Before ten years ago, we never knew we had pin cherries. It was only after the pines began to fade from age and drought, that the little stand of trees took root. After we saw them we noticed the tall sinuous parent tree to the east, one we had remarked for its trunk shape but never knew by name.

The way they told us was their blossoms in the spring, shed in white flurries like a second snow when the wind came in over the lake from the south. Their deep copper bark contrasts beautifully with their early chartreuse foliage and that of the maples and juneberries nearby.

We should have known they were there, downhill from our vegetable garden, waiting in soil created from forest duff on top of sand left by glaciers, but we never saw them until the blossoms came.

Pin cherries like cold climates, grow like weeds and die early. They take no chances on reproduction, spreading both by birds who devour their berries and by sending roots beneath the soil to the next open spot of sun and rain they can pop up to meet.

Besides being more pit than pulp, they are related to roses, I found out. Also to juneberries, chokecherries, black cherries and raspberries, all of which grow wild in our untended woods.

Good travels, pin cherries. Find a niche, stick with it, make yourselves useful. Enjoy the company of others, all of us here for a little while.

It was darkness in springtime, with orange blossoms. The Spanish understood it, especially the Greek, the one who painted as if with his brush he were feeling the bones.

Seville turned silent as the procession passed, folds of Christ’s cloak carved in wood, black with age, moving through the smell of rosemary above the costalares straining beneath their floats, weightlifters shuffling in cells of night with the bugle dirge behind them, until a tap on the pavement told them to take one more step, to set down the load bearing on their necks through soaked towels, to rest.

It was raining bombs that spring on Belgrade, and fear on Kosovo. Albanian Kosovars lined up at the Albanian border and at Macedonia, all the borders they could get to, miles of them, to get away, to get anywhere away from the slaughter. They went toward hope, for without hope the darkness is too powerful, the darkness wins. They straggled into borders, miles of people, some of them partial, some whole, some angry, some gone already.

South of Seville in Ronda also there was rosemary, bitter and resinous in the evening, people holding a sprig next to their heart as the float passed, the float of Hermandad del Santisimo Cristo de la Sangre y Nuestra Senora del Mayor Dolor, the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Christ of the Blood and Our Lady of the Greatest Pain.

They were not thinking of Albanian blood when they carved into the signal bell of their float in Ronda the name of their brotherhood. They were not thinking of Kosovars when they wrote their names on the chart of lifting positions for the raising of their float at the signal of its bell. They were thinking of the blood of Christ, of the blue veil of the Virgin floating above them in the scented night, of the sound of shuffling feet in every Spanish town this Semana Santa, this Holy Week in the Year of our Lord 1999.

The Christ died doing what he loved, convincing people of possibility. Others who saw perfection differently took his life, as did the bull which gored Manolete of Cordoba. The people loved Manolete too, for his artistry in the ring, but he worked in a way different from the Christ of Nazareth’s way, until the end when they each drew the bull close.

His spirit, Manolete’s, is still inside the replica of his tomb in his home town, on the second floor of the bullfight museum in Cordoba. You can go there and see for yourself, white marble.

In the procession of Semana Santa the brotherhoods march as penitentes, robed and hooded, barefoot and chained, dragging behind them links of iron scraped bright on the pavement. Satin cloaks and hoods bear emblems of their order, sewn-on mandalas, designs hundreds of years old.

It is a matter of fasting the next day if you are a penitente. If you are a young one, your mother will feed you a sandwich just before midnight. It is important that the procession be done late in the evening, arriving at your neighborhood church about three in the morning, because in daylight the reflections are wrong. The floats and hoods and capes and chains are made to reflect the light of candles, not of the sun. People lining the procession route expect this. They are silent and serious through the week until on Easter morning everything changes and the processions take place against the whiteness of the orange blossoms, in the light of a new spring.

Perhaps this is how Manolete will arise one day. We will be in the procession straining under our load, shuffling toward the thump of the marshal’s staff on the pavement, setting down at last the wooden crossbeam from our shoulders to crouch, to rest. And then Manolete will appear at the end of the next block, his mother standing beside us wiping away her tears in the joy of his arising from the marble box on the second floor of the house in Cordoba, the beautiful marble box lifted above the street as we lift the Christ on our shoulders.

Then he, Manolete, will lead us to the border. It is there that we will care for the woman from Kosovo, for her child and for her neighbor, the one with vacant eyes, the one who has not spoken a word.

We head for Victoria, where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of petroglyphs, according to an excursion brochure. It doesn’t say whether these are incised or painted on the rocks, only that they mark a prehistoric shamanic site.

The brochure gives a phone number to call for bus tour reservations. We figure we can find the place on our own.

“We” are Carolyn, our friends Bill and Sally and myself, driving through Mexico’s central highlands in northern Guanajuato on a day trip from San Miguel de Allende. A few hours’ drive on MEX 110 and we find Victoria, pulling up to a food vendor’s station fronting a dusty parking lot.

There are no signs reading TO PETROGLYPHS, which seems odd to me, considering this is an attraction big enough to draw bus tours. I approach a white-haired man wearing a straw hat and brown jacket, sitting in the shade of the food cart umbrella.

“Donde esta petroglyphs?” I try.

A polite but quizzical smile. Friendly enough guy.

I try again. No luck. A few onlookers converge.

“Inglese?”  Someone goes into a shop for a younger woman said to speak English. We are becoming a project. The woman with reputed “Inglese” skills appears.

“Petroglyphs?” I try again. She nods, barely perceptibly, but enough that I become convinced she understands.

I wish I were quick enough to try a Spanish construction rather than to continue repeating “petroglyphs” derived from Greek. “Rock paintings“ might help, but I can’t remember the Spanish word for paintings, my dictionary is back in San Miguel and I don’t know the word for rock, either.

She points down the street confidently, her wrist cocked toward the left. Perfect.

A white pickup with lights on top and SEGURIDAD POLICIA on the side stops alongside us, engine running. We wonder if there is a problem somewhere in Victoria, but move on toward our rental car parked facing south.

Nosing down the street, we take the left turn. The adobes get lower and there is less paint on the storefronts.  Pleasant-looking people walk past rangy dogs as we inch over topes, concrete speed bump sof varying height and width. Still no signs for petroglyphs, only for various brands of Mexican beer, and we are getting further out of town.

For some reason I glance in the rear-view mirror and see the white truck with colored lights following us at a distance which is gradually closing. Finally, it is directly behind, matching our speed precisely. Bill and I agree we should pull over. This might be the time, I am guessing, to deploy the U.S. dollars I have carried folded in a ready spot for the last five weeks in Mexico on the advice of guidebooks.

We watch in silence as the truck pulls slowly alongside. Two teenagers riding with the thirty-something uniformed driver roll down their window. He calls a question toward us across the teenagers.

We roll down our window too, and ask him our now-standard petroglyph question.

He starts his own questions over again.

Nothing is working. He pulls ahead of us and gets out of the truck. This would be a really good time, I think to myself, to know Spanish.

Somehow, I don’t get the feeling we are in trouble, at least legal trouble. He is smiling, jovial. Despite his black shirt and sunglasses, I don’t feel really threatened.

I get out of the car and meet him halfway. We need room to use hand signs, to see each other’s face and body language, to hear syllables watching them come out of somebody’s mind. He shakes my right hand and claps me on the shoulder with his left in sort of a half hug. This must be a comfortable distance for him but it isn’t for me, a Wisconsinite talking to police in the middle of a Mexican road.

“Buenas tardes,” from both of us. Good afternoon.

He goes on with a few words in English, enough to let me know he wants to help us find our destination. Which was…what, exactly?

“Petroglyphs.”

I try out a normal sentence slowed to a crawl. “We –– heard –– there –– are — some — near — here.”

His smile is unbroken. He doesn’t nod.

We both sense the language game is up.

He apologizes for his minimal English. In Spanish. 

I do the same for my Spanish. In English.

Only one thing remains to do, which is to deliver his entire plan in Spanish and hope for the best. English is out of the question. It is time for real communication, not dancing around the obvious in a foreign language, i.e. mine.

We are getting ourselves lost; he knows it and we know it. The only thing he is not sure about is where we are getting lost going to.

I pick up “Inglese” and “Presidencia.” His arms swoop through the warm dry air as if drawing our car toward his truck. Clearly, we are to follow.

OK, so maybe we are in trouble. But he’s not pulling out a notebook or a clipboard, anything with paper on it, not even a little pad of triplicate forms. Nobody has started to remove our license plates.

The buildings get sturdier and more painted the further we follow him back into town. I feel like a police trophy as our car creeps along behind his truck, rising and falling over the topes.

Suddenly a quiet green space opens up in front of us. Trees. A fountain.

He stops the truck and indicates where we should park.  Sally and Carolyn wait with the car while Bill and I follow him along a red-clay tiled portico edging the Jardin, an oasis of trees and flowers.

From an office in the wall the cop produces a man in a pressed white shirt wearing chrome-rimmed glasses. A picture ID reading ADMINISTRACION across the top hangs from his shirt pocket.

“Inglese!” announces the triumphant policeman, nodding at our newest resource. The administrator feels his English skills have been oversold.

“No Inglese,” he disclaims.

I wait, hoping.

“Go there,” he begins, pointing along one side of the Jardin, pushing his hand forward and to the right, looking at me for confirmation of understanding. I nod.

When his directing finger crosses the edge of a cerulean house he stops. We both know my comprehension of any further routing advice will be nil. If it cannot be seen, we cannot be directed to it.

“Casa azul?” I try, assuming the blue house is where we are to turn out of town. Then what?

“Si, si.” He seems satisfied with the extent of our conversation. Everybody is nodding now. He moves back toward his office. He and the cop exchange a couple of words. The cop points at the floor.

“Aqui.” Right here, this spot.

“Wait two minutes,” in English.

He raises a finger toward the portico ceiling. It will not be long now. They disappear into the office.

This must be the Presidencia, I think to myself.  Presidencia must mean “city hall.” 

Bill drifts toward the end of the portico where an ancient man sits on a folded blanket leaning against the white stucco wall. He is selling peanuts, skinny grayish-husked ones, from a rolled-down burlap bag. The man offers him some. Street peanuts? Maybe we are over-cautious. Maybe another time.

“Gracias.” Bill backs off, ambling toward the cluster of people which has now formed outside the administrator’s office, our situation turning into a mix of hospitality challenge and entertainment del dia.

The word “guia” comes up. I realize from having seen the word on the cover of our road map, part of the GUIA ROJI series, that we are on the verge of getting an English-speaking guide.

The cop strides confidently out of the city office followed by the administrator, drawing on all the English they have between them.

To my surprise, a few Spanish words filter out of my mouth as though I had actually planned them. I imagine my Spanish teacher pushing a recall button.

At last I gather they have phoned someone who they know speaks English and who also knows where the petroglyphs are. Unfortunately, that guia Inglese is “no disponible,” but an alternate solution is at hand.

Both of them turn toward a casually smiling bystander next to us. Graying curly hair sticks out below his eggshell-white straw hat. I make drawing movements on the wall and raise my eyebrows.

“Si, si.”He nods. We are on track.

The cop’s job done, he places his hand reassuringly for us on the man’s shoulder, smiling continuously and shaking our hands. He has saved himself a huge problem, i.e. us, driving our dust-covered Neon out of Victoria toward a destination he knows we cannot find and from the vicinity of which he would have to retrieve us come darkness, lost without water.

Happy guy, back to cruising the streets of Victoria.

Our guide sits mute in the front passenger seat, pointing at places to turn when they come up. We are unsure of how much English he knows, though he has not given evidence of understanding a syllable. We are lucky, we say to each other, to have made it even this far; this whole episode will be a high point of the trip. We begin chattering and laughing.

At one point our guia glances toward Bill and I wonder again if he is picking up our conversation. I decide to test with some Spanish words about the beautiful countryside. No response from our guide, though my attempt silences the others.

The asphalt road, narrow but in good shape, straightens out past freshly plowed garden-size fields. A few thin brown cattle graze shrubby vegetation near a couple of wells, one with a galvanized tub perched next to the bucket rope as a watering trough.

Just as Bill begins to speed up, our guide abruptly pumps his open hands toward the floor and points off the left side of the road to a dirt track.

Swerving off the blacktop, we bounce along the track toward a hill of globular camel-colored rocks, passing beneath formations that seem ready to roll off onto us. We park beneath a mesquite tree, its new leaves feathery and chartreuse.

At the base of the hill, our guide points to some faded dark red stick people painted on rocks. We are in the right place.

He talks briefly to a boy tending a dozen goats. The boy points upward behind where he is sitting. The guide, in dusty black leather walking shoes, leads us up the hill springing from rock to rock, eyes alert in an angular face above a grizzled stubble.

Are these the works of his ancestors, I wonder? Does he even know? How would we start that discussion when we can’t even ask for directions?

He points out figure after figure, some human, some deer-like, some abstract. All of reddish-brown pigment, some nearly worn away. Others are so arrestingly fresh we begin suggesting to each other that the goatherd may have developed an interest in creative pictography.

In a narrow shady gap between enormous rocks two scorpion images nearly ten inches long crawl directly in front of my face when I edge into the crevice. The images are so lifelike I abruptly look down at the sandy floor. No scorpions. (OK, breathe).

Then there is the sun painting. About nine inches wide, it is a set of centrifugal finger strokes of red paint radiating from the rim of a solid red circle.

The guide talks quickly now, repeating brief phrases two or three times and looking at us when he finishes.

We can understand barely a thing, yet he makes the same intuitive leap we did in English, that by simply repeating a statement often enough, its meaning will eventually become obvious to someone who doesn’t understand the language. It’s fair; we had tried Spanish and given him hope.

Actually, it is productive. I begin picking up words, as does Carolyn. We have just finished ten Spanish lessons at the Academia Hispano Americana in San Miguel de Allende. Eleven would have been better.

“Veinte uno Marzo,” we hear, and “Primavera.” 

March the 21^st, and Spring.

Could this be an equinox observation site? The sun painting would fit.

“Si, si,” he nods vigorously as I repeat the date.  Maybe I was getting it.

“Muy gente.” He points to the top of the hill above us. Many people, I think he is saying, come to this spot to observe the spring equinox.

“Mas?”  He holds his right index and middle fingers vertically, pointing upward at his own eyes. He indicates higher up the hill; he points across the flats to another set of hills a mile off which look identical to the one on which we are standing.

We pause to converse among ourselves. How many pictographs do we really want to see? How long will it take to get home? How much daylight is left? We have another stop to make, the ghost town at Mineral de Pozos.

We decide we have seen what we came for.

“No mas,” I say, “llegamos San Miguel.”  “No more; we arrive San Miguel.” How weird, but it’s the only vocabulary I have. Bill points to his watch and makes steering movements. The guide nods once, his head lowered slightly.

Back at the car, we reconsider whether we are missing something besides several thousand more rock paintings by leaving now. We leave anyway.

(Weeks later, we learn that two thousand people come here from all over the world at the spring equinox to watch the rising sun appear through a uniquely situated rock cleft, above which lies the triangular hewn tomb of a prehistoric chief, both at the top of the hill on which we were standing).

Scraping bottom, Bill swings the car onto the pavement and we head back into Victoria. Not that small a town, as it turns out. Three vehicles line up behind where we initially pull over to release our guide.

A traffic cop in a brown uniform moves us ahead a few yards, out of the way.  We ask the guide to stay “una momento” and I fish some money out of Carolyn’s purse.

He declines it, “No, no.” I point in the direction of a Corona label painted on the building where we had first stopped for directions.

“Cervezas,” I say, nodding toward the beer ad. He smiles, accepting the pesos.

“Gracias.” We shake hands and part.

Several steps toward the car, I look backward for a last glance.

So does he.

 

The entrance at Abbesses in a little Montmartre park is sheltered by one of the last verdigris iron-and-glass structures built after the Paris Metro system opened in 1900. Occasional saxophone notes well upward on humid air as Carolyn and I descend a counterclockwise stairway lined with paintings on walls and ceiling, each artist having claimed a length of tunnel and free rein. Suddenly we are on the platform, looking across a concrete moat of blackened crushed stone and silvery tracks into the noncommittal faces of people awaiting the opposite train.

Our train comes and we take seats near the middle door. Across the car a dark-haired woman, early forties maybe, in a rust skirt and black sweater, weeps quietly. Two small black and brown dogs nuzzle her hands. She dabs at her face with a scalloped white handkerchief.

A graying man slides into a seat at the next stop carrying a transparent plastic bag filled with huge bunches of radishes, the long ones with rosy tops and white tips called in the United States “French Breakfast.”  Droplets of water inside the bag reflect overhead lights in the Metro car. I can nearly taste the radishes through the plastic.

He seems a comfortable sort, loose black jacket left from some dress suit, a gray sweater, green pants, sturdy shoes, nothing really matching. Three stops later he is off, at Notre Dame-de-Lorette, by the neighborhood church.

We reach Musee D’Orsay and the Impressionists, and later Musee Marmottan, a smaller exhibition focused on Monet’s paintings of his home and garden in Giverny. A hundred years after their time, he and his friends bring their immediacy of vision to a society undergoing fundamental change, this time ours during the Information Age, theirs the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps if we saw things as they did, we could see fresh ideas in places to which we have grown accustomed.

On Line 12 back to Montmartre, facing us, a young man hunches forward, looking out the window, serious. His short black hair is freshly groomed with shiny wax, little clusters of hair sticking together in an array across his forehead. A friend getting on pulls a movie advertisement from his backpack. They point to action scenes, rocking and grinning. The first youth’s movements are less spontaneous; his face never really opens up, even to his friend. They leave together.

We exit the Metro at Abbesses, looking over our shoulders at a rumbling idea made of shapes and smells, colors and movement, actions and lives, whooshing through a steel and concrete net. Not far, come to think of it, from how the Impressionists saw their world.

 

 

 

 

In a gallery next to Bamboo Temple in Kunming, an artist said to be eighty-five years old asks us to write our names on a slip of paper. Brushing calligraphy for us on a sheet spread out in front of him, he adds a gender title and copies the English letters onto the painting below a red chop mark.

 Ms. CAROLYN. He inserts the letters vertically, on the right.

 Another column goes in below, Mr. JIM.

Our names look desperately out of place, chunks of Roman alphabet next to swirls of calligraphy. Tacky, it seems to me; aggressive marketing. We have been taken to uncounted “museums” of this type, run by the 51% government interest of the People’s Republic of China. We decline making a “donation to the temple.”

Our guide steps in. Taking the rolled paper from the artist with a slight bow, he hands it to us, declaring that the old man appreciates the chance to meet someone from America.

I carry it around all day, feeling more and more imposed upon. Back in our hotel for the evening, I crumple the thing and toss it into the wastebasket.

But something keeps bothering me. If we got his age right, the elderly artist was born five years after the end of China’s final dynasty. He would have lived through the Domestic (1911-1949) and Cultural (1966-1976) Revolutions. Who knows what he endured as an artist? More mundanely, it may be one of the better examples of Chinese marketing we will come across.

I retrieve it from the basket. The paper is soft, yielding, ivory colored. It smooths easily under my hand on the little wooden desk in our room.

Four large brushed characters, luminous black, one above the other, centered on the page next to our vertical English names. It is as if the two of us are visiting a poem.

I go back to my notebook to find the guide’s translation, scribbled beneath my brief account of the visit: “Flowers need water, people need love.”

 

 

Niran is a busy guy.

When he took up golf, he built a putting green next to a manicured shrub with a trunk a foot thick. He says he doesn’t know how old the shrub is, just that he has to trim it every month.

Every morning we see him setting out flowers, some fruit and water at a little shrine in the corner of the yard. Niran says it’s dedicated to a local deity that he calls phi, the god of the land. As in where we’re standing.

The phi’s shrine sits on a pedestal next to a Buddhist one about the same size over by the satellite dish, opposite the shrub and putting green. Eventually we notice phi shrines everywhere, in the corners of lots around hotels, homes, stores, even gas stations.

Carolyn and I are in Thailand teaching conversational English. Our hosts Sunee and her husband Niran work in the local school system, Sunee in charge of teaching English to a thousand middle schoolers, Niran in administration.

We’re staying in a house next to theirs, one they occupied with their two daughters while Niran’s parents were still alive. There are still plastic glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of the room their daughters slept in. A low concrete block wall around both buildings keeps out stray dogs.

Today is Chinese New Year. The fireworks finished in the dark this morning before we went off to teach. Now we’re having dinner beneath the trees with Niran’s extended family, mosquito coils burning near our feet.

Some of the food looks like what we saw on a table in the yard when we left this morning: pieces of boiled chicken, pyramids of chocolate coconut cake wrapped in banana leaf, an open bottle of Singha beer and a dozen other dishes for deceased relatives to enjoy during the day. Everything was gone when we got back in the afternoon.

“Bad luck to break noodles,” Niran says, lifting a sheaf of them high in the air to clear the edge of the serving bowl before transferring them to our plates.

We are brand new to Asia. I look around for chopsticks. There aren’t any, just a bunch of spoons and forks. Everyone takes a pair; from there on it’s family style, diving into multiple dishes that keep coming.

Chopsticks, it turns out later, are for soup. Not all soup; just Chinese soup, in which you ladle out broth into a bowl and add the ingredients you choose, plucking them from a tray with chopsticks and drinking the broth from the bowl.

Maybe noodles are like family. Maybe that’s why it’s bad luck to reach over and cut them off when they drape uncomfortably from bowl to plate, when they seem difficult to arrange. Keeping noodles whole might somehow keep the family together. Sort of like setting out food for the phi and for your ancestors, then eating the leftovers. It’s probably just security — lines of family, noodles of relationships, under the watchful eye of the god of the land.

 

Ebeling Hardware as I remembered it had dark wood counters with open bins of nails and bolts, cabinets for small parts, a comfortable feeling of preparedness. When I stopped in after Christmas this year, high metal display racks filled the middle of the store, loaded with small appliances, home decorating hardware and cooking utensils, obscuring the checkout counter in the rear across from where the steps go down to the basement. They were into horses too, the plastic ones girls collect in the years before they get their first period, plus stuff for real horses. Just inside the front door, a life-size black and white fiberglass pinto stood fitted with a bridle and blanket.

On the left of a narrow aisle, across from reels of galvanized chain, a yellow cast metal road grader caught my eye. It was part of a fleet of miniature earthmoving equipment arranged in a glass-fronted cabinet. My grandson was into “diggers.” The grader would be perfect. They had just one left, amid tractors and wagons, dump trucks, backhoes and bulldozers, built-to-scale earth-expert machines in John Deere Green and the creamy yellow acquired by road machinery after long days in the sun.

A lady ahead of me at the counter was buying some shelf brackets. They had six inch and eight inch. She went for the eight inch.

“You can return them for the six inch if they’re not right.” The clerk dropped the brackets into a brown paper bag without a logo. “Do you have one of our new calendars?”

She was a sturdy woman with tightly curled dark hair, glasses and a blue apron that came up just short of the neck. The woman with the brackets had not gotten a new calendar. The clerk handed her a white envelope from a stack piled by the register.

Varnished dark wood ran along the edge of the Formica counter, past an aluminum scoop sticking out of a wide-mouth jar of glistening amber candy raisins, just like when I used to come here in the eighth grade. The woman with the new shelf brackets thanked the clerk and left, her calendar’s unsealed envelope flap hanging open.

I have to get one of those, I thought. I was betting on a picture for each month of the year, local scenes. I paid cash for the road grader, setting it on a patch of counter where beige had worn through to chocolate brown. Sure enough, she asked.

“Do you have one of our new calendars?” She gave me change for the road grader, handing me the calendar with a pleasant smile.

“Thanks,” I said. The envelope was snowy white, about an inch wider on each side than its contents whose edges were palpable through the paper. I turned around, sensing someone in line behind me.

Gerald had a fresh violet scar running down his cheek from his right temple to just above the jut of his jawbone. I hadn’t seen him for probably twenty years and hadn’t actually talked with him for forty. Other than the scar, he had the same angular sunburned face, the same quiet blue eyes beneath a black wool visor cap, its ear flaps tied up at the top in a small bow. Checkered flannel padding showed at the edges of his denim jacket.

“Hello, Gerald,” I said. The words came out gently, probably because I was surprised by his scar, so fresh. He moved his weight to the other leg and tapped it with a big gray rubberized flashlight he was holding, the kind that gets advertised as “weatherproof” and “heavy duty.”

“Doesn’t work.” He didn’t press the on/off button, just stood and waited. He said it as if either he did not remember me at all or I was so completely remembered that acknowledgement of my name was unnecessary.

Gerald wasn’t getting any younger. He couldn’t have expected to run into me. Maybe he never addressed anyone by name. I shook his hand. It was callused and warm. His eyes seemed searching above graying stubble.

The Ebeling on duty came over from the next aisle.

“This flashlight doesn’t work,” Gerald offered, holding it up, this time flicking the button on and off to show nothing happened.

“Let me have a look.” You could tell right away he was an Ebeling, round-faced, capable, with a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.

I nodded goodbye to Gerald and walked out the front of the store, my footsteps thunking over the wood between the coffeepots and racks of chain and rope to where the plastic horse gazed out across the blacktop road.

Late one afternoon forty years before, Gerald’s little brother Vernon got caught in a corn chopper. I never got over wondering how it must have been for him, a sixth grader yanking on stiff greenish-yellow stalks behind the orange tractor, feeling a sudden tug as the red conveyor of the machine gripped his sleeve and pulled him in, anticipating in lonely horror the clean surprise of knives before they took the ends of his fingers, then the knuckles, inching higher until his body blocked the influx, too large to enter the chute.

Ronny, a friend of Gerald’s, said Gerald told him that the day after it happened he walked out to the field where the tractor sat and began driving it toward the barn with its partial load of chopped corn. There was a spot in the woods he passed, an opening into which he could back the wagon and dump the load. I imagined it as a place where he stopped occasionally afterward, with the tractor turned off and blue sky overhead as the seasons went along, the load’s outline beneath red and gold maple leaves followed by the overlying snow becoming gradually smaller and after a few years melting nearly away, perhaps some stalks of corn growing in an unfamiliar place the first spring and after that, nothing.

I drove down the hill from Ebeling’s, the yellow road grader in its pasteboard and cellophane package on the passenger seat. I imagined how a person might go about starting up a hardware store these days. You’d probably need a theme, maybe a logo. The easiest might be to get a franchise and color code yourself (orange or red maybe, something powerful).

What isn’t usually in the picture these days is the basement underneath the store where you repair screens in the late winter, keep plumbing stuff for outcalls, listen to people walking on the creaky wood overhead while you cut and thread pipe. Still, you try to stock stuff people need and to be there when they come in for faucet parts, for packaged fasteners, for grass seed.

The problem with the color-coded model is that you don’t know the stories. You don’t end up being a place where people let down when they meet someone they know. You have to be efficient because it’s a big box and everybody has stuff they want to check out and push their cart across the parking lot to their car and leave the cart at the cart corral.

My father was the pastor of the village church a mile from the field where Vernon died. The police chief knew him, called him to the scene. I remember him saying the chief was crying. I could see it in my mind as if it were a movie I wasn’t supposed to be watching. It never went away.

The white envelope, propped on the seat behind the road grader, flopped forward when I turned onto the highway. I pulled over and slid out the calendar.

It’s quite a thing. There is only one picture, a southern Wisconsin scene but nobody’s place I recognize. It’s a photograph of a spring pasture with a dozen Black Angus cows and several calves, a bright red barn with a gray metal roof, a cobalt sky, a few puffy white clouds. It’s oddly pleasant, with newly leafed trees countering a dead elm by the creek and in the distance, a leftover windmill. Most of the cows stand head-deep in overpoweringly green grass between patches of yellow flowers. The calves look at the camera.

The whole calendar part is complex, very analog. The cows’ picture on the top half is actually the front panel of an envelope. A black string runs through little brass eyelets at the corners of the picture, so that when the calendar is hung on the wall you can tip the cows and their pasture forward, revealing the phrase “For Mail Storage” on the inside back of the envelope.

Each of the months on the bottom half is a separate sheet folded as a pocket. The dates are very easy to read with Sundays, federal and Christian holidays in red. There isn’t much space in the square around the number to write what you have to do that day.

On the pocket for each month in small letters it says, “For Bills and Receipts.” At the end of the month you can tear it off from the two staples holding the year together and start over.

I don’t think I’ll hang it up. I don’t really keep track of things in my life that way. My life feels sort of digital. But the more I look at it, the more I’m getting used to the idea of continual increments, month after month going through what comes into a life and what goes out, trying to break even.

Maybe that’s as good as closure gets.

Of course, there will be carry-overs from time to time. January is done, tear off the sheet. Make adjustments.

Start February.

 

In New Letters, vol. 79, No. 2, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

Through the train window streaked with dissipating rain on a late October morning, the asymmetric towers of Chartres’ cathedral loomed like stalagmites over hills of yellow grass. Walking up from the station, Carolyn and I leaned into the gusty wind, stepping through a small entry cut into the large western doors of the church. Once inside, all was quiet, damp and cool, bathed in blue light.

“1793 was a terrible year for Chartres Cathedral,” announced the visitor education board in French and English, describing statuary mutilation during the French Revolution directed at the monarchy and its religious connections. Happens everywhere, it seems: desecration of others’ beliefs to confirm one’s own; violence in the service of faith.

Perhaps a cathedral absorbs the perpetual mix of peacemaking and violence which characterizes its human family. Maybe it is an architectural expression of passive resistance, the power to assimilate and absolve the rage of a few on behalf of the many who love what its symbolism recalls — peace, forgiveness, hope.

It is lighted by the sun, this place of stained glass and limestone, through a uniquely penetrant shade of blue. It seemed more than color as I stood there, a blueness drawn to the breaking point of blue, as if the sky one winter evening sent a message to this little town in northern France saying, “This is the moment; take down this blue; this is the color of faithfulness.”

Weeks later, wandering through a chilly Berlin square filled with the scents and sounds of a Christmas market, we noticed a brooding, jagged stump of tower next to a new church. The tower is a remnant, as it turns out, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church destroyed in a 1943 Allied bombing, intentionally preserved as a relic alongside the replacement church.

We crossed the street and went in. Others were already standing inside the church, saying little as crowds and traffic fell away in acoustically-designed silence. Hundreds of polygons of stained glass in a beige concrete honeycomb transmuted the evening light into a deep, penetrating blue.

The glass is French, said a brochure offered in a wooden rack by the door, specially stained panels made in the Chartres studio of Gabriel Loire.

… French? Chartres??

I e-mailed the church when we got home. The Pastor kindly responded. Egon Eiermann, its German architect, he said, had simply found in Gabriel Loire the ideal partner for his design.

So that’s it. It’s a prayer. The whole building, glass and all. Especially the glass.

They saw it. They felt it. Eiermann and Loire. The thing is, they just went ahead and did it, designing a tangible peace, a celebration of faithfulness, a recognition of the divine within each of us as we stood there on a December evening, flooded by blue.

 

In Still Point Arts Quarterly 30, 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

The stories at School Number Five filter out like water through a logjam, written in the first ten minutes of class using magazine pictures they have selected from a pile I spread out as starters. As they read their work aloud, we adjust syntax, mine intuitive as a native speaker of English, theirs percolating through a mixture of learned grammar, magazines, TV, the Internet. Eventually their stories are complete in powdery white chalk on a blackboard in front of the class of a half dozen middle-schoolers. Six stories, fifty minutes, wiped from the board after the bell with a rag dipped into gray water in a red plastic bucket.

Why do they want to learn English? To get a job, says Mihai, a self-professed computer fanatic in 8A, one of the two sections of 8th grade. Besides, he points out, you can’t really use the Internet unless you know English. Nearly every website worth visiting is in English (all nod), as are the instruction windows which tell you what’s the matter with your computer.

Hadn’t thought of that. Other reasons?

Watch American movies, ignore the subtitles. Read books. Read magazines.

Two days later, three seventh grade boys, lounging in their desks after class, offer a discussion of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” It’s their favorite computer game, about stealing cars and fighting the police. I express interest.

Out of their pockets come word lists, code for the game. Code sheets, computer print-outs in English and Russian, each with handwritten Romanian equivalents.

Is this why I’m here, to teach English for computer games? The game is violent, not something I would choose. Yet it’s in English, the language they want me to help them learn. They have taken the initiative to translate. They’re using words, concepts.

Really, how bad can a computer game be? Romeo and Juliet, my backup lesson plan for next week, thrives on street warfare, three murders, a double suicide and a near miss on bigamy. It’s taught people English for three hundred years.

Walking “home” over broken streets in the afternoon dusk to the two-star hotel where we volunteers stay for the three-week life of this project, I wonder if I will ever know whether I am making a difference by being here.

The house in the yard, so-called by the Romanian teachers in the main building of School Number Five, consists of two small classrooms in one story of beige stucco capped with gray metal. It’s where I teach conversational English. Nearly all buildings in town are roofed with the same material, even the three domes of the Orthodox church looming behind School Number Five.

Everything is starting to feel gray to me. The chill is constant and damp. An overcast November sky mirrors grim resolution in the faces of people I pass on the way to school. The terasse regulars down the block nurse their beers inside now; the weed patch next to their favorite outdoor table is frosted over. Everyone smokes.

Even problems, finally, look alike. There is not enough money for anything, whether roads, health care, heat or education. Everyone is adept at making-do or going without. Design seems unaffordable. Carpeting, tile and wall coverings from available sources coexist in clashing patterns.

I find myself searching out pre-communist buildings to appreciate their ornately sawn wood roof-trim boards. I enjoy the clopping of horses pulling farm wagons full of cabbages over concrete streets, the clang of the handbell rung by the hall monitor starting and ending class. I like watching the Romanian flag wind-drifting, splendid in primary colors of blue, yellow and red, through some political accident virtually indistinguishable from the flag of the Republic of Chad.

It is the first day of snow. Three boys sit in the house in the yard: Ionut, doubling as the fire-tender; Cesar; Marius. They were part of another class I had last week. Actually, they were the entire class that afternoon, three girls never showing up. It was the day they told me about Grand Theft Auto.

They wear their hats and jackets at their desks. I huddle by the warm brown ceramic stove, listening while they work on The Old Man and the Sea, reading passages I have marked. They like the ones about the sharks.

During a break Ionut stuffs a split of poplar into the stove, then goes to the board beside me and begins to write the names of his siblings and their ages in a column. All older, three brothers. Then the name of his father and the number 43.

Below that he writes the number 39. What would that be?

“My mother’s age.”

What is her name?

“She is dead.”

What happened? He hesitates. Am I prying, I wonder?

He’s still not saying anything, looking at his classmates for help. Probably doesn’t know the word. Marius gives it.

“She was pregnant.”

Maybe writing on the board is easier. You get your thoughts up there for people to respond to if they like. You can be more fluent in a second language while writing than while speaking. And while you are communicating, you face away.

The afternoon class of ninth graders over at the High School, four boys and a girl, are waiting in the library when I arrive. The girl seems studious, treated by the boys as an equal. I tell them I’d like to have us talk about “People Who Changed Our Lives.”

It starts off slowly.

Let’s use examples of people who invented things we use now and what change they made. I’ll start.

Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone. Can you tell me what the effect has been in your life of his invention?

We can talk to each other.

Go on…

Over long distances.

Great!

A boy volunteers: “Bill Gates.”

What was his innovation?

“Microsoft.”

What was the resulting change?

Murmured conference in Romanian, some English. Back and forth.

Finally, adjusting syntax, we conclude (in English) that he made it easy for the average person to use a computer. I write “Bill Gates” and “Computer” on the flip chart, large enough for everyone to see, under Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone.

What about ideas? Can people make a difference inventing an idea?

Silence.

OK, I’ll go.

Abraham Lincoln. He freed slaves in the United States. Resulting effect? He changed North American human rights.

Mohandas Gandhi, another idea innovator. He demonstrated the power of a specific idea, non-violent resistance, in securing the freedom of his people.

I may be getting too complex. I’m doing all the talking. This should be about their stories. Where can I go from here?

“Mihai Eminescu.”  The girl is speaking.

I turn from the flip chart. The others are nodding agreement. I ask for the spelling of the name so I can recognize what they are saying. They spell it, mixing Romanian and English pronunciations of the names of the letters. Finally, I get it right.

Who was he? They point to his picture on the back wall of the library.

Oh. What did he do?

They confer briefly.

A poet, a writer. In the 1850’s.

What did he write about?

Love poems, things about personal life.

Why is he so important?

The girl takes over. She has a long, braided ponytail. We are at a hard spot. She hesitates, dives in.

“He wrote about personal feelings. Before him, everybody wrote superficial things.”

Did he actually change Romanian literature?

“Yes! Yes!”

She is smiling now. I’ve gotten it. She’s made me understand. In English.

I look at the picture again, one in a long sepia row along the back wall. This is a library, after all; these are probably all famous Romanian writers. And he was the one they picked.

It looks like a formal sitting: a young man with longish brown wavy hair, black bow tie, a vest under his coat, gazing into a middle distance somewhere to the left of us. After a hundred and fifty years, he still moves them.

It is the afternoon of Friday, my last day. The English teacher assigned to look after me shows up, Larisa. The High School is her first assignment. She has been at it now for seven weeks. Class is over, she announces.

Larisa looks at the flip chart. I have used up what was possibly their last, perhaps their only, blank flip chart.

She smiles. I have seen that smile before. In Paris. At the Louvre, on the Mona Lisa. She walks me to the door, says goodbye.

I walk back to the hotel through the city park, past old people on benches. Young women tend toddlers in a new playground donated by a Turkish man who bought the ball bearing factory here in Bârlad from the Romanian government. The park benches are painted blue, green, yellow, red. Some slats are rotted, others are missing. People sit on them anyway.

Mihai, the computer wizard I met in class at School Number Five on my second day of this project, diverges toward me through the park with a couple of his friends. He extends his hand.

We do the handshake that starts horizontally and switches midway to thumbs-up, the solidarity shake.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”  Grins all around.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” Again, smiles.

Everybody moves on.

 

 

 

In the Wisconsin village church where I grew up, Harry was the janitor. Harry, every Sunday morning, rang the bells. While people sorted themselves into pews, waiting for the service to start, the organist would play some music to set the congregation on the road to worship. The music reached its natural conclusion or tapered off mid-page, ending at the sounds of footsteps shuffling upstairs in the loft, then a door shutting and a pause before the bells began.

Harry enlisted an assistant bell ringer, usually Carl who lived down the blacktop road from the church. Carl had a natural ear. He could play the piano in the dark. I saw him do it once when we were helping clean up after a dinner in the church hall where the organist led songs on the piano.

We had maneuvered the piano back into the storage closet. While we went to collapse the folding chairs, Carl seated himself at the piano and played something which sounded vaguely classical. His brother told us to watch, turned out the light and closed the door. Carl kept on playing as if he were reading sheet music in broad daylight.

When I was about fifteen, Carl got sick on a Sunday. I was hanging around in the back of church, participating in our congregation’s tradition of teaching high school boys responsibility by being ushers.

Harry began his ascent to the organ loft, setting each foot deliberately on the maroon linoleum of every step, even though the organ music was still going and a creak here or there wouldn’t have made much difference.

Harry turned around, pointed at me and motioned upward.

I followed him up the steps, across the choir loft, past the organist sitting in a pool of lamplight watching notes go by through his trifocals.

Harry opened the white painted door to the bell tower, waiting for the organist to quit, music fading from the pipes. We stepped into the bell tower. Harry closed the door. He pointed to the thickest of three hemp ropes, making a pulling movement downward with his fist, then opening.

Harry nodded and I pulled, the familiar note of a single bell beginning high above us, ringing over the dry, cold farmland below. Every time he nodded, I pulled the rope, releasing it so as not to be carried off the floorboards on the way up.

It was winter, way below freezing. Harry paid no attention to the cold. He worked the other two ropes, head down, arms outstretched, listening to the clang overhead, chiming their rhythm in his own peculiar sequence. The ropes whirred through worn holes in the pine ceiling. Eventually Harry quit pulling and nodding and the bells finished the sequence on their own, one ending on the upbeat.

On the way down the steps I realized I had learned the bell prayer, a ritual which had focused scores of people every Sunday morning in that limestone building for a hundred years.

“You must pull the bell with your heart,” it went.

“The rope descends beneath your feet to the bones of your ancestors. If you pull in this way you will feel the bell’s true sound. If you ring in this way, you will live forever.”

 

 

In The Lutheran Digest, Fall 2013.