Monday, March 31, 2008

My odd friend

I’m happy my friend, let’s call her Mugs, is home from her sister’s. Of course it was a result of the strangest of circumstances. Mugs’s sister was deathly ill – pancreatic cancer and a host of other things. She was having serious radiation treatments and getting sicker and sicker. But after three treatments somehow it was discovered that the oncology center had confused her records with another person’s. Person number two had an almost identical name – only the middle letter of the last name was different – and the same birth month and year. But was decidedly a different person. Here are two big lawsuits in the making. Person number one treated for something she doesn’t have and person number two not treated or even told about something she does have. Yikes.

But the odd thing is Mugs’s connection here. She seems to always be located not at the center, but continually at the periphery of the most peculiar occurrences. This is a person who believes anything, very literally anything, is possible. And somehow as the world spins around her odd thing after odd thing happens. When she saw a child with deeply blue eyes and asked what constellation he’d come from, the mother said his name was Orion. Sometimes the odd things aren’t so great. She often makes connections among what I take to be completely non-relevant events and sometimes I think she’s a stranger here. In the world of odd events, she’s a carrier.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Trees

Today I drove down to Shady Grove early in the morning. Although I was really tired from getting back really late last night – the ball game was short, but the train home was almost two hours late – I really love this time of year for its visual impact. I love the way the trees look when the buds are just starting to squeeze out. The neon green halo around all the skinny brown branches electrifies the air. It looks like someone’s taken a watercolor brush dipped barely in green and in lots of water and put a wash over all the trees. As I drove down 95 toward DC the trees were budding green and red. The wash of color in the budding trees seems almost ghostly, a reflection. So very strange because it’s anything but a reflection – it’s decisively present. The few miles from Baltimore south to Shady Grove showed a difference in the stage of the budding trees – down by DC the buds are almost leaves, the flowering trees are spouting their milkshakes of petals already. The Cherry Blossom festival kicked off in DC yesterday, and I hope to go down on Wednesday to see all those Japanese gifts again. It’s definitely enough trees for a big wow.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Two evenings

Last night Andre Watts at the Baltimore Symphony and tonight the Washington DC Nationals at their brand new ballpark -- Nationals Park. Finally. A team that's named their park after something related to the sport instead of selling naming rights. Wonder how long that will last.

Last night as I left for the symphony I discovered they've ripped up the rest of Loch Raven Blvd. -- the middle part. But still the awful pock marked, rippled, war-zone like pavement between 33rd and Gorsuch remains.

I love Andre Watts. I saw him 40 years ago in Reading, PA. He was a young, thin-as-a-rail, up and coming pianist. He'd been introduced by Leonard Bernstein on a Young People's Concert and my parents took me to see him. I remember shaking his hand out in the vestibule after the concert was over. Years later, I try to see him whenever he comes to Baltimore. Now he's like a teddy bear -- not fat, but a larger man with a dynamic, warming smile. He envelops you with his presence. He still shakes people's hands, so unusual for a pianist. When he clasps your hand you are swallowed up in his joy in the world. When he plays his hands dance over the keyboard like centipede legs -- faster than the eye can follow. His lips synch the notes so they're moving as fast as his fingers. At the end of a run his hands are propelled off the keyboard as if by an opposite magnetic field, flying off the keys turning upward as they move through the air.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Things I've seen with my own eyes

In my line of work I'm continually subjected to people talking about things they think they know because they have some bizarre notion that they've seen these things or heard about them. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people start stories with “I read somewhere…” Now it’s not that I believe people are inherent liars (although, well, enough said), but the frailty of memory and the certainty of youth are a dangerous combination.

But some things I have seen with my own eyes.

I once saw a seagull murder another seagull. A large seagull attacked a smaller seagull in mid-air. Slamming into the small head with its larger beak. The smaller – although not by so much – bird dropped into the water like a hard stone. The aggressor followed the falling bird down and held it’s head under the water until it drowned. The dying bird struggled mightily, wings flapping, trying to pull away from its killer. But the larger bird won. And slowly the flapping weakened until the drowning bird was only rocking from side to side trying to back away from its tormentor. And then it died.

As an aside: this took place day after the malevolent spirit of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America took over the Congress in 1994; I felt like I was seeing that Republican tumor spreading darkly to other creatures.

I saw this with my own eyes.

Once on a walk in my neighborhood I turned a corner and came upon a squirrel that’d just been hit by a car. It was already dead, lying motionless in the street. It wasn’t squashed, just dead. But with it was a smaller squirrel, trying desperately to get the dead squirrel to get up. I could just feel the smaller squirrel’s panic, “get up, get up!” It was trying mightily to raise its fallen friend from the pavement, first pushing then pulling on it with tiny paws. It almost seemed as if the small squirrel didn’t know how to go on without its larger, now dead, friend.

I saw this with my own eyes.

I know it seems maudlin, but I must tell the tale of when I was at Flint Gregory Hunt’s funeral. Greg Hunt was executed in Baltimore in mid 1997. At the funeral I heard from some of his overexcitable friends that after he died the corrections officers had beaten him to a bloody pulp. Why? Because he’d killed a police officer. Once again, I chalked this up to the circuitous path of rumor. Blood, they kept saying, he was covered in blood.

When we arrived at the cemetery the great group that had formed around the coffin swelled with a deep desire to place him in the ground without the barrier of the enormous and ornate box. Awkwardly, with many moments of near-dropping, yet without letting it touch the ground until it came to rest in its grave, many hands rolled the body swathed entirely in white cotton out of the coffin and into the ground. As the heavy load made its descent, I saw, with my own eyes, about a three-inch round spot of blood seeping through what was clearly many layers of cotton.

This, too, I saw with my own eyes.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Baltimore streets

I’d like to know a little bit more about Baltimore’s street repaving policy. About two years ago they came down Loch Raven Blvd. and did half the street – the center half. On either side remained the usual awful Baltimore street. Then the did the bottoom half of Loch Raven, south of Gorsuch, but left the middle – between 33rd and Gorsuch – a complete mess of old rails and rippled pavement. And then not too long after the beautiful new pavement was laid down south of Gorsuch they moved in and started tearing it up to get at the pipes. Do these departments not speak to each other at all? Ever? Repeatedly this is the case. Will they ever repave streets and leave it alone? Driving in Baltimore is like driving on a police obstacle course.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Marietta's Birthday

My friend from the death penalty movement is having a big birthday and a birthday book of remembrances is being gathered for her. This is what I've written about the first time we met:

I remember clearly the evening I met Marietta Jaeger – January 16, 1997. We were on the fourth floor of the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington DC sitting down to a meeting with our lawyer to discuss the next day’s activities. Marietta was wearing one of Abe’s blue sweatshirts reading “I oppose the death penalty; Don’t kill for me.” Before the night was over we’d all be wearing the green hooded sweatshirts that Abe had manufactured specifically for the event.

I was a complete newcomer to the movement. In fact, participating in this civil disobedience we were about to undertake was my very first abolitionist event; I was jumping in with both feet. Around the large table in the meeting room I sat next to Marietta. I’d no idea who she was or how important she was to the people in the room. But before long I’d learn.

The next day, the twentieth anniversary of Gary Gilmore’s execution, remains as one of the coldest days in my memory. Certainly not a day to be standing still at the top of a long open plaza while the bone-chilling wind whipped through my jacket and across my face. We’d come across the street from the Methodist Center disguising ourselves as a tour group, John Steinbach pretending to be our chatty guide. The Supreme Court Police rushed over to stop us, having been alerted to our intentions by our attorney, but let the frozen tour group continue on up the steps. Half way up we formed ourselves into a line and the banner – from underneath my jacket – was unfurled.

Although they were standing right next to us, the Police needed to use a small megaphone to announce that we were breaking the law and would be arrested if we didn’t move along – the wind carried away the unaided voice. And then one by one they put on the twisti-cuffs and assisted us inside where they were all set up to do our booking.

In the bowels of the supreme court building, in a wide hallway leading to the interior driveway, the 18 of us sat while they shuffled through sheaves of papers. We were not permitted to speak – but we could sing, and our human karaoke machine Art Laffin led us in protest songs of all stripes. As our voices wore down and they continued their paperwork, silence began to fill the spaces. In the still moments the police began to ask us questions. One, several probably, knew Marietta from her previous years on the steps for the Fast & Vigil – the grand annual event of which she was one of the founders.

One officer, trying to decide whether he felt contempt or compassion for us, asked her why she did this. Marietta began to tell her story, and in that moment the air in the basement corridor changed. As she spoke a stillness crept through the room until all was silence and every person present was listening.

Slowly I learned what had brought Marietta to that moment. She told the story of how her daughter had been kidnapped and killed while her family was on a camping trip. I was sitting next to Marietta during the story and even through this unholy tale her own deep commitment to peace in the world was palpable. Others with us knew her story well but still they sat riveted by her gentle voice telling a tale of such horror. The officer who’d asked, all the officers, listened cautiously, some realizing slowly that they’d need to change their minds when she were done talking. It was the most powerful time of the entire day for me. And that’s saying quite a lot.

Later, when 16 protesters had been transported to the city jail, Marietta and I sat alone in the basement room awaiting our chariot. There we were on the plastic court chairs, hands still in twisti-cuffs behind our backs. We’d been there many hours already and the shift had changed; newly pressed officers were waiting with us for the wagon to return. Down the hall came one of her court pals, an officer who’d been with us earlier now dressed in his street clothes.

“May I feed the prisoners?” he asked the current officer in charge. From his breast pocket he produced a small package of Oreos. And one at a time he fed us those scrumptious cookies. I’d never liked Oreos before that moment. But in that instant it was the most delicious cookie I’d ever tasted.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

content challenge

What? I'm trying to blog again? It's a challenge to see if I can write every day for thirty days. As soon as I look at the page all thoughts leave me and I am only a pretend writer. I've had a long day at work, starting early early in the morning and going until 7 PM. Tomorrow I will take the day off and get to the gym and do some serious rock climbing. This past Sunday I, along with a climbing friend, climbed every route in the gym that was rated 5.8. It took four hours to do all 19 climbs in the gym. That's a lot of climbs and a lot of hours. My climbing was so sloppy by the end of the ordeal that I could barely make it up the wall. Those last few climbs were just rainbows -- I could barely stay on the routes. Tomorrow I'll try to do 5.9 climbs, but I'm not sure about doing all of them. It's a popular degree of difficulty and there are a lot of them. And then after I climb I'm going to a climbing clinic about spotting and falling. I'm a faller so this will be good. I'd be even more of a faller if I were bouldering, which I pretty much refuse to do. Occasionally one of my climbing buddies will get me into the bouldering cave where you climb up without a rope or anything. The walls in the cave are all inclined against you and there's a lot of hanging off the wall. It pretty much terrifies me but some easy routes I'll try up until the last move. Then I just stop.

So we'll see about the writing. It pretty much terrifies me too. If Dave's putting a link to this blog on his blog I'm pretty terrified that someone else might read this. So I might do the writing up until the last move and then just let go and drop to the floor.

Thursday, March 13, 2008


This is Gabriel Welter. He and my Great Aunt Belle were a hot item in the 1930s in Greece.