Life, love, lust and lunacies from the Sage of Topanga

Somebody get the smelling salts. I have passed out on the floor from the shock of hearing the news: war is cruel and inhuman and disgusting.

It came to me in the form of a video that revealed four United States Marines urinating on the dead bodies of enemy soldiers in Afghanistan.

There was an immediate outcry against the desecration of our military adversaries even after we had shot the life out of them. It was OK to kill them but not to piss on them afterward.

As a result, we are demanding severe punishment for the warriors who for reasons of their own had no respect for those who had been trying to kill them and had chosen a crude but effective method of demonstrating their disrespect. But that’s not allowed anymore in the more genteel requirements of human conflict, and they must pay the price of their indiscretion.

So what am I missing here?

As a former Marine during the Korean War, it was always my understanding that war was dirty, and ugly and painful and essentially quite discourteous. We were not trained in boot camp and at Camp Pendleton to be friends with our enemy but rather to blow them into confetti by whatever means available. Shoot them, bomb them or burn them, but by any method subdue them.

Pissing on them afterwards was never offered as an option but one understood that they were bad guys out to kill you and well might manifest their antipathies in many different ways, including those utilized by the Marines in Afghanistan.

My best memory of war is of a fellow infantryman who, when there seemed an odd occurrence in the heat of battle, would shake his head and says “This is unreal.” He would amplify the phrase by concluding later that what had happened must have occurred in some kind of parallel universe.

It could not have happened to him. Not really.

He had a point. Where life and death intersect, there is no reality. The very idea of members of the same species confronting one another on a field of battle and killing each other according to very specific rules is surreal. It flashes into the head with the peculiarity of a new idea: I could die here.

Try as we might, we cannot gentrify war. We do not have referees wandering the battlegrounds to make sure that everyone is performing his duties in the best interest of the Geneva Accord. Neither do those with guns and bombs have the inclination to carry a condensed version of the rules stuffed in a pocket of their ammo belts and little time to implement those rules if they had them.

Complicating the problem of ungentlemanly conduct by our soldiers is that the newer wars are not “traditional.” We do not see great armies clashing head-on with tanks rolling and bayonets fixed. In Afghanistan and in Iraq before that, we are engaged in combat with shadows and whispers that dart in and out of reality like subliminal thoughts, targets that merge and melt before one’s very eyes.

The unreality of war has taken a quantum leap.

Does that justify desecrating the bodies of those we have killed? Never. But in their way, the Marines were playing by a set of rules that exposed what war is really all about. It is full of mindless rage, thoughtless acts of violence and a consuming desire for vengeance.

By its inherent disrespect for life, war pisses on the whole human race.

Almtz13@aol.com

This is the year of GracieAnn and I am her grandpa Apple.

Although slightly rounded I do not otherwise resemble an apple. I am neither red nor green with a bright luminous skin and I am in no way delicious.

The closest I would come to the shape of a fruit would be a pear, with the large part at the bottom and the little head-like stem at the top.

But Apple is what GracieAnn called me on the evening before the last night of the year, and there was no hesitancy in her assertion. She pointed with the certainty of new discovery and very clearly pronounced my identification.

“Apple,” she said.

Some might say that at age one it was as close as she could come to the word grandpa and perhaps that is so. But I prefer to see it larger perspective, a glimpse into the inner-me as it were, wherein dwells the solid core from whose goodness springs the American pie.

Well, maybe not.

The point is that this is the year of discovery for our beautiful granddaughter, as it is for all of the little ones of the world who, with a blink or two, are beginning to see what lies ahead and who they will accompany to the magical kingdom called tomorrow.

One wonders if in places like Africa or the Middle East or the dark alleys of America there will ever be a tomorrow for them, or if they will lie hungry and forgotten, pressed like petals between the pages of human history.

I would prefer to think that the generation that is beginning to take its place in the world will someday see beyond the elements that have traumatized us to a point of paralysis and realize that the secret to survival goes beyond occupying Wall Street to occupying a global conscience whose moral force could save us all.

Mountains and oceans and deserts of human resistance lie in the path of GracieAnn’s army of change, and we can only hope that when the infants are old enough they will also be strong enough to surmount the barriers that were too much for my generation to overcome.

We’ve heard all this before haven’t we, from someone else’s Grandpa Apple. Go forth, we keep saying, and change the world, but instead we melt into the crowd and jostle our way to payday, while the changes we make if any are miniscule.

But at least I can offer a phrase that resonated with me years ago. When I asked a rebel in the 1960s what advice he would give the next generation, he looked up at me after a march through the streets of Berkeley to end the war in Vietnam and said “Give a damn.”

Grandpa Apple repeats it here in reduced form: care. And march on from a word, GracieAnn, to rebuild the world.

Almtz13@aol.com

(This is by way of introducing you to the writing of Dashiell Young-Saver, a 17-year-old high school senior who is a member of my Topanga Writers Workshop. To say he is a prodigy would only begin to describe his writing abilities. A straight-A student recently accepted to Harvard, he is as adept at humor as he is at high drama. Meet tomorrow.)

By Dashiell Young-Saver

Shakespeare would have loved Twitter.

For those my age reading this who aren’t familiar with Shakespeare, he wrote plays on an island long ago, when people lived in their own feces. For those of you who do not know what a play is: it is like a T.V. show, but harder to understand. For those who do not know what a T.V. show is: it is an internet video that has a plot. And by plot, I mean a story, not a plot of land on Farmville.

Now getting back to the point before I lose your short attention spans, Shakespeare would have loved Twitter because it forces the youth of the world to become more inventive and creative writers.

Shakespeare wrote poems and plays in structured formats. His sonnets had to have iambic pentameter, rhyme, and be a certain length. The rigid structure seems confining, but it actually forced Shakespeare to be even more creative to work within the format and give meaning to his work. That is why old people like his stuff.

Twitter is even more structured than a Shakespearean sonnet or a play. Limited to 140 characters, Twitter would have ended this column at the first mention of feces (coincidentally, that’s also the place where many stopped reading this column). So, each tweet is almost as structured as Bruce Jenner’s face.

To fit any sort of meaning in the character-limit, twits (pun intended) have to be inventive and make up words, much like Shakespeare made up some of his. LOL, ROTFL, FTW, IDK. Since Shakespeare’s time, there has never been so much significance in so few letters. The abbreviations and shortened words convey meanings both literal and figurative. Well, figurative in that they may be talking about someone else’s body figure, as people often do on Twitter.

The Chinese were able to put years of significance and wisdom into single characters in their languages, and now they are taking over our economy, industry, and culture. American teenagers are now doing thousands of years of character condensing catch-up on Twitter with abbreviations. And they are succeeding.

Already so many abbreviations come from Shakespeare’s greatest works. His play Julius Ceaser is JC or “just chillin’” or “Jesus Christ” in youth speak. The play King John (KJ) is JK (just kidding) backwards. The Tempest is TT, which also stands for “Big Tease.” And some of his most famous tragedies arranged in a certain order: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth can be abbreviated as JHOM or “just helping out my…”

As I see my peers use more of their own words and grammar, I can’t help but boast that we are the most creative and developed writing generation. Maybe one day, we can condense the many ideas and significances of words into a single character. At that point, our generation will have conquered, I mean mastered, the English language.

As Shakespeare once wrote in the play King Henry IV Pt.2, “Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high.” So shall the Twitter bird and the young man of today climb higher than ever before in the English language.

Academics (people who live in their own feces or, what they call, their own ideas) respect Shakespeare for his ability to question and express the essence of human nature. He asked the tough questions. But one question that would not have been tough for Shakespeare is “To tweet, or not to tweet.” He easily would have answered with a resounding “Tweet FTW (for the win).”

Almtz13@aol.com

It is early in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving and the house is in moderate disarray from a family gathering of 14 happy souls.

There are still dishes in the sink and the dining room remains almost as they had left it with chairs pushed back from the table, orange and lavender petals from a bouquet scattered on the linen table cloth, glasses with traces of wine here and there.

All of this will be taken care of as the day progresses. The dishes will be washed and put away and the dining room restored to its orderly condition. The household will settle into its normal routine.

But this isn’t on my mind as I stand with a cup of coffee looking over the rooms where family had gathered only hours ago. I can still hear the echoes of conversation, trails of laughter, shards of stories traded back and forth across the table.

Our extended family is a gregarious mix of retired teachers, a retired milkman, a financier, a gifted young artist, an entrepreneur, an aspiring musician, students, a baby, a park worker and the wives who keep it all together.
As I stand near the table recreating the sounds and images of yesterday I see my wife, the vibrant Cinelli, basting the turkey, mixing the dressing, finishing the glorious pumpkin pies and organizing the additions that others have brought to the dinner.

She smiles as she works, happy to have this day, happy to have this family, happy to have all of us winning the struggle to survive during a difficult time in America, thinking of a daughter who didn’t live for this day, pushing ahead through pain and memory for the joy of others.

She is a remarkable woman who paints and writes poetry as gracefully as she serves up a gourmet dinner, as willingly as she keeps our household running, as artfully as she juggles our finances, as patiently as she keeps her grouchy, unstable husband plunging forward.

Conversations of the day before remain in the room, this pleasant room, and while they vary in content, there remains a compelling toast to those who Occupy Wall Street from Oakland to New York,  mounting a velvet revolution against greed, corruption and the ruthless quest for power that has tarnished the very soul of America.

I realize as I stand with a cup of coffee in hand considering the glory of family on a day of thanksgiving that we are a cross-section of Americana and our voices are rising to right the wrongs and to bring equality back to a nation off balance.

This is what I have to say today as morning rises over the mountains and the valleys of L.A. We are a happy people, grateful for what we have but challenging the status quo. Like the character from the 1976 movie “Network,” we’re madder than hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

It’s the bottom line on this day after Thanksgiving.

Almtz13@aol.com

Autumn is the sweetest time of the year, a hesitation between seasons that allows the mind to wander many trails.

The days grow cool in autumn as a mist spreads down from the mountains like a bridal veil, and stars strew the night skies with a multiplicity of diamonds.

Summer taxes the soul with its tyranny of heat and winter passes without noticeable change unless the rains come in drenching torrents, but autumn colors the trees and adds gold to the fields.

Autumn is a quiet time.

I realize as I sit in our gazebo facing the somber moments of my life that there is a melancholy nature to the stillness of the morning. I find myself in a month of Remember, gazing past the oak trees and chaparral to the place where images appear in kaleidoscopic substance, reassembling the past.

I see our daughter Cindy in the last seconds of her life, our entire family gathered at her bedside, saying goodbye in our individual ways. I see myself leaning down to kiss her forehead and I hear the whispery sobbing of her sister.

I imagine Cindy walking away, trailed by her life, free of the cancer that eroded her physiology.

She died at 1:25 on the morning of March 29th. It will forever haunt me that on the afternoon of her death there was a loud banging in the room, enough to shake the house, a thumping four times somewhere on the roof or around us or everywhere.

We all heard it and tried to find a reasonable source but there was none. I’ve had other spooky moments, but this was beyond explanation. The fact that there were four thumps reminded me that I used to joke with Cindy in the silliness of our rapport that the answer to anything was always four. And I wonder now if somewhere she was granted ethereal time to acknowledge that.

If there is a substance to the notion of spiritual contact it might have occurred then. And while you will not find me chanting and banging tambourines, you will find me staring and wondering.

Autumn makes one more aware of nature, of things that grow and things that live, a cycle in the seasons that calls upon us to remember that we are all interlocking pieces of the universe, each depending on the other for our existence.

Flowers that avoid the ebullience of spring bloom in the graying tones of an autumn morning, and small animals scurry through the shrubbery, animated by an instinct that is almost a dance to the shortening days of the year’s fading months.

There is life everywhere in autumn and music too if you listen carefully, emerging from a hum that is the foley of film-makers, the background sounds that affirm life’s vitality: the murmur of traffic floating up from the boulevard, the barking of a dog, the flutter of birds, the distant voices of humanity fragmented and reassembled in the misty air.

I guess I am this way today because a week ago I became suddenly disconnected with my life, not knowing where I was or why and being told later that I had probably suffered a minor stroke. With that, a bad heart and a lung disease called COPD I am abruptly aware of my own mortality. I suck in life like energy through a straw and rise to remember how much beauty is contained in its essence.

Autumn is the mother of seasons, and I am one of its children.

Almtz13@aol.com

To those who know San Francisco it should come as no surprise that certain of its citizens are rising up to fight a proposed ordinance that would regulate public nudity.


The law would not say that you cannot stroll down Market Street naked or that you cannot ride your bicycle through Golden Gate Park wearing only the skin that God gave you.

It only says that you must have on clothes to dine in one of the city’s restaurants and that you must put down a towel or something similar before sitting naked on public benches.

Naturally these kinds of restrictions have everyone upset, especially in the Castro District from whence most peculiar resentments emerge. So what did they do in protest to the proposed law? They took off their clothes.

I cannot imagine a city of naked people riding cable cars, hailing taxes, visiting art museums, shopping for food and clothing or dragging their bare-assed little children through Fisherman’s Wharf or to matinee features of naked penguins and dolphins.

But some of them apparently did to maintain their right to display their rolls of fat and hairy bodies in public if they want to.

This, I am pleased to say, could never happen in Los Angeles County. We have no tolerance for nudity except under certain conditions, such as showering or sleeping, although we do allow a good deal of leeway with whom you sleep or shower.

Our laws, once fairly lax on nudity at certain beaches, now forbid public exposure of one’s “genitals, vulva, pubis, pubic symphysis, pubic hair, buttocks, natal cleft, perineum” and so on. They similarly forbid women from exposing their breasts “at or below the upper edge of the areola.”

I mentioned this to a friend and he said he didn’t think he had a perineum. He recalled that it had become infected and was removed during a surgical procedure some years before. He must have been thinking about his gall bladder or appendix because the perineum is generally not removable. I can’t get too specific here but it is located, well, down there, where permanency abides.

Additionally, If there’s a danger of exposing your symphysis or areola you might want to look them up first.

Most among my acquaintances dismissed the hullabaloo as being typically San Francisco and unworthy of discussion, while some shuddered at the idea of school rooms filled with naked teenagers. One or two would not like to see ugly nude people sashaying about because it would be offensive or naked beautiful people because it would make them jealous.

I have removed most of my clothing while writing this column in order to convey a kind of existential essence of nudity, although I continue to wear a T-shirt and gym socks against the morning chill. I must say there’s a certain freedom of expression to be thus unencumbered with underwear and Levis, but not to worry. I’ll never leave the house without my shoes.

Almtz13@aol.com

This is the story of chubby little Kimberly Warren who got so fat she sat on a toilet seat and broke it, and the toilet seat bit her when the crack closed on a portion of her ample posterior.

It was, in addition to the shock of being thus abused by her own toilet, an epiphany, one of those flashes of divine light that allows a person to either see visions of the Virgin Mary or truths of self-realization.

In Kim’s case she struggled free from the toilet with a bruise on her butt and said to herself, “I’m too fat.” She went on to diet, lost 100 pounds and now she is probably too skinny and will fall into the toilet someday and be flushed away.

I bring this story to you from an AOL site concerned with healthy living in order to engage you in a brief conversation about fat people in the Valley. Ever since I saw a story on the front page of this newspaper relative to the problem of obesity in America I have become conscious of the waddlers among us.

I talked about it so much at home that my wife has put me on a diet. She purchased a large blender and now grinds up fruits and vegetable into a liquid form for me to drink as dinner every other night.  I have lost five pounds, which isn’t much, but it is enough for me to be able to sit on the toilet with impunity.

But enough about commodes.

The reason you are fat, I have learned, is that eating is one of three activities that releases dopamine in the brain, the chemical emitted during pleasurable activities. The other two are sex and music.  Some men double up by humming when they eat, which is my habit and it annoys hell out of my wife, and others increase their sexual activities, each act of which is said to burn 150 calories if you do it right, more if you’re innovative.

An article in the National Enquirer, the people’s newspaper, reported that Paula Abdul had dieted down to a scary 97 pounds and has become something of a poster girl for those who, over-dieting, are gradually becoming nothing more than sticks with enhanced breasts and then disappearing completely so there is nothing there at all but a speck of dust where they once posed in their bikinis.

I have spent the last week preparing for this article by observing fat people releasing their dopamine by eating.  They either stuff huge loads of food into their mouths as a way of declaring fat pride or pick at tiny salads to please their observers, and then go home and down a pot roast.

If the problem of obesity continues, I suggest that we minimize food and become advocates of sex on trampolines which would release dopamine and burn off large amounts of calories at the same time. Music is optional, but a little rock and roll wouldn’t hurt.

Almtz13@aol.com

Night quickened into a golden morning on the day Cindy died.

It glowed over the still dampened leaves of the oak trees in our yard and reflected off the windows of the house.

Days of rain had ceased but the world continued to glisten with an afterthought of the storms that had shrouded us for what seemed an eternity.

Our extended family of 12 took turns standing around our Cindy’s bedside and watching her struggle for life with short, shallow breaths and then at last sigh and settle gracefully into her dreams.

For days she had been in a semi-conscious state, awakening long enough to whisper her pleasures and annoyances in words we had to lean closer to hear, but the disease that was taking her life would not even allow her that, and she drifted into a coma.

Her full name was Cinthia Louise. She was 59, born in May, 1951, just two months after I had been shipped out by the Marines to fight in the Korean War. When I came home on a rainy night in San Francisco she was handed to me by my wife Joanne who said simply, “Meet your daughter.”

She was our first born, to be followed by another daughter, Linda, and a son, Allen. Like her father, she was often defiant and willful but also possessed a wicked sense of humor and could laugh out loud even when the joke was on her.
Two and a half years ago after a routine colonoscopy she was told by an oncologist at Sacramento’s Kaiser Hospital that she had inoperable cancer of the liver and her days were limited. It stunned us all. We began asking why her?

Cindy had never smoked and only drank alcoholic beverages in moderation. She lived alone in her roomy apartment with three cats she dearly loved, not far from her boyfriend’s home. While she didn’t exactly live on a diet of spinach and carrots, neither did she limit herself to Fatburgers and candy bars. Her culinary choices lay somewhere in between.

A polished photographer, she was creative in many ways, working with colorful tiles to fashion designs and scenes on table tops and walls, and crocheting wall hangings for special days. On one of them was written her version of a Biblical passage: “There is a time to be born and a time to die and a season for every activity under the heavens.”
Cindy loved “fun times” as she called them and managed to work them in between a full time job with Sacramento County and reading half the night. Books became her real world as she unraveled the mysteries of her life. All the rest was fantasy.

We are planning a memorial service in April to say the formal kinds of goodbye to a child-woman who lived and died as time determined, but she will exist until the end of my days at a place in memory where there are no tears and where one never has to say goodbye.

It was one of those nights when someone passing through the canyon says to himself, “I want to live here.” That usually comes about when the Valley’s too hot and the ocean too foggy and Topanga exists in weather of its own, remembering the cool of winter but anticipating summer.

But it wasn’t just the meteorological biome that made the night special. I don’t even recall what the temperature was, actually, only that we wore light jackets and weren’t too cold or too warm. What intrigued me was all of it put together, Topanga, a non-intrusive crescent moon and jazz.

It was one of those moments you remember in some detail even though you might forget your cat’s name and your wife’s birthday. You walk into a place, the Canyon Bistro in this case, and there’s a guy in the corner riffing on an electric guitar making magic to an almost empty outdoor seating area.

That’s what we walked into the other night at the Bistro, and I have to tell you that I got into a mellow mood real fast listening to him. Jazz is the kind of music that talks to you and I was hearing it say let go, relax, soar with the sound to a place you’ve never been on a night that never was.

The man doing all this to me on this perfect night was a jazz guitarist who calls himself Edwing. He was sitting on the floor against a wall impassively plucking at the instrument, its echo lingering over a small Wednesday night crowd as friends at a nearby table listened with the kind of attentiveness just naturally paid to a master. One of the friends was Yvonne Butler, a woman in a bright yellow, wide brimmed summer hat and yellow summer smock, a vocalist who has sung with the Edwing Trio, and who sang on this night.

We came in a group—my wife, Cinelli, and two daughters, Cindy and Linda—to have dinner and weren’t anticipating music with the food and good wine. Larry Cohn’s dinners stand alone as far as I’m concerned and we go there often. But I’ve never been there on a jazz night. It was an added incentive to mellow out and be transported to one of those mystical places of memory that jazz can evoke.

I was listening to Edwing riff idly but intensively which is where all bravura performances are born, with both ease and concentration that transcends the moment, making it special. He suddenly seemed to pull away from wandering through the chords and began playing “As Time Goes By.” If there’s one piece of music in the world that will carry me through a thousand memories, it’s that one. I can get positively dreamy listening to it and remembering a rainy night in San Francisco when Cinelli and I were young and the future was unrolling like a scroll of time.

Edwing played other pieces that evening, like “Misty” and “The More I See You,” as the last of the heavy traffic faded on the boulevard, leaving the night to music, but it was “As Time Goes By” that got to me. That stormy night in San Francisco found us in a club called Blackhawk awaiting the arrival of Billie Holiday. She didn’t show up when she was supposed to and the place was almost empty when she finally did. Only Cinelli and I and a couple of friends were hanging in there listening to Cal Tjader on vibes filling in.

Finally, like two hours late, Holiday wandered in through a side door half stoned, her hair and clothing damp. One could only guess what she’d been doing. She didn’t say a word, but just stood at the mike and began singing like a little girl in pain, which maybe she was. She sang steadily for what seemed like half of the remaining night, but it was the tune from “Casablanca” that remains all these years later, evoking perfect visions of the City long ago.

So I want to thank Larry Cohn for having Edwing and Butler at the Bistro, he graying and pony tailed, she in dazzling yellow. They provided the stimulus to lose myself for a moment under the stars, with music as sweet as honey in hot tea and that silly little crescent moon shining bravely in a windless Topanga sky.

Almtz13@aol.com

There’s a darkness over the world, one of those periodic cycles of woe that has everyone edgy and nations unpredictable. I’m beginning to feel like a guy I used to know in Oakland who walked around under a dark cloud like the cartoon character Joe Btfsplk, living a life of grim expectations. Ask him what the trouble was and he’d say “Everything,” which caused the rest of us to fall into his gloomy state, anticipating the worst, hunched over and sad.

Well everything does seems to be the matter today. That oil spill tops it all off for the moment, spreading a gummy mess through the Gulf of Mexico, polluting the sandy shores and threatening the wildlife. But then there’s that Iceland volcano too sending up clouds of smoke so thick you can’t fly through the damned stuff. The essentials in peril.

Periodic earthquakes up and down the west coast and elsewhere in the world, tornadoes in the Midwest, a recession throughout the land, hatred in Arizona, a bunch of banjo-plucking protestors who call themselves the Tea Party following an emptiness like Sarah Palin to, by God, set things right, and layoffs in L.A. that are going to send hundreds more shell-shocked jobless people to the bread lines.

What’s going on here?

Even fun places like Greece and Italy and maybe Spain that no one takes seriously in the economic strata are causing money problems and what about that nut who pushed the wrong button on Wall Street and sent our own stock market into what they’re calling a flash crash? A chef is charged with trying to hire homeless guys to kill his wife and the mother of a dead girl visits the guy in jail who killed her daughter and says she forgives him.

What? Huh?

Everything Is out of synch. The music’s wrong, the words don’t scan, the beat is erratic. One expects that at any minute Godzilla will rise out of the sea and we’ll all run screaming like the Japanese in Tokyo, dashing blindly through the Ginza, but in L.A. it’ll be down Sunset Boulevard or Broadway in New York, depending on whether the monster rises in the Atlantic or the Pacific. He’ll eat us all.

The feeling of doom is one I can’t shake. Forget the war, that’s penny ante horror compared to everything else that’s going wrong and could go wrong. Our troubles are in the core of the Earth and in the very atmosphere we breathe and no one seems to know what to do about them. We blame each other, we blame God or government, we blame nature, fate, kismet and the radiation we’ve loosed in the air, and the acid rain falling on our heads.

Yesterday the cat bit me. It was a big bite for no good reason and it drew blood. Great, I’ve got a bad heart, bad lungs and a convulsive stomach but I’m going to die of cat fever like some kind of small prey that wiggles into stillness in the last painful moments of life, screaming beyond our ability to hear, a wee cry into eternity.

“You’re just lumping all of the bad things together, which makes the world look terrible and life as bleak as the face of the moon,” my wife says. “It is bleak,” I say, “even my fish are dying. I had six in the tank and now I’ve just got that one scrawny thing staring out at me. He knows, the fish knows, but the fish aren’t saying.”

She used to say that bad things happened in threes. The refrigerator would stop working, the dryer would break down and the car wouldn’t start. Now it’s in far greater multiples, affecting everything around us, damaging our auras and dimming our electrolytes.

Then I look out the window. The rain has stopped. Drops of water glisten on the new green of the oak trees. The world glistens. OK, I say to myself, the oil still leaks, the volcano still rumbles and the wind blows evil circles through the cities and the farmlands, but there’s sunlight too.

Cling to the brighter things, I say with a will. Let a little light shine in.

Almtz13@aol.com