Edges of my Life.

April, 10, 2011 Dolores Park, San Francisco. Today - SIXTY-SIX years after the atomic bombing of JAPAN - that country faces another nuclear crisis. A total of SIX nuclear reactors threaten the lives of many thousands of people in JAPAN and around the world. The long-term effects of radiation are hard to measure but we know radiation kills.  Japan's 54 reactors provide some 30 percent of that country's electricity, and this is expected to increase to at least 40 percent by 2017, and 50 percent by 2030. Japan has a full fuel cycle set-up, including enrichment and reprocessing of used-fuel for recycling.  Nuclear power has become a significant factor in the industrial world’s central planning. It has become essential for the continuance of what some  describe as disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is prepared to risk many thousands of lives and our planet so the few can make more and more money.  Enough is enough! After World War Two, the Japanese Consti...

Begonias. Geraniums. Honeysuckle. Gardenia. and grandmother’s early lilac blooms. and spears of green again  already quickening in the new blue sun. It was sometime later you offered me the olive  and I took it from your fork  with my mouth.  You refilled my water glass  and inquired about the bright winter sun in my eyes. The olive is firm,   infused with horseradish,  tomato juice, salt and pepper.  The soup is lentil-coconut shared and you told me  you met him on an elevator,  eyes met and that night you made love.  I buttered the thick, crusty, brown bread. The miscarriage was terrible.  I said you’d make a great mother  and you agreed. You want to go to Africa. You love sex. You want sex. So do I.

She emailed and I found her in San Francisco at her sister’s apartment on Twenty-First and Dolores near The Mission. I parked the Benz halfway down the block on a steep hill turning the tires into the curb as one does on those steep San Franciscan hills. The sun was hot and orange in the late aftenoon but the air was clean and nice. I walked under the shade of the Fichus trees. I rang the bell and waited. The heavy wooden door swung open and she skipped down the steps, she radiated and threw her arms around me and her hair was still wet and curled against my face. Sitting upstairs in the cool wood paneled apartment, pale beige with large old varnished wood-framed windows, books and magazines scattered on the chairs and the dusk light settling on her face and her ocean eyes and cheek bones, she seemed to run from her natural beauty. I hear the train whistle in Oakland tonight, the mournful wail across the warm and steaming night. She’s sitting on the bed and I’m crawling in, pulling m...

                                           “Andrey, I’m leaving, I’m going home to Moscow.”  After many years in the U.S. Sasha Nova still spoke with that soft Russian sound, like a zephyr in summer swishing through a Birch forest, like the sound of her name Sasha Nova.  “Andrey, my father found me an apartment and I’ll be in Red Square for May Day.”  Sasha Nova left home when she turned twenty-one. She’d fallen in love with a Russian woman ten years older who’d migrated to America and soon she would follow. Sasha’s not really Russian, she’s Ukrainian, born on the Black Sea in Crimea in the capitol, Simferopol. She was an only child and her parents were intellectuals, art critics and university teachers versed in classical Russian history. They were not members of the Communist Party so walked a tightrope between intellectual honesty and supine Party politic...