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Humming Bird and Hawk.

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I heard a bird and I ventured outside, down the steps then up past the small lemon tree now bare of fruit and then more steps up to the small patio and the love seat. I looked up and I saw a hawk, swooping and reeling in the blue sky.  I’d heard the name many times, Miguel Gavilan Molina, The Hawk , it was his radio signature at KPFA where we first met and where he worked as a producer on a daily public affairs program. He was deeply imbedded in the American Indian Movement and farm worker’s rights. His father had worked in the fields and taken young Miguel with him. He was Chicano; part Mexican, part Native American and had the high cheekbones and gravitas of Anthony Quinn and his skin was creased and tanned because he loved to work in his garden. Miguel Molina, “ the Hawk” took me under his wing when I arrived in California and here he was flying high above the Eucalyptus trees  and the pines over the red tiled roofs in the Oakland Hills and San Francisco Bay off in th...
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The Lake House

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You drive out of Hancock, across the bridge, across the Delaware, from New York State into Pennsylvania. We were together soon after his birthday, Marco and I and he was seventy-four years old. I called him my younger brother. He was pre-old. Japanese say seventy-five is old. But before “old” comes “pre-old”, sixty-five to seventy-five and after that you’re old and Marco was just seventy-four years old.  We were together in the Subaru speeding along the northeastern country roads in  Pennsylvania in early spring and the buds were blushing and coming now and the forsythia was blazing and the daffodils too and the Saskatoons on the forest edge were blooming white flower clusters in the crisp shadows. But it was  cold, a gray day with a twinkle of ice in the air and the new green fields were dusted fairy white. Sometimes when I drive through these old hills I think about Andrew Wyeth’s haunting painting of Christina , the crippled young woman in the yellow grass field lo...
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The End of the World Pot Luck.

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It was like a wraith, a cold shadow and a feeling, a visitation before or after death and like a cat or a wolf detecting danger, my hackles rose and my mind jolted down to earth and it all came together. There had to be an end of the world pot luck and I would host it.  It’s hard for me to put thoughts together because there is so much. It goes back fifty years or more. But let me start on the beach. Nevil Shute’s novel about an atomic apocalypse and the end of the world. It stayed with me. On the Beach . And then came the film directed by Stanley Kramer.  It goes something like this. They’ve dropped the Bomb and all life north of the equator seems to be gone. No signal. Incommunicado. Nothing. And now radiation is slowly making it’s way across the equator, high-altitude currents gradually mixing with southern winds drifting down towards Melbourne, Australia, possibly the last place humans survive after the apocalypse. It was my home.  And then they pick up an errat...
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