MindSpinner

Every life, bravely lived, ought to have such a love story, and such a love story ought not to have an end. Life, however, is no respecter of such principles. Perhaps that is why the best love stories have to be told and retold.

I never met Julie, except through her stories, which are artful and muscular and brave. I would read them for the first time a month or so after she died. Her voice lives in them still. I’ve heard parts of this love story before, from DrGuy, Julie’s husband, but I have not heard the whole. He’s telling it now, in blog-post installments. The telling is the gift love can yet give.

I’ll steal no thunder, tell no more. You’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat from one installment to the next, for, as Shakespeare put it, “The course of true love ne’er did run smooth.” Begin, of course, at the beginning, which is listed at the bottom of the page, and read your way through the thread.

Fortunately, sent mail on my ISP’s server was restored to me when I set up my computer again. Last night I discovered two photographs I thought lost - I had emailed them to friends. They aren’t suitable for printing. They exist now only in a reduced state for use on the Web, but they are something that remains.

At Shaker Village, to reach the trail that winds to the river among the wildflowers, you have to venture through a field past these two magnificent fellows. At a distance, this seems a test of your mettle, but when you are nearer, you realize that they mind you not at all.

Among the many shots of wildflowers I took along the trail was this one, of wild phlox. It was my favorite, and I’m glad to see it again.

Beyond the stacked stone fence, the last field, and the algae-clogged pond with its ducks, we found a place that held a kind of magic for me. If E and I had been children together, it would have been our secret place. (Even if we had known each other forty years ago, we would not have been children together, for seven years separate us. He would have been Science Boy, and I would have tagged along to see what he was up to, making a nuisance of my smaller self ;->. I think, though, that he would have tolerated me. But sometimes we can be children together anyway because the children we were are still a part of us now.)

To the left of the trail, there was a stone chimney, partly fallen, that once served as the hearth in a cabin or a house now long disappeared. The house had been replaced by a tree that grew with several trunks and arching branches, along with all her seedling children, to form a grove. From without, the wonder place looked like an abandoned chimney at the edge of a tangle of trees, but when we entered the grove, as I knew I must, the limbs and trunks made another sort of house under the mother tree. The branches formed arching doorways out into light in every direction and a place of quiet, without walls.

This, too, I tried to capture with photographs. I could take a picture of the chimney from within and without, and I did. I could take pictures of the dance of leaves and light, ever moving in a sea of air, and I did, though I only stilled the dance. I could take pictures of the mother tree and even of her bark, which seem to flow in twining rivers down her various trunks, into her roots. I could take pictures of her several doorways, and each resulting shot did indeed invite passage. But I could not take pictures of all around and up above and forest floor at once, as I would have had to do to recreate what it was to be in that place. So the loss of these photographs is not so much a loss, and words will do - or not do - as well.

I can’t quite explain the draw of the chimneyed grove. It seemed somehow sacred, and its sacredness seemed far older than this chimney or those trees. Its discovery was, at the least, part of the gift of a day spent, as E would put it, “down the rabbit hole,” escaped to a world apart.

On this Earth Day, I learned that my Toyota Corolla, which I drive about 20K miles per year, anually dumps somewhere around 11,680 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s a ghastly amount. You’d think there’d be bricks of the stuff falling out the tailpipe.

On a somewhat brighter note, my deceased 12″G4 laptop will not also be polluting the earth, thanks to Apple’s recycling program.

As a pick-me-up, I stole away to a nearby wildlife education center for a couple of hours this afternoon. (The idea wasn’t to leave everybody behind; they just didn’t want to come.) I sat on a bench and read for a while, then strolled the paths, taking pictures of the local residents.

The weather was warm, the day perfect. The bears, for their part, knew just what to do.

The wild columbine grew here and there, as does the Wal-Mart columbine seeding everywhere in my garden. I think the wild columbine is prettier.

The eagle, whose right wing is inoperable, spoke out against the injustice of being flightless and a bird.

The goslings tucked themselves close in their mother’s wake. If they had been teenaged goslings, they would have been hiding in the reeds on the other side of the lake, talking on cell phones.

I was able to pick up my laptop yesterday, restored except for pictures I loved, a few trifling documents, and a batch of software I’d installed. The hardware tested true; apparently disaster derived from software problem compounded by a failed “fix” that obliterated the computer’s ability to find its own hard drive.

Having sporadic access to a computer has meant that I’ve been able to post only now and then, and I’ve not kept up with email as I should. Moreover, some posts will never be. I wanted to take you down the wildflower trail, you see, because the day E and I walked it was a bit of magic in an ordinary life, and certain pictures captured something of beauty and wonder.

The day has come and gone, and the photographs with it, but photographer lives and camera works, and early April returns every year. It is good to sit crosslegged on my bed, browse the news, and write a word or two.

I remember a haunting dream I had once. I was on a quest of some sort and found myself a guest in a castle tower. High in the tower, in a ballroom, was a party filled with sounds of laughter, dancing and music, the swish of colored silks. The party went on and on. Only once, when the music paused, I heard groans from somewhere beneath. I slipped away from the party and found my way down narrow stone stairs, and at last to a dungeon. There were no prisoners chained to walls there that I can remember; there was no one to speak. But by torchlight the whole place seemed alive somehow, and the stones looked like parts of bodies, crouched atop another. Wordless moans came softly from all around. Up above, the music could drown them out, but not here. I studied the stones and suddenly knew that they were not stones at all, but people made, by means of some horrid magic, to be the stones that built the foundation of the tower. The people above drowned out the sounds of their agony with their laughter and dancing, with music and the swish of silk.

I dreamed that dream some fifteen years ago. I don’t dream memorable dreams often, but some never leave me. This is one of those. It haunts me more now than it has ever done, and it comes to mind again as I read Bob Herbert’s column this morning in the New York Times. He cites an Amnesty International report on U.S.-engineered “disappearances” whereby victims are transported for imprisonment and interrogation in countries where torture is practiced. He concludes,

The Bush administration will never do the right thing when it comes to rendition. Congress needs to step in and thoroughly investigate this program, which is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down.

AI’s report details the secretive program and offers the stories of some of the victims, including Salah ‘Ali Qaru:

Salah ‘Ali Qaru became one of probably hundreds of people caught up in the secretive and illegal US programme of “rendition”. The CIA has used private aircraft operators and front companies to preserve the secrecy of their rendition flights, but nearly 1,000 flights have been identified as being directly linked to the CIA.

Salah ‘Ali Qaru was then flown from his secret detention site to Yemen, where he was held for more than nine months without charge, before finally being charged with forging documents and released. He has never been charged with any terrorism-related offence.

His life has been destroyed. He has been traumatized by his ordeal. He has a two-year-old daughter he has never seen. His wife is destitute, living in Indonesia not knowing where he was for most of his detention. He doesn’t know if he’ll have the money or permission to return to his wife and child in Indonesia.

More and more, I am feeling that my privileged American life is the party high in the tower, and that its foundations are being shored up by more human suffering than any of us can truly come to know. But we hear the groans, if we bother to listen.

I just want to stop the music and hear. I want to know who suffers unjustly in the name of my freedom (or America’s access to oil, if that’s what Bush’s shennanigans in the Middle East are really all about), and I want the human rights abuses and ill-advised wars to stop. I want to say to my government, “You cannot do this in my name.”