The Squirrel Incident

A man rode by on a motorcycle smoking a cigarette. It’s not that he had not seen someone doing those two activities at once, it’s just that the fellow riding, seemed like a perfect gentleman, and the cigarette was somehow burning perfectly and ashing in just the right proportions. As if he were on a Vespa in the 50’s with a top hat on.
Anyway, he prided himself on noticing daily anomalies. Even when looking at a piece of art, he would find that one thing that was just a bit off or occurring in another dimension, or implied something just outside the narrative of the canvas.
This day, it was the cigarette rider. But there was also something else. There was a girl sitting on a park bench just across the street which the rider had passed.
She was sketching something on an art pad, and seemed in her own world entirely.
He immediately decided to go over and ask her what she was sketching.
He decided he wanted to tell her how sketching can save lives. That is to tell her his own story of being in Paris and seeing a man about to commit suicide and walking over to him with his own sketch pad and miraculously drawing a keyhole, a cross and a steeple and a door, and showing it to the man, who started immediately crying and came off the bridge. Turns out that man was a failed priest who felt he missed his calling and was going to force God to respond that evening. And those little sketches had convinced him that God was somehow still tuned into his life, so ti must not be over.
He was going to share all this with the girl on the bench. But before he could get over there, a huge truck came barreling by and hit a squirrel in the head. The squirrel was spinning in circles in the middle of the road, so he knew he had to do something. He jumped out in the middle of the road and started directing traffic. He called over to the girl to grab a trash bag from the park’s waste bins. Remarkably she kept sketching. But now it was clear she was sketching the spinning squirrel. She seemed incapable of leaving her sketch pad, or hearing the man’s commands.
Fortunately, an older man heard him, grabbed a trash bag and a large stick, and came over to bag the squirrel. He did so, and let the squirrel escape into the park trees, after some time of being dazed.
After all the drama passed, he walked over to the girl who was still sketching on the bench, and asked her. What exactly are you sketching now?
She turned around her pad and what he saw shocked him. It was a portrait of himself before the squirrel incident, while he was just sitting at the corner cafe.
She had been watching him, and as she put it, “Making sure you were ok.”
Then she turned the page, and there was a picture of him in what looked like a fireman’s suit, saving the spinning squirrel.
You’re a hero, she said. 
He responded, You know you can save lives by making art.
Yeah, but also by stopping traffic so a squirrel can get off the road.
He had always believed there were angels filming his life. Afterwards, as they both walked off, he wondered if she was one of his angels watching over, but also just watching his life.
Regardless, he had a dream that night that he was knight riding on a motorcycle smoking a long pipe.

His Other Place

He wanted to have an apartment someplace in the world other than where he was living. A place to get mail, when he wasn’t there. A place to hang at least one hat. A place where his other self could go paint or make art at night in his dreams.
He wanted to rent a place in a place he had never been, a place only he could find, if he really needed it.
A place he could imagine himself living in, even if he didn’t. He didn’t care whether he did or did not ever actually live there. But there would be that sudden possibility. If everyone around him all died at once, for instance, he could go there and be ok.
Well, he could go there, and his hat would be waiting for him. He really just wanted a place to hang his hat, that would wait for him if and when needed.
It was not a form of escape. He liked where he lived and the daily life there, and the circle of odd friends he had made over the many years. But, there was that need inside of him to have that space in waiting.
And it needed to be a place that no one knew anything about. No-one. Barely even him, but by faith. Yes, a faith space in his life. One where you know if anything bad happens i have a place to go and be. Just someplace else which would wait for him just in case.
Only he would have one key and make no copies. One master key was it.
Now, he wondered about that desire. Was it a matter of control then. That one needs an inviolable room in one’s life—one no one can rearrange ever.
He knew he didn’t have that room where he was living. He lived with many cats, and cats are violable-that is, notorious for making every space their on when needed. That is, they can get into any room anywhere. Cat’s have master keys.
So yes, in that sense to have a door one can truly lock. That might be it. Why he wanted this space someplace else.

So one morning he found himself rifling through on line adds for apartments in odd places. He could choose anywhere, and didn’t even really care the cost. Most of these adds were geared towards Americans, so looked luxurious and had lots of tv screens and swimming pools. That did not interest him.

He was looking for a place near a roof top, that no one would ever notice. One might assume that an elderly person lived there, who only read books—a place like that. But up. Up was important to him.

Since childhood and seeing Mary Poppins, he had always liked rooftops. The chimney sweeper. And then later, in Chagall’s paintings, the floating rooftop fiddle player. That is always where he saw himself living—on or near the rooftops of the world. It’s a perspective that made sence to him—just above the daily drama, so everything blurs out a bit into what it really is.
Anyway, as he was riffling through or surfing as it is called now, he saw an add which read only: small great magical rooftop space immediately available for as long as you live.
That’s the one, he thought. That landlord gets me, and is thinking long term.
There were no photos of the place, just those words and a number with a country code which led him to Belgium. Somewhere in the north he suspected, as they tend to be a bit kinder there, and this landlord, felt kind to him.

So right then and there, he picked up his mobile phone his friend had given him, and pressed + country (32) code and number. After that usual submarine like delay in ringing tones, it began to ring in that European way which feels more weighty than America. Like the ambulances in Paris, versus Chicago. They just sound like they’ve been wailing longer and remember wars.
Anyway, finally after about eight rings, the voice of an old lady picked up.
“Hallo”.
Yes, I wanted to inquire about your listed apartment.
Do you want it?
Yes, I do.
Then, it’s yours.
The key will always be under the mat starting now.
And then she hung up. That was that.
For some reason, he knew it was true. That the key was under that mat waiting for him starting now, and he could just show up to his place in Belgium. That was enough.
He never visited, but he could have on any given day. He knew that for the rest of his life.

Been working on some short stories recently.

Some people start with the characters, or plot or tone, or pacing, I’ve been starting with the ending. The last line in the story. Just as a challenge mainly. As few of us know our last lines of our lives or stories!

It helps to know the ending of the story to make the middle and beginning make sense. Meaning is often found in birth and death, as they say!

I’ve been starting some of the little short stories I’m writing with the last line.

Every time I do, the story comes together better.

I’m not sure there is an exact analogy to life. But endings matter!

All mine, of course, are new beginnings!

Fun exercise in story writing—start with ending, and work backwards.

It may be because I’m learning Hebrew which is written from right to left, or it may be because I’m just fascinated when things end well. Or, that i like listening to very old people’s life’s stories. The ending matters. And contextualizes the in between parts!

From a particular tree shaped like a bear, I’ve been watching for over 30 years——
Of course, there would be a a bear-shaped tree standing watch over California. But this one, has really seen a thing of two, and before they cut down his father-and his father has seen all the way to the gold rushers, and I’m sure his father was seen by the natives here, and they were probably real friends-before they cut down him to clear some land for housing, his father planted him on the edge of this park overlooking the Bay, and Bear Tree has always been thankful for where he was planted.

I wish i would’ve met his father, but I only know Bear Tree, and would like to meet his daughter as well. Trees, as you must know, stand much longer than us, and know and remember more. But old Bear Tree has gotten thin recently, so I wanted to tell what I heard thus far for the last 30 years or so, from him. He watches ever the San Fran Bay mostly, but also remembers the stories he’s heard along the way……

What bear tree knows:

Bear tree wears sunset daily
Bear tree stares out over the bay to keep watch
Bear tree is the bay watcher
Bear tree saw the 60’s and long before
Bear tree had kids smoking pot and writing poems beneath his branches
Bear tree survived the pandemic
Bear tree saw the city become a ghost of herself
During Covid. But even before no one could afford to be here,
He overheard.
Bear tree sat alone when the Mission district went silent
Bear tree sat over the city of homeless in all her many parks
Bear tree remembers the white charcoal circles like sports lines of isolation, he said, making alienation overt and a rule!) that distanced us all from one another-but let us look into one another’s circles, and our own, to consider what was really there-back, when under
Shut down. When kids couldn’t play in parks, and all was masked for a while
Like fog over the bay, he would say, until it clears.
The mouth of humanity was finally closed for a second
Just as to not gasp. Mandatory sabbath. Mandatory Sabbath, he heard
From a vacant synagogue. For all of us, together, for once.
“A forced global monastic silence to consider
And this one not for war” as Bear put it.
A re-calibration of inner spiritual marketing, he heard
On Market street. A silent white poppy flower slowly decending underwater, was that moment,
He heard from a young girl poet, in lower Haight, who wrote her way through and out of
The pandemic.

“Most wars, happen over there, but this one was in the
Entire lungs of humanity”, he overhear from an older Italian man was writing on a bench in North Beach-

the City of Light book shop just behind him.

Even Bear was shocked by the irony.

We all had to beat or not beat as one. Bear liked that line
And knew it even when he was younger, before the Black plagues went viral.
Finally, a shared suffering. Local and global, the same air
The same pastels, the same sunsets, all together under and shared red moon.
And so many partial and full ellipses he had seen by then.
So many orange skies, and disco lights playing on the surface of seas.
And flags and flags, risen and buried in that self same sea.
People become nations and nations become drowned in the same water
He was watching-he said to me once, on a deep night, when even I
Was smoking a long pipe out on Pier one. Thinking about why we love the Japanese now, but then they were our enemies. To the point where, to the point
When, to the point, even we tried to extinguish them. But, Bear kept watching.
He heard about when Wall Street crashed again, he heard way too much of the false hope of trading. He heard even that wealth would be like a Messiah.
He didn’t flinch. He just kept watching the Bay, until he saw the dolphins play.
He just kept watching.
When 911 came, he was not surprised. He glanced over the skies to see if planes
Might also make it way out here—the land of surfers where people only hear their own waves, as he put it. They did not make it so far out.
“We are so ‘far out’, out here.” He joked with me, after years.
“But we make symbols well—the Paris of the West, they tell me.”
His humor somehow, remarkably intact (though his right and left legs shaved back from years of wind, and park renovations, I’m sure) I love her deeply, but we are a joke,
He whispered to me once, as I had a small campfire in his park.
And the real church has done the best here maybe, havening us all.
St Francis may have left us something to recall. And that’s the last word I recall
Bear Tree saying to me, before I moved to Texas. But I remember the rest.
Bear tree as a kid can even remember the deployment after Pearl Harbor. And his dad Big Bear Tree remembered all the gold rushers frenzy
His Father those who lived here before the Europeans brought chocolate and
Their love for gold. Baby bear tree has heard the long story
And keeps looking out over the bay this evening in pastel’s glory
Standing on a dark purple fog line that seems to never end.
Bear tree is looking bare these days, but has a little girl-she may
Have moved across the Bay to get a different angle, or….
She’s run off somewhere like those kids in the 60’s, he thinks-
She stood watch with him for eras…
But she’ll return to see the rest of the story, he’s sure
Tonight bear tree is watching the elections, and hoping for the best
So he can keep watching over this bay.
I met bear tree only 30 years back, and he got taller over time
But now he looks thin, but determined as they say. Bear tree won’t die
He told me. My leaves will just blow into the bay, and my skeleton
Become art, before the great fires comes
“Bigger than men’s wars,” he says.
But he’ll keep watching, he told me.

I only spoke out to Bear once, and asked him this question:
Why do you keep watching?
What I think I heard him say in the windy foggy bay was:
“I am a Bear”.

(Bear tree is still standing watch over the Bay, to this day, he’s seen a thing or two, but it takes a while to get to know him. His daughter has since been found in Oakland, and seems to be working her way back home. What she will do on her call is yet to be determined by any of us, Im sure).

From an urban monk:

The early monks did have the advantage of cultivating silence alone in their cells, and then could go plant potatoes with their brothers or sisters. They did have that advantage as compared to cultivating silence and a listening spirit in heavy traffic. I’m sure in that sense, caves were a bit more conducive to prayer. But few of us have caves in our lives. Jesus seems to have kept finding gardens. That we can do, or even parks. I think the old practices are still possible regardless.

Making art for me is also a sort of urban garden.

And if the final city is a gardened city with streams as Revelation seems to image, then it must be possible to meet God in our busy city lives.

Anyway, those caves, probably had snakes and scorpions anyhow. I prefer city parks.

When the world trade centers fell, a great piece of art was also lost along with so much else. I was there, and forgot about that piece, as there were more important things to tend to than art. Yet, years later, I realized that huge piece was also buried in the same rubble as everything else…..

Art lost at 911: a thank you note to Joan Miro:

Women, birds and the moon
Are still good meditations, Miro. Thanks John
Thanks for turning our attention upwards and inwards
During the wars, and rubble making contentions.
Thanks instead for making constellations!
Not escaping war, but contextualizing it at least, and being buried
With it. 
And again sorry we did not have a funeral for your piece at the world
Trade centers that day. Art to ashes
And ashes to .art But there are few funerals
For art these days. And world trade
Isn’t the safest place for art to dwell, it seems.
But thanks for that maquette in Milwaukee though later.
Hopefully there will be no wars there.
Your grand painting beneath that same rubble
Of all wars is probably still reflected in the pools there somehow. Thanks for making it anyway. Perhaps
People enjoyed it in their last moments!
So about that painting bro. I was there, but had
People on my mind. No time for funerals for art in this life.
Wish I could’ve grabbed it for you though.
But it was way too big for that day.
But here’s my art eulogy for it, anyway.

From a particular tree shaped like a bear, I’ve been watching for over 30 years——

What bear tree knows:

Bear tree wears sunset daily
Bear tree stares out over the bay to keep watch
Bear tree is the bay watcher
Bear tree saw the 60’s and long before
Bear tree had kids smoking pot and writing poems beneath his branches
Bear tree survived the pandemic
Bear tree saw the city become a ghost of herself
During Covid. But even before no one could afford to be here,
He overheard.
Bear tree sat alone when the Mission district went silent
Bear tree sat with the city of homeless in all the parks
Bear tree remembers the charcoal circles that distanced us when under
Shut down. Bear tree as a kid can even remember the deployment after Pearl Harbor. And his dad Big Bear Tree remembered all the gold rushers frenzy
His Father those who lived here before the Europeans brought chocolate and
Their love for gold. Baby bear tree has heard the long story
And keeps looking out over the bay this evening in a pastels glory
Standing on a fog line that seems to never end.
Bear tree is looking bare these days, but has a little girl-she may
Have moved across the Bay to get a different angle, or….
She’s run off somewhere like those kids in the 60’s, he thinks-
She stood watch with him for eras…
But she’ll return to see the rest of the story, he’s sure
Tonight bear tree is watching the elections, and hoping for the best
So he can keep watching over this bay.
I met bear tree only 30 years back, and he got taller over time
But now he looks thin, but determined as they say. Bear tree won’t die
He told me. My leaves will just blow into the bay, and my skeleton
Become art, before the great fires comes
“Bigger than men’s wars,” he says.
But he’ll keep watching, he told me.

About my funeral, just since you asked (but no worries you have many years to plan it!), I’m sure you would want to know (if I have any friends left on earth at that far future point):

Simplest way to choreograph my funeral, though I have much more complex ones, where people have to go and find objects I’ve hidden around the world, and make art from them, then return together and make a film about what they found (but that plan takes a huge global team), so I came up with a simpler one- make my casket out of painting canvases, and have every one come and collaborate in painting it. Each a prayer for me, or based on a cool memory they had. That would make for a simple funeral for all, and a cool casket.
Sometimes, caskets are a bit boring to me, having grown up doing so many funerals. I want mine to be performance art. Of course ,there would be a documentary film with interviews, and would be edited and given as gifts to all who came. Art is meant to be given away. I’m really into art giving. I do that even in my old creative workshops. Making art responses to another person’s art, and then giving it as a gift of seeing that person. But for a funeral, I like my simple casket painting idea. But don’t put me in a museum afterwards—too many alarm systems! I might never get out!
I’m not being morbid, I’m just art planning my cross over art projects!
Lots of people don’t plan their funerals. I work with elderly, I know. I think it’s wise to plan on how you want to be celebrated. Mine is performance art, with a bit of adventure! But the painting the canvas coffin part, could occur anywhere, and I think is.a practical funeral, for those who aren’t mobile or adventurous!
I’ll keep working on the eulogy, but that could take another 40 years, at the very least! So we all have plenty of time!

Art invites us into the impossible possible around us daily:

I had a dream that I was taken, what seemed like upwards, but may have been through a huge lateral gold curtain, into what my guide called, “The Realm of Impossible things”. It was filled, in addition to every sort of art supply, old umbrellas, top hats, bowling balls, huge canes and almost anything you would ever want to make art from. Theater props, piles of purple feathers, huge and small glass balls and every other sort of impossible object that only an artist could see a purpose for. Like my old mentor, who I’m sure had a little hut there, as it seemed like a village of artisans, with his two headed brooms he used to make-“Just in case you need to sweep both corners at once,” he used to say to me.
When he died, we used those two headed brooms at his funeral (true story!).
Anyway, in the dream, I felt that every object has a potential other use than what it was originally intended for. A coat, as with kids, could become a tent. A hat, a bowl for confetti. A whale bone, a cane and so forth. Everything had potential or possibilities.
This is exactly how I see thing daily. And I think is a common “curse” blessing for all artist. In that it makes it difficult to go pick up the mail, or do grocery shopping, as one is always seeing the symbolic level of meaning around them.
So we get bored with assigning something only to its primary function. A book is also a doorstop, or a potential stairwell for cats. Aren’t we always just opening up the “other” possibilities of the daily things around us.
Yesterday, a fork became a scalpel in making my painting.
Comedy works similarly, I think—“What else could this subway be?”
Artist work by symbolic associations. And this realm I was guided in, was filled with ellipses, or things which would also be used for….
I love those sort of dreams. I felt right at home in that part of The Kingdom.
It is said that artist invent, but I think they just see what else something could bee seen as-what else is a broom or a rose. For, as we know, a rose is not just a rose!
And that we dream at all, proves it.
Artist are seers, meaning we see more layer of meaning to everything. Or we see things more in the larger context.
Art just makes us aware that there is more than meets the eye to life around us! Kids of course, already know that. But we forget that Reality isn’t flat. It’s dimensional. Elijah saw heavenly armies around the earthly ones.
And we tend to make studios which are filled with objects of possibilities—impossible possibilities. As life itself is. That we breath, sleep and wake up, and even that we make art, is a sort of common daily miracle. But art reminds us that we live inside a miracle.

What I have really touched

What have my hands actually touched?
A girl’s broken ankle at sunset, was best
Or most real yesterday, I think. Her feet smelled like perfume from France.
A cat too lame to make it across the road
And had to be picked up, slowly, as cats do-but knowing her name, by instinct.
Felt like a touch or tag at least.

a sketch pad, a back pocket bible and a crayon–enough to save a life or two, I’m sure.
A sunset in a canyon too gorgeous to name now-but
My eyes only touched her.-still it felt that real.
The rest I did. Lots of slaps on many backs.
A man off a bridge in Paris, and few held dead body’s hands
As 911 became an icon.
Every time I touched something, in Love.
That’s what I knew. Or, What I really touched.
Lots of soil and blood, and people’s eyes as they passed
In closing….I suppose
That’s what I really touched.
I mean, what I loved well.

What have you actually touched?

your hands must remember.