Stray birds
Odds and Ends- people and places from some of my stories

Cheery, brightly colored titmice, yellow and black with a touch of blue and white, come to our bedroom windows in the morning and put on a little show to encourage us to get up and start our day. They flutter their wings and hover for a few seconds, and then land on the sill and repeat the performance like impatient pets.  They sometimes follow me from window to window as I make my way through the house and perch expectantly on the porch railing while I take the four or five steps down to the mail-box to get the morning paper. After, they fly to the kitchen window and wait.  If I’m slow to respond, they peck reproachfully on the glass until I open it and reward their aerobatics and persistence with small bits of cheese from my outstretched hand, careful never to break their trust by closing my fingers around them.

                     ****

Before the Wehrmacht was driven from the Soviet Union in 1944 it is estimated that 100 to 150,000 Jews, Russians and Romanis were murdered at the ravine called Babij Jar on the outskirts of Kiev in the Ukraine. Olof Palme referred to Babi Jar in his passionate and fierce denunciation of the Vietnam War and the terror bombings of Hanoi during the Christmas holidays of 1972.  Until my friend Joe brought the atrocities that took place there to life, Babi Jar was just a name that I vaguely remembered from that speech. Palme compared the bombings to other places where violence and terror had triumphed but where history had judged its perpetrators harshly. He said in a radio broadcast, “the bombings are an evil deed and a new name is added to that list of infamies:  Guernica, Oradour, Babij Jar, Katyn, Lidice, Treblinka, and Sharpeville are joined by the name Hanoi.” Palme’s speech and the Swedish governments’ sharp criticism of the Vietnam War infuriated Nixon and Kissinger to the point where the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Sweden and with their typical arrogance, referred to Palme as that “Swedish asshole.” The speech is regarded today as having been a key factor in unifying Europe against the war.

From: No Monument Stands Over Babi Jar

                    ****

Morning had broken when we woke the children, wrapped them in their blankets and carried them home along the pine fragrant forest path that led to our back door.  We heard a cuckoo call in the distance. In Swedish folklore it is said that you could tell the future by listening to them. A call from the south was a foreboding of death, from the west good fortune, from the east solace or comfort, and from the north sorrow.   

From: Rural Highway 511

                      ****

The sun rose from the sea over Vasto into the cloudless sky as though the sounding bells had woken it from its slumber. I kept my eyes closed, I think, as much to hold onto the dream I was having, as to keep out the blinding light. The high pitched clang that came from the steeple of San Giuseppe Church on the town square called the faithful to mass. Our house shook as the great bass bells of the nearby cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, chimed in, as if competing for the souls of the faithful. As they quieted, only the more discreet ringing from the other, lesser chapels and churches could be discerned in the distance. Our downstairs neighbor opened his door and called to his dog Chico, “vieni qui.” I heard the reluctant creaking of weathered wood and rusty hinges as the old woman across the alley pushed open her shutters to let in the morning air. He greeted her with a hearty “boungiorno” that reverberated from the ancient stuccoed walls and lanes.  I was still in that indistinct realm between sleep and waking and wondered if I hadn’t been here before. Was it the gravitational pull from the gnarled roots of my family tree playing with my memory, or was it  memories of my Italian ancestors calling to me after all these years? 

From: Vasto, A story for my fine souled Italian friends

                   ****

We were saying our good-byes. I gave him the typical hug and double sided  cheek  kiss, which wasn't a kiss at all, and  you never rubbed cheeks either, and he  said  with a wink,  " you know that the Italian border police ask every departing traveler if they have taken proper leave of their friends and families.  If they hadn't they had to return home and do it before they were allowed to leave the country.

                  ****

A gale was howling, scattering  leaves and branches on the road and then  blowing them into the fields in an effort to  tidy up.

                    ****

When we came to Vasto a month ago I had every intention of taking a break from the stories I had been working on and write about our “Heart of Darkness” trip down the Congo River. When I went through the notes that I had brought with me  I came across an anecdote that was the beginning of a story about Mrs. Mani, the wife of my cook. I had started it a few years earlier but left it unfinished. I felt an urge to take it up again and the story  grew  as I remembered her, her curries, her easy laugh and her children. As I was writing about her  my "in box" signaled the arrival of  a message with the title “Sad News.” Mike Lipman  had forwarded an e-mail saying that Mrs. Mani had died a few hours earlier. I' m inclined think that my thoughts and memories were more than just a coincidence; India is a place where the paranormal is normal. When I told one of my Italian friends that I was thinking and writing about her when she died,  he said simply " it wasn't a coincidence, everything and everybody are connected."

From : A Letter From Vasto

By nineteen sixty-nine the year that my group was accepted to the Peace Corps, the Vietnam War was raging and had escalated to the point that there were five hundred and sixty thousand American soldiers in South East Asia.  It was a tumultuous time and antiwar sentiments were at fever pitch. Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. The draft had become increasingly unpopular and it was mostly the poor and uneducated that were called to mandatory military service. After college it wasn’t possible to get a   student deferment and deferments of any kind were very difficult to get unless you were fortunate enough to get into the Peace Corps.   I was disappointed that some of the guys in my group said that they were packing it in because they didn’t need their Peace Corps deferments any more. They were winners in the draft lottery and were exempt from  conscription. I didn’t realize that not everybody in my group saw our time in Kolar as an altruistic opportunity and like me thought that this was the chance of a lifetime. 

From: Songs for myself

The times are a changing.  Twenty years ago a rock poet could never even had been considered for a poetry prize let alone a Nobel Prize in Literature. But now there we were, gathered around the TV waiting for Bob Dylan to be awarded a long awaited but unexpected Nobel Prize. We watched Patti Smith sing a heart wrenching interpretation of his “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” There wasn’t a dry eye in Stockholm’s concert hall as she sang.” When it was over, Ulla our hostess, handed me her guitar and asked me to play some Dylan. I played first a little Woody Guthrie to show where Dylan had come from, and then a medley of his early songs. I always said that his love ballads were my favorites, Girl From the North Country, Boots of Spanish Leather, One too Many Mornings  and then Blowing in the Wind, everyone’s favorite . After our “ Nobel Dinner, some of the guys actually wore frocks and the women gowns, I sank into an overstuffed armchair by the bookshelf and drifted into the orbit of my own thoughts, wandering out of the gravitational pull of the party and blocking out the din of the small talk around me. I found a copy of Nil’s Ferlin’s poems Barfota Barn (Barefoot Children) and was jumping from one of his falling stars to another. Ulla asked solicitously what I was reading and why I was sitting alone. I smiled and replied that, “I wasn’t alone; I was surrounded by books,” and when she asked me  If  I had found anything interesting, I replied, “not really,”  unwilling to break the spell and try to explain to her that I was travelling on Ferlin’s lonely roads, feeling the pains of his heartbreak, and hearing the sighs and longing of his prose like I was his “ bare-foot child of life. “

From: A recent letter to a friend

I guess for the most part that it is true. The ditch digger’s children become ditch diggers; the doctor’s children become doctors. For every success story that begins with “all that I had  when I started  were my two bare hands,” there are a thousand crushed lives.

Our stars would shine differently, some burned out others were in ascension, I was unknowingly being prepared for a life defending the weak, simply because I didn’t want to seem weak myself.  Some of us would be scholars, others conartists, storytellers, postmen, priests and philanderers.

We all have dreams and we all carry our pasts  like backpacks that we fill as we go through life. When our pack  becomes too heavy, we throw out some memories and lighten our load, and even in our forgetfulness  the marks of the straps  on our shoulders remain.

The strong oppress the weak. I took on a burden of guilt when the morning stillness was broken by the metallic click of Jean Claude racking his weapon, knowing that those were the laws or the lack of them that bound me, and what was right and moral was a question decided by who held the gun.

The year before men had left their first footprints on the moon but all these people in rags were a bigger challenge. This was humiliating poverty and you had to exempt yourself from the shame of only helping marginally and block out the guilt of being a witness to it. In the villages the poverty was different, more disguised. In the cities it was squalor. On my way to dinner I walked through Bombay’s back alleys and side streets past families in rags with outstretched hands. Begging was not the problem, poverty was. Walking up the marble steps of the ornate Taj Mahal Hotel I saw the contrasts of India’s discarded lives scattered among its incredible riches. I stepped over a tangle of sleeping bodies covered with threadbare cloth with a thick wad of 100 rupee notes in my pocket, surprised that these men let me pass to spend more money on a dinner than they could earn in a month.

****

The main route from Bangui to the south where we'd meet the Congo River was no more than a rutted path impossible to navigate when it was muddy, almost as bad when it was dry. After six months of hard travelling we were ragged and worn. The fine red dust of the jungle tracks had crept into every pore. The Sahara crossing with three and a half thousand kilometers of sand and stone with a minimum of food, water and petrol, in comparison would prove to be one of the easier legs of our odyssey. But so far we had been lucky. The bike was running well, we hadn't been ill, and we hadn't had any serious mishaps. We were hitching upriver to Kisangani with Greek traders and had been on their boat two weeks and were beginning to get back our energy. The river was so  wide that  it was easy to mistake the islands that we passed for the opposite shore. We had all but forgotten the claustrophobia of the jungle, the insect bites, snakes and scorpions and the high wall of green that let only stray feathers of light flutter down to the tangled undergrowth. 

****

We were physically and mentally exhausted. The road deceptively marked out on our Michelin Carte d’Afrique as the main route south from Bangui was nothing more than several ruts, a foot or so deep, gouged out of the sandy jungle floor by the trucks that made their way to the river to unload their goods for boat trip east to Kisangani or south to Kinshasa. We were overloaded and the bike was heavy on the back wheel. Every few yards it burrowed deep until the under carriage and hub were bogged down and the engine stalled. The narrow tracks didn’t give me enough room to fish-tail and slide through the loose sand, so I walked along side, leaning over, feathering the throttle, with one hand while working the clutch with the other, pushing forward on the handlebar at the same time Kersti grabbed hold of the luggage rack and lifted the weight off of the back wheel. We did that for a few hours and were only moving along at the pace of a slow walk. I smelled the overworked, slipping clutch plates and could hear the engine complaining before it seized, a warning in the form of a sharp pinging coming from the pistons and cylinders that were overheating from the high revs and ninety degree heat.  

****

The gold caps on his incisors shone in the dim light of the open doorway. His pupils captured the stray rays that filtered into the room and  were surrounded by whites clear and unmarked except for the sadness that seemed to seep out of them. His eyes were the same bleached color as his large teeth that were framed by  lips that had difficulty turning upwards into a smile. We sat a while and  I asked him why he was so quiet and he  quoted a proverb from, his native language, “you have two ears and one tongue, therefore you should listen twice as much as you speak."  Eventually he told me that his family was killed in the Biafran War. The ones that didn’t starve to death were shot or hung. He said, " judging by the evil and horror that were perpetuated everywhere  it was difficult to believe in God every day, but   I´m trying."

****

We were following the Ubangi river to Bangui. We finished haggling with the ferryman over the price for poling us across a tributary only a hundred or so yards wide, one of those many surprises not important enough to be staked out on our Carte Michelin d'Afrique. We unpacked the bike and piled our load, jerry cans, sleeping bags, tent and spares, on the river bank. the ferry which consisted of half a dozen logs lashed together with hemp rope was tied to a branch five feet below us a bit out in the river. There was no way that we could lift a 350 lb. motorcycle down onto it. There was no alternative if we wanted to cross. I backed up, opened the throttle with my right palm, held my fingers on the front brake lever ready to pull it hard as soon as the bike was airborne. If and when I landed on the ferry, I'd have three feet to stop, or else our trip would end with me and our transportation, under twenty feet of murky jungle river.

****

Mamakos’ boat made hardly a ripple as it headed farther into the Congo Basin, an insignificant intruder sailing deeper into Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” This was Africa as I had imagined it, day after day of gliding through the impenetrable wall of jungle on the silky slow moving river. The tropical sun bared it´s teeth as it did every afternoon. To get a respite from the heat and humidity and relieve our boredom, we swam from the front barge. We grabbed a rope in one hand and jumped from the bow catching the stern when it passed, or just let the boat tow us along while we floated on our bellies as it plowed upstream. We had obviously never heard the warning “Don’t swim in the Congo River.” Who thought about the fearsome giant tiger fish with its voracious appetite and two inch long teeth, or the ubiquitous crocodiles, or maybe just losing our grip on the rope, missing the stern and getting left in the middle of that wide river.

 From: Drifting on the Congo river

We called ourselves the Honorary Society of the Friends of Ambrosia and besides the common ground of our politics and philosophical similarities we all had a love of food and cooking. We went on Sunday outings together sometimes to a mountain village to eat arrosticini (lamb kebab) because it was the best in Italy or to a distant village because the wine or cheese was special.

I reminded one of the Ambrosians of a trip that we had made together the year before to Sepino a Roman archeological site in the mountains not far from Campo Basso. She had difficulty in recalling the day until I reminded her that it was there we ate that magnificent “tagliatelli with truffles” and then the memories flooded. The ruins of the ancient city were a marvel, but the food more so.

Le guide rouge de Michelin was very prestigious and its’ recommendation sought after, but when we shopped or went out to eat, we joked with one another and asked how many stars the restaurant or shop  had in the Guide d’Amici di Ambrosia. The recommendation of our discerning friends was, in our eyes, the most reliable.

You don’t have to look any farther than the kitchen to find the ethos of Italian culture. Despite its enormous quantity of historical monuments, archeological treasures, poets and artists, in Italy it is the  food and the culture that  are synonymous.

You can even find dog food that is pressed  into the shape of penne rigate and a taxi driver who picked you up while making normal small-talk might give a lecture on the evils of over cooking pasta or which prosciutto was best and which regions  had the best oils and cheeses. Everyone seemed to be an expert on food and how it should be eaten and they revealed their secrets  willingly. When you met someone they could as readily talk about one of their culinary experiences as the weather.

From: Amici di Ambosia

We came to India as  ambassadors of change without realizing that change was a slow process and that India would probably change us and  our  way of  viewing the world more than we changed it.  We were continually  weaving in and out of unusual situations, trying to avoid the  mistakes that we seemed to make with such ease in the  intricately woven Indian culture.

We came to a place that stood outside of time. Bullocks lumbered past our bungalow decorated with garlands of jasmine and marked with cum-cum, the tips of their horns capped with silver. They  pulled crude  carts with wobbly wooden wheels. The earth had stood still in the place that would be my home for the next two and half years.

At days end the sudden wonder of the sun setting behind the mountains and the ensuing coolness driving away the languor of the afternoon, giving life back to the village. The melodious laughter of children floats through the trees as they bring in the herds and flocks. Slender hipped erect girls return from the well, clay pots filled and eyes downcast giving an impression of tender timidity. A lithe farmer with skin the color of polished mahogany, clad in loincloth and turban, urges his bullocks home from ages past. While  I sit and watch the moon is rising, giving shape and shadow to the palms on the horizon and gazes down on my own endless dreams.

You couldn’t call it a bath and it wasn’t a shower. Mani heated water by lighting a small fire under a   clay cauldron and I washed  off the grime after my day in the workshop by pouring water over myself with a tin mug and then ate dinner, usually a vegetable or lentil curry over rice.  I’d eat in the normal traditional way by rolling my food into a ball with my fingers before pushing it into my mouth.

The well behind our house is a convenience for the women and girls from the nearby bungalows. The water is always fresh and the well saves them a long walk several times a day to the communal tap.  Indoor plumbing is a luxury that doesn’t exist in the village and filling the family’s water jugs for bathing, laundry and cooking is their responsibility.

The women usually come twice a day, in the evenings and mornings.  They bring their own rope, or use ours if it is hanging on the pulley, dropping their brass or clay pots four or five meters down to the water and then with strong arms and  hands pulling them up and hoisting them gracefully onto their heads and hips. The well is in constant use and the water is always cool and we have hard surfaced the surrounding area to prevent impurities from leaching into the aquifer during the downpours of our short rainy season.

It has never occurred to me that we own the water; or don´t think of it as strange that our neighbor’s don´t ask permission to take it. To me it has no value. We come from a society where there is water in abundance and therefore take it for granted.  We wash our cars with it, flush our toilets, water our lawns and let it run out of the faucet if it isn’t cold enough to drink. In contrast the residents of Kolar are forced to count the precious drops and I'm  beginning to realize that for most of the world’s people, access to adequate clean water is a luxury that they have to traverse long distances every day to get. Use of our well might save these women hours of standing in line and the burden of lugging their pots home from the village tap where at best there is pressure just a few hours every day.

Even if there was a vast cultural divide, there seemed to be a recognizable symmetry between my life in India and the way I grew up. There were striking similarities between the two, and seen through the lens of my Catholic upbringing, waiting for a ghost to appear in the quiet Kolar night wasn’t so far- fetched. Hindu polytheism and village superstition, didn’t strike me as so far removed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. From an early age my head was filled with stories of the intervention and miracles of The Saints, vivid tales of reward and punishment in heaven and hell,   prayers for the dead and living, of blessings and benedictions, angels and demons. Partaking in the ancient ritual of the Latin Mass was like falling into a time warp. 

From : Letters from Kolar

 It was India with her heat and droughts, monsoons, rivers and coasts, mountains and plains, temples and sad eyed cows roaming the streets and lanes. It was India with its patchwork of small fields and rice paddies and colorful markets. It was India where superstition and the spiritual were always present.  It was India, a land of six hundred  thousand  villages and overcrowded sprawling cities. It was India, a country without proper sanitation or enough water and where everything except hospitality was in short supply. It was India that you either loved or hated. It was India and for the first time in my life I felt as though I was home.

During our Peace Corps training in San Luis Obispo, Lenny the staff psychologist began the day’s class with a metaphor. “When you dive into the ocean that is India, you might take a gulp or two of saltwater. Spit it out and keep on swimming,” he said with a smile and added, “If you become dispirited don’t worry, it’s pretty normal, most Volunteers feel that way at some time. It’s okay when you’ve been working in country a while and aren’t as excited and optimistic as you were in the beginning. You can look at your state of mind as though it were the letter J and drew one on the black board, but in inverted form.  He called it the Reverse J Curve. Pointing to the top, he said, “you arrive in India full of energy and enthusiasm but after wrestling with the frustrations of its bureaucracy, your homesickness and health, and perhaps realizing that you are not accomplishing as much as you wanted, your curve will dip downward.” Tracing the J with his finger he assured us, “ there will be highs and lows but India will change you, as you begin to understand the culture and acclimatize, your curve will start back up again and should level off somewhere in the middle.” Lenny was right.  I came out of the ocean he referred to a different person than I was when I dove in and have taken his life lesson with me.

Selection – To be successful you had to be a reader and have a bit of the hermit in you and possess a dichotomy of personality traits. In training I felt as though I was being rigorously tested for my social skills and my ability to function in a group when, as it turned out, much of the time I would be alone. I was selected because I was a doer, someone who was expected to get things done while at the same time  being able to tolerate periods of inactivity and isolation, adjust to a slower work pace and boredom one moment, be industrious and inventive the next.

I released the carriage and rolled in an aerogram. I wrote in the glow of an unshaded bulb, finding and plunking out my words on an ancient Royal with a faded ribbon and the letters “a” and “e” sticking so that I had to stop writing and pull them back.   Every time I struck a key two long filaments waved back and forth.  In the dim light I perceived those silky threads as strands of hair that had fallen onto the tangent arms.  When I removed the cover to take them out, a cockroach the size of my thumb and with antennae as long as its brown-beige body crawled out and fell onto the floor. As it scurried away to find an undisturbed crevice to hide in, I made a mental note to tell Mani that it was time to fumigate again.

I asked him if he washed his hands. The question and the reason why were quickly forgotten. The bar of soap that we left in the kitchen by the drain remained unused. Trying to convince people that gastro intestinal illnesses came from fecally transmitted sources was pointless. People couldn’t see the bacteria, therefore they didn’t exist. The short rainy season was the most dangerous time when all droppings, human and animal washed into the shallow wells and ponds. It wasn’t the normal case of “Delhi belly” that I had. It was much too violent. I vomited and my back arched at the same time that my bowels turned themselves inside out. I was definitely ill, and seriously so. There was a war going on between millions of bacteria and the battlefield was my intestines.

Fate smiled on me. I was home. Everything seemed so natural. I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the spartanly furnished rooms or the bare stonewalls. The cement floors polished red, were cool under my feet and I found a freedom in the monastic austerity of my surroundings. When Carol saw them for the first time she said “you live in a cell,” but I didn’t agree. I found the sparsely appointed cottage liberating. The rooms were clean and well painted. The shuttered windows were unglazed with only bars to keep out the monkeys or intruders and let the fresh morning breezes blow unhampered through the house. My simple meals were cooked on a small hearth on the kitchen floor, the smoke escaping through the open window. Water for bathing was drawn from an adjacent well and warmed in an earthen-ware cauldron in the same way. I was privileged in as much as I had abundant water and one of the few outhouses in the village so I didn’t have to go out in the fields or among the bushes to make my toilet.   

Beggars found their way to the door every day. My conscience wouldn’t let me ignore them. Some were holy men covered in ash, saffron-robed, leaning on their staffs, pilgrims wandering from temple to temple on the path to salvation. Others were crippled or blind. I understood that begging was India’s social welfare system and that Hindus had a collective obligation to help the poor. I saw that the political isms, communism, Marxism, socialism, had their roots in the great religions and that there was a universal value in giving alms.  I also realized that to be born in the privileged West and to live a life in abundance wasn’t destiny, or karma, but rather chance, who was born where and to whom was no more than a coincidence.  Inequality was a condition that I’d have  to accept. I couldn’t give alms to all the needy and I’d have to find a balance that I could live with by learning to give a little more than I took.  

We saw India’s age old problems first hand: illness, disease, poverty, illiteracy, underemployment, corruption. We saw the exploitation of the weak by the strong from front row seats. We were shocked by the sight of the beggars that seemed to be everywhere. Until we had learned better it was convenient to think that these ragtag people who wandered the lanes of the market and mumbled “bakshis swami, bakshis” “alms sir, alms” did it by choice and could have easily done something else. What could those young mothers holding up undernourished babies done, or the lepers that thrust their hands with rotted stumps that were once their fingers in our faces.

What choice did those abandoned children with limbs as thick as a man’s big toe, propelling themselves on makeshift roller-boards have done to survive other than to beg. This was the  welfare system that we would have to adjust to, the true test for new  Peace Corps Volunteers, the insight that you couldn’t solve all the social problems that  confronted you, something that Peace Corps training didn’t prepare you for. As a volunteer you either learned to live with your role or flew home. And regarding our own health – you accepted the fact that you could get up in the morning with diarrhea, or discover that you had parasites or lice or could see worms crawling from your feces and still get on with your day.

I picked them out of the mattress seams before I turned out the light. When I crushed them between my fingers they left a sharp sweet smell in the air. I had a chronic itching. The red welts were as   big as a dime. The bedbugs were small vampires, nocturnal creatures that bit and sucked blood in the humid Bangalore night.

It was a whole shipload of nitrogen fertilizer, a necessity for the success of the Green Revolution, left unprotected on the docks in the monsoon rain and then baked in the tropical sun. After a few weeks  it was as hard as stone, forgotten there because the proper bribe might not have been paid or just the fact that no one had thought about transport or distribution. USAID had fulfilled its obligation to get the cargo  to Madras never realizing that shipping was the easy part. The key to effective aid was distribution and that was considered to be a local problem. A few years later I had been on the docks in Dakar looking for passage on a freighter back to Europe. Before I saw them, I smelled the bales of dried Norwegian cod that were destined to meet the same fate as the fertilizer on the pier in Madras.

It  helped to possess a diverse assortment of personality traits if you were going to stay on an even keel and be a successful Peace Corps Volunteer. Volunteers were culled from a large group of aspirants and selected for service not only for job skills and language abilities, but because they were adaptable. They were  expected to be  self-starters and  creative problem solvers and at the same time  be able to  accept  inactivity and isolation, adjust to being bored one moment, industrious and inventive the next.  Paradoxically, volunteer trainees  were rigorously tested for their social aptitude and  ability to function in a group, when much of the time they would be alone and culturally isolated.  There was always an overhanging risk that a volunteer  drifted into a destructive orbit of introspection, but fortunately the minimalistic, uncluttered life I found in Kolar, far from the background disturbances of the materialistic, modern society I left behind, suited me.

 At dusk Kolar slowed down as if it was fueled by the sun. After my day’s work was finished the evening and night usually belonged to my imagination and the book I was reading.  I read eclectically, partly by inclination and curiosity and partly by whim. I exchanged books with other volunteers or with travelers passing through.  I became  a steady customer at Higginbottom’s, a surprisingly well stocked book store on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bangalore, and  spent part of my monthly living allowance there on topics as divergent as the cross breeding of dairy cattle and the collected works of Thomas Mann and Rabindranath Tagore. Everything seemed interesting and  the exposure to a broader set of ideas was changing the way I looked at myself and the world I came from.

From : The Peace Corps Survival Manual

The tarmac ended at Ghardaia in the northern Sahara. From then on we´d have to follow the direction markers that staked out the track and wouldn’t drive on asphalt again until we got to Kano in northern Nigeria,  4,000 kilometers of sand and gravel later. I tightened and retightened every nut and bolt on the bike, changed to knobby tires, changed the oils and filters in the gearbox and motor.  We filled our tanks and jerry cans with as much water and petrol as we could carry and then  stocked up from what little we could find in the way of dry goods in the bazar for the  hard crossing that awaited us : tins of sardines in oil, powdered milk, a couple of kilos of dates, tiny cans of tomato paste, onions, rice and elbow macaroni.  We wouldn’t be feasting but it would hopefully be enough to get us to the next oasis at Ain Salah.

The nights were growing colder. The  coarse woven woolen djellabas that the Berbers wore during the winter would be perfect to sleep in.   I thought I was clever bargaining with the burly, turbaned merchant who sold them along with other traditional Moroccan clothing from a tent in the market.   Satisfied after  haggling in my broken, high school French, and thinking that I had made a very good deal, I stretched out my hand and tried to give him the money that we agreed upon. Instead he took out a curved  dagger  from a sheath under his robe and demonstratively started cutting off the buttons on my newly purchased garment . “What are you doing? What good is a djellaba without buttons!” “You didn’t pay for the buttons, they are extra” he calmly replied. 

From: Crossing the Sahara

They  had learned their lessons: exploit the weak obey the strong. They categorized me without bothering to know me. I didn’t have an education. At least not one that was validated by a piece of paper that the dean’s secretary at some university wrote out and that I hung on a wall in an uninteresting office. It didn’t matter how many languages I spoke, how many books or newspapers I read, how broad my knowledge of things both practical and intellectual, how keen my memory was or how sharp my wit.  I didn’t have the paper and in their eyes I was  nothing more than manual labor. Behind the dream “with my two bare hands” there was a netherworld of ruthless struggle that punished many more people than it rewarded. I was part of the class that supplied the cheap dispensable workers that fueled the dreams and achievements of the privileged, or if nothing else, polished their cars, cut their grass, and cleaned their homes.

From: The Workshop

Now all those sad-eyed people with sagging unkempt faces are referred to as the homeless. When I was a kid you called them bums. One-legged Pete hung around Pine Street by the factory where my father worked. He slept in the alleys in the little warmth that the ventilation ducts provided and in abandoned cars and knew all the doors that were unlocked and where the cops wouldn’t look. He wadded newspapers and stuffed them into his filthy clothes when it was cold. The meanness of the world manifested itself one night while he slept in a  wine stupor. Some workers from the factory stole his crutch, not because they needed it, but so they could watch him crawl on his one knee in search of it when he awoke. The thieves had no more compassion than a malicious child that pulls the wings off a flying insect in order to watch it, with its handicap, scurry about in panic. Pete died in the winter of 1958 with no one to miss or mourn him. 

Maybe we are born only half ourselves. Something happens. We cross a line, open a door that we didn’t know was there, find an empty room and fill it with something we call life. The past and present stake out our path. We imagine that we choose our destination and we follow an agenda that we think we have written ourselves. The rest is that blank page that we like to call free will.

My grandfather spoke only one word of English “ sologobitch”

Mom said that my uncles were wonderful guys but she didn't like it when they took their guns into the house.

From: My Father wasn't a Professor of Philosophy

The boatman rowed out into the current towards the middle of the river and pulled up his oars. I could see him counter balancing the narrow boat as his passenger stood up to spread the ashes of his loved one.  It was the boatmen  and priests and the sellers of ghee and wood that profited the most from the sorrow of others. Taking care of the dead and speeding their passage to the afterlife was the  business of Benares.

From: Benares

I originally wrote “Highway 511” in Swedish, a language well suited for describing the bitter overcast Scandinavian winters and the melancholic grey tones of the Baltic coast and its   archipelago, the tight maze of  islands where a thousand years earlier Viking ships had set sail on their voyages to trade in the lands to the east.  It´s a language that seems directly sprung from its environment, perfect for expressing a suppressed longing that many feel for the clear days and short nights of the Nordic summer and the solitude of the deep northern forests. It’s a language where the words yes and no are spoken while taking in a breath, almost like a sigh, reserved and thoughtful like the people.

The doctor came to our village quite unexpectedly, more unexpectedly for himself, I suppose, than us.  He needed somewhere to stay in a hurry and took refuge in his family's cabin in the fishing  camp on the outskirts of  the village .The story goes that he came home one evening to find his clothes, books, his guitars and even his piano in the courtyard underneath the apartment that he shared with what was about to be his former wife. She had thrown him out, or more rightly had hired a gang of Polish movers that had professionally and expediently boxed his belongings and lugged them down the three flights of Carrara marble stairs.

There were no histrionics or drama. She had had enough. Her chilly exterior was deceptive, a facade that disguised another side of her, one that was  strong willed  and temperamental.  When their television set began acting up, and after long discussions about which make and model to replace it with, she ripped out the cables, carried it to the open French doors,  and tipped it over the railing onto the same courtyard where the sum of the  doctor's belongings now stood securely covered by a tarpaulin.

She said bluntly “I have found someone else.” It was a bizarre feeling, much as he imagined a free fall from a cliff would be in those long seconds before he hit the ground in the valley that he had just been peacefully admiring.

From: Landsväg 511

 I wake up at 2 am. thinking that it’s time to rise. Looking out at the still blue sky and the sun speckled birches I can’t help but feel that it is mid-morning. After marveling a little and convincing myself that it is just the midnight sun deceiving me, I roll over and go back to sleep.

Wise Guy had the carriage and demeanor of a race horse, he was three quarters of a ton of nervous muscle, not a mount for beginners. When Ulla helped me up on him I felt like the Lone Ranger. It was my first ride ever but I had seen so many cowboy films when I was a kid that it was just up in the saddle, heels in the sides of this Ferrari of horses and gallop. Ulla ran after me shouting “STANNA! STANNA! STOP! STOP!”  Whoa, I pulled back on the reins like all my childhood film heroes.

From: Letters From Nävekvarn

Justice was something that was arbitrary. There was no cloak of correctness to disguise its brutality. When you interpreted laws to the letter and ignored their intent forgetting empathy and humanism and common sense you were no better than a fascist or a Taliban.

From: Suivez la Piste

Holy Joe sat in the back of the church in a suit that had seen better days. He was at peace among the funeral participants. In some way he found comfort in their mourning, in their sober clothing, in the organists Deus Ire and the chanting of the requiem mass. He sat there like a penitent, with his cheeks sunken, hair cut short like stubble on a harvested field. Perhaps he sat there thinking of his own death. He was zealously religious but didn’t dare admit that he wasn't there to pray for fear of offending God. He wasn’t there to pray and not for solace or divine guidance but rather to absorb the quiet and resignation of the mourners. He could sit there in the half-darkness mesmerized by the funeral ritual and cough up his memories,  regurgitating them, chewing them until he sucked out every last bit of nourishment.

The nun said that every time we sinned that we drove the nails of the crucifixion deeper into the hands and feet of Christ. I often feel that I'm bearing the scars of those nails in the form of guilt. 

Agnus Dei: In my First Communion class at St. Joseph’s, Sister Ellen of the Sacred Heart told us that we were all God’s Lambs. Whenever my father screamed “Goddamn” I could never in my seven year old mind figure out why he would  shout “God’s Lamb” when he was angry. 

From: Souls or Soles

We didn't  realize at the time that we were challenging the age old way that Indian farmers looked at their future.  They saw the future as unchangeable, viewing it as a repetitive cycle dictated by the past. Subsistence farming  and simple plows drawn by buffaloes or bullocks  on fields that were harrowed and sown by hand would be replaced, albeit slowly, by motorized tillers and tractors.  Traditional crops such as rice and millet that people maintained were tastier and that after threshing produced enough straw for the draft animals and cows would be replaced with modern high yielding hybrids with heavy ears and  short sturdy stalks that could support their increased weight, but consequently  wouldn't produce enough straw for  fodder.  It was an inevitable spiral of change. When the bullocks and buffaloes disappeared so would the dung that they produced and then was spread on the fields. The ever so important nitrogen  that came from the manure would have to be replaced by chemical fertilizers. Small plots of land that had been passed from father to son would be used as collateral for loans for the more expensive seed and fertilizers, loans that couldn’t be paid back if the  harvest failed. Small family plots would be joined into larger farms that were more suitable for mechanized agriculture.  Modern farming would eventually make emigrants of people who had lived on the land for centuries forcing them to migrate to the anonymity and squalor of the already over populated cities.

He said "I heard that Americans cook their food on fires and eat outside, and then go inside to go to the toilet.  We go to the toilet outside and eat in our bungalows. And is it true that you brush your teeth in the same rooms that you use to do your toilet?"

 By nineteen sixty-nine the year that my group was accepted to the Peace Corps, the Vietnam War was raging and had escalated to the point that there were five hundred and sixty thousand American soldiers in South East Asia.  It was a tumultuous time and antiwar sentiments were at fever pitch.

Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. The draft had become increasingly unpopular and it was mostly the poor and uneducated that were called to mandatory military service. After college it wasn’t possible to get a   student deferment and deferments of any kind were very difficult to get unless you were fortunate enough to get into the Peace Corps. 

I was disappointed that some of the guys in my group said that they were packing it in because they didn’t need their Peace Corps deferments any more. They were winners in the draft lottery and were exempt from mandatory conscription. I didn’t realize that not everybody in my group saw our time in Kolar as an altruistic opportunity and like me thought that this was the chance of a lifetime.

From: Letters from Kolar

 Appointment in Samarkand

An Iraqi fable about fate.  The story stuck in my memory.   It goes something like this…

A merchant in Bagdad sent his servant to the market to purchase supplies. The servant came home terribly upset and said that he was accosted by a woman that stared at him intensely. The servant felt threatened when he realized that the woman was the angel of death and feared that she was in search of him. Shaken, he borrowed his employer’s fastest horse and fled to the distant city of Samarkand to hide.  The merchant concerned for his loyal servant,  went back to the marketplace to find the woman. When he found her he confronted her and asked why she had threatened his servant. She replied that she hadn’t threatened him but was simply surprised to see him in Bagdad because she had an appointment with him in Samarkand later in the evening.

Life was returning to normal on Kfar Giladi, even if normal was a high state of alert.  Kersti and I usually slept unconcerned about the canon fire and the jet fighters that flew in low over the hills on their way to missions in southern Lebanon. During the day, I watched from the fields as Mirages and F-4's made their sorties and then flew back over the border chased by Russian made anti-aircraft missiles. For weeks the army had been firing nightly artillery barrages, but we slept soundly none the less. We never considered sleeping in a shelter in case there was counter fire from the PLO. We weren’t youthfully nonchalant or reckless; we simply got used to the rumble of the cannons, like Londoners that went about their business during the V2 blitzes of the Second World War. There was a wind storm one autumn night.  We were awakened by a crash that sounded like an explosion.  Half awake, we thought that it was the PLO returning the army's artillery fire with Katyuscha rockets. We instinctively rolled against the concrete wall for protection, staying put, not wanting to take a chance running in the open to a shelter.  After a while, things quieted down and we went back to sleep.  In the morning we saw that what we thought was a rocket explosion was just a thick tree limb that had blown down in the storm and landed on our roof.

That day like every other, I had gotten up before the sun and a little groggy staggered over to the communal dining room. The early morning air was chilly but held the promise of another cloudless day and the heat that would come later.  Coffee was already brewed and placed on a warmer in stainless steel pots along with bread and cheese and the boiled eggs that would be the early risers first breakfast. After a quick bite, I opened the equipment shed and cranked up our sun bleached Massey Ferguson. I coaxed the old diesel to life.  It coughed and spit, revving a little easier as it warmed up, the metal bonnet on the exhaust pipe opening and closing, keeping time as the cylinders fired. I backed the tractor out of the shed, hitched the wagon and waited. Miriam the farm boss and the other volunteers John, Charlotte and Etienne hopped in. Jean-Claude a French kibbutznik climbed up and sat directly behind me, riding shotgun. I heard the sharp metallic click as he snapped the magazine into place, released the safety and pulled back the bolt on his submachine gun.  The sound of him racking his weapon was a  reminder  of the continual security problems on the border. I eased the tractor into gear as the first rays of sun streamed over the Golan and Mt. Hermon. We bumped and shook on the unpaved road that led down the hillside, through the gate and towards the fields, unaware that there was a band of PLO terrorists travelling in the same direction.

Rather than taking cover I watched the Syrian surface to air missiles clumsily track the Israeli Phantoms and Mirages that flew raids in the airspace overhead, a diversion that broke the monotony of pulling weeds in the afternoon sun. I was tending the cauliflower fields on the perimeter of a war zone, Lebanon was a few miles to the north and west, Mt Hermon and Syria, a short distance to the east. Like anyone who worked those lots by the wadi, I was much more concerned about disturbing the four foot vipers called Tzefa that hid  under the broad leaves, than I was for PLO operatives sneaking across the borders and waiting in ambush. I had seen lots of snakes there but never a PLO soldier.

From: Life on a Kibbutz

A society that can't take care of its sick and poor can hardly call itself civilized. From a European standpoint the polemics of the American health care debate seem reactionary and hateful, and of course unchristian.