. . . where roofs are closer to the sky than to the floor,

lights kept small and close,

where the art is real, the food fresh, and flowers unexpectedly wild. . .

Staying sane while working a steady-eddy phone job requires periodic full-body immersion in art, but petty-betty phone jobs don't provide the kind of money needed to buy theatre tickets or pay for expensive museum admissions. So like any starving artist in desperate need of art, I do what is necessary to throw myself onto or into the nearest art island/slagheap/ burning bush (or swamp).
I volunteer.

This week, I hustled over to SF to serve as a volunteer usher at Forum,  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' experimental theatre venue. I wanted to see  Eiko & Koma's Fragile,  originally produced  as a gallery installation for the Walker Art Center but then recreated as a more formal performance piece together with SF's own Kronos Quartet. It was, I thought, just the thing to take my mind away from surveys and chitter-chatter, maybe push me into the light  . . . or bury me in dark. Either way,  I was ready -- I thought -- to sit quietly for four hours as the two of them lay naked barely moving, caught inside haunting bells mixed with the lapsed strings of the Kronos Quartet.

I would sit -- I thought -- as silently, as still as their unclothed bodies dusted with white rice powder and bits of leaves and feathers. I would be as naked as they, my mind my spirit as stripped as motionless, lying on mounded dirt, while the Kronos played. 

Either I was caught thinking (again) or I should stop already with all this thinking.

I didn't know that my volunteer gig would remove me from the performance space, abandon me to the narrow space of an organized past. I did not know I would  not be asked to seat the audience and then left to my own devices within in the womb of the performance space as expected. I was surprised and a bit chagrined that I was instead positioned as a "guard" of the 'archives,' asked to stand in a back corner behind the impervious black curtain separating the stage from an artificial yet "upfront" backstage where a suspended oversized rack holding costumes from past performances swayed above a floor littered with snapshots from past performances.

Nostalgia gone wild.

I was supposed to keep folks from walking away with the photos, from grabbing the costumes unceremoniously, from sneaking into the  dark unexplored space behind the stage. Control the crowd. But I was alone in that corner. I was expected to guard the past, but, of course, no one was interested in visiting the past. 

No one cared to dive headfirst into the sensuous floor to ceiling cascade of fiber, string, and paper that had been essential to the set of a previous performance. No one reached out to grab the over-sized kimonos, the faux bearskin wraps, or the silky scarlet camisole suspended above the hundreds of photos scattered about the floor. No one knelt to peer at those snapshots or picked them up to hold them closer to the light.

No one wandered into the corral of the past.  The audience was dutiful and respectful. The door opened. The door closed. They walked in, turned left, sat down, and stayed neatly folded onto the benches inside the curtained performance space.

The musicians played. The bells tolled. The two naked dusted bodies curled and uncurled, and I, guard of the past, stayed in my corner, leaning on myself,  splashed color, dim light, and violins, stretched past fragile.

I make a lousy guard -- not really my nature to guard things -- but in this case I was a ridiculous guard, a Beckettian guard, waiting for waiting, standing inside of standing, leaning on nothing.

I was extraneous.

I would like to believe that the audience was more focused on the present and thus ignored the carefully collected past, hanging  unceremoniously off to the side.

Mid-afternoon, as the sun grew longer and golder, I heard voices. First two distinct voices speaking loudly in harmony, and then the many repeating, responding. Those voices were distant but approaching. By the time, I had laid aside my work, a small but active crowd was passing in front of my house. Two young women were out in front with megaphones, followed by a group of thirty or forty people, including  the Mayor, her husband, the Police Chief and other Oakland city workers, marching solidly up Peralta Street. The women yelled out What do we want? and the crowd yelled back PEACE. And the women yelled back When do we want it? And the voices lifted  NOW. 

End the violence. End the violence. End the violence now.

Join us, join us, yelled the man with the microphone. My heart was with them, but I couldn't get up and walk. I was working. I was barefoot. I would have to put away my work, close up the house, set the alarm. I had a million excuses, and even before I could scratch them all on the back of my skull, the crowd was turning the corner to head down Twelfth Street towards Mandela Parkway and away.

_
What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW.

NOW. . .Now. . . Now.

What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW. . . Now.

The mayor's husband, a doctor, a founder of an over-60 health clinic, reached across my fence and handed me a magnet  for my refrigerator. Create a Safer Cleaner Oakland. Report Problems to the Public Works Agency. I thanked him, and then stood still, listened to the gentleness of feet moving together, the pitch of voices rising. Call and Response. Call out and the world calls back.

I did not want to think about how many years ago, how many decades past, I yelled those same words, passionately, convinced that by working together, we could change the world, bring peace to our cities, peace to our land, peace to our world. Almost 50 years. I stood aside and watched them go  -- the years, the people, the voices -- wondering why I cling, somewhat stupidly, to a hope for peace, but I do. I do.

After they were gone, my neighbor to my right went back to working on his car. My neighbor across the street picked up his hammer again. The man who had stepped out from the Western Service Workers Association put away his camera and stepped back in. I went back to work, and somewhere behind some closed door someone went back to cleaning his gun.

What do we want?       PEACE.

When do we want it? NOW. Stop the Violence, stop it now. NOW. Now.  now. . . please NOW.

But how?  Federal funds are funneled off to wars. Schools are collapsing under the weight of senseless and useless bureaucracies. Our society is gasping and grasping and gagging. There's no money for schools, no money for health care, no money for housing, no money except for those who already have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime. Education, housing, healthcare  have become unaffordable for most of us. Real health care is no longer available except to those who can afford to pay for private  insurance and the hefty deductibles. The rest of us make do with aspirin and tisanes. The social safety net is so shot through with holes that if any who has the misfortune to fall into it instantly falls through its rotted netting and hurdles downward into the abyss.

We want peace, but who's going to sign the Peace Treaty and give up war when war is the money machine, the rusted gas guzzling brutal nasty engine that keeping the economy pumping. . . All money goes to war; all money comes from war. Capitalism is war on the people. Once that war was organized with well-defined rules of engagement; now, it is guerrilla war, fought down in the ghettos and out in the streets, and we, the people,  are being unwittingly transformed into soldiers, destined to die in those trenches unless we cast off the uniforms, lay down the guns, and give up on war. NOW.

Now . . . NOW . . . Now . . .

But how?

If we want peace, we have to stop consuming and start nurturing. We are not the brave soldiers of capitalism, marching off to consume and consume some more. We are mothers and fathers, artists and musicians, farmers and mechanics, dreamers and inventors, scientists and doctors, workers, children, grandchildren, lovers, humans with thin skins and giant hearts.

To find peace, refuse war. All war. All violence. Live simply. Consume less. Do no harm.

Yesterday, was surprisingly warmer, no rain, and I found myself  walking about another unfamiliar neighborhood where there are more apartment buildings than there are houses. The houses nestling between the taller fatter but not necessarily sturdier apartment buildings are sometimes large, sometimes small. It is impossible to know why they are still here while other, equally venerable, I’m sure, have disappeared. It’s the sort of neighborhood where young twenty-something men toss footballs in front yards, looking every inch like well-composed ads for high-end sportswear. It's the kind of neighborhood where neatly detailed Porsches and BMWs are parked at the curb next to manicured sidewalk gardens overflowing with exotic plants that no one ever disturbs. No garden thieves here.

It’s the kind of neighborhood where dark-skinned women push red-cheeked blond babies in super-wide strollers as expensive as some cars and equipped with expansive sun shades above, shock absorbers beneath and huge shopping nets behind. Here elderly women walk small dogs so fluffy so orange so bedecked with bows and ribbons that they seem like stuffed animals on wheels. Should my scruffy terrier, ruffian that he is, try to say hello in the way dogs say hello, sniffing all parts that really matter, little Phoebe would be immediately swept up into her shocked Mama’s arms, out of harm's way. Here there are no heavy mesh security doors but plenty of discrete video cameras, recording every passer by. Windows have no metal bars  but are equipped instead with expensive tasteful shades, designed to allow light to enter yet keep anyone from seeing the domestic bliss within.

And, here, surprisingly, some houses brazenly display lawn ornaments, stubbornly (and thankfully) out of sync with  gold-leafed building numbers, marble entries, and copper gutters.

Behind this rusty dog, closer to the house, stands a tall yellow birdcage, empty except for a few sprays of always blooming plastic flowers and a hand-written sign that reads:

                                                                           Those who like to sing will always find a song.

Years ago, I lived in a house high on a hill. I call it the house of the Thirty-None Steps, but I think there were more out of kilter slate and brick steps than that leading to my front porch, where I could sit looking down to the neighbors' yards and across to the tops of venerable sycamore trees. The porch was an old-fashioned porch meant for long afternoons of musing and dreaming., and in order to summon the dream,  I hung wind-chimes from its eaves -- at first just a few but soon many. Bells of all sizes, modest bamboo flutterers, tiny tinkling chimes of the sort that are found in dollar bins outside stores in Chinatown, and a few of the more sober hollow sonorous chimes that sound pleasing chords when breezes blow and symphonies when high winds surge through.

_
I wouldn't say my porch was cacophonous but it grew noisy enough to elicit a few polite complaints from neighbors who were trying very hard to be accepted in the society of those who lived in far grander houses on higher hills, sedate houses that never communicated with the wind only with the FedEx man or sometimes UPS.

Yesterday, walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I found myself passing by houses with  wide welcoming porches, thinking about that old cheerful porch of so many years ago where I sat happily many early mornings and where for one long afternoon and another even longer night, I sat aghast, watching great huge orange red flames leap from ridge to ridge, exploding houses and torching trees. Remembering the Oakland fire is not something I like to do very often . . . especially as my memory of that event is far different than some of the more exotically explicit accounts of the fire. But no matter. As we all know, history is sometimes a rather conclusive social 'science' drawn from the more elusive and inconclusive art of memory, but the fragility of history never bothers me.

_
I enjoy the gentle smudging shadows of memory as much as I love the more distinct details of the everyday. Couldn't live without it.  Certainly, these houses I passed yesterday made me smile, even laugh. I enjoyed walking through their backyards of memory as much I did traipsing through my own. I was grateful for their flights of fantasy, details remaindered from another age. I found their exuberant joy electrifying, as capable of sparking my own memory as wiping it clean.

Yesterday, no folk sat comfortably lined up on porches, flattening down the rattan chairs or opening up the wooden benches, but I can imagine that on hotter days folks do sit quietly with fans in their hands, sipping tall glasses of lemonade and passing through late afternoon on the gossamer wings of gossip. So imperfect, so impure, and so positively delightful.

But this day was a grey day, fiercely close, winter trying on spring and finding the fit a bit tight. Besides myself, the only other person moving on the street was a burly man in coveralls briskly changing the tire of a sunshine yellow Volkswagen convertible while his own even brighter yellow tow truck, large enough to winch a tractor trailer out of a ditch or up a cliff, occupied the whole center street. A young woman stood  to one side, both hands stuffed into deep pockets. She  offered no commentary but looked soberly on, patiently waiting for some sign from the sober silent man with the jack that her car would once again be whole and ready to rock and roll. 

_
I wondered if that young girl was so confused by jacks and wrenches that the changing of a tire required calling in a tow truck large enough and heavy enough to lift a tractor trailer or if she just believed that tires were better changed by experts driving trucks large enough to consume two gallons of gas to drive  the few miles from the service station to her car. The brave new world of instant and "free" road service, which is not really free. I'm afraid we all pay the rather high price of the increased pollution leaking from this inefficient use of energy.

No one stepped onto any porch; no one crossed the road. No one jogged on by, and I was happy to be alone, walking walking walking walking with my little dog Earnest by my side, past houses more than a century old painted jauntily, each smiling and each with an entrance raising  a great shout of welcome,  some making music and some with signs bidding entry to places where I would like to be. Poets places.

By early afternoon, broad icy winds had arrived to disabuse us all of the frilly silly notion that spring had come to stay.  Temperatures dropped with lightning speed, and lashed by the wind, trees  bent away from the bay. Ducks  tucked themselves into their feathers and the geese just flew away.  I, on the other hand, expanded into that stiff cold wind, gulped its great distance into my lungs and walked on past the great flocks of worm-footed coots and gulls lined up against the rocks.

In no time at all, I was out to sea.

_ Driving to the shore today, I passed a man pushing a shopping cart piled high with his belongings, not an uncommon sight in this part of Oakland, but his overloaded cart bumped its wheels over the broken pavement, I could see his effort was far from ordinary. This man walked with a looping gait so pronounced that every step swung his body in a wide circle to the right and down. One shoulder would swoop down until his hand very nearly grazed the sidewalk and then his other shoulder would jerk spasmodically, hauling his body upward and forward a few inches no more. At first, I thought him lucky to have the cart as balance until I noticed he wasn’t depending at all on the cart to steady him; indeed, the opposite was true.  As he lurched forward, he tugged and jerked the cart, trying to keep it from overturning. This was a man of uncommon determination. I couldn’t help but wonder where he was coming from, how far he had traveled and where he was going. If I had a pick-up truck, I would have stopped and offered him a lift, even though I think he would have refused my offer. He was moving under his own steam.

When I turned, driving under the freeway and into the tunnel, I saw yet another unusual sight but this one was far bleaker. Beneath the overpass, at least a dozen burly men dressed in white disposable coveralls and armed with trash bags and shovels were breaking down a long established homeless encampment. For months now, a group of quiet folk have made their homes there, and no one seemed to mind. Just yesterday, I counted more than a dozen tents and makeshift shacks. The camp was out of the way, invisible to most, and generally the ground around each campsite was kept clean and swept, belongings piled neatly and precisely. Signs at the edge of the camp read Thank you for Random Acts of Kindness.  The folks who lived there would take turns standing on the corner with signs asking for small bits of money; I would see the same sign, each day held by a different pair of hands. I had begun to think of the encampment as a homeless collective, a viable alternative to overcrowded ‘shelters.’ Those who lived there seemed to be cheerfully supportive of one another.

Now, the tents were gone, the shacks razed to the ground, and men with rubber gloves and paper masks were raking the pavement, filling bags with boxes of Cheerios and granola bars, tossing abandoned sleeping bags to a waiting dump truck. No one stood on the corner; no one who had lived there watched from the sidelines. Everyone was gone. I wondered if the man I had seen struggling with the shopping cart had left before the raid, and I wondered if the paper white men felt any sadness as they tromped about in their great rubber boots, shoveling socks and cooking pots into black plastic bags destined for the landfill.

Last evening, I was in San Francisco, helping out at a Christmas performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and wandered briefly amongst buildings lit against the darkest days of the year and thought happily of the coming of the light. December is a difficult month for me. The increasing dark drains me; the shopping frenzy alarms me. Sometimes I just hibernate.

Last night, I left Oakland just as the sun was setting and arrived in San Francisco minutes later in the deep dark. Boarding the train, I was unable to find a seat and stood near the door next to two taciturn police officers, one of whom nervously checked his watch. Two more stood at the far door of the car. I suppose their presence on the train was supposed to reassure shoppers bound for Market Street, but I was not soothed by the sight of unsmiling men in uniform with guns and tasers strapped to their waists. For a moment, I felt as if I could not breathe.

Exiting the train, I felt so disoriented, so anxious for fresh air, I turned and walked away from my destination and very nearly bumped into a trailer parked on Market St to serve as temporary police station, also meant, I'm sure, to be reassuring but for me unsettling. I find it disturbing there needs to be such a visible and determined police presence. It is, I suppose, indicative of a creeping dis-ease within our society -- both an admission of the increasingly wide gulf between those who have the resources to shop at Nordstrom's or Macy's and a sign of the rising fear that those who don't have will attack those who do have because they, too, want to have. All this emphasis on consumerism has sickened our society. I think of what Ericka Huggins said recently, and I quote loosely, We need to remember we are citizens not consumers. As citizens we care about community and each other; we can open our hearts and be generous. As consumers, we give in to desire and greed.

As shoppers passed by, jovially jostling one another, I looked upward to the sky made blacker deeper darker by the wonderful lights painting with bold strokes color onto the buildings below.  I felt grateful for the gift of the light. It was enough to breathe that color, a more delicate and succulent food than any buttery pastry, any savory tart and far more valuable than a diamond encrusted watch.

_I am not an angel, and as it turns out, I'm far too solitary to be an effective social activist, but I do what I can. I don't shop; I don't steal. I approach my world honestly and with open eyes. I have given up thinking my ship will "arrive"; I am content to let it sail, and if it wrecks on some rocky barren shore, ends as rooted to the earth as this one is, that's okay. If I am marooned, I can walk through my world, acting, I hope, with compassion, grace, and kindness. On this night, there is enough light to fill my heart. Tomorrow, the sun creeps back.

It will take longer for the return of leaves , but on this night trees are washed with ice blue light and the tiled ground below swept to green with flood lights that transform the dark. We have our nighttime sun above, a glowing orange-lit window dancing with its rays of darker red,  but soon soon  the noonday sun will  grow warmer and brighter and fuller as the season turns. There will be blooming hillsides soon enough.

For now, we must content ourselves with flowers of light, bursting into bloom on pine boughs, barren branches, and sometimes on street cars. This passing bus was peculiarly empty of passengers but nonetheless smiling and cheerful as it laughed its way down the street, avoiding any turmoil.

A patient being.

_But not all vehicles festooned  with lights are cheerful reminders of a season of giving. Just before leaving Oakland, vehicles with flashing lights, non-celebratory lights, parked quietly in front of my house. A man who had been volunteering for WSWA on the corner suffered a seizure, and emergency personnel  arrived promptly, which was great, but what followed was not as wonderful

_
The neighborhood thugs reared up, acting with a grim meanness that was both cruel and unnecessary.
As the firemen put away their life-saving tools and as the paramedics removed the man to the waiting ambulance, kids in cars decided to assert their authority, confronting the emergency workers by careening at high speeds in the near-by intersection, leaving circular tracks of burned rubber on the pavement.

Thick black smoke engulfed the fire truck and covered the emergency personnel as they quickened their pace, trying to hoist the man into the ambulance before his troubles were made worse by the toxic smoke. That heavy oily smoke lingered for many minutes, settling on trees and flowers, smearing windows and seeping into lungs. Eventually it blew away, but the toxicity of the insensitivity and inherent cruelty demonstrated by these 'doughnutters' cannot be as easily dissipated. They meant the mark left on the street – black circles seared into the pavement created as emergency lights flashed – as a challenge to authority but instead it served us all as a reminder of the loss of heart that is more and more evident in our daily lives. It was an act of violence not of innocence, violence directed not towards individuals but toward the community, their own community. That these kids would choose to pollute the air at a time of great need, when a life hung so precariously in the balance, is both pathetic, shocking, and profoundly sad. 

I hope for the end to this senseless  violence. I await the return of the light.

Sometimes for some words have little meaning. Especially, if squirrels are present.