“I made a full and minute census of the whole of Sakhalin’s population, and saw everything except the death penalty. When we see each other I will show you a whole trunkful of stuff about the convicts which is very valuable as raw material. I know a very great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sakhalin, I only had a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sakhalin seems to me a perfect hell.” Anton Chekhov, letter to A.S. Suvorin, Dec. 9, 1890.
The Scheherazade Chronicles is dedicated to the development of storytelling and to raising awareness of and promoting access to the humanities for the edification and enlightenment of humankind, thus to save humankind from death by the cleaver of ignorance.
Driving south from picturesque Wickenburg, Ariz., and Phoenix, I headed down to Sunizona, down near the Mexican border, southeast of Tucson, and the Sunizona Motel where I stayed for a couple of nights. The photo below shows the view from the motel, looking west at the Dragoon Mountains. The husband and wife motel owners were friendly and went out of their way to accommodate my wishes. The wife was a writer and we agreed to write a book together one day. We haven’t yet. I was eating breakfast there one morning when a guy in a white pickup pulled up in front, nose in. He climbed down out of the cab, sauntered into the cafe, moseyed over to the breakfast bar and sat on a stool at the counter, gun in the holster at his hip. To the locals, such an assemblage must have been commonplace, for no one took special notice. He ordered his breakfast and I finished mine and got out, wondering whom he had a hankering to shoot.
Outside, I climbed into my Hyundai and from the motel drove a short distance southeast to the Chiricahua Mountains. I was tracking Geronimo.
I headed into the hills towards Faraway Ranch and the Chiricahua Wonderland of Rocks.
I encountered deer as I walked along this road into Faraway Ranch. I shot them in photos but the photos are not very good. I couldn’t get a closeup.
When I visited Faraway Ranch this day in 1994, I knew little about its origins and history. I do recall reading that Lillian Erickson Riggs and her husband arranged horseback tours for the guests into the Wonderland of Rocks. This image, below, I copied from the Internet tells more of the story:
I did photograph this marker:
Yes, Tucson and surrounding Southern Arizona range from about 4,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, not counting the higher mountain elevations. So, if you visit in winter, don’t wear shorts. It snows — not deep, but a good dusting.
Above is an ocatillo cactus growing against the fence with the overgrown corral behind it.
In 2008, eighty percent of the Chiricahua National Monument was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, called The Chiricahua National Monument Historic Designed Landscape, consisting of Faraway Ranch and within the Chiricahua Mountains hoodoos (alternating layers of hard rock protect the soft rock from the elements) and balancing rocks, formed from volcanic ash and pumice.
This is the land of the Apaches. Mexicans and Americans tried to claim this land as their own, and their tactics were equally as barbaric and brutal as those of the Apaches. This is the home of Geronimo. This is Cochise County. Cochise (c. 1812-74) was a Chiricahua Apache chief. Geronimo was born here into the Chiricahua Apache tribe June 16, 1829. In 1851, a Mexican militia surprise attacked an Apache camp. Geronimo was away at the time. He returned to find his mother, his wife and his three children, his family, dead, killed by the Mexicans. For the rest of his life, Geronimo and his band of followers waged revenge, especially against Mexicans, but against Caucasian Americans, too. Geronimo and his band often hid out in the Chiricahua Mountains and the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Yet, he was captured and was held as prisoner of war. He broke out three times. The Apache prisoners were sent to Florida and then to Fort Sill, Okla., far from their homeland. Geronimo became a celebrity in traveling Wild West shows. Ultimately, Geronimo rode horseback with five Indian chiefs at the 1905 inaugural parade and days later he met with President Teddy Roosevelt and asked that the Apaches be relieved of their prisoner of war status and be allowed to return to their native land in Arizona. The president refused, citing continued animosity in Arizona for the civilian deaths resulting from Geronimo’s raids during the prolonged Apache Wars. Geronimo died on February 17, 1909 at Fort Sill Hospital, still a prisoner of war. He was buried at Fort Sill Indian Agency Cemetery. Geronimo is said to have held supernatural gifts. He could see things happening far away, as they were happening; and he was a healer. I hiked around this land on a still, warm October day, and a ways up into these Chiricahua hills. I sensed the spirit of the Apaches around me, ostensibly Geronimo, free to roam, free to live off the land, watchful. And that’s when I spotted the deer watching me. I snapped some photos. Up in the Chiricahuas a mystical, transcendent quality pervades the trees, the scrub and recesses among the rocks. It enveloped me like an incense. I could envision one hiding out in those mountains for a long time. For a long time, in the scrub of my nature, in the recesses of my spirt, still, the spirit of Geronimo abides, like a musical suspension, a prolonging of a note of one chord into the next.
Avalon, N.J., is a quiet town on Seven Mile Island, one of the barrier islands south of Atlantic City. The borough of Avalon shares this island with the borough of Stone Harbor, to the south. My mother owned a home here in Avalon, on the beach. She hosted friends for weekend visits and family — children and grandchildren — for long stays. These were happy days with many fond memories for us all. Ed McMahon, Joe Paterno and Taylor Swift have summered here; in fact, Ed McMahon’s home was near my mother’s.
Avalon Boardwalk, looking north.
The pavilion at the north end of the boardwalk.
Avalon has a lovely beach for taking long walks.
The upper left of this photo looks north across Townsends Inlet, the bay inlet between the islands, to Sea Isle City and Strathmere, on Ludlam Island, which sits below sea level, first used as a fishing grounds for the Leni Lenape Indians, then as a stopover for pirates, and beginning in the 1800s, as with all of these South Jersey islands, a summer vacation place for Philadelphians. In my family, as in many, the men would go to their jobs in the city and after work, commute down to the shore, about an hour, by train. I stood on a jetty to take this photo.
Beach goldenrod, growing in September and October in the dunes along the boardwalk.
I’ve inserted a great, detailed National Geographic map here:
Take the Ocean Highway — follow the seagull on the sign — across Townsends Inlet to Sea Isle and continue north through Strathmere along that island to Corson’s Inlet and cross to Ocean City (Peck’s Beach Island, named for whaler John Peck). Ocean City is a dry town, founded by the Methodists as a retreat camp. Because the town is dry it is billed as a family vacation resort. The two and a half mile long boardwalk is wonderful and said to be one of New Jersey’s finest. My family owned a home here before I was born. Sometimes during our stays in rental homes we’d see Grace Kelly’s family on the beach in front of the home they owned near the south end of the island. Author Gay Talese and his wife own a home in The Gardens, at the north end of Ocean City.
Below is a picture of the Ocean City boardwalk, also scenes of the music pier and some of the summer homes along the avenues.
Don’t be misled by the sandy beach to the right of the Music Pier. The sand must constantly be replenished. When the beach washes out during storms, the ocean comes right up under the pier and at high tide the breaking waves splash through the cracks between the boards on the boardwalk.
Striped awnings are one of my favorite things. It’s cool and quiet inside them. They make me nostalgic for summers gone by, before there was air conditioning.
Howdy. This is a saguaro cactus at Coolidge, Ariz., near the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, between Phoenix and Tucson. The saguaro (pronounced sah-wah-roh) will grow only on the Sonoran desert in Southern Arizona. The saguaro cactus grows very, very slowly. A baby saguaro grows one inch in 10 years; by 95 to 100 years it may start to produce its first arm; by 200 years the saguaro cactus has reached its full height, 45 to 70 feet. I’ll wager that if the cactus I stood before and photographed could talk, it would tell you stories of the Old West that would make your skin prickle. The local Tohono O’Odham people viewed the saguaro cactus as a different type of humanity, not as a plant. They considered the cacti as respected members of their tribe. You can read more about this fascinating cactus here: Organ Pipe National Monument. I shot this photo on one of my road trips across country. I love Arizona and have explored nearly all of the state. Every time I go there I don’t want to leave.
Wide open spaces and that Arizona sky.
I love Southern Arizona, around Tucson, the best. Below are some scenes:
The venerable Horseshoe Cafe, a historic landmark, has been in operation since 1938. Whenever I travel to Tucson, I make a point to stop in nearby Benson, on Highway 80 (business route Interstate 10), and eat at the Horseshoe Cafe. I visited a few times in the 1980s and ’90s; but it’s been now 20 years since I was there. The Horseshoe Cafe not only has historical ambience, but also Vern Park murals on the walls depicting scenes of the Old West, a jukebox and plenty of great food and service. Folks are friendly here. It turns out that my waitress was good friends with a young woman from Benson whom I worked with in Los Angeles; and the young woman in L.A. had told me about Cody, the buffalo, from a Benson ranch. Cody is a celebrity: he was the buffalo in “Dances With Wolves,” the 1990 movie.
Here’s an Old West tale about the Horseshoe Cafe and one of its residents. http://www.examiner.com/article/spirits-at-the-lucky-horseshoe-cafe-benson-arizona. Note that the painting on the west wall when I took my photo in 1994 (the uppermost photo below) now has Ghost Riders added to it, evidenced in the more recent 2010 Examiner photo (middle), and the next one.
Below is the Horseshoe Cafe with the recent recreation of the Ghost Riders painted on the wall by Doug Quarles. This photo below is not mine. I took it from the
I owe the town of Bisbee more than just a drive-by photo, shot from my car window. I ran out of time. I wish I could have stayed longer. I reckoned I’d come back someday soon. These are the copper hills surrounding Bisbee, located 92 miles southeast of Tucson, close to the Mexican border. Bisbee has a quirky history and an open-pit Copper Queen Mine. But more minerals than copper are unearthed from the mines here in the Mule Mountains — gold, silver, a high quality turquoise (Bisbee Blue), cuprite, aragonite, wulfenite, malachite, azurite and galena.
In 1929 the Cochise County seat was moved from Tombstone to Bisbee, where it remains.
Tombstone is one of my favorite places in Arizona. Unfortunately, it has become commercialized, so it’s hard to get authentic pictures of how the town looked in the days of the Clantons, Doc Holliday and the Earps.
The O.K. Corral occupies a small open space to the left of the store.
Every April writers and bloggers come together to take up the Blogging From A-Z Challenge. This year I am taking up the challenge, once again, along with this annually growing group.
I wish to thank my writer friends who have inspired and encouraged me to take up this daily writing challenge. Each day we write a blog post themed on a letter of the alphabet, beginning with the letter A on April 1, continuing to the letter B on April 2, the letter C on April 3 and so on. We take Sundays off.
This year, simply enough I have decided to show you each day a picture of a place where I have lived or visited. My theme, accordingly, is “From Sea to Shining Sea,” my landscape photos from my travels across America.
My landscape photographs have hung in gallery exhibit, and been selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for slide show presentation.
I hope you enjoy my 2016 A-Z Blogging Challenge presentation.
This was my view of Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park, Calif., when I stood at their base in Yosemite Valley that day in May. There are three falls, the Upper Falls, 1,430-foot (440 m), this plunge alone one of the highest waterfalls in the world; the Middle Falls, or Middle Cascade, 675 feet (206 m), a series of smaller cascades; and the Lower Falls, 320-foot (98 m).
The falls drop 2,425 feet (739 m) from Yosemite Creek, elevation 6,526 feet (1,989 meters) at the top of the upper fall, to the base of the lower fall into the Merced River in Yosemite Valley, elevation 4,000 feet. While Yosemite Falls are fed by a creek, some of the falls in Yosemite Valley are fed by living glaciers.
The waterfalls in Yosemite Valley cascade from November to July. The best time to see all these falls is at the spring snowmelt, May and June, when they are at their resplendent fullness. They dry up completely or dry to a trickle by August. Yosemite Falls freezes in the winter.
Yosemite Valley has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth; and, John Muir notwithstanding, I am not alone in my perspective. I am awed. To be in the Valley on the banks of the green Merced, embraced by sequoias, incense cedars, sheer granite cliff faces carved by the glaciers, rising 3,000 feet above you, and the sonorous crystal waterfalls lifted and dancing on the wind is glorious. It is heaven on earth.
I nominate Gwynn Rogers Gwynn’s Grit and Grin, to continue this 5 Photos/5 Stories challenge. Gwynn lives way up there in the Pacific Northwest. Writing from a peninsula overlooking a bay in the Seattle area, Gwynn finds humor in situations that even Erma Bombeck might have found a stretch.
Rules: for 5 photos, 5 days challenge:
1) Post a photo each day for 5 consecutive days
2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, a paragraph — all entirely up to you!
3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation! This is fun, not a command performance!
Unloading at Dock: The Maggie S. Myers with her sails furled and her dredges.
The Maggie S. Myers is believed to be the oldest, continuously-working oyster schooner under sail in the United States. The historic Delaware Bay oyster schooner has never been out of commission. Her captain, Thumper, and crew work her nearly daily on the bay dredging for conch, blue crabs and oysters. She is living history.
The Maggie S. Myers is owned by my Bowers Beach, Del., friends, Frank “Thumper” Eicherly IV and his wife Jean Friend. They bought the Maggie in 1998 when she was about to be scuttled. The moment they saw her, Jean said, “It was love at first sight.” Since then Thumper and Jean have devotedly invested tens of thousands of dollars into her restoration.
The Maggie was built as a two-masted Delaware Bay oyster-dredge schooner in Bridgeton, N.J., and commissioned in 1893. She is 50 feet long and 18 feet wide. The 24.62 ton schooner can carry her weight in oysters. Her masts were removed when she was motorized in the 1940s. She is listed on the National Historic Register.
The Maggie with her day’s catch coming through the cut from the bay to dock on the Murderkill River. Thumper sews her sails.. (Robert Price photo)
When the Maggie was built, below deck she had four berths and a woodstove for cooking. She and her crew would stay out dredging the bay all week, then sail to Philadelphia with oysters piled up to wheelhouse windows, unload their catch and be home to spend the weekend with their families.
“She’s low to the water and dredges by hand,” Thumper rhapsodizes. “She turns on a song, like a snow goose flying around in the air.” I can tell you his claim is true; I piloted her briefly up the serpentine Cohansey River in New Jersey at sunrise that morning in 2004 on the way to the boatyard to restore her mast.
The last I heard, recently, the Maggie was at the boatyard having her second mast restored.
Here is a link to an in-depth story I wrote about the Maggie, published under my Carol Child byline in the Delmarva Quarterly, “The Low Whistle of the Wind.” This story provides a link to the boatyard where you can see stunning photos of the Maggie’s restoration.
There are the Santa Monica Mountains, across the Santa Monica Bay, in the background. This place still feels like home to me. I lived in Redondo Beach, Calif., most of my adult life, for 30 years. It is where I raised my daughter. Over the years we lived there, we watched big Pacific storms wash ashore fishing boats permanently anchored out in the bay, and partially destroy earlier piers standing on wooden pilings; on the end of one pier was a dinner-house restaurant, Castagnola’s, washed over by huge waves.
The first Redondo pier, 1889-1915, was built to facilitate delivery of timber and oil from ships to trains. It was destroyed by a storm. The second pier, 1895-1929, built nearby, in front of the Hotel Redondo, was V-shaped and had a railroad track on one prong. It was destroyed by a storm.
In those years, Redondo served as the Port of Los Angeles. It was a bustling harbor where passenger trains and Henry Huntington’s Big Red Electric (trolley) Cars brought people to enjoy superb saltwater fishing, shops, restaurants, the world’s largest saltwater plunge and poking around in the mounds of moonstones on the beach. These natural mounds of gemstones are said to have been five to six feet deep and 40 to 50 feet wide. They’re not there now, and I’ve never been able to find out what became of them.
Back then, residents of inland cities such as Pasadena and Glendale summered in their beach bungalows lining the broad boulevards along the cliffs above the beach. The streets above Moonstone Beach where the Hotel Redondo stood bear the names of gemstones––Ruby, Diamond, Sapphire, Emerald, Beryl, Pearl, Garnet, Topaz, Carnelian…. The bungalows charmingly graced Catalina Avenue and Broadway when I first moved to Redondo. They disappeared in the 1980s when they were replaced by high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums.
Built on a bluff overlooking the Santa Monica Bay in 1889 with an 18-hole golf course, tennis courts, each of 225 rooms “touched by sunlight at some time of the day,” the $250,000 Hotel Redondo embraced sweeping views of the Santa Monica Mountains along the Malibu coastline to the north, the 1,000-foot altitude Palos Verdes Peninsula to the south, and the vermillion sunsets to the west.
Alas, the gods smiled on Redondo in a roundabout way, saving the city from becoming an industrial port and keeping it for the beach people, the upwardly mobile and for families and children: The grand, red-turreted Hotel Redondo was done in by Prohibition, razed in 1926 and sold for $300 for scrapwood. Its near twin, the historic Hotel del Coronado, built on Coronado Island off San Diego in 1888, continues to host guests in grand style.
During Prohibition, the gambling ship Rex operated three miles off shore. As the Redondo harbor declined, the San Pedro harbor bustled, and San Pedro became the Port of Los Angeles.
In the stead of the Hotel Redondo, today jutting out over the harbor, high over the waves in water as green and clear as an emerald, stands the bustling horseshoe-shaped Redondo Pier, with its restaurants and shops. Built in the early 1990s on concrete pilings, the present pier has outlasted its predecessors lost in El Niño storms every few years.
The ramp down to our beach when we lived in Redondo. (Kellie Child Soucek photo)
Weather in Redondo is sunny and in the 70s F nearly every day — except in June, when the “June gloom” sea mist rolls in and hangs around. The steady salt breeze off the ocean wafts aromas of ice plant (a succulent planted to keep the cliffs from sliding), sea urchins and Mexican food.
The land on which the City of Redondo thrives was once Rancho San Pedro, part of a land grant the California (Mexico) government gave to the Juan José Dominguez family in 1784.
They rode beneath vegetables in hay wagons; they came packed in shipping crates; they ran through the swamps in the night, reaching for the light in the distant window, the bounty hunter hot on their heels. The Appoquinimink Friends Meeting House, in Odessa, Del., provided a safe hiding place when you were a slave running up from the South for your freedom, where you could get food, clean, dry clothing, money and be guided on your way to the next stop. The Meeting House, added to The Network to Freedom in 2008 by the National Park Service, was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
This, one of the smallest Friends Meeting Houses in the nation, placed on the National Historic Register in 1972, has just one room with a small room upstairs. There are no windows along the pent eaves on the sides of the building. Local Quakers, some at the expense of getting caught and losing their own property, hid runaway slaves in a small alcove under the eaves, pictured here. Prominent among them was conductor Thomas Garrett, born in 1789 on his family’s farm, Thornfield, west of Philadelphia. The Garrett family held abolitionist beliefs. When Thomas was a boy, a family paid servant was abducted by men intent on selling her as a slave in the South. The men were tracked down and she was returned. Thomas never forgot the incident, though, and it served to intensify his abolitionist beliefs. Coincidentally, I grew up in Drexel Hill, Pa., on land that was once Thornfield. The Garrett home still stands and is open for tours.
You might imagine then, what a curious phenomenon I found at age 10, when our family moved from Drexel Hill 30 miles south to Wilmington, Del., to encounter segregation — separate water fountains, restrooms, schools, movie theaters…. Delaware was a border state during the Civil War, divided. Indeed, before the War, many runaway slaves hidden in the Appoquinimink Meeting House came from plantations in lower Delaware and the adjacent Eastern Shore of Maryland. Here is a link to the magazine story I wrote about The Appoquinimink Friends Meeting House and the Underground Railroad: The Quest.
It is my pleasure to take up this 5 Day / 5 Photo Blog Challenge for which my good friend, author and blogger Susan Scott, Garden of Eden Blog, has nominated me.
bodie state historic park
Bodie Alley
Bodie is described as haunting, desolate, captivating. It is. I was there.
Bodie State Historic Park, Calif., is a ghost town, “preserved in a state of arrested decay.” Interiors of the 110 remaining buildings are untouched as they were left, and it looks like some people left in a hurry, their belongings still strewn about.
In 1859 William (Waterman) S. Bodey discovered gold near here. Mr. Bodey didn’t have much time to revel, though, for in November that same year he died in a blizzard.
In 1861 a rich strike was made and a mill was built. Over the next years the railroad and the telegraph came and the population swelled from 20 to 10,000. It is said there existed three breweries, 65 saloons, an abundance of brothels, a Chinatown, opium dens and a Wells Fargo Bank. There were gunslingers and shootouts. It was a full-on Wild West town. Bodie became the second or third largest California town and one of the earliest United States towns to acquire electricity. The big strikes were soon depleted, though, and the town slid into decline in the 1880s. Miners moved on to Tombstone, Ariz., and other legendary places. Bodie was officially labeled a ghost town in 1915, after the last newspaper closed. The ghost town was designated Bodie State Historic Park in 1962 when the last residents left.
Bodie, just north of Mono Lake, a salt lake, is located at Bridgeport, Calif., near the Nevada border, just below where the eastern border of the state bends to the right. Bodie is northeast of Yosemite and about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe, on high, open hills. The Clint Eastwood movie “High Plains Drifter” was filmed at Mono Lake. The production company built a large façade town at Mono Lake just for the filming.
Even in its boom days, I wonder how residents survived Bodie winters. It is one of the coldest places in the U.S. Up in the Eastern High Sierra Nevada Mountains, elevation 8,375 feet (2,554 m.), where the winds sweep through (up to 100 miles per hour, according to Wikipedia), Bodie has a subarctic climate — temperatures even on summer nights can drop below freezing. The most snow recorded in one month was 97.1 inches in January 1969. Bear in mind, the snow doesn’t melt until spring. The population of Bodie is now a few park rangers and assorted ghosts. The rangers use snowcats to get around through the deep snow. The park is open in the winter, but only to those with skis, snowshoes or snowmobiles. I have visited Bodie in the daytime, in May. I dream of returning with a digital camera to take a nighttime Ghost Walk.
The ghost town is a National Historic Landmark.
The timeline on this site linked below is interesting, plus there are some great photos:
Avec le temps is a poem and song composed by Léo Ferré (24 August 1916 – 14 July 1993). I note that I am composing the draft of this piece on the anniversary of his death (also Bastille Day). Léo Ferré was “a Monegasque French [he grew up in Monaco] poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer, whose career in France dominated the years after the Second World War until his death.” Wikipedia. Worth reading is his bio, for he was an individual who followed his heart, led a fascinating life and became an anarchist. Few have his courage to do so in a positive, compassionate sense, in the global atmosphere today.
Below, I have excerpted lines from the poem. While the poem speaks ostensibly about the lost passion of a lost love, it holds a deeper, or higher meaning. All life is impermanent, transitory. Everything comes and everything goes away. To lessen despair and suffering, it would seem well, then, to adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards life; that is, to not allow ourselves to get boxed into the emotion of the event, but to see it and let it go. Easy to say, I know; nonetheless, Avec le temps gives us pause for thought.
With time …
With time, it goes, everything goes away
We forget the face and we forget the voice
The heart, when it stops beating, there’s no point
Searching further, let it go and that is very well
With time …
With time, it goes, everything goes
The other we adored, we searched in the rain
With time, it goes, everything goes
We forget the passions and we forget the voices
Which whispered the words of the poor people
“Don’t return too late, mostly don’t catch cold.”
With time, everything goes away and we feel pale and gray, like a tired old horse. Everything vanishes.
“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.”
–Richard Bach, “Illusions”
Right off the bat, when confronted with a problem, I think, “OK, what did I do to deserve this gift?”
“Wait a minute,” said Moriarty. “Were it not for the problem of readers not commenting on your blog, you would not have met me, the Phantom of your blog.” We were sitting at the blog round table holding chunks of baguette, mopping up the remaining broth in our bowls from the borscht Moriarty had made, his signature dish.
As a baguette with borscht, this version of Bono singing “One” with Pavarotti and Friends seems a perfect rhythmic pairing for reading this piece:
“Your readers were all padding around in your blog,” Moriarty continued, “rummaging through all your stuff and you didn’t even know they were here. Like phantoms, they were. Am I not your gift, even if I don’t dust? Your readers like me. And contrary to what some say, I am not your imaginary friend. I am a real Phantom.”
With a grand flourish, waving his napkin above the table, he stood up. Suddenly he found himself waving a flaming torch. The paper napkin had caught in the candle flame.
Dickens, Moriarty’s black fluffy dog, leaped to his feet and barked — a single bark followed by three quick, choppy barks: dog code for “fire” or “danger,” apparently.
Moriarty plunged the napkin into his empty borscht bowl and snuffed out the flame, leaving a heap of ashes.
“You’ve done that before,” I said. “Readers will wonder what happened to me, why I haven’t published a post in a while. That is because you might have burned down the blog while I was away — or even before we finish this conversation. That would be a problem.”
“Then you’d have to start over with a fresh draft. Your story might be more fascinating the second time,” he said flatly.
I sighed, stood up, blew out the candle and we headed with our dishes into the kitchen. Moriarty filled Dickens’s bowl with fresh water, ran hot water into the sink, added soap and stood back. “Your turn,” he said. “I cooked: my gift to you.
“At least I made myself known to you,” he went on, as I rinsed the dishes and set them in the drainer.
“Yeh-uh,” I drawled,” by padding up behind me and nudging me over the edge of the catwalk. I fell into a heap of backdrops and then I didn’t know which scene I was in. I thought I was speaking English to an English speaking audience and no one seemed to comprehend,” I said.
“Then you had to stand up for your dignity and cause, didn’t you,” he pointed out. “You had to think in a new way. That just cultivated and strengthened your character. I’m quite sure. I helped you gain more confidence in yourself as an individual. More important than the problem is how you react to it. You have choices.” He looked at me. I lost the thread of the conversation, for, in that moment I saw how pale his eyes were. They weren’t gray or blue, or blue-gray, or green. They were pale, always so pale. He stepped back.
Dickens yelped.
I bent down, patted him and rubbed his muzzle. “Aww, sweetie. He stepped on your foot, didn’t he.”
Moriarty rubbed Dickens’s side, ruffing his fur, topping off the gesture with a head pat. “My gift to you,” Moriarty told him. “I step on your foot and you get more attention.”
–Diane Lauridsen, Lauridsen Ballet Centre, Torrance, Calif.
Well, of course the Marquis de Sade invented pointe shoes. Every ballet dancer who has danced on pointe knows this. Through personal experience taking ballet class as an adult for many years, I know this. Besides, our ballet teacher, a master teacher, Diane Lauridsen, artistic director of the Lauridsen Ballet Centre/South Bay Ballet, told us this.
I proffer this fascinating perceived fact because Susan Scott of Garden of Eden Blog nominated me to take part in a Three Day Quote Challenge, whereby each day, on three consecutive days, I pick a quote, from a person famous or not, and say a little bit about it. Thank you, Susan. I am honored you selected me.
Susan quoted Anna Pavlova: When I was a small child … I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights for one brief moment, but soon flits away.
Since Anna Pavlova inspired me to study ballet, I decided I must write a spinoff, as it were, of Pavlova’s articulation.
It is said Pavlova put ball bearings in her shoes to create the illusion during bourées that she was gliding across stage. Dancing in pointe shoes with ball bearings in the toes would have the dancer portray the tortured swan rather than a dying one, I should think. Pointe shoes (or toe shoes) are handmade, commonly from satin with a soft leather sole. At the front tip of the shoe, housing the toes, is the box, typically constructed of layers of material hardened with glue. As you might imagine, dancing across the ballet studio floor, which has become suddenly vast, or across the stage in a pair of these would abrade your toes, rendering it very difficult to look like a butterfly when all you want to do is grimace and flop down, the forlorn swan. Indeed, dancers wrap their individual toes in adhesive tape to prevent blisters and bunions, what little good that does. Dancers prefer their shoes old and soft, therefore, wearing them until the satin frays and the shoe completely breaks down. Seasoned dancers resort to all sorts of techniques to soften a new pair of pointe shoes, such as repeatedly bending and kneading them and slamming them in a doorjamb.
Happiness is the process of fulfilling one’s passion for dance. Happiness is receiving constant corrections from your ballet teacher and striving to reach perfection. And maybe for a moment you do; and then it flits away. You know you will never achieve absolute perfection; but with dedication and discipline, you diligently strive after it, gradually improving amid the setbacks.
A dancer must work regularly (ideally taking class five or six days a week) for two years before gaining the strength to go on pointe. Your feet must be strong (no, not because you’re wearing socks you forgot to wash) and you must have the core strength to lift yourself up and off your toes. A child should not be put into pointe shoes until she is 10. Before that age, her bones are too soft, still unformed. To prevent injury, it is essential you research and find a genuinely good teacher.
Not every female who dances on pointe is a ballerina. The term arises from reverence for a high level of achievement, though not gymnastics in toe shoes but rather possession of a certain je ne sais quoi, “the perfume of her inflections, the projection of a larger spirit or deeper spirituality,” as dance critic Laura Jacobs put it in Pointe Magazine.
In today’s terms, Pavlova created an aura around herself as a brand — vis-à-vis Lady Gaga. Does Pavlova use ball bearings in this two minute film of her dancing “The Dying Swan”? I doubt it. In her bourées she keeps her feet close together and she’s just quick. She gives the illusion of the ethereal.
“Some of her dances look like improvisations. She looked as though the music was playing and she just got up and danced. She knew how to project magic about her,” said the late British ballet dancer and choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, in conversation with Natalia Markarova, who achieved prima ballerina status in the 1960s, in this seven minute YouTube video.
So, to rise to inhabit the apparently effortless ethereal spirit, you must be committed to years of practice, years of barre work and dancing across the ballet studio floor, appearing often less like a butterfly, rather more like a mushroom, or as our teacher, Diane, pointed out, “You all look like hawks.”
Over the three years I have known Susan Scott, having met her on a LinkedIn writers caregivers group, she has become a good friend, wise, insightful, compassionate and always supportive. She is author of the book In Praise of Lilith, Eve & the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, which you can purchase on Amazon simply by clicking on the icon in the left sidebar of my blog.
In turn, I am pleased to nominate my good friend T.J. Banks and two new friends, Sara C. Snider and Celine Jeanjean, three delightful and accomplished authors:
“… the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.” –Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence Once upon a time in the faraway land of my childhood, my mother held me on her lap in the rocking chair … Read more »
This is a story of a great love and a powerful connection, one to keep in your heart, always. It is exquisitely written by my good friend T.J. Banks. It is her story.
The Unseen Traveler
By T. J. Banks
(From The Way-Back Files: Until We Meet Again. Guideposts, 2003.)
The rain that early July Tuesday had been monsoon-like, forcing me to pull over to the side of the road at one point during my travels. By 7:15 p. m., it had stopped, but the roads were still dangerously slick. I’d just gotten off the phone with my husband, Tim, and could tell from his voice that the swing shift he’d worked the night before had finally started catching up with him. “You sound like you need to be off the road,” I’d remarked, telling him to skip the trip to the store he’d been about to make.
“I really want to be home,” he’d said just before signing off.
A funny queasiness took hold of me shortly afterwards. I wandered restlessly about the house, then headed up to our three-year-old son Zeke’s room and began reading to him. I happened to look up at one point and went even sicker inside. The walls of the room began pulsing, the colors in the wallpaper draining away.
A few hours later, my in-laws came to tell me that Tim’s van had crashed into a telephone pole, killing him instantly. The time of death was 7:31. (“I can’t say for sure,” a friend said later when I told her the wallpaper story, “but I’ll bet you that’s when Tim died.”)
Pain set in, followed by an eerie numbness, a winter of the soul like nothing I’d ever known before. I made the funeral arrangements, picked out the monument, gave away many of Tim’s belongings, and probated the will, hoping that once these things were done, I would somehow come back to life. I was a ghost wandering through a lonely dark wood, searching desperately for a clearing, some space between the branches that a ray of light could pierce through.
Two weeks after Tim died, I came back from running some errands and went up to my room to lie down. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d just rest a bit in the cool shadowy room while my mother took care of Zeke downstairs.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a white-gold light appeared to the left of the headboard. It hung in mid-air, glowing like a flame and deepening in intensity as I gazed into the heart of it. The light flickered and danced before my eyes, then slowly…ever so slowly…faded away.
I sat up, amazed. The room, as I’ve said, was a shadowy one, thanks to the huge oak tree shading the window directly across from the bed: in the past, I’d hung crystals in that window in vain attempts to work a little rainbow magic. There was no prism in the window now, only an enormous aloe plant snaking its arms against the pains…and, anyway, a prism would’ve cast its rainbows against the walls, ceiling, and floor. It wouldn’t have conjured up that firefly flame that hung suspended in the air, beckoning and reassuring me….
The June after Tim died, Zeke and I traveled to Prince Edward Island. It was the vacation that Tim and I had planned for the three of us to take for what would have been our tenth anniversary. It was a tough trip on my own with a four-year-old, and Zeke was homesick. So I cut the vacation short and drove the rental car to Charlottetown the day before our re-scheduled flight. We stopped at the airport first to confirm the flight changes. The woman at the counter was genuinely charming and helpful, waiving the change fee. “Now,” she said brightly, looking up at me, “there’s a third person traveling with you?”
I did a double-take – after all, it was 1996, and surely a single parent traveling alone with a child shouldn’t be that much of a novelty – but explained the circumstances. The woman shivered. “That gives me the willies,” she admitted, as she directed us to a motel close to the airport.
I found it easily enough. The woman who ran it was just as friendly, and we chatted lightly as I filled out the necessary paperwork. “There’s a third person traveling with you?” she asked suddenly.
I guessed there was – an unseen traveler who wanted to make sure that we were all right and had landed in a good place.
Tim
^^^
T. J. Banks is the author of A TIME FOR SHADOWS, CATSONG (winner of the 2007 Merial Human-Animal Bond Award), [see CATSONG Amazon link in my left sidebar], DERV & CO., HOUDINI, & SOULEIADO. A Contributing Editor to LAJOIE, she has also worked as a stringer for the Associated Press and an instructor for the Writer’s Digest School, and elsewhere. She has received awards for her fiction & non-fiction from BYLINE, the Cat Writers’ Association, & THE WRITING SELF. Her book, SKETCH PEOPLE: STORIES ALONG THE WAY, is based on her blog of the same name. Both the book and the blog feature “conversations” or interviews with people who have stories worth telling.
Visit T.J. on her “A Time for Shadows” Facebook page or on her blog:- Sketch People.: “We all have stories to tell. SKETCH PEOPLE is a series of interviews with people about what they do — their passions, their purpose, and their adventures along the way. It’s that simple. And that fascinating.”
... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
Thomas Wolfe Look Homeward, Angel
1929
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The Dead
“Gabriel Conroy reflects on his wife's former lover, Michael Furey:
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
--James Joyce
"The Dead"
From Dubliners 1914
“Chasing Cars,” by Snow Patrol
We’ll do it all
Everything
On our own
We don’t need
Anything
Or anyone
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don’t quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They’re not enough
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we’re told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that’s bursting into life
Let’s waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads
I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Forget what we’re told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that’s bursting into life
All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they’re all I can see
I don’t know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Songwriters: Nathan Connolly / Gary Lightbody / Jonathan Quinn / Tom Simpson / Paul Wilson
You forget me,” he said. “Am I not your steward?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I can but imagine.”
Dusk embraced us now, at the window here in the blog cupola. The Blue Deer lifted its head, sniffed the air, and then walked off into the woods. I pulled the window shut, picked up my purple and white iris the Phantom had picked for me and we headed down the winding staircase, I behind the Phantom. In case I stumbled I hoped he would catch me. If I went first I feared he would push me. I didn’t want to flatten my iris.
When we reached the foot of the stairs, I thanked him again. We parted there. I lifted the iris to my nose. The stem had a nutmeggy smell, like his hand.
“What is your name?” I called after him.
“Moriarty,” he called back.
-- S.M.
The Raptor
I took a lunch break just now and sat out on my porch in the sun. I watched a dark raptor circle the broad grass plot between the houses across the street. A pair of crows came and chased the raptor, pecking at it. The raptor landed on the roof of the house next to the grass plot. Every time the crows pecked the raptor, the raptor ducked. Then it spread its wings, staying perched on the edge of the roof. Imposing. The raptor's mate showed up and perched beside it. The crows flew down, took a bath in a puddle and flew away. The mate flew away. The raptor left the roof, circled and landed on the grass plot. Now I could see, this was a turkey vulture, and it proceeded to eat what had been a squirrel.
S.M.
The Fog
From the attic I view the fog hanging at eye level. In our tall, thin Victorian house, I have climbed the spiral staircase to the third floor and chanced to look out the window at apparitions of trees and through the belfry in the church steeple at the heavy black bells, the condensation tintinnabulation off the gray, dripping cloud beyond, and faint lights here and there, like spirits holding lanterns, seeking their way up out of the Underground Railroad, while the fog descends, descends upon them.
I watch the fog cloud stealthily drape steeples, trees, houses, and, I can see, it is soon to inch down tree trunks and creep across lawns and up steps and onto Victorian porches.
S.M.
I spent seven years in the 1990s binge-cashiering at a farm stand on a 30-acre farm in Naples, Florida. While strings of cashiers came and went, during the intervals I often worked nine days straight. I loved my job and the customers. Some became enduring friends and plenty produced sundry stories for my amusement. I wrote down the stories and saved them. Now, as thoughts poke through of gardens and rows of strawberries, corn, tomatoes, lettuces, herbs, peppers, eggplant, squashes and melons, I offer you samples of my stories and expert citrus advice. For your binge-reading pleasure, I am gathering these stories into a book called FUNNY FARM STORIES. You can find some of these stories up above, in the menu headings under the header photo, across the top of this page. Don’t know an orange from a melon? Check out WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THIS GREEN THING…? I hope their flavors delight you. –Carolina Gringo, as told to Samantha Mozart.
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Gatsby
In my capacity as publisher of Scheherazade Chronicles Classics I have formatted for ebook and published for sale on Amazon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This is the link.
There are no windows along the pent eaves on the sides of the building. Local Quakers, some at the expense of getting caught and losing their own property, hid runaway slaves in a small alcove under the eaves, pictured here. Prominent among them was conductor Thomas Garrett, born in 1789 on his family’s farm, Thornfield, west of Philadelphia. The Garrett family held abolitionist beliefs. When Thomas was a boy, a family paid servant was abducted by men intent on selling her as a slave in the South. The men were tracked down and she was returned. Thomas never forgot the incident, though, and it served to intensify his abolitionist beliefs. Coincidentally, I grew up in Drexel Hill, Pa., on land that was once Thornfield. The Garrett home still stands and is open for tours.
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