Nut-jobs and Nebbishes in Nowheresville

I have met a few crazy people in Seattle.  Some are illusions of course. You can always spot the people who are only representations of human beings.  I keep an eye out for these types. I assume that some of them are angels, and perhaps some are extraterrestrials here to scout us out. And then there are the human beings who really are human beings but their brains are billions of light years away in another dimension. I know a guy like that. He told me the other day that he was standing at a bus stop in the rain and the nephew of Jimmy Hendrix gave him a pure silver serving spoon. The nephew said Hendrix had not meant to kill himself. So, I suppose that is why the nephew feels it is necessary now to go around Seattle with a wood case and give random silverware to strangers. It makes so much sense. I asked my crazy friend how he was certain it was Hendrix's nephew, and he said he knew because it is a small community, and  all the musicians know one another. He said he should know because he was a music producer. I asked him what studios he'd worked in or what musicians he had produced and he got irate and stormed away, saying that was all in the past, and besides, none of that mattered anymore. He also claims to be a film producer but he's not produced any films. He is trying to get me to edit a screenplay from a guy I've never met and if I ask him who is this guy and how my crazy friend knows him, he walks off and spews a litany of swearwords. He says there are little helpers sent from God and if I knew anything I'd know that. I guess I just fell off the turnip wagon; I didn't know God was in the business of using crazy people to witness to strangers with silver spoons. Who knew?

I have wondered why the universe delivers crazy people to me. It is as if I have an invisible neon sign above my head that only crazy people can see. The sign, in glowing blue letters, reads: Nut-jobs Welcome.

I used to jest that I was God's jester. I complained I hadn't even applied for the job; God decided that I was going to amuse the universe at large and so he made me a writer who writes whatever comes into my head, like a writing machine (in the parlance of Kurt Vonnegut).

One of things I wrote about today had to do with the nature of God. Most thinking people have done a fair amount of serious thinking about God. And because I am into profundity, today I wrote about the probable philosophy of lepers. In this imaginary leper colony, I described the lepers, who through no fault of their own, had contracted this horrible disfiguring disease. The lepers, seeing the God of the world outside the leper colony had forsaken them, had made up their own version of God. Their God was also a leper and losing his limbs. The leper God had no limbs at all and was mostly spirit, except for a large gap in his front teeth. The gap was actually a black hole, and when the lepers died they would be sucked into the black hole to reach Leper Heaven.

I came up with this interesting take on understanding God from a piece of paper I found under a table in the Portland airport a couple of days before Christmas. The paper was neatly folded, so I unfolded it and found a crude concentric line drawing, in blue pen, that was either done by a six-year-old or by an elderly brilliant physicist. From what I could discern, the drawing indicated that the world, as we know it, is made up of orbiting objects around a black hole. The hole is to be worshipped. Thus the leper colonies' religious slogan must naturally be, "Life Sucks!"

There are black holes everywhere in this economy. There is a phrase we often hear, "Whatever floats your boat." At the VA hospital in Seattle, there are a lot of leaky boats that have been scuttled. They will probably never float again. These veterans row into the hospital from all over the area. They know they are doomed to sink, and that their crazy ideas about life have been formed by years of homeless living, and drug and alcohol abuse.  They cannot do anything about their plight. They are also being used by God for the amusement of the universe. Out there they are laughing at us, we just can't hear them.

While I was waiting my turn at the hospital, an older man in a dark trench coat asked me how he might get out of the building, and get to his car. His glassy eyed stare reminded me of my father's Alzheimer's. I told the man I thought the way out was to go up one floor, and if he followed me I would help him get out of the building. We stepped into an elevator half filled with people. The elevator went down one floor before it went up. The man got out before I could stop him. "Bon voyage!" I said as he slipped away. Then I arrived in a room where all the crazy people were. I overheard a Vietnam veteran man named Wild Bill tell a thin older black man that he felt the country would be right as rain if doing random acts of kindness earned the doer a tax write-off. He had the black man stand and he gave the man a back rub. "There!" he said, "now if everyone did that to one another, we'd all be better off!" The feeble looking black man smiled and agreed. I am guessing the black man was God in disguise. God gets a lot of back rubs from unsuspecting masseuses.

It is hard to argue with a crazy person. I do not recommend it. I think we all could use a few more back rubs. I would vote for any politician who ran on a platform based on random acts of kindness and back rubs. Or, simply on a silver spoon giveaway methodology.

But I'm crazy that way.

Beating the Running Blues.

Yesterday was a good day. I was looking for the signs, and the signs were all showing green. Here's what I was looking for mostly: A Job.  I was a bloodhound on a trail, and my nose was pointing me due north five to ten miles, to the town of Bothell.

For readers not familiar with the town of Bothell, it is a typical looking small town connected like a caboose to Seattle, which lies thirty miles south as the crow flies, and let me tell you, there are a lot of crows in this neck of the woods. Bothell is not as hip as Seattle, but they have a Starbucks where the refugee hipsters hang out. Bothell is home to the tiny Cascadia campus of the University of Washington. When one arrives in Bothell it is best to pay attention, because you will pass through the town in under five minutes.

The real surprise, for me, is the Bothell Business Park. Let me tell you about the park. Imagine a clever California contractor jacking up a business park in Orange County and plopping it in the middle of a meadow surrounded by fir trees. That's Bothell Business Park. As I walked around the thirty or so perfect, uniform, clean, upbeat buildings I thought I was having a flashback to when I worked in Mira Mesa, CA. The buildings were doing it to me. And then I saw my destination - Brooks Sports. I had found Nirvana. Finding it was like the lotus opening; I was forced to confront not only my job search but an incident from my childhood. Let me explain.

I have always been an athlete. And when you possess athletic skills from the beginning of your life, you feel the pull of destiny to achieve something spectacular. You are driven. It is the competitive nature that makes an athlete strive for victory in all they do. When I was a boy I wanted to be a geologist, an astronaut, a pro baseball player, or to win an event in the Olympics. Essentially, I wanted my face on the front of a Wheaties box.

My legs were the first part of my body to grow when puberty set in. In the space of two years I shot up six inches. I had six inches of upper body and the rest was legs. I had restless leg syndrome; I had the urge to run, and my legs could take me there fast. I was Forest Gump.  Mr. Nellermoe, the eighth grade track coach noticed my legs and said, "I bet you could run pretty far on those long skinny legs of yours!" And then he said, "You know, boy, there's a school record for the 880 yard dash at this middle school, (this was before the metric system made it the 800 meters), and with those legs you might just break it."

"You mean, that I might break my legs?"

"NO, BOY - THE SCHOOL RECORD! I'M GONNA MAKE YOU A RUNNER!"

I had grown up with a father who was not aware of my existence, and attention from a male mentor was like manna from Heaven. So I replied, "Sure, why not?"

The middle school was poor and did not have a regular track. The track was made of grass, and grass wasn't always cut. It was inferior to cinder and the modern rubberized running tracks. I didn't know the difference. Nellermoe began training me like his personal slave. His training consisted of the following: A.) He held a stopwatch. B.) He said, "Run, Forest, RUN!"  And that was about it. He didn't teach me strategy; he simply wanted me to fulfill his goal to smash that record. The record was 2:21, set by a boy whose last name was White. To beat the record, all I had to do was run two moderately fast laps around a track, but as I mentioned, we had no track to speak of.

Nevertheless, I got faster, very fast. I ran so fast I sometimes tasted blood in my mouth. The dandelions were pummeled into dandelion soup. My lungs grew exponentially; my heart grew to the size of a cantaloupe. I learned, that is - I taught myself - to pace my breathing and my head to tell my body, "That's right - RELAX BOY - EASY DOES IT - save your strength for the sprint at the end." And my body obeyed.

We had one track meet on the calendar. It was against the city kids of our town. They had been training on a real track for years. But I had confidence, I had clocked a 2:30 880. If I hadn't stumbled on a rock I may have matched the school record. Nellermoe's face beamed as he clicked the stopwatch that day, "You almost broke the record! Next time, RUN HARDER - BOY!"

The day of the big meet came. I stood next to a short guy with wavy brown hair. I didn't know anything about this kid except his name: Bill Barney. My coach had not warned me about Barney.  The other runners didn't worry me, but I figured Barney might be good. When the starting gun fired we set off at a blistering pace. Barney and I left everyone in the cinder dust. We began lapping people on the first lap. We could have stopped for Frappuccino's and won that race. We cruised through the first lap at sixty-five seconds, and we didn't slow down. Around the bleachers we went on the second lap, running side by side in the shadows, stride for stride. I wanted to make small talk, maybe ask Barney what kind of bionics he had in him, but he was all business. He intended to run me into the ground. My legs were a blur, my lungs were saying, "When is this guy gonna fade?" I wanted to elbow that shrimp but former altar boys don't do things like that. Besides, I had a feeling it wouldn't have worked. He was playing head games with me and I had to test his resolve.

But Barney wasn't fading. At a hundred yards out I hit the jets. My after-burners were flaming. I figured I had enough rocket fuel to blow by Barney. I smiled, thinking of that shrimp writhing on the infield, holding his gut. I was wrong; Barney got faster too; he had more gears than a semi-truck headed over a pass. And then the unthinkable happened: about fifty yards or less from the finish line my legs gave out. The top part of me was pumping fine, saying, "We got this, we got this!" but my legs were gone. Barney cruised past me; I thought I was going to pass out, and then I hit the track. It was a cinder track and the cinders tore holes in my palms and legs. I could hear my heart beating like a drum, and the other runners coming, but I couldn't get up. Then I could get up but I didn't want to. So I lay there until everyone passed by.

Nellermoe said as I walked past him, my hands and legs bleeding, "You could have broken the record! Go get on the bus, BOY!"

That year we moved to a new house in an adjacent county. I left all my friends, and Mr. Nellermoe behind. At the new high school I met several horrible coaches who were every bit as bad or worse than Nellermoe. I might have tried to regain my glory but the fire wasn't there. I tried pole vaulting. I was good at it too, but the coach would not buy me and a guy named Lang the poles we needed, so I only vaulted eleven feet. I didn't get the confidence for running again until junior year, and I never went out for track again. I was still fast, and my legs were still long, so I went out for cross-country. I became the number two runner.

So when I saw the Brooks Sports office I had the craziest thought: What if I got back into running again? Would I still be as fast? What could I do NOW? I hadn't  been a slacker. I had taken up tennis, golf, bowling, cycling, and occasionally I still ran - mostly on trails in Eugene, Oregon, or on good running tracks. For a while I ran two miles every day. But then my mid-forties came and I cut down on running.

But like the saying goes, "It's never too late to try." I am not as fast as I once was, but I am in great shape. It may take me a year, but with the right shoes, training, and a good track - I'll find out. My goal: to run a 5k next year. I need a running partner like Barney. I wonder what he is up to now?

The vagaries of bus riding in Seattle after dark.

I took a bus ride into downtown the other day that brought me face to face with how close one can get to sleeping on the streets of a major city. I will describe that experience in a moment.

The first leg of my trip had auspicious beginnings; I took the express bus (number 522) to downtown with no problem. I enjoy riding the buses; I like to interact with people, and study their faces. It is a strange thought that it is unlikely that I will see any of these people again in my lifetime. They are living their lives that are as real as mine, but they seem like phantoms until I make eye contact and initiate conversations. And I often do.

I wasn't dressed appropriately to walk ten blocks up to Capital Hill. I don't recommend walking up hills in leather sandals, especially when the temperature is hovering around freezing.  I arrived at the Northwest Film Forum office on 12th Street ten minutes late. Twenty mostly twenty-something year olds were listening to Marty Oppenheimer, of Oppenheimer Cine Rentals, explain the workings of two 35mm motion picture camera's and a super-16 film camera. To buy the 35mm camera's would set you back anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000. The super-16 only cost $15,000.  Making films is not an inexpensive proposition. You can ruin your credit rating with one unsuccessful film, not to mention it might lead to your getting divorced and being pursued by your financial backers, and the I.R.S. Which is to say emphatically: filmmakers are the either the bravest people in the world, or the most foolish, or both.

Oppenheimer is in the business of renting film camera's to people who are not afraid of risking everything. He knows the ins and outs of every model, and he and his assistant showed how each was loaded. The eager young filmmakers gathered around him as he removed the film magazines, loaded them, and filmed us. The images were dark and this was  due to the fact that it was rather dark in the small theater, plus our breathes were probably fogging the lens, because we were packed like sardines.

While I was at this demonstration I met two people. One was a Cambodian-American man who was planning to shoot three documentaries in town. The other was a young man who grew up in Cambodia, France, and yet was born in Pittsburgh. After the presentation the three of us went to lunch at Phnom Penh, a Cambodian restaurant in the Asian part of downtown. The owner, Sam, had just released a book about his experiences during the Khmer Rouge years. A poster advertising the book was displayed on the front window of the restaurant.

Over lunch we talked, or mostly I should say we listened to this Cambodian-American, "Bobby" talk with intensity about the Khmer Rouge genocide and the injustice of the United States not to educate and provide for the refugees who flooded into America from Cambodia due to those horrible years that happened over thirty years ago. He said it was America's fault that a fair percentage of these Cambodian refugees ended up homeless, and incarcerated for criminal behavior. Bobby promised the young Frenchman, Timothy, who grew up in Phnom Penh and was leaving for Cambodia in two days, that he would show him how to run a camera, and that while Timothy was in Phnom Penh, he should:  A.) Recruit attractive Cambodian actresses to be in Bobby's films. B.) Find impressionist art, (he would wire Timothy the money for the art). C.) Get back as soon as possible so they could begin filming in Seattle. Uh-huh.

I was the odd man out, and I was also the only one with any experience to speak of in making films, and creating art, and writing scripts. None of this mattered to Bobby.

After lunch Bobby dropped me off in downtown. I had an inkling that our film alliance, our  triad, would go nowhere, despite Bobby's assurances that we would all be working together very soon. I suspected Bobby was a drug dealer, as he avoided answering my direct question about how he'd made his money, and his mentioning that pot should be legalized. I didn't doubt Bobby had some money, but I figured it smelled like pot. I have had dealings with typical Hollywood film people, who make all sorts of promises and don't fulfill any of them. After L.A. you get a sixth sense about things like this. It is like the old joke that goes, "Hello," he lied. Clearly, if a film was made, it would be Bobby's vision that led the way, not mine, and I wasn't sure I wanted any part of it. No, I was sure I wouldn't be.

The gray sky showed a rim of lavender. I was in downtown Seattle, and it was closing in on 4PM; it would be dark in an hour. I had the sudden insight that my bank had not attached the right pin number to my new bank card, but my naturally optimistic side pushed that dark thought to the back of my mind, because I didn't have one dollar in my wallet.

I arrived at my bank at 4:15 and discovered that the bank had closed early, so I stepped inside the glassed in ATM area and tried my card. It said I had a zero balance in my account. I tried three different pin numbers to no avail. That was when the panic crept in. I knew I had money, but there was no way I could get to it, and the sun was setting, and the vampires would soon be waking up. I always had a fear of vampires and darkness, and it was not looking good for me. I rubbed my neck, dreading the bite I felt was coming.

I went to to four stores to see if I could get cash back on purchases. The clerks were in no mood for my explanation; they had heard it a million times from other indigents.

As I walked block after block, wondering what I could do about my situation, I walked amongst throngs of seemingly successful, well coifed people doing their holiday shopping. I passed scores of homeless people begging on street corners, often with glassy eyes that showed they had lost their hope, or displayed their intoxication. I thought of myself and how close I was to sleeping on the street, and I said a prayer for help. I am a person who has empathy for people, and recalled my friend mentioning that when a person is homeless they become invisible. They cease to exist in the eyes of most of the world. But I knew if I used my brain I could find a way out of the situation. Or so I thought.

At a Walgreen's I phoned my brother for a ride. I didn't want to do that because it was an eighty-mile round trip for him. I phoned while a manager was considering my story. I was trying to get cash back on a purchase of a bottle of Fiji brand water. Then the man did something unexpected that I wish everyone in America would do more often: he opened his wallet and handed me three dollars. "Gosh," he said, "I'm sorry you've had a hard time of it today. Will this be enough to get you home?" he asked.

I felt a wave of tension sliding off me. "Yes," I replied, "Thank you!"

The Cambodian-American, "Bobby" was wrong about America. Americans have faults, yes, plenty of them - but one thing the United States has done more than any other nation: they have always given money to help people. And it works on a big scale, and it filters down to the little people who work ordinary jobs in American cities who give money to people in need - like me - this past weekend.

A Steve Jobs fairy tale.

There was a drought in the land, and the owner of the apple orchard was sad. His orchard seemed doomed. He said to his partner in the business, "I must go away for a while. If I don't return you may have my share. I can't bear to see the orchard die."  


The partner of the owner tended the orchard as best he could, and sometimes he made a profit but mostly the money just covered his expenses. Once, customers had come from miles around to buy the apples, but not now. Across the valley and to the north other orchardists were raising similar fruit, but their fruit had no flavor. But the apple imitations were cheaper, so customers went to them. 


In the Spring, when the apples of the previous year still lay rotting on the ground, the bare apple trees began budding and blossoms formed as they always did, but this year there were more blossoms, like in the former years. And then the gentle rains came, and the sun shone, and the blossoms fluttered like snowflakes on the warm wind. The partner and his wife and children danced between the trees and lit candles, and their breaths rose upwards to the miraculous bounty of apples that began growing at the end of every branch.


The former owner had died on his journey, and his soul went to a barren place where the sky was perpetually gray. There were no trees there, and the crops were cut low to the ground. Brittle, pale yellow stubs made dull whistling sounds in the perpetual cold, dry wind. The owner sat in the gaps between the rows and prayed for rain or sun, or anything that would change the monotony of his new existence. But this was not a place where prayers were answered quickly. One day was like the previous day, and there was no sleep. 


One day the old farmer lay with his face to the ground and felt a small something in the trouser of his overalls. He sat up and found an apple seed in the pocket, and his ghostly face widened into a smile. It had the same rich brown color it had had in the land of the living, and it glowed with life. He planted the seed in the fallow ground, and for moisture he used his own ghostly spit, and for sun he used the light of his own soul, and the seed grew into the most lovely apple tree he had ever seen. It budded and produced perfect apples. He gathered seeds from apples and used the same process to grow more apple trees. Ghost spirits came from everywhere to admire the orchard. In the gray land the bright apples were visible from far away and glowed against the grayness of the sky.


Seeing the old farmer's success, the Lord of All opened the clouds and a beam of sunlight pulled the old farmer heavenwards. The Lord let the old farmer travel back to the land of the living to see the wonder of his former orchard. For now, customers were coming to his former orchard in droves to buy his fruit, and paying his former partner and his family premium prices.


The ghostly former owner stood and smiled at the bins overflowing with apples. The bins were loaded onto the bed of the partner's truck, and when his partner got in the truck to drive to town, the former owner sat in the passenger seat. They drove the long straight dirt road to town, and as they drove the former owner noticed the smile on his partner's face. "You have done well," he said to his old partner. "This is a miraculous crop."


The partner sensed his former friend beside him and said, "Ah, if only you had stayed. If only you had stayed you would have been able to help me expand our crop. Now I must rely on other partners who were not with us in the beginning. It was so much better when it was just you and me."


The former owner said, "I will watch over this apple orchard, and the one on the other side. I changed things there, and I will help you change things here. As long as you remember me, I am always with you."


The End

Broken Ice on a Monday.

It was twenty-five degrees this morning in Seattle. The children and the commuters had broken the ice on the puddles and the shards lay on the rigid street like shattered glass. Too cold to be out walking, but I was out. The world woke at 6AM. I had eaten and even gone online by then. Every Monday is a new beginning, and whatever happened over the weekend is flung like broken ice and only the bare puddle remains. My bare puddle this week is muddled as most puddles are. When you are stuck in Limbo, it is best to not think about being stuck in Limbo. My Limbo is both real and imagined. The real one is the story, the Young Adult novel I crafted some time ago and sent to a publisher last week. I think of being a writer, a fiction writer, is not unlike being a batter. You get three strikes and then you're out. But what often happens is, you get hit by a pitch or walked, or you end up hitting foul balls for a long time. Every once in a while you connect with the ball, and get on base. I am still swinging, swinging, swinging, hitting foul balls. But I have a good feeling about my novel and my other novels too. And that is the trick in baseball and that is the trick in writing. It is the difference between batting .500 and being a strike out king. Luck is involved. Trust your gut. Believe. It is like believing in the truth of Christmas. Most baseball players, and I suspect - most writers, are superstitious. They have trouble with absolutes. Superstition is a natural process wherein you sense that there are other things going on outside your vision, powers afoot beyond your power to control. You sense, as you stare at your monitor, when you converse with strangers, when you walk the street early on a frosty morning with an mobile device wedged against your ear, or while riding buses watching the faces of those around you, and when you drive your car, and fly in an airplane - that this is an elaborately staged play with the director nowhere in sight. We all could be locked up for thinking these sobering thoughts, couldn't we? They have a word for it: paranoia. Welcome to the padded room; we hope you'll feel at home, sitting there in your straightjacket. Here's a thought: everything is both random, and predestined. These seem to be opposite ends of the sanity spectrum, but they aren't; it depends on your point of view. From God's point of view it is like a finely tuned machine, a clock with invisible gem driven gears that go all directions at once. Wheels within wheels. From our point of view it is folly, madness, random, and often cruel, like LOVE. And sometimes life is so ironic and funny that we burst into laughter at the profundity of it. We laugh at ourselves and our hopelessly ridiculous situation, and this is a healthy way to be. This is normal. Some call this coming to grips with what is and is not - Buddhism, or Judaism, or Christianity, or Hinduism. Some simply call it the Peace of God that, like a sheet settles down upon us and we close our eyes - and the world disappears - and all of this - our perception of time - is an illusion of what really is. We are but stardust and rapidly spinning universes of atoms. We are invisible except for the wonder of light. We are illusions, and as far as we know, we exist as part of a great ice sheet on a puddle, until God fractures our existence and we lay disillusioned like shards of ice on a rigid street on a winter's morning.

The aisles were mostly empty in the Prince of Peace Lutheran church on 145th last Sunday. I had walked there to meet God. God took the form of the elderly and the mentally challenged, who spoke out of turn once too often. One man behind me, who was of the latter, spoke loudly and above the voices "Your mercy is great!" Ah, now there was a testimony! Later on, I went to eat cookies and drink coffee with the church members, and found myself in a long conversation with an older woman named Monica. Her husband, Bill, wandered  away, and Monica told me about the complications of growing up with the Finnish language. She said the Finnish language is different from all other languages. While an English speaking person may describe a table perhaps in five different ways, a Finnish person could describe it in fifteen different ways. Language is strange that way.

Physicists and mathematicians say that there are at least eleven different dimensions, but probably an unlimited number. In some of them, we are as flat as slabs of ice on a puddle. They say that each of us has an exact replica of ourselves in each of these dimensions. Exact except that in these other dimensions the other versions of us are making different decisions than we are making. They may even be living longer or shorter lives as a result of their decisions. What are they saying, really? That we are splintered beings, that we feel detached and incomplete because our real selves are scattered across time and space? That would explain a lot. As if there aren't enough mysteries.

The Lutherans are not a lively folk. Ask Garrison Keillor. They don't generally talk about esoteric realities beyond this one. It is easy to be a Lutheran. To be a Lutheran you simply have to keep your eyes wide open and see only what is before you and that God is always nearby and will answer your prayers. Ah, if only life were that simple. If only it was enough to say, "Once upon a time a child was born in Bethlehem, and he was sent by the Almighty to save us from our sins." Ah, if only. If only Jesus had no doubts about himself and his mission. If only he had stuck with woodworking, with life as a carpenter. How much better to have dove tailed wooden joints to remember him by instead of a wooden cross. How much simpler our theology would be in the Western Hemisphere. How far fewer deaths would have occurred, how fewer wars fought in Jesus name there might have been. Ah, if only. If only Jesus had given the parable of the broken ice, then we would know what broken ice symbolizes. But we don't have that to lean on. And ice tends to break rather easily. Like faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is LOVE.

In the parking lot on the north side of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church there is tent camp for the homeless. The church lets the homeless live there in their blue tarped sanctuary. They give them free dinners on Wednesday nights. I did not meet the homeless on Sunday, but if I did I might ask to join them. Jesus would, why not me? Listen: this is the fall of Western Civilization. The world is on the precipice of worst things, my friends. Go now; hand your sandwich to the first homeless person you meet. They will take it; they have lost their pride. The hand of the Lord of All has crushed them, but why? Careful now, hand the sandwich with observant eyes - it is the Lord you are handing the sandwich to. The least of these, the least of these. Yes. Watch and observe. Armaggedon is not far off.

Solzhenitsyn on a Tuesday in the Red Hall.

My literary eyes are forever seeking out the oddities of life, as if I am now living in a Russian gulag, as the winter comes calling to the Northwest. Exhibit A: I was on bus #39, en route to downtown Seattle, when I saw a group of large deciduous trees garbed in multicolored sweaters. The trees stood in a park by the municipal courthouse, their limbs and lower trunks custom dressed in woolen rainbow hues. On closer inspection, the sewing was so exacting that it seemed only magicians or elves could have done the work. But how? And, why? Did it matter? Yes. Art is about the out-of-the-ordinary. It shakes us like a tsunami from the slumber induced by our cubicles and ordinary lives. But the objects below the sweaters were of more interest: here there were low-lying lodgings for the homeless, constructed of blue tarp, cardboard, and silver duct tape. It was a wake-up call.  And then I saw a middle-aged black woman in winter clothing walking towards me. I did not immediately understand her mission. She was pushing a metal luggage type cart filled to the top with plump brown bag lunches. She stopped when she came to me and I introduced myself. I soon discovered she was part of her church's outreach to the homeless. Naturally I had to know what had motivated her to come out on a Tuesday when the temperature was hovering around thirty-five. She explained that she had been in a head-on car accident the previous year and had broken her leg, ribs, and arms. I assumed there had been a cash settlement, and that afterwards she had had her epiphany to help the homeless. I didn't get that part of the story. Maybe she had her epiphany years earlier. Her name was Julie Tucker. I told Julie I was underemployed and new to the area, and she smiled and handed me one of the bags and explained that it was a good lunch and contained an orange, pretzels, cookies, and a ham and cheese sandwich. Another woman had a similar cart and was handing out bottled water. I asked Julie what she thought about the sweaters, and she unabashedly said the sweaters would be better used to keep the homeless warm than putting them on the trees. I didn't disagree with her, but as she walked away I stared again at the trees and their magic rainbow colored sweaters. If I were in the homeless shelters it would be those trees with sweaters around their trunks and lower limbs that would make me smile, and I would remember that despite all the things that had gone wrong in my life, there was joy and whimsy in the world. The vision would ignite my optimism. There are still angels in the world: they masquerade as sandwich ladies. The sight of those sweaters may be keeping some homeless people alive. And then, still glowing from the experience, I walked down 4th Street and went in the main library. I meandered a bit as I often do. I sent a few emails, made one phone call in the stairwell, and ate the bag lunch. Then I had two more whimsical experiences. The first was a panel of six LCD screens that sat behind a reference desk. Words and colored lines passed from right to left and down from one screen to the next. What was this? The reference librarian explained it was the brainchild of a man from UCSB, my alma mater. George Legrady created the electronic artwork, titled "Making Visible the Invisible." It presents an unusual way of analyzing and visually mapping the items people are checking out. In other words, every time someone checks out a book or whathaveyou, it registers on the monitors. It looks like random poetry, and taps into the collective mindset; like a self-portrait of what people are thinking about at any given moment within the library. And while still mesmerized by the screens, I saw a red staircase. I had to go investigate it.  I felt like I was entering another dimension, a portal to something as I went up one flight, but to what? Suddenly I was entering a place that instantly conjured up a host of emotions simply by being the color RED. And when I say, "RED," I mean even the floor was painted RED. Red is feminine, it encapsulates sex, love, jealousy, anger, and seduction. When you are in a RED HALL you feel different; the endorphins are replaced by hormonal frenzy  Your heart races. You are back in the Stone Age. The color enters your eye gates and goes down the long red DNA stairway and knocks on the red door of your soul, and you hear the sound of tribal beats, and envision the flickering shadows on the cave walls, cast by the red flames of a cave fire. What mastermind had conceived this? What mad, mad architect was toying with me and everyone who arrived at the Red Hall? It was the spawning pool; and I had been led to it by the surreal lime green staircases and escalator. I had seen a portal in the wall while going up one green escalator. People's faces were being projected in a sort of solar system display. The faces and mouths were saying individual words, as if words themselves, random words, were poetry. On the backside of the Red Hall, past the technology meeting rooms of Boeing and others, I saw the backside of the lime green display. I saw parts of human beings sliding past and upwards on the escalator. I could see them but they couldn't see me. I was down the Rabbit's Hole, in the Elvis Rumble Room, reading Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Lily died today.

Lily died this morning, and her parents are still in shock. They knew it was a possibility from the beginning, because Lily was born premature, and she arrived weighing less than two pounds. Her time here was short, only a few months. She spent most of her life in an ICU of a hospital in Colorado. Her parents brought her home recently, because she appeared to be big enough to be able to breathe on her own. She had underdeveloped lungs, which are apparently common among  premature babies. It was a sink or swim situation, and for a time it seemed Lily would make it.  There were plans to bring her to California because there is more oxygen at sea level, which would make it easier for Lily to breathe. Lily had the best parents any child could want: they wrote about her progress on a blog that showed images of Lily as she grew. Less than two weeks ago, Lily had reached six pounds, which was a milestone. She seemed perfect on the outside, but her lungs gave out. Lily is at peace now. She was a miracle; she beat the odds. Her parents and grandparents would have liked her to grow up, and go to school, and experience all the good things this world has to offer, but God had other plans. What kind of God takes little children? Is God cruel, and unjust? We understand when an older person dies, but we see no mercy  when a child dies. Lily was the first grandchild of a woman I once dated a long time ago in California. I spoke to my friend on the phone this morning; when she answered she was crying. There weren’t many things I could say; no words were adequate. We live our lives in a vacuum, a perpetual state of uncertainty, clinging to hopes and dreams for ourselves; our children; and families. We are forced to believe in the substance of invisible things. We have very little proof of a hereafter; but little miracles like Lily ought to be proof enough. We live our short lives never knowing with certainty that God exists, cares, or hears our prayers. The universe is vast and beyond understanding. Love is the only glue holding everything together. I have experienced the death of very few people, and that in itself seems like mercy to me. I have lived longer than some and not as long as others, and each day is a miracle. I never knew Lily, but I loved her vicariously through my friend. My friend and I are in the same place: divorced, single, the parents of grown children, and not yet grandparents. When we pray we pray with the hope that there is justice in the world, and that God’s ear is infinite and open to not only us but voices without measure across the ages, and expanses of time and space. Faith is the substance of things unseen. But faith doesn’t entirely soften the loss of Lily much for her parents or her grandmother. God speed to you Lily; you gave it your best shot, and you breathed the good sweet air for a time, which is better than not at all.