field.”

“Fine. I’ll do my best.”

“I’m sure you will. Samuel will show you around, get you settled. Welcome to the 265th.”

“Thanks Tops.”

“That’ll be all.”

Samuel, a small wiry African-American company clerk was a virtual resident of Nam having extended his tour for five years.

“Better money to be made than going home to abuse, derision, scorn, apathy and unemployment,” he said issuing me a sleeping bag, M-16, ammo, gas mask, helmet, flak vest, Boonie hat and survival knife with a serrated edge for tearing flesh.

In - out dialogue.

“I know what you mean.”

“No you don’t. None of you white guys have a clue about real life in America. Better drugs in Nam cheap and good quality control. Let me know if you need a little weed.” Access. He pointed to my hooch up a hill.

“Top will meet you there. Take you on the grand tour.”

“Thanks Samuel. Nice to meet you.”

“See ya around.”

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A memoir.

*

Spike Lee co-wrote and directed a film released June 12, 2020. Da 5 Bloods follows a group of aging Vietnam Veterans who return to Nam to find a fallen commander and buried treasure. It received excellent reviews.