Hunkered down beside a trash barrel near the entrance to the busy Starbucks where I had gone for morning coffee, he appeared to be one of the thousands of ubiquitous homeless persons living by the river and in the alleyways and parks of San Diego. His stringy, uncombed hair made a bizarre halo around the dirty ball cap on his down-cast head. If he had been kneeling with hands in an attitude of prayer, he would have been a perfect peasant in a painting of a religious scene by one of the great masters. He would be perfect as a poor man watching a procession of Medieval nobles pass him by on a tapestry. His arms hung loosely, his hands rested palms-down on the sidewalk. He wasn’t striking a pose of a beggar. He was a weary man.

From where I sat with my Atlantic Monthly and my cup of coffee, I watched the steady stream of customers coming and going. The man didn’t look up at them, He said nothing. Nobody said anything to him. Once a trio of Transit Authority cops paused, glanced at him as if on cue, and came into the shop.

This Starbucks is small... maybe half-a-dozen tables with straight-back chairs. Four comfortable, brown leather chairs anchor the front corners of the shop. Soft music from Starbucks weekly CD mixed with quiet ordering of regular coffee and louder announcement of specialty drinks, breads and sandwich orders being delivered to the take-away bar. For everything but plain coffee you hear the name of the customer and what was ordered... “lattes and turkey-bacon sandwich for Sharon.” A pretty young woman dressed for office work picked up the drinks and the sandwich. Being an old retired guy, I have plenty of time to speculate about everything and everybody. I thought to myself that in these uncertain economic times this young woman should get up early enough in the morning to make her lunch before leaving home. She left the shop; and as she passed the homeless man, she handed him the sandwich. The hand-off was fast; she barely paused. I don’t think she said anything to him. His back was turned to me, so I couldn’t see if he said anything. She walked toward the parking lot with the three lattes. He unwrapped the sandwich and ate it. He half turned to the trash barrel and threw away the sandwich paper. The paper didn’t make it into the barrel. I expected him to ignore the wadded wrapping on the sidewalk; but he didn’t. He looked back and saw that he had missed the container. He reached for it and put the paper where it belonged.

The same kind of thing happened three more times: two cups of coffee and another sandwich. After the second sandwich and the second cup of coffee, the man stood slowly and walked in the direction of the river. At this coffee shop there are always all sorts of people coming and going: all ages, all sizes, well-dressed, casually dressed, sloppily dressed. Several things about the scene surprised me: first, that the man didn’t ask for money and wasn’t given any; second, that he didn’t make any sign of begging. Looking back on it, however, the biggest surprise is that the four people who gave him food and coffee were young people. The second sandwich was given to him by a young man who was walking arm in arm with a very pretty young woman. Neither of them could have been more than twenty-five.

What I saw at Starbucks gives me reason to believe that things are going to be all right. Empathic, generous young people feeding homeless persons outside a coffee shop in Mission Valley won't solve the problem of homelessness in San Diego or in America; but at least it's a response. Young people in America are often characterized as apathetic. Many are not. When I hear the talking heads on evening news programs telling me about all the dreadful things that are happening in the world. I will try to remember what I saw... and I will try to do better myself.

My friends know that I'm out and about in San Diego on my bicycle almost every day. I carry a little notepad and a camera. When I see a particularly interesting bumper sticker, I jot the message down. When I see something in a way that I haven't noticed it before, I take a picture. I’ve thought about trying to put photographs to the bumper stickers; but that project hasn’t got off the ground. Today I saw a car on Fifth Avenue that was painted with flowers and covered with bumper stickers. Now is a good time to publish the list of bumper-sticker I’ve been saving.

MEN WHO CHANGE DIAPERS CHANGE THE WORLD

CHANGE IS INEVITABLE; GROWTH IS OPTIONAL

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

WILL WORK FOR PEACE

WHAT WE ARE GIVEN IS OUR FATE;
WHAT WE DO WITH IT IS OUR DESTINY.

WHEN YOU INVITE PEOPLE TO THINK;
YOU ARE INVITING REVOLUTION.

I’M AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY;
LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO JESUS.

DISSENT GAVE BIRTH TO THIS NATION

THE BEST IS YET TO COME

INFORMATION IS POWER

NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST

DON’T ASSUME I SHARE YOUR PREJUDICES

WE ARE CREATING ENEMIES FASTER THAN WE CAN KILL THEM

SUPPORT FAITH-BASED MISSILE DEFENSE

THOSE WHO CAN MAKE YOU BELIEVE,
CAN MAKE YOU COMMIT ATROCITIES

MINDS ARE LIKE PARACHUTES;
THEY ONLY FUNCTION WHEN OPEN.

HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE

PEACE CANNOT BE KEPT BY FORCE;
IT CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY UNDERSTANDING.
--Albert Einstein

AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND

THE CONSTITUTION IS A SHIELD, NOT A SWORD

ERACISM

FOLLOW YOUR HEART

YOUR SILENCE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU

GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD;
NO EXCEPTIONS

IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED,
YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

ART NOT APATHY

I LIKE YOUR CHRIST.
I DO NOT LIKE YOUR CHRISTIANS.
THEY ARE SO UNLIKE YOUR CHRIST.
--Mohandas Gandhi

A FREE SOCIETY IS ONE WHERE IT SAFE TO BE UNPOPULAR

GOD BLESS THE FREAKS

IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE,
TRY IGNORANCE

SPENDING MORE ON DEFENSE
LEAVES US LESS TO DEFEND

YOU CANNOT SIMULTANEOUSLY
PREVENT AND PREPARE FOR WAR

KILLING ONE PERSON IS MURDER.
KILLING 1,000 IS FOREIGN POLICY.

THE MEANING OF LIFE
IS TO LIVE IT

ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES:
FIRST, IT IS RIDICULED;
SECOND, IT IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED;
THIRD, IT IS ACCEPTED AS BEING SELF-EVIDENT.

IT TAKES A WHOLE VILLAGE TO RAISE A CHILD

RAMBLINGS FROM CHURCH
City Heights is an older San Diego urban residential community from which most white citizens fled long ago. They left behind reminders that they once lived there, none more conspicuous than Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church. The Beautiful church sits proudly on the corner of Orange Avenue and 42nd Street. A very sweet mosaic mural covers the entire streetside back wall of the church. The mural depicts three very white children clinging to a very white Jesus. Few of the real people in yards and streets of the community match the images on the mural. The notice board outside the church announces three Sunday masses, one in Spanish, one in Vietnamese, and one in English.

As I participated in Easter services at First United Methodist Church, my thoughts wandered to television’s and radio’s loudest chatter this week, the chorus of talking heads repeating inappropriate remarks by Barack Obama’s pastor. At the center of the Reverend Mr. Wright's life, racism frustrates and hurts. From the center of my life, racism is mostly an intellectual aggravation, an embarrassment. He is a theological thinker who connects the will and actions of his personal god to whatever is going on in the world at any given time in history. That's what theologians who speak from pulpits and from their writings often do. Apart from difficulties I may have with Reverend Wright's theology, the fuss over his remarks served mainly to prove the good preacher’s thesis about racism to be indeed more right than wrong. Racism is alive and well in America. Remarks inappropriate because of where and how they are stated are often more true than false. A neighbor, for example, might truly be an S.O.B., but it’s rarely appropriate to tell him or other neighbors that he is so. It’s simply not good for the neighborhood to do it. But they know anyway.

Cognitively and intellectually competent and honest Americans know that their nation has a long way to go before it escapes completely its uncomfortable racist past, and it’s not unreasonable to predict that it may never escape it. Every person becomes acculturated by being brought up in a particular cultural setting. The things that make my tribe MY TRIBE are often subtle, nuanced practices that speak to members of the group in ways that are different from the way they speak to outsiders.

I am a member of a wonderful 80-voice choir in a church that is in theory and by declaration a fully inclusive community. As I was putting on my choir robe this Easter Sunday morning, I turned my stole from the black of the day of crucifixion and death to the white of the day of resurrection and life. With black stoles on Friday the choir sang about the agony of the cross. In white we sang on Sunday of the glory and triumph of victory over death. In our culture (Notice how easily, out of long habit, I presume the larger culture to be “mine.”) black and white are symbols full of meaning, taught and understood and accepted from early childhood. On this Easter Sunday for three consecutive services, eighty singers, all in gleaming white robes, marched to their places in the choir loft. The ministers who on Friday were all robed completely in dismal black were dressed at Easter in glorious white. The mostly white choir (one Asian) in all three services sang anthems for a predominantly white congregation. There might have been as many as a dozen African Americans among a couple of thousand people in three services. The few Asians and Latinos were not enough to interrupt the visual impression that this is a white church. The congregation is mostly white Sunday after Sunday. The choir once had an African American baritone and a Chinese soprano, but they were hired help. Now they are gone.

First United Methodist Church is a “cathedral” church. It is big. It is beautiful, It is a definite presence in San Diego’s Mission Valley. Mission Valley’s commercial district is most definitely fully integrated. Shops and restaurants in the valley are fully integrated. The church is not. I have little doubt that First United Methodist Church would like to be fully integrated to match its message; but it is, after all, a tribal enclave and the tribe is primarily white. Mr. Obama’s Reverend Wright is after all right indeed in some of his message. However much many of us, perhaps even the majority of us, might wish it to be otherwise, our America is still seen by the rest of the world as a white culture. The election of a brilliant, articulate black man to be our president might move the rest of the world to see us differently and might even cause us to see ourselves in a new light.

Beneath the Cross
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND OTHER SORROWS

Heading into Holy Week on Palm Sunday, I looked ahead to “Good Friday” with foreboding. Images of crucifixions, not just the Hollywood variety but even tiny crosses with the dying figure of Jesus, bring to my mind unpleasant memories and unresolved conflicts. One memory is of an execution I witnessed at San Quentin Prison in 1960. Another is of a summary public execution by a Saigon street mob in 1971. I don’t like the idea of capital punishment. I don’t linger long before crucifixion paintings and sculptures by the great masters in museums. I don’t even like looking closely at crucifixes. Usually Protestant Christians don’t fix the corpus on their crosses, but the imagery is vivid nonetheless. There is something unsettling about adopting a crucifix as the primary symbol for a religion that is supposed to address suffering and bring peace to a conflicted world. Oh, I know the theory, the doctrine, the statements of essential beliefs about the suffering, dying man-God, spotless and unblemished like a Paschal lamb, paying the penalty of death for the sins of the world.

In spite of having forgiveness and redemption as a core principle of the Christian faith, the church has filled the record books of history with accounts of its executions by burning, hanging, beheading, and drowning dissenters. Perhaps crucifixion would be thought sacrilegious. As civil law replaced church law in many parts of the world, execution remained as punishment for the most egregious crimes. In our own country since 1819 in Texas, a bastion of American Christianity, 1153 people have been legally executed. More recently the condemned have been killed by lethal injection; the latest was Michael Richard on September 25, 2007. In Texas various methods of execution have been used: hanging, firing squad, and electrocution. George W. Bush during his six year term as governor of the state of Texas approved 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. In my own state of California capital punishment is a legal form of punishment. In my part of the state, the first recorded execution in San Diego County was in 1778 for conspiracy to commit murder. With apparent approval by the church, four native Americans were shot. Since then there have been 724 executions in the state; there are 667 people now on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.

In 1960 I was witness to the execution of Richard Harmon at San Quentin Prison in San Rafael, California. Harmon and I were the same age. He was condemned to die in the gas chamber for his assault on a guard at another prison, leaving the correctional officer in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. I was a graduate student with a wife and child. I had to work to stay in school. I took a job as guard at San Quentin because I could work from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight or from midnight until eight o’clock in the morning. The pay and benefits were good, much better than the salary I had earned as a public high school teacher in the two years between college and graduate school. I saw Richard Harmon first when I was assigned to Death Row for two weeks as part of my orientation as a correctional officer.

Midway in my first year at the prison my name came up on the list of guards who were required to attend an execution. My watch finished at eight o’clock in the morning and the execution was scheduled for ten. After twenty-five-years of Sunday school, vacation bible school, and church membership, I had not developed the moral understanding or courage to stand and say to my watch lieutenant that executions are abhorrent, wrong, criminal, and that I couldn’t participate.

At the appointed time that morning I went with other guards into a room adjacent to the death chamber to get my assignment. Correctional officers were appointed to stay close to people in the witness area who might need help if they should became ill or should faint. I was assigned to stand with a nineteen-year-old airman from Hamilton Air Force Base who had made an official request to be a witness. Anyone over the age of eighteen is eligible to apply to attend an execution in California. In a grim lottery he had been a winner. My young airman told me he had no connection to the case. He was just curious.

At the signal I went with him into the execution area. Located in the center of a large empty room, the gas chamber was a green metal, octagonal room-within-a-room. Its single oval door stood open. There were windows all around the chamber for witnesses... who didn’t sit, but stood gathered around as people might have crowded close around a platform at the Tower of London to watch beheadings. My airman went directly to the chamber and stood close to a window. I followed and stood directly behind him. The condemned man had not yet been brought into the room. We waited. I felt sick. I thought I might faint. I desperately wanted to be anywhere else.

Momentarily Richard Harmon was brought into the room. He was escorted, held up by two officers. They entered the room slowly. The condemned man was wearing street clothes: navy blue trousers and white shirt. His head hung forward, his chin on his chest. He could obviously stand and walk only because he was supported. His shirt, wringing wet, was plastered to his body. I thought at first that the wetness was deliberate, that perhaps the cyanide gas would be more effective and quicker if his clothing were wet; but I learned later that he had been sweating profusely for more than an hour.

I decided that I would try not to look. I fixed my eyes on the neck of the boy in front of me, but peripheral vision forces us to see more than we sometimes want to see. The two guards guided, mostly carried Richard Harmon through the open door into the chamber. They seated him in the left one of two rude, ugly chairs and quickly fixed sensors to his chest to monitor his heart, and they secured his arms, legs and chest. One of them leaned close to him and said something, then they left quickly, closed and sealed the door.

The man about to die began to take exaggerated, gasping breaths. I thought the cyanide pellets had been dropped into the acid bath under his seat, but in a minute it became clear that he only wanted it to be over quickly. Then he suddenly went into a convulsion, the kind I had seen epilepsy cause.

The young airman’s neck a few inches in front of my own pale face suddenly turned paper-white. He let go of the railing and fell straight back. I caught him and sat holding him on the floor where I was glad finally to be unable to see the man dying and glad to have something to hold onto. After twelve minutes we were allowed to leave the room. Richard Harmon was dead. He had been killed by the state. I had been part of it.

Another airman who had been a witness helped me get his friend to his feet. Outside I hurried to a wall as far from the chamber as I could get and vomited. When I returned to work that night, I went directly to the watch captain and told him that if my name was ever on the list again, I wouldn’t participate even if it meant losing the job. My name never appeared on the list again.

I have witnessed only one other deliberate killing of a human being. It happened thirty-eight years ago in the city that was then called Saigon. In 1970 I was living with my wife and children in the Republic of Singapore some four hundred miles from Vietnam. In spite of the war, I volunteered to go to Vietnam to participate in a two-month program designed to train Vietnamese teachers. I suppose I was trying to be noble; but looking back on it, I realize I was mostly just foolish. Those of us who were teachers in the program and the program itself were another absurdity for a poor country that had become a battleground for political forces from outside its borders.

Although the war raged furiously all over South Vietnam, I saw mostly only the dreadful consequences of it in the lives of Vietnamese civilians in places like Da Nang, Vung Tau, Nha Trang, Dalat, and Saigon. The execution I speak of happened late one morning near the central market almost in shadow of the great cathedral in Saigon. My friend Gary and I were walking back across the center of the city from our teaching session to the compound where we were staying near the American Embassy. As we got closer to the market we heard angry shouts. Our interpreters weren’t with us, so we couldn’t understand any of it except the anger. There were no sirens and no gunfire, so we walked on toward the confusion. As we came near the entrance to the market, a mob emerged from the far side of the large main building. It was advancing slowly on a man who was walking backward facing a crowd of mostly men. He was waving his arms and trying to speak to them. They shouted, brandishing boards and lengths of wood and metal. Suddenly, as if at a signal, the mob broke into a run and overtook him. They beat him to death in a couple of minutes. There were no police or soldiers. Gary and I ran like hell. We heard later at the embassy that the disturbance had been a labor dispute between veterans who wanted special consideration and shop owners who had not been part of the Regular Army.

Both these tragedies came threading through my memory last weekend as I watched the procession at the beginning of Palm Sunday services. Two thousand years after that famous dreadful execution on a cross, where is the peace on earth, the good will of men? The Christian movement continues to promise and reassure.

I was glad to hear from my friend Robert Smith that the United Method Church Book of Discipline, Paragraph 164A, states complete opposition to capital punishment and urges for complete abolishment of it in all states.

Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison,
Kyrie eleison.
Gloria in excelsis Deo,
et in terra pax hominibus
bonae voluntatis...

THIS ACORN WOODPECKER lives in a group of about twelve in San Diego's Tecolote Canyon. You almost never see just one of them; and their clownish wake-up, wake-up call makes them easy to recognize even before you see them. The birds obsessively make holes in both dead and live pine and oak trees and store a reserve supply of acorns in them although their main diet consists of fruits and insects. Like all woodpeckers, these birds use their tails to steady themselves when clinging to a tree.

Acorn woodpeckers are highly social and live in groups of twelve or more. The bird in these photographs lives in a group in Tecolote Canyon. I read that only a few in the group may mate, but all take responsibility for raising the babies and creating nests.

HILLS OF HOME: In mid-March a two-hour drive from San Diego into the Anza Borrego Desert brings a traveler to a usually dry, muted brown landscape suddenly alive with color. After getting home from a day's journey into the desert, I went out onto our own hill and into Rose Canyon and found the same flowers blooming. There's a lesson here somewhere.

SOME OF MY RELATIVES PROBABLY WON'T APPRECIATE THIS REMEMBRANCE, but I must say the bonobo chimpanzee troop at the San Diego Zoo reminds me of the lazy Sundays when I was a boy and my parents and siblings joined a much larger extended family at my grandparents’ home at the end of an unpaved rode in Arkansas. Adults clustered together or sat apart alone. Smallest children scampered squealing among a large yard full of the thorniest and most fragrant roses I have ever known. Their play spilled over into the green meadows surrounding the place. Adolescent cousins looked with lonely suspicion at everybody and especially at each other. The girls always clustered at the far end of the long porch. They did a lot of touching, especially hair and clothes; but like all of the other boys, I knew I wasn’t supposed to get close enough to hear what they were saying.

For the boys, Cousin Carl was a fount of all knowledge about all things, especially sex. We younger cousins stayed close to him like sycophants at a medieval court. It was much later after we were grown that I thought to question the accuracy of his descriptions and explanations of the mysteries of life.

Carl, who had been to Hot Springs alone, had stories to tell. When the rest of us had been there, we were shepherded by our parents. If Carl had actually done all the things he said he did, his trips would have been much longer; but it didn’t matter. He knew things. He had been to the world. He was worldly. He told us of his plans to go to New Orleans. He knew what he wanted to do there, and he told us all of it in great detail. All in unison, like a silent choir, our breaths came shorter.

Carl is old now and lives in Odessa, Texas. I haven’t seen him in many years. I’d still like to hear the details of that trip to New Orleans, if he ever got there.

Long before I had seen any of the world’s oceans or even a modest sea, I felt the call to it, the magnetic power of it. Now in my older age (I wrote "old age" first but changed my mind), I live only a mile from the pounding Pacific surf, and I have sailed on all of the great oceans. The call of the sea is as demanding as ever.

I often ride out on my bicycle to the glider port behind UCSD to look down on the long stretch of surf that reaches from as far as I can see south and north. The call of the sea here is to surfers. Carrying their surfboards, they make their way down a treacherous path to finally reach one of the most wonderful beaches in the world. I’ve never done it, but I think I know what they feel. It’s what John Masefield felt.

SEA-FEVER
John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song the white sail’s shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a gray dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the fall of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear all that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.