27 June 2018
When I get home I’ll see you there through the entry window, at the heart of the floor, sleep-watching the stairs, on watch for blurs through your cloudy cataracts, on watch for me in your dreams.
Category Archives: Personal
Membership: Window to the Soul
Look what I just found in the garage!
Once upon a time I was 25 years old and I tried to resign quietly from the religion I’d been born into—and formally “declared” myself into. I’m not sure that my declaration, at the mature age of fifteen, amounted to more than saying “yes” to my parents, but sure, I was a believer—just as I’d been a believer when I was five. I don’t remember being particularly interested in religion at the time.
By the time I resigned, or requested to do so, I’d been around the Bahá’í block, so to speak. I’d studied the Bahá’í religion intensely, studied Arabic, served on a Local Spiritual Assembly, participated in several mass teaching projects in four states, and served at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. I knew a thing or two about the Bahá’í religion, but I hadn’t believed in it at all for more than two years, and I was watching a Bahá’í leader in my local community behaving quite badly, so I was moved to mail in my resignation.
Continue readingThe Math of God’s Everlasting Kingdom
The first Bahá’í book that I truly enjoyed reading was Thief in the Night by William Sears, a Bahá’í “Hand of the Cause” whom I think my parents had known in their L.A. years (1957 to 1966). Continue reading
A Stroll Down Memory Lane
Hey, I’ve been giving the Authoritative Odor hell online for twenty years now! … Well, not so much lately.
In the process of moving my web sites to a new hosting provider, I encountered an old guestbook file that was active during my “FBI” years. In looking back, I was inspired to outline my mileposts as an Ex-Bahá’í: Continue reading
Dip Room Blues
Read more about this in Men Without Fear, available at Amazon.
After missing a year of high school to a life-threatening illness, Fred Tarrant would need an extra year to earn his high school diploma. Not a great student to begin with, he found himself falling just short of the credits he needed to graduate. Unwilling to trade discrete favors with one of his teachers, he returned home in 1946, sans diploma, to Saratoga Springs to work at Tarrant Manufacturing. He started in the factory dip room, alone, hooking machine frames onto an electric lift and lowering them into huge vats of paint and thinner, afterward sliding each frame over a thirty-foot drip pan. He did this over and over while, unbeknownst to him, the lift threw sparks here and there, trying its best to set the place on fire.
The Strike of ’43
Read more about this in Men Without Fear, available at Amazon.
When it came to John Jensen’s character, his failures could be as telling as his successes. Fred Tarrant recalls a night when his buddy John was heading out on a big date. Fred, though blind, could see better than John, so John had him inspect his outfit. Fred was impressed with John’s stunning white suit and red boutonnière, and sent John off into the New York night with his full approval. John returned later that night with his white suit splattered with grease, soil, and blood. He had fallen off a train platform en route to his date!
Personality Disorders
Sam Barber, sitting in the redwood parlor playing Adagio
for Strings on the Steinway, and Una’s in the bathtub
running the cold tap with a pistol in her hand and a bullet
in her breast, her black broth bleeding out, making warm
curlicues all around her, an arm reaching out
for more sleeping pills.
Behind the piano, the door to the guest room is closed
for J.R. and his guest, romping on the deathbed
and I’m seasick on the heaving edge, looking out
the west window—the reaper in the surf.
Yeats, J.R.’s comrade is fog-white with age
and madness and running naked through the poppies
singing for the tatters in his coat and brandishing
Una’s best cleaver at the star-eyed tourists.
© 2016 Kaweah
Falco urbanus
“Jeffers is my God.” — Charles Bukowski
When the blades of the falcon’s
silhouette flash
Between the bright towers of the City
we rub our eyes.
Pigeons squat in gutters
on watch for shadows.
Not the ruddy-tailed buzzard
the poet lionized;
Bagger of rodents, wounded birds,
wayward fledglings,
Squats atop Tudor cottages and
unicorn castles;
The brute too clumsy to thread
a cypress hedge,
Hover above the moor, nosedive
from infinity.
Continue reading
A Drive to Oregon
Point Arena Light
For Thanksgiving Break 2015, the kid and I drove up the coast and through the Klamath Mountains to the Willamette Valley to visit Grandma, and from thence back through the Klamaths down to Mount Shasta and McCloud. We stayed the last night of the trip in a nice room above the shops in McCloud, and had dinner at a quaint, local pizza joint. McCloud struck me as a candidate for retirement, though perhaps not the best place to spend one’s final, feeble years.
Along the way, we stopped to see the sea-granite of Bodega Head, Point Arena, the coast redwoods of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, plus a herd of Roosevelt elk crossing the highway.
For some unnumbered years I have been interested in the kinship between the Klamath Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. They seem to have been born together, split apart around Redding, California, and then pursued separate fates.
© 2015 Kaweah
Uvas Canyon, Autumn 2015
A couple weeks after our walk-in camping experience at Sanborne-Skyline County Park, Michael and I spent a night at our family’s favorite county park, Uvas Canyon. We enjoyed a crackling campfire, some sinfully rich camp food, and a pleasant hike up the falls trail.