Saturday morning back in Queens I drove with Peter past immense cemeteries to the center of Middle Village where, since his birth, his mother had bought groceries. The clerks in the small supermarket went out of their way to provide us with empty boxes. These were neighborhood folks, sounding like characters in Mafia movies, and so were the residents of the small tidy row houses sporting American flags we passed on the way back. “Police and firemen mostly,” said Peter, “90% white. I grew up with these people. That’s why I never believed in the working class revolution.”

Jan was still sorting documents upstairs, and there was nothing for me to do till decisions were made about how to dispose of the furnishings. I sat on one of the plastic covered sofas and started reading my signed copy of Busy Dying, Hilton Obenzinger’s delicious new memoir centered on Columbia 68, while Peter conferred with the real estate agent in the dining room.

Meticulously dressed and coiffed, the young man, who also worked as a marriage counselor, had lived down the street all his life and cherished the place. He told Peter that the house could be made beautiful for the virtual tour he’d put online, but suggested gently that some items be cleared. After he left, Peter asked me to help move a bookcase to the basement, and I suggested we put it in the Goodwill room so that no further decision about that item would be required. When he agreed, I knew we were getting somewhere. Within the next two hours the ugly lamps, coffee tables, nylon curtains, artificial ferns, plastic slipcovers were removed, and the original, quaint design of the place emerged, ready for its internet debut. (more…)

Early Friday morning Jan selected clothes for Peter to take to his mother in the nursing home, and I divided the basement into areas for stuff going to the trash, to Goodwill and possibly to keep. On the subway trip back to Columbia, we attracted many people eager to direct us. Passing the gates at College Walk, we heard loud noise coming from Low Plaza and noticed hundreds of pink balloons attached to posts and railings all over the central quad.

Wow! I thought, there must be a huge group of Code Pink students marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war today. But instead it turned out to be a festival sponsored by a Korean-American sorority.

We arrived a few minutes early at the Journalism building for the morning session and met up with Taigen Dan Leighton, Zen priest, translator and scholar, just arriving from a stay in Richmond Virginia where he led members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in a walk along the Slave Trail and a meditation vigil at the Statue of Reconciliation in downtown Richmond, Virginia, the site of the slave auction houses.

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Ten days after it ended, I’m still processing the conference and slowly going through my notes trying to sift out memories and lessons to keep. So much of significance was happening at every moment that weekend–the recreation of past occurrences forgotten or newly understood, the simultaneous evocation of forty years of experience in hundreds of exceptionally conscious minds, the unfolding of present day history in encounters with young people and emergent political disputes, plus the emotional impact of connecting with old friends–it could generate a different book by every one of the participants. I look forward to see what comes of the many films, sound recordings and pictures documenting the activities while they were happening. This picture was taken on the front steps of Peter Behr’s family home in Middle Village Queens, where we stayed for four nights during the conference. I had spent the whole ten hours of our flight engrossed in the story of the strike narrated in the 300 page book, Up Against the Ivy Wall, written immediately after it concluded over the summer of 1968 by the student reporters of the Columbia Spectator. I hadn’t looked at the book since the year it was published, and clumps of its pages came apart as I read. I was astounded by the precision of its research, the astuteness of its political analysis”even with the distance of hindsight–and the liveliness of the narration. As I finished with each clump of pages I passed it to Jan who was equally enthralled. The book was edited by Robert Friedman, Spectator‘s editor at the time and now one of the organizers of the conference and moderator at many of the sessions.

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Next Wednesday we leave for this event in New York. Participants are being asked to submit stories of their lives since the 1968 strike to a collection stored here (at “Stories 68-08.pdf”). This is what I sent.

In January, when we first received word of next week’s reunion, my wife Jan and I agreed to go. The topics and speakers promised a pooling of wisdom about how to relate to a world which had become worse than the one we confronted head on in 1968. It would also be a chance see old friends and enjoy April in New York.

A few weeks later I changed my mind. Lets look at our obligations and finances and see if this trip will really fit into our schedule of grandparenting, visits with far flung children, our niece’s wedding, a long planned bicycle tour, I argued. Having just declared her candidacy in an upcoming city council election, Jan conceded it might be too much. But what really had made me back out was reading the bios accumulating on the website. Among the participants in this conference, my credentials were severely lacking in moral clarity, consistent commitment and creative innovation. I didn’t want to have to apologize or to brag.

At a party celebrating the success of “Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions,” an all day teach-in drawing 4000 attendees at the traditionally conservative University where I teach, one of the student organizers said to me, “I hope some time in the future, this group will get together to celebrate what we did today, like you are doing at that Columbia reunion.” How to tell her I wasn’t going? When a friend wrote from Chicago of his plans to attend, even the disheartening sniping on the website couldn’t keep me from ordering tickets on Travelocity with Jan’s immediate approval.

This shilly-shally recalls foggy memories. In or out of the building? In, then out, then in again, until the bust.

In 1968, I was a first year Acting Assistant Professor of English, closer to students in age and outlook than to most faculty colleagues. I’d entered the Stanford PhD program in 1963 after graduating from Columbia as an undergraduate, joining the Peace Corps and getting kicked out after ten weeks of training for being “too intellectual” and having the “wrong attitude toward authority.” (more…)

My aunt Hannelore died on January 21, almost three months ago. I keep telling myself that I will write about her or to her, to reach some kind of closure. Doing this with my father and mother upon their deaths in 1995 and 2005 allowed me to say goodbye and close the door. But Hanu has been weighing on my mind, and so has Gabi, her surviving sister, to whose living presence I feel I owe it. The delay has been largely due to lack of time”the pressures of teaching, visit to the family in Idaho, etc.”but now there’s no more excuse.

Other reasons made me start and stop, go frantic or lethargic, change plans. I felt a special connection with Hannelore because she was such a prolific writer, such a perspicuous observer, such an elegant stylist. Her love for books, expressed in her devotion to the family bookstores, could well have issued in her becoming a novelist or non-fiction writer, vocations I’ve always admired but never felt confident enough to pursue. She focused those talents on eliciting information about me and my family and then formulating her own stories about what was going on, often with great insight, sometimes comically off the mark. This connection led to extensive correspondance going back twenty years. Unearthing the file folders of thick letters she wrote and the word-processor and email files of my answers is an imposing task that I started last week, disappointed at first by the many holes in the record and then thankful that not more has survived for me to process.

Our connection was also influenced by circumstances of kinship. I had no brothers or sisters. Neither did my father. Hannelore was one of my mother’s step-sisters. She along with Gabi and brother Hans-Peter were my only aunts and uncles. With my maternal grandparents they emigrated to Brazil to escape the Holocaust while my parents went to New York. I had heard about them and seen pictures since earliest childhood, but had met only Gabi in person, during her visits to the States. Their many offspring are my only cousins. After my father’s death Jan and I took a trip to Sao Paulo in 1998. We felt deeply welcomed and at home in family gatherings. But that trip also revealed oceans of distance: cultural, linguistic and experiential.

In-person contact magnified Hannelore’s admirable eccentricities. We stayed in her house, squeezed between highrises in downtown Sao Paulo, filled with relics of Germany in the 1930’s. We witnessed her midnight rambles with neighborhood derelicts and her relationships with her live-in maid and son. She guided us through the business enterprises of her children and around the city-center.

Death at 86 is no cause for sorrow, and Hannelore had been in the hospital twice during the last few years. Recent business reverses may have been the coup de grace. Cousin Marcelo’s brief email described a good ending, at midnight, on the way upstairs:

Unfortunately, our dear and lovely ant Hannelore died yersterday, at 0:00. Renato called us and immediatly me and Rony runned to her house to give them a little confort cause de sadly situation.
Lastely, she was bad because her hart was weak.
Suddenly, in her home, when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietely. Dario and Renato were together. Hannelore died near her son’s

But I cried when Gabi told me the news on the phone in Jan’s office. And now I want her to keep talking.

5 April 2002

I am not at the office, stayed home for a fortnight because I fell and broke”once again”my even previously not too classical nose, ¦ I also broke all my front teeth, but nowadays you can glue them, which I had done¦Monday I will go back to the bookstore!

¦we are having big trouble with the house. You remember it is a double-house, now my neighbor has Alzheimers and cant practice medicine any more, his wife has Alzheimers too, they share a nurse, and the son, a building engineer, has sold the half to be torn down and incorporated with two more lots for a big building. We share one roof and separation wall. They want us to sell too and are trying to force us because we are afraid for the structure of our house. As a matter of fact legally they cant do it, but nobody cares much about the laws here¦that was the reason I fell, because I was so worried. They are already tearing down the other two houses they bought, with a crew of unqualifiedmen, with axes, without the necessary license.

July 5 2002

Yesterday the Bookfair ended. I am getting a bit too old for these events, but love them. Ruy got an honorable mention for a book on Physics he publishes at an Oscarlike ceremony. We had a beautiful stand, a monument to Ernesto. I am very grateful that the children continue his life’s work¦

Ruy managed to get a court order to postpone the demolition of our town house. Mario is a friend of the owner of the foremost civil engineering firm, who declared it unsafe for our house if the other half is torn down. A nice young lady judge had the demolition stopped by a summons served¦eventually they are going to succeed¦Of course, his is a crook and of course he waited for Ruy to leave for a US Bookfair on Tuesday to try on Friday to tear down the house court order and all, and of course Ruy had foreseen that intention and sent his bodyguards to stand in the path.

March 16 2005 (Upon the death of her older stepsister”my mother)

She was so happy and so proud of her family and I wish I could visualize her when she was her own self because her last years were very sad, since she was present only physically and not with her admirable mind. Very often that is the tribute people have to pay for still being around. I hope this wont happen to me, even more so because I would be financially a heavy burden on the family¦She had a very special marriage, a lasting love-affair with adorable Henry. I don’t know whether you ever knew how the marriage happened: Henry was a promising executive in her best friend’s father’s department store, Tiefenthal and Halle. Lotte Tiefenthal set out on a trip to visit family and entrusted her so-to-say fiancée Henry to Lise’s care and guard so no no one would conquer him for herself. Of course he succumbed to Lise’s charm and beauty and¦she kept him for herself. Lotte Tiefenthal would have liked to murder her when she returned, but emigrated also to the States, got married¦and stayed friends. As opposed to Gaby and me, Lise had a new boyfriend and marriage candidate every month and kept our father busy chasing them away, but he was very happy with her final choice, Henry. Even during that restricted and morally hypocritical period , he helped her in finding a job there so they could be together. They did have an exceptionally happy marriage, though she was moody and he quite a tyrant in his charming way. I am really happy you followed their example, even though in the beginning, in those troubled years, you partially had a hard time. Janet went with you through thick and thin until you finally were “allowed” to resume your disrupted career. And like they did, you enjoy each other’s company.

August 8 2006 (accompanying a newspaper clipping)

Yes that’s poor old little me at the meeting in one more attempt to get the “camelos” (Peddlers) out of the once beautiful new town center. Nobody goes to town any more. One of our past mayors, Erundine, brought thousands of them downtown, where they destroyed the asphalt, ruined shops, including ours, bankrupted all our department stores, cook and sell Yakisoba, produce in plain view, thousands of pirate CDs and DVDs, use the streets as public toilets, steal, assault. Cheating at cards, now and then one kills another, generally by knife. They are dirty, illiterate, uncultured and nobody manages to get them out because they are really a front. Everybody at the meeting had one minute to speak. I told them that I had observed them for years. They never sold anything, had no wrapping paper, no small change. I never saw anybody choose, buy, pay, and most of all, they are not worried about it. That means what? I made my point, the are there to peddle DRUGS! Of course I didn’t say that or I would be dead.

August 15 2006

Here is something to amuse you, photos of the celebration of 70 years of Ernesto’s beloved bookstore. Considering the situation we were not going to do anything. But at the last minute Ruy changed his mind, improvising. We decided to have a very modest celebration at one of Ernesto’s favorite Italian restaurants. Knowing Ruy, you wont believe it: due to the “special circumstances, everybody paid for himself, we all shared a few dishes, nobody even mentioned desert, except of course for Yago. And would you believe it, we had a wonderful time. I had taken Ernestos picture along. In front of it I placed an orchid all the employees together had given to me¦It was really a mark in my life and I want to share it with you. On August 1 I completed 66 years in the firm. Sylvia is eligible for pension next year. If I live until then, I will have a sixty year old daughter.

When to stop? Hanu, Hannelore, Hannylorie. These are short excerpts of but a few of the letters I saved, and the dozens that disappeared. These are paltry samples of pictures you sent, I and Jan took, and my parents preserved in boxes of albums sitting in the garage. And I met you only once. How much of you is left to the sister, children, grandchildren, extended family, co-workers and neighbors with whom you spent your days? How much less than we long for, how much more than we can relinquish?

Woke up this morning feeling rested, relaxed and healthy”first time since the new year. Went for a swim, after which I felt exuberant. At 1 p.m. I took a break from grading papers to fill the bird feeder and discovered it was clear, breezy and warm outside. After I added a scoop of sunflower seeds, the red-headed finches twittered their gratitude from the surrounding cover. I walked up the steps to the blooming volunteer almond tree, the first sign of spring. Coming close, I was enfolded by its shimmer and fragrance. Honey not tasted but inhaled, its sweetness pouring through nasal passages up into sinuses behind my eyes.

What a day for bees, I thought, and immediately was surrounded by dozens of them flitting and hovering, trembling in the wind along with the blossoms and new leaves, apparently oblivious of my presence. The breeze died down and the fragrance ramped up. Up close I watched the bees nuzzle and grope and hump the tiny golden stamens at the center of each blossom. Vibrating with excitement, released from the pull of gravity, they rode a wave of pleasure in taste and smell.

I was transported with them for a moment. Then I tried to observe. A single blossom held an inexhaustible supply of delight. One after another bee entered its bower of warmth and brightness, took its harvest, and was replaced and sometimes bumped out of the way by a new visitor.

I tried to track an individual bee, noticing how it used two or three or four hands to grasp whatever it gathered on the top of those stamens and shove it greedily into its mouth. It moved to another blossom, dove in, turned on its back, curled its abdomen around the group of stamens and rubbed furiously against them with its belly.

At most ten seconds on any one flower. But, why move on when there’s plenty left? Why approach another flower and then back off, or touch down on a third and depart without entering? What determined its preference? I couldn’t track a single bee for more than a minute before it sped out of my narrow focus.

more bee pics

I sit twenty five feet up in the branches of the great live oak, on the deck of the tree house. Inside is drenched by rain that’s fallen through a gash in the roof. I’m enjoying a break in the weather that probably wont last long enough to finish writing this entry. The hike up was easier than expected, aided by two new gaps in the fence and enough fresh grass to allow evasion of the worst mud.

I’ve moved indoors. The intact half of the roof keeps the drops that penetrate the canopy from blotting my words. What do we need for shelter? This makes the cabin at Walden a McMansion by comparison. No lake, but the occasional stream flows within view, down the middle of a gully covering the underground watercourse that allows this tree to grow so large. The lichen coating its elephantine limbs now is bright green. The slope that tilts almost to vertical just above the uphill edge of the canopy bursts with new vegetation, hastening to stabilize and clothe itself before it’s undermined from below by slumpage or eroded from above by runoff.

On the way here I noticed water sheeting off driveways and pouring out of drainage pipes embedded in the sidewalk, gathering in the gutters and racing down the gentle slope of the street. All that water from these tiny municipal lots, looking for a place to go because it cant soak into the ground or find its natural channels. Further along the flow increases and suddenly disappears with a roar. Tucked under the lip of the sidewalk a grated storm sewer opening three concrete squares wide. This is where the stream draining the whole valley between Poly Mountain and our Alta Vista hill must once have run, starting at the top near the Admin building, going by the site of the PAC, under the track and practise field, down to Palm Street, then California, then Monterey then Santa Rosa, before emptying into San Luis Creek.

Beyond the sewer opening, the water flowed toward me, a thick foam-edged meander crossing Grand Ave. next to the parking kiosk.

Its been raining for weeks. The one sunny day I remember since the funeral in Paso Robles was Thursday the 31st: Focus the Nation Day. May it be remembered as a historic one.

Focus the Nation Cal Poly slideshow

Eban

Here’s a sample of the kind of responses we’ve received
____

To the organizers of Focus the Nation:

I just wanted to congratulate all of you who worked so long and hard to put together the Focus the Nation event. I must say that in the 25 years I have been at Cal Poly, this was the most impressive, relevant, important, professional, and well coordinated student run event I have ever seen on our campus. You are all to be congratulated for an amazing job – the energy and passion you brought to the event was truly inspiring. Thank you for advancing the message of sustainability to our faculty, staff, students, community, and political leaders. And thank you for the opportunity to participate and share some of the things going on within Facility Services. Kudos!

Thanks,
Dennis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I want, personally, to pass on some of this gratitude to you.

The first time I encountered you was in the elevator in the motel across the street from ASU November 2006. It was late at night and you were pulling your suitcase. No words were exchanged but I got a sense of being in presence of a furious intensity that made me both curious and uncomfortable. When I heard you introduce Focus the Nation at the AASHE conference the next day, I got it. That suitcase was carrying a time bomb of an idea. Of all the enlightening and inspiring material shared at the conference and the energy it stirred up, yours was the only outlet, the only immediate action item. At the organizing meeting you called afterwards, I had mixed feelings. I wished that you had offered more to rely on: financial backing, a staff, a sense of irresistible power like David Orr or Ray Anderson’s, but instead it was only a perfect name, a practical idea, and an agonized personal urgency that said you were going to give all you had to make it happen. The rest was up to us. From the small-scale experiences I’ve had of starting things up and getting people going, I recognized that this was what it takes.

Over the intervening months, my confidence in the progress of the project lagged, but my sense that it was the right thing to do didnt falter. After returning from Las Vegas with our Cal Poly delegation, the sense that it was up to us was even stronger. Regardless of what happened nationally, we were going to make it happen at Cal Poly. We presented the idea first to a group of faculty who said yes, came to a few meetings and drifted off. At the same time Chad and Matt, the two students who were in Las Vegas, decided to take more initiative. They invited their friends and took over calling and planning meetings. They got it: this is about action, not deliberation. The claim that to me seemed a bit overblown–“the largest teach-in in American history”–became their warcry. They were going to add a job fair, poetry slam, rockband, carshow, art exhibit, expensive dinner for decision makers, zero waste organic lunch, landscape installation. I offered some practical suggestions of who, how, and where, got early necessary arrangements out of the way, and urged the necessity for organizing strategy and program design. As a last resort we opted for sticking as close as possible to the exact models that you had devised. As we followed them in succeeding months, my appreciation steadily grew. At a certain point, I realized that you had this figured out to a T from day one.

In late Fall 2007, the national organization started looking more substantial, despite the absence of any serious media presence. But the idea that we could get a significant number of political figures involved seemed a pipe dream, let alone have any influence over the presidential primaries. Though our congresswoman Lois Capps was amenable, and so were local officials, where were the big endorsements? By the time they started flooding in, after the New Year, we neither expected nor needed them. But the unexpected flurry of national support toward the end must have been incubating for a long time, and I suspected that behind the scenes you’d been making it happen all along. That surge elevated the last stages of organizing to a level of joyful confidence that I never dreamed of when we first started.

Where this will go next remains to be seen. But I now have an easy confidence that you will lead it there.

The second day of rain. The gift from heaven prayed for in need. Wet. Cold. Dark.

My aunt Hannelore died Monday in Sao Paulo. She was 86, my mother’s half sister. We met in person only during the visit Jan and I made to Brazil ten years ago. But we talked regularly on the phone, and corresponded at length by letter and email. She was a born writer with a great mind. They wouldn’t let her become a doctor in the 1930’s. She married an older man who took a mistress and left her nothing in his will. She always loved him. “In her home when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietly,” wrote my cousin Marcelo.

On Friday we attended Maggie’s funeral. Saturday was Don’s memorial celebration in Lund. Sunday a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration outside Solvang, where I sat next to a woman I went to elementary school with. We didn’t say it, but looked at each other marveling at the ravages of time.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by the demands of teaching, the impending climax of Focus the Nation next week, the huge expansion of the Sierra Club’s chapter’s commitments to lawsuits and fundraisers. I cant do justice to any of the specific obligations they incur, let alone to the doom-laden mission to do something about the threat of Global Warming which lurks behind all of them.

I wake up with grim determination to get through the day and I plow through the piled on tasks longing simply for the moment to sink into the pillow at night. Maggie, Don, Hannelore, enjoy your rest.

I regret binding myself with duties that generate unrelenting anxiety, that pull me away from the innocent vitality and the fresh bodies of my four grandchildren, and of the other kids at Ian’s school I was able to play with in the autumn. I long for more of the retreat at Knoll House and regret leasing it out to Tristen and his family for another year or two.

I read Thoreau to prepare for today’s class.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music(1) to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.

I want to take this therapy with a walk outside or with reading my own ecologs, but instead I have to scurry to get on with the jobs at hand. I know that the movement through isolation and sadness leads to connectedness and joy, and that the more room given to grief, the grander the reward:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

Another mixture of Henry’s truth and lies. One hour only he says he felt lonesome. But I sense that he grappled with that “insanity” every day, rain or shine. And that he knew the struggle was what produced the exaltation that made the common companionships of life pale to inadequacy. Every gorgeous item in the catalogue of solitary joys that follows is drawn with ink of ashes and tears.

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.