Our family is getting a new puppy. Cali is a five-week-old chocolate lab. For another couple of weeks she will stay with her parents and her eleven siblings, then she will move in with the Davids... She'll come to our house when they have to be out of town. If their mother looks haggard, she can be excused... and commended. She had twelve healthy, hungry pups all in one litter.

REGRET

My Grandma gave me a quarter a long time ago
when I was twelve... what a year that was...
and you know how you’re caught unaware
sometimes and you have no idea at all
that something important is happening.

It was the last time I would ever see her.
She was a big woman, not fat, just big.
I don’t remember her without an apron
She liked all of us and looked at us
even when we didn’t see her doing it.

Grandma led me aside from the others
and took my hand and looked at me
for a second and gave me the quarter.
She knew the gift wasn’t the money.
I had an inkling but didn’t see it clearly.

I don’t know what she gave to the others.
They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask or say
what she gave to me perhaps for fear
I’d learn that I wasn’t the most special,
the one she loved above all the others.

Grandma never worked at a paying job.
I know she got money by selling eggs
to the peddler who came once a week.
She bought thread from him and sugar.
I wish I knew what I did with that quarter.

Every now and then
something blooms
with such
piercing
beauty
that
words
cannot
be found
anywhere that
show how pure it is.

Auld Lang Syne

Children chasing birds
beside a wild sea
on a Saturday morning
maybe with dogs
and two people in love

Statue of a Discus Thrower in the Balboa Park Hall of Champions

I have one of those screen savers for my computer that begins when it’s left alone for awhile showing a word that grows and swirls around on the semi-dark desktop... changing size slowly but constantly, until it is replaced by yet another word. When I came to my computer just now, the word on the screen, growing larger and light blue against a deeper blue background, was brevity... bre.vi.ty |ˈbrevitē|. Because brevity isn’t my strong suite, I decided today to give it some thought... That’s all I’m going to say... for now...

Every poem has to start somewhere
and end somewhere
or not at all
which is what I prefer
it is just a matter of putting together
what you’ve got now
or had once
such as a reflection in a silent pond
and perhaps a parrot
and a moon
or a moon and parrot
and maybe a wee bit of pear blossom
and you say
what about that boy
in the red shirt and the scary dinosaur
it’s perfectly normal
for any poem
to end unsatisfactorily
if you expect to go on with it in a dream

You know how it happens sometimes... You’re our looking at something and you don’t even know why or for that matter you don’t even know you’re looking at anything, and somebody comes along and asks what you see; and then you try to think of something even halfway intelligent to say, but you can’t. That’s exactly what happened when Rousseau came along today and caught me staring up into a tree. Actually, I was waiting for Margaret and Jim and Irene; and I had decided to pass the time by taking a picture. I’d got that done and was holding the camera down at my side, and for some reason I was standing stone-still staring up into the tree when my friend Rousseau came along and although he didn’t ask, “what’re you looking at?... I knew that’s what he was thinking because he was trying to see what was in the tree, too. Now Rousseau, like his namesake, is something of a philosopher. You can see it in his eyes and in the way he sets his mouth and wrinkles his brow.

Although he never actually says so, I have the feeling that Rousseau, also like his namesake, is trying to grasp an emotional and passionate side of man, which looked like what my friend was trying to figure out about me today. I have the feeling that he believes man, and perhaps other creatures as well, are essentially good when they are in what I think he thinks is “the natural state,” although he’s never spoken to me of it. Now I happen to think his insight is pretty profound. Not to call too much attention to it, but philosophical thinking is actually what I was doing looking up into that tree today, and I could tell Rousseau could tell that’s what I was doing, although, as I said, he didn’t say so. My neighbor Rousseau is a very quiet sort... and perhaps that’s what makes me think he, like his namesake, believes good people are made unhappy and corrupted by their experiences in society, which the guy from Geneva with the same name certainly believed and wrote a whole book about it. I prefer to think I was pensive but not unhappy looking up into that tree today; but whatever it was, Rousseau caught onto it right away. He didn’t press me for anything except a pat on the head, which is the usual thing when we get together.

I don’t think I mentioned it, but Rousseau, who lives upstairs in my building, is a dog, and I mean that in the kindest possible way.

THE MORNING PAPER RITUAL

When I’m reading the New York Times in the morning I often get worked up over some political/social situation and feel bad about what’s happening to people somewhere; but I almost never cry over the news. This morning I did. I actually dislike those television “newscasts" that focus on the grief of people who have experienced great loss. I turn off the TV when a newscaster asks a widow how she feels about her fireman husband having been killed in the burning building or a distraught mother how she feels about her soldier son or daughter having been killed in Afghanistan. So I wonder if I am doing what I recoil from seeing real journalists do on television. I've made myself believe there is a difference.

What provoked my sadness is the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Joseph Kabila is president. The country is usually called simply the “Congo” or “Congo-Kenshasa,” to distinguish it from neighboring Republic of Congo. Joseph Kabila became president of the country after his father Lauren Kabila was assassinated in 2001. Lauren Kabila’s presidency had followed the rein of the infamous Mobutu Sese Seko, who at the time of his death in exile in Switzerland was judged to be one of the richest men in the world... that after his having been born to a mother who was a hotel maid and a father who was a cook for a Belgian household. He became a dictator who eliminated anybody who opposed him. Pierre Mulele, his Minister of Education, ran afoul of Mobutu and was executed, but only after he was cruelly tortured. While Mulele was still alive, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals were ripped off, and his limbs were amputated one by one. Mobutu Sese Seko was not a nice guy.

In spite of the fact that Congo is potentially one of the richest nations in the world, the citizens of Congo today are not much better off under Joseph Kabila’s presidency than they were under his father or even under Mobutu. The country is estimated to have $24 trillion (equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of Europe and the United States) worth of untapped deposits of raw mineral ores. Congo has the world’s largest reserve of cobalt and significant quantities of the world’s diamonds, gold and copper.

So what did I learn this morning from Adam Nossiter’s piece in the New York Times? To survive, barely, families in Kinshasa cope with the critical food shortages by practicing what they call “power cut” (in French, delestage).” Ten million people in the city practice the following routine: On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days all children eat, and the adults do not. In the Berbok family today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Benedicte, Josiane and Manasse, 3, 6, and 9. Their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month said the little ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any. There will be a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more. At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”

Delestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe state-decreed electric power cutoffs. It has come to represent also the rationing of food. As a survival tactic, a head of household must painfully impose it on the rest of the family. Unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness like having the lights go out. It means that two days a week children in most households don’t eat.

composition |ˌkämpəˈziSHən|
noun
1) the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up: Two red umbrellas, one slightly larger than the other; one even larger yellow umbrella; sand; half a dozen people; pigeons; one ocean with slight swell; fog bank; and one American flag over all.
---------------
Not often, but occasionally I capture an image with all its “ingredients and constituents” arranged in a way that pleases me. If an American flag happens to be located in the preeminent place in the picture, it’s even better. I don’t know what was happening here. A old man fully clothed and with a heavy coat had set up his “spot” for the day on Mission Beach. Camping isn’t allowed on this beach; so even with a lot of camping gear, he can be there only for the day. The day was sunny and cool with a brisk breeze. One umbrella kept the sun off him and the two others stopped the wind. When I got to the Mission Beach on my bike this morning, the fog was so thick I couldn’t see the ocean from the boardwalk. By eleven o’clock the fog bank had receded making one more interesting horizontal element across the image.

BEGINNINGS
January 1, 2012

S**T HAPPENS

The morning began very well
in church...
An important sermon...
full of truth and affirmation.

Then back at home a sewer problem
threatened to spoil the beginning
of a brand new year,
but obviously when shit happens
whatever follows
must surely be better...

And I was right...
an evening with friends...
Everything was better
immediately.