Sylvia's Garden

I'm not sure poetry and blogging mix. I know when I'm reading other people's blogs they have about fifteen seconds to grab me. Hey, I'm a busy man. You've got to rivet me to my chair or I'll be running off to see what Aprilbaby said today.

But poetry doesn't work that way. Oh, I know - there's the occasional Milk of the Bayou, a poem that smacks you in the face like a cold fish (think Sylvester the Cat here) and there you are, transported into a Roadrunner cartoon when you meant to spend quality time catching up on the G8 conference.

But regular poetry works slower. She's shy. You've got to court her. You've got to print out that poem and take it into the garden and sit under a tree with a glass of lemonade and all the time in the world. Let the words trickle down like beads of moisture on your lemonade glass until they start to mean something.

Well, who has time for that? Might not hurt to try, though.

Hey, stay with me another twenty seconds already. I rummaged around and found Allen Cohen's memorial poem for Sylvie, the one I referenced the other day in Before the Storm Hit (read it first for perspective if you haven't already)....

I got a funny feeling this morning, finding it in my back files and looking back towards the San Francisco of my youth - those years that created me. Am I the only one of my time and place left with memory intact? Why am I still here when so many who shared that youth have gone down to Davy Jones' Locker? There must be others left - but where are they? I want to call Allen Cohen to talk about 1736 Page and after -- but he's nowhere to be found. He's down waiting for the Ferryman.

Sometimes I feel like I'm marooned on a distant planet somewhere at the edge of the Milky Way - sending out little digital signals. Is anybody there? Is there anybody else out there? Oh well, guess I'd better go build up the fire...

By the way, Sylvia wasn't the dear girl's birth name. I changed it to protect her innocence.

THE GARDEN
Elegy for Sylvia, August 26, 1994
by Allen Cohen

It is the hot night of our lives.
Our bodies limp in their misuse.
Our souls though, that inner body,
statelier than mansions, gardens
lush and orderly with serene ponds
and tropical thickets.

Many beings and so much bitterness and beauty
inhabit our labyrinthine souls.
We have tended and grown each plant.
Nurtured each being that has entered there.
There are many secret places
that no one has yet seen,
some we have yet to explore.
Everyday we are adding
gorgeous flowering plants
and making new paths
and silent spaces.

And I think of you dear heart
and your wondrous pained soul.
How it ached and yet made room
for so many to find nourishment there!
In my memory I see you at 16 or 17
with an unearthly beauty, as if there
were four or five angels within you,
each pulling and lifting you
in a different direction
with each awkward breathless step.
It was a deep and mournful joyousness
that lived within you, strange
(I don't think I romanticize here)
how every man wanted you
in order to heal their broken souls.

And you were a hippie maiden of the wind
until you finally settled in your body
and it began to corrupt your innocence
and the pain and the escape from pain
drove the angels of youth out
leaving you alone and empty.
Your destiny to reinvent your soul
To climb the ladder of light again
to let the air and rain
water the growing Eden within you.
With each act and thought
a deep compassion grew.
When such beauty born
and beauty reborn
departs our shattered world,
a vast mysterious crater
is created in the mind.
We look down into it
remembering you, looking
for the gardens of you,
stretching to reach across
the mystery of your departure.


Photos by Patrushka, except the fish.

Found It

Till we bought this place in September, for seven years Patrushka and I traveled - homeless, rootless. No home to go home to. It was circumstances. Not our choice, really - there were things we had to do. East Coast, West Coast, the UK - even South Africa for a couple of months.

I like staying on the move. I could live in hotels and just keep going. But I want to go home too. I mean really - Home. That place where I used to live a long long time ago.

All those years a line from an old poem kept trying to be reborn in my head. What was it? How did it go? The snatch I semi-remembered went something like this: "I've been gone so long I don't know where my home is anymore."

But that's not a poem. The actual poem wouldn't form in my mind. I just knew it expressed a deep homesick feeling like mine.

I was leafing through my 1964 journals the other night to help remember details for the Langley Porter post. And I found it - the poem, that is. I had copied it out neatly in my book one afternoon at Langley Porter.

"He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where;
He says it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there."

A quick Google search reveals the passage to be by Henry Vaughan, from his poem Man. Here it is in its entirety, from The Oxford Book of English Verse. Look down towards the bottom of the page.

Ain't that pretty? It was worth the wait.

PonderPig Explains Psalm 42 - Part 2 of 4

The Pondering Pig has decided to explain the Bible. He’s up to verse four of Psalm 42. Let’s listen in as he ponders…

Verse 4. These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

Poor poet. He's feeling major homesickness and nostalgia. Wishing life was back they way it used to be. Back with his brothers and sisters and wives and children and everyone shouting for gladness. Man, I want to be there too. Why can’t life be like it used to be when we were young and beautiful and strong, and the sky was blue and the golden city was beckoning and my bones didn’t ache after moving boxes all day and I could walk down to the North Beach Arts Festival and there were all my friends dancing with gladness? (This is from my San Francisco youth. Put your own memory here)

Verse 5. Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Rhetorical question time. Reprise of the first four verses plus a new idea. The priest-diplomat gives his soul a little pep talk, trying to pull himself together. “This is just a phase, this bleak moment is not the sum of reality. God hasn’t changed. He’s been my help and he will be again.” Maybe now he feels a little better, but he has to keep reminding himself. “Even though I’m stuck here in Assyria (see part 1) negotiating with an unpleasant rude barbarian dictator and his underlings who look like they would be happy to slit my throat, it’s not going to be this way forever. Someday I’ll get to go back home to beautiful Jerusalem, my home.”

Verse 6. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

Well, that new hope lasted about five minutes, which is also my experience when I give myself little pep talks like that. He’s downcast again already. And he throws in this really odd line “therefore I remember you”. What, did he forget about God for a minute? -- “Wait a minute, what is it I forgot? Oh yeah – God. Good thing I remembered!” -- Just doesn’t make sense to me. Not this guy. I’m thinking maybe the translator goofed on this one.

Then he lists the places where he will remember God from. I guess he’s not in Assyria after all. First, there’s Jordan. Now there was no country of Jordan in those days. He’s talking about the river, which was controlled on both sides by the Israelites. Hermon is a mountain up on the border between Israel and Syria, a really high mountain. I’ve read people go skiing up there. Or at least they did before Hezbollah rockets and global warming. And I don’t know where Mount Mizar is, but it’s probably on the desolate side.

But if he is still in Israel or its border areas, then who are these unpleasant people mocking his god? I don’t get it.

Maybe the Temple has decided to add a new wing and they’ve sent the psalmist on an expedition to the mountains to pick out some good timber. And his lumberjacks are a bunch of unruly pagans. I don’t know. I think I’m missing something. Comments please.

Continued next post.

Thanks to STONEWALL Veterans'Association and the Mt.Hermon Ski Resort for pics.

Pondering Pig Explains the Bible: Psalm 42

I’ve been reading Psalm 42 a lot lately, the one about the deer panting for the water. I relate to it. I’m just like the guy in the psalm and I want to keep my spirits up too because I know it’s going to be okay in the end.

But the more I read it the more confused I got until I started pondering. Now I think I can explain most of it so it makes sense when you read it.

Here’s the Pig’s verse by verse explication. By the way, I am using the New Revised Standard Version. Bible scholar David Hamilton once told me he thought it gives the best idea of what the original Greek and Hebrew says.

Verse 1. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

Pretty good image, huh? Now I figure not every deer is longing for flowing streams, just the ones who got lost out on the desert. They’re wandering around the Mojave gasping “Water, water!”

But deer don’t just go out to the desert, they know there’s no water out there. They stay in the fields and pastures. So either somebody pushed them out of a truck, or maybe there’s a terrible drought and all the little streams have dried up. Like in California. It’s hot and dry all summer and never a drop of rain, so if the winter rains don’t come and the streams dry up, it’s bad news for the deer. Also the raccoons and mice.

So verse 1 means this guy has got himself into a place where all his streams have dried up. Everything he depends on and expects to quench his thirst – spiritual in this case – has dried up and blown away. He’s just sitting there reading the Bible but not comprehending the words, feeling sort of dead inside.

I’m ignoring the part about 'my soul longs for you'. But it’s funny. Why doesn’t he just say ‘I long for you?’

Verse 2: My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

The psalmist repeats himself, which is how they wrote these things. It’s expected. For emphasis. Then he throws us a zinger. He wants to go where he can see God’s face?

God doesn’t have a face. Never did. The old Hebrew guys were the ones who first realized God was Spirit. So I think he means he wants to go back to the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews believed God was really centered and focused in that particular earthly spot. You go in there and that’s as close to God as you can get. Kind of an odd idea, since God is everywhere. Maybe some readers who are Jewish scholars would care to comment.

There was this place inside the temple called The Holy of Holies, where only the high priest could go in and then only once a year. You can read about it in Exodus. That’s where he could get as close to God as it was possible to be on this earth.

So I’m guessing this spiritually dry guy is actually one of the highest priests of Israel and he’s in big trouble because everyone expects he’s the man who really is in contact with the Almighty. But he’s not.

Verse 3. My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’

A real puzzler. Yet it’s the heart of his complaint. Who are these people who are taunting him? Certainly not other Jews, because they know where his God is. Over at the Temple. You could say, “Well, it’s just a manner of speaking. What they mean is ‘how come your God doesn’t answer your prayers if he’s so great?’” But that comes down to the same problem. A Jew would never mock God like that. It doesn’t feel right to me.

I think, for some reason the priest is off on his travels. Maybe he’s been sent on a diplomatic mission to the King of Assyria or something. And he wishes he was back home with his brothers and sisters. If the Assyrians said “Where is your God?” they would mean it literally. Because their gods were actual chickens or something else that you could see. Okay, not chickens. Giant statues with horns, say. How about a big stone lion?

Wait, we’re not done with verse three yet. What about “tears for food”? Either the psalmist is so upset he can’t eat or, more likely, he is fasting. And tears are the second watery thing in this psalm so far. First, the water you need to live, and now the salty water of sorrow.

Next post: Homesick in Assyria. Or maybe on Mt. Mizar.

Pondering Pig's Tour of San Francisco

Planning your big trip to San Francisco? Don't forget your coat! I know you want to see Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum real bad, and, oh those cable cars climbing halfway to the stars, they’ve got to be great. How about a trip to the Haight-Ashbury to see where the Grateful Dead lived? Maybe a topless bar (wink wink nod nod), and a nightcap in the bar of the Holiday Inn.

But hold on for a minute. There’s another city hidden beneath the glitter and gloss of "My Enchanted City”. A city with hidden treasures and landmarks that only the talking pigs know about. Let me take you down, cause I'm going to...San Francisco's Richmond District, Home of the Talking Pigs!

Oh, there’s not many of us left now in the City. We’ve dispersed across the world. I’m an exile myself, sleeping in an abandoned mobile home far down the coast with only an owl and a feral cat for company. (Besides the beautiful Patrushka and her indomitable Mom, of course, both of whom insist they like it)

Oh, perhaps it's quiet, perhaps it's a little lonely today. But there was a time when the Richmond resounded to the throng of happy snorts and grunts, when little curly tails disappeared into the bakeries and came out with pies and cakes and sugar cookies to take home for tea. Young pigs such as myself studied in the libraries and parks of the Richmond and learned to ponder deeply into the mystery of things.

Wandering through the muffled streets, we learned to love the fog and moist grey gloom. For us it was a warm cozy blanket. The wind barreling off the Pacific, it filled the lungs with glee. Ah, for the life of a talking pig in the Richmond District in those golden times of yore.

Certain among you are beginning to wonder when the show starts and I wish you’d have a little more patience. I’m just getting warmed up. But ever it shall be. Okay, next picture, please…

The Temple of Learning. Ah, the lines of merry young pigs that stood outside the Balboa waiting for the box office to open and the Saturday matinee to begin. Some Saturdays we heard a lecture on Aristotle. Other Saturdays it was six color cartoons, a Superman serial, and Mickey Rooney in “Penrod Fights The Gangsters”. Even today, the remnants of the Golden Age remain. Where else could you have your choice of Nacho Libre or Army of Shadows, a phenomenal, magnificent 1969 French film about the Resistance during WWII, and don’t miss it if you trust a talking pig’s judgment). But it’s not coming soon to a theater near you. Sorry. Maybe on DVD.
The Secret Treasure Statue. I boldly proclaim its location because I know how to get to the treasure and you don’t. No, it’s not symbolic of the treasure of the imagination – it’s money. Gold beyond your wildest dreams! And it’s mine, mine mine! Hahahahahahahahah.


Adolf Sutro. How we honor Adolf. Not only did he build San Francisco’s Sutro Park, most beautiful park in the known universe, he was the first talking pig to successfully pass as a human for most of his life. We don’t like to do it, but it’s so much more convenient. People are always asking embarrassing questions like “How come you’re not wearing trousers?” But they never guessed the truth about Adolf. What a pig! Too bad about the name though. It was a perfectly nice name in 1890.












The Old Manse. Pigs lived here once but now they’re gone.




Our tour of San Francisco's Richmond District is about halfway through. We'll be stopping for lunch today at The Blathering Pig. Please try not to encourage the proprietor or we'll never get served!

Complaint of the Pondering Pig

Such an uncomfortable life we’ve led the last few days. Would you mind dreadfully if I sit down and complain for a moment? It won't take long and I'll feel ever so much better. After our long journey across the continent we’ve landed for a few days at Grandma's mobile home on the California coast. Interrupting her neat and tidy schedule and not knowing where to flop. Trying to remember to squeegee out the shower and wipe it down with a cloth provided for the purpose.

Well, our horse Gabbin is enjoying the rest anyway. He winked at me as he dug into his oats. He said he talked to a red fox coming through the iceplant below the neighbor's retaining wall at dawn this morning. Fox said he's doing fine in between the mobile homes. Lots of cats to eat.

The German home cooking here is tops. Grandma makes cabbage rolls just like they did in her home town in Lower Saxony when she was a little girl. With white sauce, not tomato sauce. Mashed potatoes and gravy and a special kind of cole slaw she learned how to make when she was waiting table at a fish n chips place in East LA in the Thirties. It's fabulous even if you don't like cole slaw.

No internet connection of course. We’re talking an 87 year old lady who won’t even push the ‘on’ button on my computer because she might break it. So here is the closest place with free wi-fi, temporarily the office of the Pondering Pig:


Office of the Pondering Pig

Why do people want to come to the California Coast so bad? I can’t figure it out. Here's what it looks like around here...


Hey, palm trees in the parking lots. Not bad.

Plenty of shopping for everyone...


Did I mention the parking? Unbeatable. And every lot has palm trees. I think it's a law.


Well, people are strange. They have strange desires. I'm glad I'm a pig - - yet pigs have strange desires too – here‘s mine: I want to live in a nice little nineteen twenties bungalow out on the edge of town. Still has the original wood paneling and plenty of room for books. Big garden with tomatoes and chilies and cantaloupes getting ripe and a fast cable connection and a little office where I can write The History of the Talking Pigs in peace and every once in a while gaze out my window and there is Patrushka, the princess who married a pig, in her floppy sunhat doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more? Out behind I can see our horse Gabbin standing by the fence gabbing with the other horses about all his adventures since he came to live with us.

Who could ask for more? Well, actually...since you asked, I still want to go to Europe every year and hitchhike down wet northern highways to an overgrown, haunted spa where dukes and duchesses took the waters in 1827. And I still want to find the ruins of Great-Great-Great-Grandma Pig’s farm on the misty flatlands of Ostfrisia where my ancestors Hisko and Gerhardt Pig built the dragon that frightened off the Duke's soldiers.

Wait, I’m not done complaining yet…I don’t want to live in a 1970’s subdivision ranchburger with corroding aluminum windows, the garage made over into a huge room nobody knows what to do with, there's nobody home but me on the block but the driveways all have gigantic pick-up trucks parked in them and there’s a big German Shepherd behind the chain-link fence next door who won’t stop barking. Could I not live there, please?

Right now at least one of my readers is saying, “Hey, what’s with this pig? I live in a 1970’s subdivision and there’s a big pickup truck in MY driveway and I have a big German Shepherd and he’s really nice. So what’s wrong with that, you stupid pig?”

If so, I refer you to the Comments section below. We have learned to give free expression to all and welcome your comments, no matter how rude and unfortunate. It’s just not for me, not for Patrushka. We're not Seventies people. In our little hovel we neither wear bump-toed shoes nor play disco music. Except for “Shake, Shake, Shake Your Bootie” of course. We read William Wordsworth and walk on the cliffs at midnight reciting "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". We tune in our crystal sets to see if we can pick up Ashtabula. We have tea by the fire with just a tot of brandy in it. I spend a lot of time blathering on like this while Patrushka calls the doctor.

Hey, thanks for listening. I think I really do feel better!

In The Shadow of the Babcocks

Sunday afternoon. Spring in New England. For something to do, Patrushka and I drove over to Westerly, a neighboring town where the Babcock-Smith House Historical Museum was having a little fete. It's one of those eighteenth century mansions so beloved by New Englanders, where their prosperous sea captain ancestors copied the manners and styles they had seen on visits to England.

The Babcock part of the Babcock-Smith house is of special interest to the Pondering Pig because - well, they're his ancestors too.

My grandma, Nana Meyer, used to tell me about the Babcocks, her mother's people. Farmers, preachers, and wanderers, they were restless, eccentric folks who came over with the Puritans and slowly crossed America following the wagon tracks all the way out to Pasadena and San Francisco and now back to Westerly, Rhode Island all over again, at least for today.

My Nana Meyer was a no nonsense sort of grandmother, and when I was little I was afraid of her. But she improved immensely as I got older and she began to tell me stories about her girlhood on a farm in Lincoln County, Kansas. And about her family, the stock she had come from. Her Dad, Ferdinand, was a Prussian soldier who'd skipped out and caught a boat for America as soon as the Prussian army had finished beating up the French in the early 1870s. First he got a job building a waterwheel somewhere in Delaware, then he heard they needed carpenters to build the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, so he went up there. From Philadelphia he slowly made his way west, working on the railroad till he got as far as Kansas. At the end of the Santa Fe railroad line, in Ellsworth, toughest cow town on the frontier, where Wyatt Earp kept law and order with a smoking six-gun, he met pretty Amy Babcock, my great-grandmother and Nana's Mom, and a direct descendant of the Babcocks of Westerly.



They got married in 1879 and drove a horse and wagon up to Lincoln County to homestead. First they lived in one of those sod houses. Nana was born there but later Ferdinand carpentered a rough wooden cabin from planks he bought from his railroad friends.

Nana had a picture of the cabin, just a shack really, and another of her family taken in the 1890s...Ferdinand, still young, bold and handsome with a big walrus mustache and Nana, called Mabel in those days, beautiful, 12 or 13, with thick dark hair like her Dad's tumbling over her shoulder and sweet wistful expression. I would have fallen in love with the girl in the picture except I knew it was Nana Meyer. And there were her two little sisters - my pretty blonde great-aunt would get polio and have to make a life for herself in a wheelchair - and her brother who ran off west and was never heard from again.

Amy was dead sick. You could see it in that photo with her haggard face and dark circled eyes with the light gone out and bony emaciated face - she was fixin' to die. Yet she was only 35. TB maybe, it roared through the country with scythe and skull's head bared in those days. And Nana had one other picture she always carried with her - Amy's Kansas grave.

Nana carried those pictures around with her because she had no bureau to keep them in - Nana had no home. She traveled around the country and up to Toronto, staying a few months with each of her children and sisters and then taking the train on with just two suitcases to hold her belongings. Her husband, my grandfather, had made the big bucks in LA in the Roaring Twenties, but he got shot down and she lost what was left of the fortune in the Depression. Now she was a wanderer, one more American with no home but just that restless standing on the platform listening for the whistle one more time.

I grew up with a sense of the myth-steeped history of my family. We were part of the great sweep of America. I would ask Nana to tell me about when she was a little girl and I could see it in my mind when she talked. I saw her little one room schoolhouse with its sixteen year old teacher. I saw Nana and her family riding through the wheat fields in their little buggy at dusk going to the schoolhouse for the big spelling bee. And how well Nana had done, taking second place in the whole county. My cousin has Nana's little autograph book from that school - an album where her classmates wrote sentimental sayings and remembrances to her when she had to drop out of school. Nana kept it all her life.

Because after Amy died, Ferdinand packed up the cabin, filled his shabby battered suitcase and caught the train west to Pasadena, California to start over. He left his kids with Amy's sister Aunt Neen up in the sandhills of western Nebraska.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it's why we Americans are like we are, somehow. Restless, wandering Jack Kerouac Americans except years and years before he was ever born. My America. And my people have always been here. Nana was a Prussian soldier's daughter. But she was also the daughter of Amy Babcock, whose ancestors had been original settlers in Roger William's Rhode Island, birthplace of American freedom, and had scrabbled from there all the way out to the saddletramp cowtowns of Kansas by 1879. Her tough-minded great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Jabez Collver, had sided with the British during the Revolution and then had to fight his way to Canada with his six strapping sons on the dark forest roads of York State across the Niagara River, a damned Tory. But her grandfather Moses crossed the roaring river back again and strode on to Ohio along the forest roads preaching the gospel in every town he came to. With his little family in the wagon beside him wondering where they would ever find a home again.

Now the Pondering Pig and his princess bride Patrushka are heading west from Rhode Island - in just a few weeks, in our little gypsy cart. We aims to get to California if we can. I think I'm going to stop in Lincoln County and see if I can find Amy's grave. If I do, I'm going to buy that girl a big bouquet of spring flowers.

And you're all coming with us in the wagon, in a sense. I'll be posting from the road wherever we can find a wireless connection out there in the great dark Johnny Appleseed forests of Ohio, along the wide rolling Huckleberry Finn Mississippi, in those saddletramp sixshooter cowtowns of Kansas. And down below along the great dark mesas of New Mexico and Arizona.

Once more into the breach, my friends. We're Americans of the restless kind. It's in my blood. But I'm glad we've got some friends on this journey. Makes it a little safer around the campfire at night when the coyotes are howling and Patrushka and I are singing "Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairee" and there's a scurrying noise in the brush beyond our circle of light. Glad you're along on this journey. Wagons Ho!

A Little Resurrection in New Jersey

Came down to my old town in Jersey to see daughter Jenny and her family.

Clinton's world is yellow-green with maple leaves a-spreading out, pink and white cherry blossoms singing up and down the street and in front yards and the churchyard, blaring yellow forsythia bushes shouting hooray, the daffs not quite done and the tulips strutting through people's yards in pink and gold and bright yellow perfection.

Plus little fluffy clouds and me walking through town in my shirtsleeves and everybody, all my old friends, so happy to see me and gathering around and shaking hands and asking Where's Patrushka you old pig?

Easter Sunday, the He Is Risen day, and my old town is looking like heaven. An old-fashioned, small town American kind of heaven.

I stopped in at my old church, Clinton Presbyterian, for the big Easter 11:00 service. I took my first faltering steps there after God showed me He was real after all and I decided to follow Jesus. My kids sang in the choir there and played their squeaky violas to great applause. I led my first Bible study there when I had never even been to a Bible Study before. It was the silliest Bible study ever seen on the planet, but it was real, man.

Those Presbyterians were like, Go Man! I sang Marvin Gaye's song Save the Children once for the musical offering. I sang Bob Marley songs - just maneuvered the words a bit. I didn't know there was such a thing as modern praise music and neither did any one else.

So yeah, Easter Sunday, they're still playing organ music, but they have a good organist now and the music just soared. And there were my old pals up there in the choir in their blue robes - but now they were singing good! Somebody has figured out how to do those old hymn tunes right. And Eileen Mansfield spotted me in the second row and came running down during the 'pass the peace' deal to throw her arms around me and ask where's Patrushka you old pig? Eileen Mansfield is not exactly a demonstrative person. So I felt welcomed, like it is when you get to heaven for a day.

Tim, the new preacher, gave a sermon I could actually understand from beginning to end, about believing something even when you don't understand it, and when we took communion together it was like the scales fell off something inside me and I could pray again. I thought of Spoke up there in Alberta feeling the same alienation from church that I have been dealing with for so long, and I just prayed for a little resurrection for both of us. And as for me, I got it.

I just was graced with a little visit to heaven, and you don't get that every day.

That Fox Again

I've always wanted to follow Jesus. I don't know why. Just seems like he has better ideas than other people. Practical ways of growing up to become a proper pondering pig. Maybe even a pig of action!

Like that one about let God do the judging, you do the healing.

It's not bad advice. Gets the twisty stuff out of my mind. It's like the sun comes out when I can stop judging other people for a minute and relax. I wouldn't know to do that except that I follow Jesus and that was his advice.

So I am a disciple - except I am the world's most inconsistent disciple. Here's a bit from the Gospel of Matthew I have successfully ignored so far: "If you want to be perfect, sell what you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me."

I have walked around this advice, inspected it, but decided not to ponder it, because it didn't seem to lead to joy but rather to having to sell all my stuff, give the proceeds to "the poor", then go wander around the countryside with out even a backpack and no place to keep dry and my dear little pigsty, where is it? And my little kids, if I still had some, would they have to wander around too? Not able to go to school and nothing to eat at night unless the rich lady felt generous, or we met (fat chance) some other disciple who was giving all their money to "the poor" - that's me.

I just have not been able to see any joy in this particular scenario. Sounds like a big drag, frankly. So, I have decided not to ponder it. Until today.

I'm sure it has something to do with that twisty feeling.

It's like, and I'm wandering off here - dancing in the sunshine Marin County Spring 1968 with a beautiful hippie girl I'd never seen before and never would see again, dancing for hours it seemed in pure joy while the Grateful Dead played off the back of a flatbed truck and my long hair gleamed and brushed the morning. No drugs - just joy of life and being young and sharing it with a dear beautiful saint for a moment.

It's like that versus being chained to a death job with angry ghosts passing in the halls and meetings with sour, cynical faces day after day like in Dilbert - because I had to make the mortgage and my kids needed braces and our beautiful old Victorian was warm and safe with my girls safe and jolly and their friends running in and out.

Just seemed like that's what you did when you were a man - you took care of your family, and that met burying your heart and living behind a mask. I never felt like I had a choice to sell all I had and give it to "the poor" and then go follow Jesus. Couldn't I do it now somehow?

Oh dear , I don't think I've pondered this through but rather got more confused...

Fox Without A Hole

Thanks Anonymous, Gary, Kirstie and Leonard for your invaluable, God-loved insights about these foxes (not the ones who eat all your grapes). Here's a pic of Jesus just taking it easy in the snow after a good day.

I'm not really a very metaphysical pig. My understanding goes more in the one plus one equals two direction. I think you guys who see a message about the Holy Spirit here are right, but me, I'm more the "I wonder if there are any truffles in these woods?" kind of a pig and I go snuffling off. If lightning starts flashing and enlightening the woods, I'll probably stay safe home in my pigsty. God makes all kinds, I guess.

Anyway, I was just looking at this story again and I noticed that it comes right on top of several other stories when Jesus is frustrated with his dumb and dumber disciples. (This is in Luke Chapter Nine starting at verse 28.) First, Jesus and three of his disciples climb a mountain where they have an amazing visionary experience. Jesus suddenly is wearing gleaming white robes like Gandalf after he killed the Balrog. Moses and Elijah appear and are talking over important matters with Jesus when Peter rubs his eyes and makes the endearing but totally off the wall remark "Hey everybody, let's build three huts so Jesus and Moses and Elijah can just hang out as long as they want to". Then - puff - the vision is over and they are back laying in the grit on the mountaintop.

Then the next day a father shouts out at Jesus, "Hey, could you please come and heal my kid? Your loser disciples tried but nothing happened." And Jesus replies "You faithless and perverse generation! How much longer do I have to put up with you!!!" And he heals the child.

Now in every story between here and the foxes story, the disciples get Jesus' words seriously wrong. Right up to when the disciples suggest Jesus blast a village with lightning bolts because it didn't invite their whole entourage to spend the night.

Just at this point the poor sap walks up and says, "Jesus, I'm going to follow you wherever you go." Time is getting short here. Jerusalem and death on the cross is just down the road. I think Jesus is starting to have second thoughts about his big plan to get 12 ordinary young guys with baseball caps and heavy-duty pickup trucks completely transformed into world changers who are filled this elusive thing called the Holy Spirit. Now here's yet another one popping up.

I'm wondering, from my non-metaphysical piggish perspective, if his 'foxes have holes' remark is really an insight into how lonely and bereft he must have felt to be the Son of Man on assignment down here on the fallen earth.

The Pig Ponders His Future Over A Glass of Fine Old Port

Strangely enough, we pondering pigs need a certain amount of routine in order to properly ponder. You needn't pander, but to ponder we require peace and quiet, a pipe by the fireside, a snifter of fine old port, our slippers, our good old doggie, a cat on the mat, and a pile of morocco bound volumes on the little table by our easy chair. Preferably Robert Louis Stevenson. Or Charles Dickens will do quite well. We will accept, in a pinch, Uncle Wiggily on the Farm. And we require our man to pop by from time to time with a fresh snifter of Old Snuggly. In fact, we need so much routine in order to properly ponder, I wonder why we bother.

Yet there's no peace in the old Pigsty tonight. We have to move. Can't put it off. Our lease is up on May 31 and we haven't a clue in a cartload as to where we should settle. Perhaps you know. For full particulars, inquire at Wookey Hole Farm, three miles down on your left.

Should we go home to California? Find a little homestead in the foothills of the Sierras with room in the back meadow for Fred our old pony? Go back to hedgetrimming to pay for that exorbitant California real estate?

Or should we perhaps explore the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania with its gigantic Indians and rafts of drunken bargemen cursing into the night and there perhaps establish an organic heritage apple, plum, and cherry orchard as did Johnny Appleseed? They say prices there are very cheap indeed, but we don't know a soul with a sou in the Susquehanna Breaks.

Of course I've heard tell Pittsburgh PA is an undiscovered rough diamond ripe for the plucking by a bold and determined young pair 'o pigs.

Mama! The pondering pig is blathering!!!

Then again -- the Western slope of Colorado! The mighty Rockies singing a song of themselves while the whistle blows for no man. There's the place for hanging gardens and adventure in the morning! Alfred, fill my glass!

You see, I'd much prefer to sit here by the fire all night and ponder and ponder and not have to actually DO anything. Yet May 31 is coming. It's enough to make me squeak!

Two Girls Barefoot; First Day of 1960

Actually, I'm not exactly sure what day this poem was written. Jack Gilbert was a big published poet at San Francisco State when I was there and this poem ran on little cat feet across the lawn licking from soul to soul into my mind. Where it still resides. Kids whispered it into each other's ears like the Revolution is here or like the the wind in the eucalyptus trees as the fog swirled in on little ghost feet and made Bess Faraway wrap herself in her green wool flannel car coat as she nearsightedly headed for the Commons looking for Walrus Pemmican but he had already split.

ON GROWING OLD IN SAN FRANCISCO

Two girls barefoot walking in the rain
Both girls lovely, one of them is sane
Hurting me softly
Hurting me though
Two girls barefoot walking in the snow
Walking in the white snow
Walking in the black
Two girls barefoot never coming back.

- Jack Gilbert

The photo, by the way, is not really 1960 era San Francisco. But it really is San Francisco. By an excellent young photographer named Nitsa. Her stuff is here.

Pigs Gotta Dance

Been trying to write more about my Dad. There he comes before me in joie de vie vision doing a soft shoe in our living room in San Mateo, California to Toot Toot Toosie Goodbye. Then Mom comes into my vision and they spin a smart fox trot around the living room.

Here's what Dad taught me:
A dancing pig always always beats a philosopher.
Work should be fun even though it is work.
It's fun being famous and we should all strive for it.
Trivial, inconsequential, who cares? The thing is to get out tomorrow's column (I never believed him on this point.)
Here's what's important: to dance and sing and play a squawky violin and write and tell stories and laugh in great snoots and spill your glass of wine with every sweeping gesture at the dinner table.
And I know it's true.
But I find tears falling on my keyboard and I can't write anymore.

Why do we grieve?