Today is the memorial gathering in the Gazebo for Don Worthen.

Yesterday we attended the funeral of Maggie Ballesteros, Teresa Fisher’s sister in Paso Robles. She helped take care of Ian between one and three years old while Teresa worked. We saw her frequently during that period and got quite close.

She died of colon cancer, the same disease afflicting Teresa and her brother Art. Teresa urged us to come to the ceremony and sit in the front rows with the family.

It took place in the St. Rose Catholic Church, a large building with a huge crucifix and a realistic statue of crucified Jesus above the altar. First came a viewing of the body–bewigged and coated with a rainbow of different colored makeup. Then a two hour rosary and mass in both Spanish and English. Ian stayed with us for the first hour, drawing a picture of Maggie with wings, and saying he missed her. The sallow priest officiated in a low drone.
We got lost on the way to the cemetery and stopped at Starbucks for directions and espressos.

Back on track, we drove through a beautiful wrought iron gate marked 1892 down into a little hollow where a crowd stood by the open grave surrounded by the flat monuments of the family plot and half a dozen ancient Valley Oaks, leafless and silver trunked, casting dramatic shadows in the low January light. Art, who was put under hospice care the day after Maggie died, was brought to the graveside in a wheelchair. An eight-man mariachi band played mournful elegies while the children ran up and down the grassy hillside above the hollow or sat in groups on the flat gravestones. After one long Spanish song by an elder of the family, the huge casket was lowered into the ground, and adults and children lined up to drop handfuls of dirt brought from the old family ranch on top of it.

As the air got chillier, people got back into their cars, returned to the St. Rose Church, and met in the bright gymnasium for what turned into an amazing party. Here are few pictures.

4:45 p.m. close to sunset, sound of hoofs galloping behind the dome where thirty people sit quiet, the light and warmth of a day between storms waning.

A single birdcall highlighted against the silence protected in this hollow between Caballo peak and Cuesta ridge. Poly Mountain rises to the south, Rockslide Ridge to the north. A wispy cloud above the summit of the peak begins to luminsce below higher dark gray clouds, then drops below the ridge line. A small stream meanders through the middle of the structure, separating the rickety stage from the new concrete amphitheatre seats. Poly Mountain’s north flank now burnished with dark gold light from the invisible sunset. Muscles tensed from a day of preparation, teaching and hiking up the slippery canyon trail slowly relax as the weight of the body settles on the cool cushion of stone.

Jan, Steven,

About 8 trees blew down near your house in the last storm. The good news is that none of them damaged anything, & that they don’t need immediate attention. They don’t need Zenia or an expensive faller to clear them out. And the final good news is that there are now more poles for Joe.

We went up today and cleared the tree tops from the driveway. And I took the limbs off the downed tree near the shed but did not buck it up cause I don’t know the lengths Joe wants.

The house looks fine. Towagh, Kemi, & Aya plan to come up on Dec 20th.
In other news there was a great potluck at the Lund School yesterday.

Peter

blowdown pictures

PROGRAM

Excerpt from “Mein Freund ist Mein,”
from Bach’s Cantata #140

Anniversary Pictures from 2007

Wedding pictures from 1967

S: Thank you all, friends and family, for joining us to honor our 40th wedding anniversary. The song you’ve just heard, a duet from Bach’s Cantata 140 based on the Biblical Song of Songs, was our wedding music. We want to take this moment to celebrate our blessings, especially our two children and four grandchildren. After 40 years of marriage, we want to celebrate that we are still in good health and still love each other.

J: We met just before the summer of love in 1966 and were married April 2, 1967 in our backyard in East Palo Alto . Rock and roll, tie dye and the war in Vietnam were raging. Those were the days of the generation gap. Both poor students, we had very little to spend on the wedding. It cost under $250, including the dress. Our parents arrived in Palo Alto to meet each other, and to meet the person their child was about to marry, for the first time, the day before the wedding.

S: We met several times with the minister, our friend Stuart McLean, to explore on the deepest inner level why we were founding a family with the world falling apart around us, to consider Christian and Jewish wedding ceremonies and, finally, to craft our own. We would like to share a few excerpts from that ceremony with you now:

S: We are assembled here in the presence of witnesses to join this man and this woman in marriage; to rejoice with them in the unity they have found; and to recognize that the vows between them made are a social as well as a private act. ¦

J: The act of marriage represents a change in relationship to the social order. It is the presentation of a new social unit to society and the founding of a family. As you who are gathered here symbolize this public world, Steven and Janet ask for and need your acceptance.

S: Nevertheless, while recognizing that community is the womb of life, and while affirming the importance of the social order, they are profoundly disturbed by the sickness of our society. In their higher commitment to our common humanity, they find that they must rebel against its dehumanization. Here they also, ask for your acceptance. Their commitment to one another is not just a private act, but a commitment to the concerns of all persons everywhere. Together they hope to give each other the comfort and courage both to affirm the social order and to change it…

J: The vision of our common humanity meets our past and embraces this present event of marriage. It is a public event, but more profoundly an act of two who hae decided in faith to become one. It is an act involving suffering as well as delight”conflict as well as love”despair as well as hope. Its form reveals the essence of true covenant. Within it two become one, but because of it, Steven’s and Janet’s unique individuality may grow.

S: Marriage is a moment of decision which is not just a moment in time, bujt one which transcends time, a moment in which Steven and Jan will always live. Its decision is a leap of faith. Its love takes the threat out of dying and growing old. Its promise changes the conditions of the future.

J: In the decision to live with and for one another, Steven and Janet have created a new relationship which involves all life. We all rejoice with you. ¦.

Wine ceremony”raise cups”these are words from our ceremony

S&J: This cup of wine is symbolic of the cup of life. As we share the one cup of wine, we undertake to share all that the future may bring. All the sweetness life’s cup may hold for you should be the sweeter because we drink it together. Whatever drops of bitterness it may contain should be less bitter because we share them.

S: And now in gratitude to all of you who’ve joined us today, some who were there with us 40 years ago, some who have traveled from as far away as Canada, we offer this toast. “May the close, loving bonds of each of us–to partners, family, friends, community and the earth itself–be strengthened and renewed today and every day.

___________

Some anniversary poems:

1979

1991

1992

Peterson Ranch, above the pole house, looking east. Breathing hard after a brisk walk. French horns and snare drum of the freight train laboring up the grade in the background, twittering of sparrows and finches in a dense grove of sycamore, bay and oak down below, the scream of a young redtail circling overhead, two rooks shouting and sparring in a tree top. Twenty five people spread out out on the hillside silently listening and recording.

A wisp of breeze stirs the stagnant air, cools the sweat on the back of my neck. Flat light, not the Vergillian golden radiance and lengthening shadows of former years. But the overcast makes the new growth flouresce with a dozen versions of green.

The usual April torrent of the creek is down to an October trickle. Not thirty but eight inches of rain this year. Yet around us on the serpentine bloom lupine and tidy tips, blue dicks and blue-eyed grass, monkey flower and johnny jump-ups.The dell explodes with a rude ecstatic trill. Wings wildly flapping, a small bird darts our way, then glides and swoops into the willows up the hill.

It’s a shame to disrupt this performance and its rapt audience, but I’ve assigned homework and prepared a discussion, and ink and paper has been consumed to print the readings. On the first day of class we read Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, when innocent humanity was sustained by honey and acorns, and also the biblical account of Nature’s creation as a harmonious artwork designed to provide for all the needs of his naked children by a generous parent-God. Today the ancient texts are Vergil’s Georgics”a praise of the farmer’s life acknowledging the immense difficulty of mere survival”and God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, where He mocks the good man’s futile search for intelligibility and proclaims the cruel and awesome wildness of His universe.

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is.

I read the fierce verses and they echo the screams, the croaks and the trills we’ve just heard. They answer Thoreau’s question, the motto of this course:

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him ¦whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library¦ .

Maxine Hong Kingston is a mythic personage for me. I read The Woman Warrior soon after it first came out in the 1970’s while living in Canada. It was so difficult I decided to teach it in my introduction to literature class at Malaspina College. That was the only way I’d devote the effort needed to understand it. Each chapter was a world of its own, with a different style that required many rereadings to decode the mercurial connections between sentences and incidents.

I was gripped by the horror of No Name Woman, having to piece together in my own imagination the chaotic details of its isolated heroine’s torment. I was thrilled by the pent-up fury of the young girl in revolt against the grip of her Chinese heritage and the hateful prejudices of her native Stockton. I laughed at the cross-cultural comedy of Auntie in Los Angeles.

But what got to me most as I sat reading on the old chesterfield in the log cabin was Maxine’s pre-Disney retelling of the story of Fa Mu Lan, “White Tigers.” Its mixture of psychedelic voyaging, epic battle, erotic romance, frontier child-rearing, pacifist militancy, gender-bending feminism and poetic lyricism distilled the whole range of my aspirations over the preceding ten years. It also reminded me of my wife, another woman warrior who, shortly after we met, had entered personal battle with the President of Stanford University and won, gaining the right for undergraduate girls to live off campus and who had ripped a phone booth out of the wall to stop a mob of angry cops from coming up the stairs during the 1968 sit-ins at Columbia. (more…)

My pre-dawn run leaves me bathed in peace, pleasure and inspiration. I started up with exercise again last Saturday with an hour’s run-walk on the Miossi Ranch and then yesterday morning with four laps around the track. The sense of self-neglect has been growing for months, along with intensifying bouts of anxiety and depression: body protesting to mind. Yesterday and today I woke up before the 5:30 alarm relieved to escape dreams of embarrassment, frustration and failure. There was no longer a choice, something led me to the tennis shoes in the closet, to the door, and down the steps under Venus and a crescent moon.

(more…)

Yesterday I went to the Mission Plaza at noon to attend an anti-war demonstration organized by Code Pink, the national organization, largely of women, who have been mounting protests since the war started in 2003. I was reminded of Women Stike for Peace, to which my mother belonged in the 1950’s.

It was one of those beautiful west coast January days.Low light and long shadows. The creek was flowing, the bells were tolling, music wafted through the plaza from one of the restaurant patios. Pairs of shoes of all sizes labelled with the names of Iraqi casualties were laid out on the pavement, an effort to put passersby “in their shoes.”

Prayer flags fluttered from the bandstand, each inscribed with the names and ages of U.S. soldiers killed in the last year and the dates they died. An art teacher unveiled a group canvas produced by her students showing the lofty ideal of the dove of peace and its ragged reality, trapped in barbed wire.

Starting with a woman in her nineties, people read the names of the 110 US troops who died in December written on flags that had not yet been mounted and placed them slowly in a box. After each name, one of the organizers beat a gong. Some wept as they read.

The day before, I had cashed in my United Miles and got a ticket to go to Washington for the January 27 national mobilization. Last night I listened to the CD just sent to me by college friend Jeff Parson: The Baby and the Bathwater–seventeen songs about the horrors of this war he felt called to write and perform with one of his daughters and friends.

Passions are rising. What comes next after elections?

A Walk to the Confluence of Warm Springs Creek and Big Wood River

What do you call a guy who does the Luge? Click mvi_7408.AVI for the answer. Then run the Quicktime movie backward.