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What's New, Summer 2000

Welcoming Sky (m.s.b)
My father died on a late Autumn afternoon. He fought without complaint against an illness he could not defeat. My father was my best friend and I was with him at our house when he slipped away. I remember the Moon that evening, how it was full and lit the sky.

I spent part of the following month arranging his inurnment at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. It was important that the ceremony contain an element of Buddhist ritual because my mother is Japanese. My father was a decorated Air Force combat command fighter pilot, and as I planned his funeral with the help of the Defense Department I realized the hallmark discipline and self-effacing courtesy of military people serves them as they confront death sympathetically and honestly.

For a long time afterward I dreamed about my father nearly every night. He would appear and I would reach out for him and try to pull him back from death into life. There was nothing frightening about these dreams. Just a stubborn, greedy struggle to have the souvenir of even a second more of his life in mine, one snippet of his voice, a brief gesture of his hands.

Then one night I dreamt I was alone in a large planetarium, seated before a broad control console. Using the switches and slides of this keyboard I could direct the sky show that unfolded on the inky hemisphere above me. I rotated the dome to display the western sky, then the northern sky. I zoomed in to take a close look at Venus and the Big Dipper. I used its time travel dial to see the constellations as they looked to the Pharaohs and the Crusaders. I adjusted its animation panel to watch galaxies burst into bright existence, quickly take form, then fade into the dark. Hours passed as I flew this immense cruiser through the boulevards of the universe. Then I returned to Earth.

I found myself positioning the ground location to Arlington and pointing the observation tool to the west. I wanted to see what the sky over my head looked like from my father's crypt. On this new hemisphere, a lazy Sun floated low, preparing to set. To the east a thin rim of darkness began building at the horizon.

I zero the ground location back home and set the time traveler to the moment my Dad died. Then I speed the animation of the promenade overhead and watch the choreography begin. Daylight gives way to a licorice black canopy embroidered with archipelagos of sparkling stars; the Moon glides in and waxes to a lingering, saucy orange disk.

I push the console to propel my vantage high upward, deep into the welcoming sky. Space rushes in to surround me. And as the dwindling light vanishes I believe I see the world my father saw when he looked out one last time to begin his voyage into the long mysterious night.

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The Princess and the Dragons (m.s.b)
A long time ago in a small kingdom lived a dragon collector. This dragon collector loved to take walks through the Enchanted Forest and he did so every morning.

One day while walking he saw the most radiant princess and fell instantly and completely for her. He did not see her again for some time, but when he did she happened to be walking along his path. How marvelous her manner of moving into view. How regal her carriage. His heart leapt.

He approached her and struck up a conversation. It was then he saw the jewels on her hands and realized her beauty was the heart's joy of another. Oh woe.

He decided to take his walks in a different part of the forest so he would not see her and wish things were different. This worked, for awhile.

Time passed. By chance he saw the princess and they had a friendly chat. She told him a dragon had taken up residence in her castle and made the worst trouble. What could she do, she asked herself out loud. He said he could help. He said he knew a few things about dragons. The princess was overjoyed and this made him feel good inside. He was doing something nice for someone he felt special about.

He visited her castle and found the dragon but it proved to be a clever one. He had to return several times to gradually coax it from its hiding place. As he did this, he soon found himself secretly taking great delight in the music of the princess's voice, the bright magic of her laughter, and the gaze of her lovely eyes.

It was at this instant he recognized another dragon was in the room. His heart! He quickly captured both dragons, took them far into the Enchanted Forest, and let them go where they could only bother each other.

He saw the princess occasionally afterward, but from a distance. He believes she also saw two dragons in her castle that day. He believes she knew before he that they were in the room. He is not certain whose heart he released in the forest. Or whether he ever even captured the clever dragon in the castle. He kept the memory of this amazing moment to himself for the rest of his life.

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Elegantly Wasted (aka "Hypnotized by Fire," 2007) (beef!)
The cold shower didn't work. My skin felt loose-fitting and alien. It was tan but not otherwise a natural color.

I was home. The show was over. I sat on the floor, then lay on my back. My eyeballs sank, like heavy marbles, down below my eyelids and through my brain. They bounced gently on the back of my skull, making sounds like the low beat of a massive kettle drum. My face slid off my head and lay on the carpet like a wet burlap sack. I began to collect my thoughts.

Under a beating tropical sun, leader and disciples, we traveled together through the tall, slender grass for days. Then we crossed brackish, snake-infested waters and luminous mangrove swamps. Our route cleared, more often it turned obscure, many times it vanished altogether. When we sent scouts back to find where the trail disappeared, not one of them returned. But we persevered and made it to the rocky beach.

There were beer trucks. Yes. That is clear. Beer trucks and pallets of vodka delivered to this island by a swarm of monstrous black helicopters. Masked guards wielding shotguns held us at bay as muscled drones rhythmically unloaded the cargo beneath the swirling, whooping blades. They left weapons too, some crude chopping tools, bandages, and motor oil. Then they were off.

The Baptist had the idea first, to drink our way to freedom through a wall of fire. But it was the Buddhist who said we were free already and that we must drink through the wall of fire anyway. We began, soldiers inspired. We gave rifles to the children and sent them out to hunt for food. We did not want children drinking so early in the day.

As the tide licked at our feet, we gutted fourteen rusting Cadillac convertibles. We filled their cabins with driftwood and laid steel grates over them to make barbecue grills. Bumper-to-bumper they seemed a long column, like the spine of a giant metallic beast that had died crawling ashore. We anchored them with cement pillars so no one could steal them. Then we placed the bench seats of the cars on the sand nearby and sat to rest, sweating in the salt wind. The crashing surf was deafening.

At night the hunters returned, their shoulders drooping with game. Goose, elk, wild boar, python, chimpanzee.

In the cool evening breeze, we coated the driftwood with the motor oil and lit it with blowtorches. The smell of meat filled the air and I heard the wicked growl of an electric guitar echo in the background. Somebody moved to dance. The priest stood and shot an alligator that came too close. There was a taco stand nearby but nobody paid attention. We ate and drank, hypnotized by the smoke and flames roaring from the burning chassis. Several hundred people from a local tourist hotel gathered to watch. We didn't care. The tide would cover us all.