Bit of a rush this morning, to have a bite and get out to pick up our rental car for our jaunt through the Pennsylvania countryside from here to Philadelphia. Awoke, yesterday, to steady rain, which cleared off a bit while we had a pleasant breakfast in our B&B dining room. Then off to visit the Mattress Factory, which we had missed yesterday.

Glad we didn't miss it today. The Mattress Factory is one of those wonderful spaces--two entire buildings in fact--where artists are invited to indulge their fantasy in site-specific works. To our surprise, on the top floor of the first building, we found the distinguished--and somewhat eccentric--Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama--using her trademark polka dots to extraordinary effect in two entirely mirrored rooms. Here's Ellie in the first...

... and me, taking a picture of the two of us in the ceiling.

This is the second room, with three naked, red polka-dotted mannequins and a red polka-dotted floor...

... another couple of ceiling pictures...

Here's one small room whose space is filled almost entirely by an imposing concrete structure built there by one of my favorite artists, Jene Highstein--a kind of minimalist scuplpture, hard to capture in a single picture...

... and a whimsical kinetic piece with a chattering stapler by Drew Pavelchak. Again, hard to capture the humor of the thing in a single still picture.

And finally, a room installed by a dual artist team, Victoria Hruska and Latoya Ruby Frazier...

... and odd mixture of European and African-American sensibilities. Here's one of the outdoor installations, in the garden...

From there, we went on to the Carnegie Museum of Art (no pictures!) where we had an excellent lunch in the cafeteria and spent several hours touring the galleries of the museum that our friend now (impressively!) directs. The collections seem especially strong in the modern and contemporary area, and we found some real treasures on the walls. Sorry not to have more on this experience, but I was too absorbed to take the kind of notes I would have needed to say more than these brief words.

From the Carnegie, we walked out into sunshine! It lasted about five minutes, then got cloudy and cold again, but we had a good walk through the university area of Pittsburgh. Here's what they call the "Cathedral of Learning."

On the fine campus of the Carnegie-Mellon University

... we wandered around an incredible, recently-opened Bill and Melinda Gates media building, a magnificent sports arena, and came upon a still-in-progress installation by the LA artist Jonathan Borofsky. A student, ascending...

... under the watchful gaze of a handful of figures, below...

Back to our B&B and out for a final dinner in Pittsburgh.

Bad Foot...

... just what I needed on vacation. A sharp, stabbing pain where the heel meets the ground. We like to walk a lot, as we did yesterday. And of course that makes it worse. Ah, well.

We woke up to a gray, drizzling day, looking out over the outdoor patio at our B&B. Not a place for breakfast, clearly, at this time of year. Still, we had a very pleasant breakfast indoors, and left armed with ample instructions for a tour of downtown Pittsburgh.

A twenty-minute bus ride from our B&B brought us right into the center of the city, where we found ourselves in a tree-lined street...

... surrounded by tall buildings, old and new, in a rather pleasing mix. Plenty of pedestrian traffic--notable, always, to those of us mostly deprived of such social interaction in the City of Angels. We spent a good while wandering around the city center streets, before heading down to the Convention Center which received so much publicity last week, with the officials of the G-20 meeting here. We walked down under the building along this pleasant, curving walkway...

... between flowing streams of water to a spectacular view of the river and the city beyond. Here's a view of the Convention Center...

... from one of the bridges, and an artsy composition of old and new...

... by yours truly with this Canon PowerShot. There's a good deal of this contrast in the city, where old, raised rail lines and the rusting steel and peeling facades of structures dating from the great steel days are juxtaposed with modern and contemporary development. I liked this sign...

... for the Association for the Improvement of the Poor. Still plenty of work to be done in that area!

We walked on down Penn Street from the Convention Center, passing up on the Heinz History Center for lack of time rather than interest. Further on, the street becomes a long, straggling food market, with grocery and spice stores, bakeries... and plenty of fish mongers. Our B&B hostess, Liz, had recommended lunch at the Penn Fish Market, so we sought it out and found it rather towards the end of the commercial part of the street, but well worth the walk. At the fish counter...

... I think I have never seen larger shrimp than these (should have put a hand into the picture, to give a truer sense of size!) And here's the small--but crowded--restaurant area. Come here for the fish sandwiches! We had a cod wrap. Excellent!

We walked off our lunch, trudging back along Penn and past the Convention Center to the Andy Warhol Bridge...

... from which we could look back over the downtown area, and forward...

... to the other side, where we found the Andy Warhol Museum, six floors of galleries devoted to the life and work of Pittsburgh's most famous artist son. It's a nice museum, but I came away not much further impressed by Warhol, the artist. (No pictures allowed, I fear.) He seems to me very much the artist of the late 20th century, whose intentional superficiality reflected much about his time. My favorite was the "Silver Clouds" gallery, a small space filled with two dozen inflated, silvery pillows which floated cheerfully everywhere and invited the childish impulse to pad them around like big balloons. Oh, and I also like the stuffed Great Dane--a huge, regal, handsome creature. Among the many artifacts that Warhol liked to collect were the products of the art of taxidermy. Otherwise, plenty of Warhols everywhere, from Marilyns and Elvises and Jackies, to giant skulls, electric chairs and car crashes. You've seen 'em.

The good people at the Warhol front desk were kind enough to call us a cab, and we returned to our B&B later afternoon for a rest. Ellie took some pictures...

We took a twenty-minute walk to our recommended restaurant, the Casbah, had an excellent dinner served by a charming waiter, and returned to the B&B for a good night's sleep.

En Route

PITTSBURGH, PA--I did mention, didn't I, that we were coming here? But you probably forgot. I can't blame you. Anyway, here we are, waking up in Pittsburgh, PA, on a windy, rainy morning--a day the weather man described as "ugly", but which we Californians manage to find quite beautiful. We are not used to clouds, nor water falling from the sky. It has been months since we last saw rain, and it's a welcome sight. But then, we have not yet ventured far from our very nice B&B, the Inn on Negley. (We're in the Arkansas Room. Check it out..)

We had an easy flight from Los Angeles, upgraded with our United Mileage to... First Class! Which meant a wider seat, an obsequious flight attendant, and a choice of salad or sandwich for lunch. And of course unlimited liquor. We could have been as drunk as those proverbial lords by the time we reached our destination--but we abstained.

A cab from the airport brought us along the Ohio River, a glimpse of whose majestic flow reminded me not a bit of the little trickle on a concrete bed that passes for the "Los Angeles River"! Then on through the museum and university area to this nice little area where we are staying with tree-lined streets--deciduous, folks!--and Victorian houses. Very exotic.

We met our friends Lynn and Paul Zelevansky for dinner. They have just moved here from Los Angeles, she from a curatorial position at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to become Director of the Carnegie Museumof Art-- a fine move for her, in an already distinguished career. Paul is an artist, educator, semiotician, student of images and signs and how they function in our lives. You'll find some of the results of his work at his website, The Great Blankness--well worth checking into and exploring. He manages to be wry, witty, even whimsical without abandoning a basic seriousness of purpose and challenging his followers to exercise their minds. He has promised me a copy of his recent book, 24 Ideas About Pictures, which I'm looking forward to receiving when we're back at home.

A good dinner, then, at an Italian restaurant not far from where we're staying, and thoroughly engaging conversation on a wide variety of topics. Funny how yo start to get to know people when they've moved away...

After Paul and Lynn dropped us off at our B&B, we took a walk through the local streets to wind down a bit from the day. It was for us, of course, still fairly evening. A few minutes of Bill Maher on the new Jay Leno show. I have to admit, Maher's blithely uncompromising liberal expectations of Obama piss me off a bit these days. Still, I did manage to get to sleep...

A Wonderful Text

In response to my entry a couple of days on "Alms", my friend Paul at Parami Press (note, in passing, the cover of my soon to be published book at Paul's site!)--referred me to a text by Ajahn Chandako at the Vimutti Monastery in New Zealand. It's the story of a "tudong", a traditional walkabout by Thai Forest monks, in the glorious landscape of New Zealand's South Island, without money, food, or even plans. The Ajahn's narrative (scroll down to the entry "Wandering Forest Monks" and hit "Read the full story) is at once a wonderful, sometimes funny, always beautifully descriptive read, well worth he time you spend with it. More than just a journey, it reads with unusual clarity as an introduction to Buddhist thought and practice, and explores some of the key terms in a delightfully approachable manner. Take, for example, this passage on "vedana":

Beautiful, ugly, comfortable, uncomfortable, delicious or yucky—these are examples of the manifestations of vedana, the Pali term for the very basic and quick reactions we have to sense experience at any of the six sense doors (the traditional five senses plus the mind). The sense experience itself is quite simple: merely electromagnetic waves or particles, chemical reactions or mental energy that manifests as color, sound, smell, taste, physical sensations or thoughts. The vedana is then experienced as positive, negative or neutral, depending on basic human nature and conditioned preferences. Seeing an attractive young woman or man will usually give rise to the positive vedana that we call ‘beautiful’ or ‘cute’. Stubbing your toe or smelling a skunk will normally bring on a basic human reaction of unpleasant vedana. Other reactions are more dependent upon our cultural backgrounds and past experiences in life. Beauty is literally in the eye—or mind—of the beholder. Some smells immediately bring up a warm memory even before we think about it. At this basic level of sensory interaction with our environment we can try to maximize the odds of experiencing pleasant vedana, but it is impossible to totally eliminate the experience of the unpleasant in our lives. In fact, the constant pressure to maintain a high level of pleasant experience can in itself become a tiring burden, while a life dedicated to it suffers from hollowness of meaning.

Another important step of the sensory experience is when we recognize the color, shape, sound or feeling and label it. A sight, for example, may be initially neutral until we recognize the shape as a friend. Then it suddenly turns positive. Vedana arising from these perceptions are highly personal. The sight of a furry opossum in New Zealand may bring up a heart warming reaction of ‘cute’ in one person or a gut-tightening hate in another. And then they can argue about it. At the level of sense contact and vedana life is still pretty simple. However, once our minds start projecting perceptions of like and dislike, good and bad, mine and yours, all hell breaks loose. A sight is no longer merely color and shape. We interpret it, judge it, desire or hate it. A thought is no longer merely a thought, but ‘my’ thought, a ‘great’ thought, a ‘bunch of useless’ thoughts, a ‘judgmental’ thought about how something should be different than the way it is, or even a ‘bad’ thought that feeds self- perceptions of unworthiness. This is where we can cause ourselves a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. This is where the tangled pile of knotted string called the unenlightened mind offers us the opportunity to patiently wind it up neatly. And this is where, through acceptance of how things actually are in the present, we can experience some measure of freedom and peace.

The Ajahn's story is full of such asides, the sum of which form a skillful introduction to the wisdom of the Buddha and the ways in which it can be useful to us in the way we choose to live our lives. His month-long journey with an associate, is full of unexpected encounters, all of which lead to new insights and wisdom. I liked especially the story of the ferry-boat haunted by the spirit of its former captain, a liberal drinker who died of a heart attack and, though dead already, seemed disinclined to leave his post--to the dismay of the boat's crew, who called upon the monk's to help them with their problem. While disclaiming expertise as ghostbusters, the ajahn and his sidekick did delve into their Buddhist training for some surprisingly sane and excellent thoughts about ghosts and how to relate to them.

Or there is the story of their encounter with the hostile fundamentalist Christian who wants to convert them to his own beliefs. Here's Ajahn Chandako, again, spinning straw into gold:

I suppose I could have told our Kiwi crusader that I had an undergraduate degree in comparative religion, and that I was not unfamiliar with the Bible and the teachings of popular Christianity. I could have explained that of all the religions I had studied, it was the teachings of the Buddha that touched my heart most deeply and seemed to me to be the most profound. I could have challenged him a bit by saying that I felt the stated Christian goal of everlasting heaven seemed shallow compared with the Buddha’s explanation of enlightenment (Nibbana or Nirvana). Or I could have questioned the common sense behind the ‘gift of grace’ that supposedly condemns good people of other faiths to an eternity in hell, while promising that no matter how much evil you have committed in your life, simply believing in God before you die ensures your place in paradise. And it might have been interesting to see his reaction if I suggested that even if a Christian path did lead to heaven, it offered no lasting solution to the search for eternal freedom and happiness. But that would have likely extended our conversation without much prospect of benefit, so instead I just decided to say, “thank you.”

I respected his right to believe whatever he wished, and I wasn’t about to try to convince him otherwise. However, in my own experience it is not belief, per se, that determines one’s future, but the motivations fueling one’s thoughts, speech and actions. Religious beliefs hopefully lead to positive and harmonious motivations, but all too often lead to their opposites. In Buddhism, mere belief—no matter how strong—has little relevance compared with direct insight into the nature of reality. It is wisdom and kindness, not belief, that is the litmus test for a good heart.

I'm still in the middle of reading this excellent story. I hope you'll join me along the way, and find as much to delight and inform you as I have done. My thanks to Paul for recommending it!

A Money Dream

So we found ourselves walking in a vast, deserted plaza in some strange city, tall buildings barely visible in the distance. An escalator led us down to a lower level, this one also vast but not quite so deserted. It seemed that Ellie went on ahead of me and I lost track of her for a while. I came upon a coffee shop and inquired if anyone had seen her, and a young man said, Yes, Ellie Blankfort is over there.

I followed the direction he indicated, into a large adjacent open-air space lined with picnic tables, and found Ellie sitting at one of them. As we walked on, she told me she had taken out another loan. I was furious. We had only recently secured our re-finance, why would we need another loan? We had already borrowed four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I said (which is not what we owe), why would we need more money? Why had she done such a thing? Ellie answered only, because she could. I demanded to know the details, but she adamantly refused to disclose the amount, the interest, the monthly payments. I told her angrily that she would have to pay the installments out of her own bank account.

We walked on, finding ourselves now in a long, low, barn-like building, dark and musty. George--who was not our George, but some kind of small terrier--unearthed a rat and scrabbled after it. We passed another rat, this one dead, lying on its back, its white belly showing, and I hoped that George would miss it. He did, and we walked on into the end of the dream...

Your interpretations welcome. Thank you.

Alms

My thanks to Jean, over at Tasting Rhubarb for bringing my attention to this wonderful blog entry by the British Thervadan monk Ajahn Sucitto, abbot of the Chithurst Theravada monastery in the south of England. The ajahn writes about the experience of doing the alms-round ( pindapada), in a small English town. He translates the term as "scrap-gathering" and describes as "the heart of the livelihood of a Buddhist monastic (or samana)." "We are alms-people," he writes, "not 'monks' or 'nuns', and certainly not priests. To rely for sustenance on what arises through bringing one's presence as a Gone Forth person into the market place takes trust in humanity. In fact just being in the market place and yet not a part of it entails the faith that the disturbance of one's presence will generate some positive ripples. So alms-rounds set a lot of nerve endings twitching - for both the samana and the townsfolk. Maybe out of what turns up, one's needs will be met."

Now I have always been curious about this practice, and I have asked Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) about how it feels, as a Westerner trained in the need for self-sufficiency and the impropriety of asking for something, to walk the streets with an alms bowl and to be dependent on the generosity of others for ones very sustenance. Ajahn Sucitto's writing gives me the answer. Very much aware of the response he elicits in the context of a culture defined by very different expectations and mores, he manages to hold his center in the deeper meaning of his action. His gentle response to the citizens who do manifest compassion and concern (most, it seems, avoid contact of any kind) elicits a return in kind, a deeper understanding and respect.

A part of the point of the alms-round, as Ajahn Succito sees it, is precisely to create a ripple on the surface of the social pond. "Just being in the market place and yet not a part of it," he writes, "entails the faith that the disturbance of one's presence will generate some positive ripples. So alms-rounds set a lot of nerve endings twitching - for both the samana and the townsfolk. Maybe out of what turns up, one's needs will be met. And if not, then through being open and upright, one's mind will at least be clear, undistracted and free from craving. Because when you practise this, any craving for food, or even to get away from the public gaze, stands out so starkly as the creator of suffering and stress that you have to let it go. Instead you just maintain presence."

I found this to be a powerful and somehow heartening piece, which tells me a great deal about the courage that it takes to step out of the social norm and question basic cultural assumptions; and a great deal about the inner strength and conviction, the quiet assurance from which that courage springs. I'll be adding the Ajahn's site to my blogroll, and will look forward to following his occasional entries.

Art Gallery Update

Ellie and I had fun yesterday in the gallery complex at Bergamot Station, where we delighted to find an unusual number of shows that really tickled our fancy. Since I'm feeling more than a little pressured for time this morning, I'm going to do more show than tell. All the images, by the way, are grabbed from gallery sites, where proper attribution will be found. So here, in no particular order...


... is Francesca Gabbiani at Patrick Painter Gallery. Hard to see it here , but these large-scale, provocatively baroque images are created entirely out of small elements of colored paper, glued together. I have a very small piece of hers, a yellow-jacket, which amazes me every time I look at it. Her work is getting larger and more daring in this current show. Next door, at Craig Krull Gallery, we found these extraordinary anatomical prints, again large scale, at once studies of the unbelievable beauty and intricacy of the human body, powerful memento mori's, and compelling works of art.

A couple of doors down, Richard Heller shows two artists,,,

... Charlie Roberts (that's a single painting, by the way) and his Norwegian wife, Heidi Johansen...

Roberts offers not only the large, richly-imaged pictures like "The Cave", above, where hundreds of objects and figures jostle for attention, but also dozens of quirky "short-stories"--told in half a dozen sequential images on small sheets of paper. They're funny, slightly bizarre, and some of the affectingly human. Johansen's tiny figures are carved out of balsa wood and tanged in shelves the length of the gallery wall. Amazingly, even though roughly carved, they manage to capture the life of their subjects with both humor and compassion.

Here's Margaret Gallegos...

... who's showing at Fig. With a newly attenuated palette--a good deal of black, white, and gray--she combines zesty abstraction with hints of figurative image, and asked the viewer's eye to join her in a jazzy journey through the picture plane.

You hear a lot these days about the paintings of the Armenian-American artist Gegam Kacherian at Rosamund Felsen...

They're certainly amazing paintings, assembling finely-painted figuration with fanciful abstraction, sci-fi futurism with ancient history, the majesty of the animal world with the absurdism of cartoon... As rich and unabashedly decorative as a Persian tapestry and intense with narrative interest, Kacherian's paintings engage both the eye and the mind a frenzy of activity.

Over at Ruth Bachnofner, I was impressed by the quiet serenity of the work of Seiko Tachibana...



(this is only a partial shot; the space of an entire gallery is filled with these gently floating banners, which bring to mind Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags).



I liked, too, the fine atmospheric landscapes of Yvatte Molina, these painted on aluminum disks.

I was unfortunately unable to grab images from Shoshana Wayne's exhibit of some stunning clay Kathy Butterly, but it's certainly worth a visit to her site, just a click away (be sure to follow the prompt for the entire sequence of pictures.) These small works manage to seem quite monumental on their individual pedestals. Their strange, idiosyncratic and sensually organic shapes suggest at once artifact and flesh, the vessel that contains and the vessel of the body. The polish of their gleaming exterior makes no attempt to conceal or diminish the vulnerability their forms evoke.

Pre-Flight Nerves

We leave again for a trip next Monday, and I'm noticing all the familiar signs of pre-travel nerves: restlessness, difficulty in falling asleep, low levels of fear and anger promoting a general sense of malaise. It's not a long trip this time; we're just heading to the East Coast--Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington DC, mostly to visit museums and spend some time with friends. You'll be reading about it, surely, on The Buddha Diaries. I'll take the laptop along. I'm looking forward to it with the usual mix of excitement and dread.

There's something in me that wants to stay put. Perhaps we still carry the ancient genes of our ancestors, for whom it was inconceivable to travel more than a few miles from home. Our journey to Pittsburgh, a matter of some four hours from Los Angeles, would likely have taken us four months a century and a half ago; before that, it would have been unimaginable. It's my suspicion that our body-minds have not evolved at the same pace as our technology. I know that mine--my body-mind--recoils from such radical dislocation, and that restlessness and malaise result from its anxieties.

Last night, having gone to bed early, I woke before midnight and couldn't get back to sleep. My mind was racing, and my stomach churned. Beside me, Ellie was also wide awake, suffering from leg cramps and insomnia. A fine pair of travelers. I got up, swallowed down a couple of gulps of Mylanta with a half an Ambien and returned to bed. I slept until morning.

Am I alone in experiencing these symptoms? I'm sure not. I'd love to hear what strategies others might have found, to make those symptoms easier to live with...

This Internet...

I likely would never have known these things without the Internet. A couple of days ago, I unearthed three years' old news that an old school friend had died. This morning, I learned in the same manner that another old friend died--back in 1994! Shreela Ray was a fellow poet and student at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in the 1960s, a member of a small group that met regularly to read poems and talk about them. She was Indian by birth, extraordinarily beautiful and smart, and she wrote poems filled with love and compassion for her fellow humans. How could she have died so young? I was shocked and horrified. And much saddened. I wish I had kept up with her, had read the poems she wrote later in life. Aside from the simple dates beside her name, 1942-1994, I have been able to discover nothing more about her life since we parted ways.

Ellie and I watched the Lifetime special on Georgia O'Keeffe last night...



and I have to say that I was underwhelmed. I tend to think--dare I say it?--that O'Keeffe's work has suffered considerably from overexposure in the poster and postcard market.



I tend to prefer her elegant abstract images...

The Lifetime biography concentrates, of course, on her long and stormy relationship with the pioneer photographer Alfred Stieglitz who championed her work in the New York art world of the early 20th century--and both characters are well played by Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons, who manage to powerfully dramatize the sexual tension between the two vision-driven artists they portray. And their antagonisms were as strong as their mutual attraction. As Holland Cotter, the New York Times art writer points out in his review of a current O'Keeffe show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, "O'Keeffe wanted the power to include sexuality in her art's expressive range. Stieglitz wanted the power to define her art purely in terms of feminine sexuality, and to market it accordingly." Sieglitz, in this version, comes off as the archetypal early 20th century artist--self-involved, demanding, domineering, and pathetically unable to see past his own immediate needs. O'Keeffe, by contrast, is alternately submissive and assertive, constantly seeking to balance her sense of herself as a powerful independent woman and an artist and her love for a man who needed her more as a prop for his own ego than as a partner. Though it managed to capture much of this dynamic, I found the story line of the film to be disappointingly thin, and the truly compelling moments few and far between.

More compelling, for me, was the remarkable appearance of Barack Obama on the David Letterman show last night. Critics, I'm sure, will carp about presidential dignity, about Obama's current media blitz and the dangers of overexposure, but I thought it was a delightful hour. He accepted with a light touch of graceful humor the gift of a ridiculous heart-shaped potato. He spoke with comfortable ease about his family, the summer, the charged political atmosphere of the day, and moved on to discuss weighty issues--the economy, health care, Afghanistan--without resorting to cliches. I like that he listens to questions thoughtfully and answers the question that is asked, not the one he would have liked to have been asked. He actually thinks, and works his way rationally through his thoughts as he comes up with his answers. He is fair-minded, acknowledging other points of view; but at the same time clear about his own. When he doesn't have one yet, he's clear about the need to wait until he has gathered all the information that he needs and heard arguments on all sides of the issue. Isn't that what we would want?

This man, let's face it, is a lot more gracious than the rest of us. We all know his job better than he does, and assail him--more, or often less politely--for not doing things our way. The further we get into his presidency, of course, the more there is to complain about. I have no idea what can be going on inside that calm and self-assured exterior, and I often wish that he'd veer a little bit more over to my side. But I hugely admire that ability to seek the middle way, to listen and bide time, because that's where wisdom lies. Sure, I'd like him to resolve decades' worth of problems in the blink of an eye. And sure, his campaign rhetoric deluded us into believing that he could. Failing that, however, I'll settle for a president who thinks with both his head and heart. Which I still believe he does.

The Duke

We called him “The Duke” in part because his name was one letter away—one small alphabet letter, in fact—from the great jazz man, Ellington; and in part because he was, like his near namesake, a jazz fanatic. His name was Elkington.

If you have been following The Buddha Diaries this past week, you’ll know that I have been obsessing a bit about school day memories. This is one of them.

The Duke was by far the coolest boy in the school. He was reed thin, with a face as pale as a porcelain plate, and short, dark hair curled tight and close to the head. I remember little about him until we both moved up from the common room to the “dens”—little individual studies ranged the length of a narrow corridor that were assigned as a mark of privilege to senior fifth- and sixth-form boys. Elkington’s was directly across the corridor from mine. He had a portable record player on which he played music that, in our day, seemed outlandishly avant-garde. This, by the way, was the early fifties. In England, at that time, the names were known to only a rarefied few of the intelligentsia: Dizzy Gillespe, Charlie Parker, the be-bop crowd. Elkington had them all on Blue Note, in the coolest sleeves you could imagine. He even deigned to show an interest in smoother jazz--the likes of Gerry Mulligan, George Shearing, and Dave Brubeck. But distinctly less so.

He was one of those people who seem blithely able to get away with breaking all the rules. He smoked. He drank. He played his music loud. He even managed to make the school uniform look cool, wearing his trousers tightly tapered, like the Teddy Boys of the day. He was the editor of the literary magazine, of which I was some kind of associate editor. It was he who had the temerity to write to Evelyn Waugh, an “Old Boy” of the school, asking if that great literary giant would submit a piece for the magazine. Waugh responded, tartly. His card, as I recall, said that he had learned little at our school other than to be lazy and unhappy, and that for this reason he was unable to accede to Elkington’s request. Elkington wrote back promptly, asking if he could publish Waugh’s response, and if he could have the assurance that he would never write for the school magazine, to spare future editors the disappointment. Waugh’s card came back, and I do remember this one, word for word. It said, Yes to both questions, and was signed EW.

An aspiring poet and intellectual, I did my best to keep up with Elkington, but it was a lost cause. I smoked—and got caught and caned for it. That never happened to Elkington. I drank. I had my corduroy trousers tapered, but succeeded only in looking absurdly un-cool. I read Auden and Isherwood, James Joyce. I wrote poems about man and the machine. In defiance of house rules, I stayed up late one night and painted murals on my den walls—including the huge blow-up of one of those blue and white Matisse cut-outs that I thought was quite successful.

In short, I tried everything to emulate Elkington's cool. But I could never quite make it, and my slavish admiration was returned by my hero with frankly cruel contempt. In the school dining hall, he was unsparing with his witty barbs at my expense. He abused my attempts a friendship and turned my eager innocence against me in front of those I was most desperately seeking to impress. I loved and feared and hated him all at once. One of the most acute of feelings I recall on leaving school was the relief of not having someone so close to whom I felt so painfully inferior.

Then, when I arrived at Cambridge, a year or so later, there he was, more cool than ever. Of course, I was anxious once again to keep up with his coolness. I’m sure he was into drugs: though I would have had not the first idea about how to lay my hands on a marijuana cigarette, I would bet he smoked them daily. He showed me how to break open a nasal cold inhaler and use the contents to achieve a benzadrine high. I introduced him to the girl I had (still innocently) fallen ridiculously in love with, and he coolly stole her from me. He was the hero and the nemesis of my youth.

You’ll recall, perhaps, that I could remember nothing but last names, because during my school years we never used the first. But I did know Elkington’s. It was Chris. So I googled him yesterday on the Internet and came up with this obituary. He died three years ago in Tanzania, a jazz fan to the last. I have been thinking about him ever since, with gratitude for the strange role that he played in my life. I have never managed to be as cool as Elkington, but at least I have learned, over the years, to be more accepting of my lack of cool. The Duke, I discovered finally, was never who I am.

Sweet Relief

I ran into a friend at the gym yesterday morning, who told me about a concert scheduled for that evening at the Forum Theater in Laguna Beach featuring his niece, Molly Venter. He even dialed her number on his cell phone so that I could talk to her, breathless, from my elliptical walker. Well, she sounded charming, so what else could we do but go?

We went. It was a lot of fun. As I think I have mentioned here on The Buddha Diaries in the past, I have a highly under-developed ear for music. Since we seem to be on childhood memories week, let me recall as a brief aside that we never had music in our house when I was growing up. When we listened to the radio, it was always language stuff--theater (Dick Barton, Special Agent!) Or comedy (The Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour...) Or BBC Home Theater. Or, mostly especially, the news. This was the big daily event, during World War II, and the adults in our household--including our numerous paying guests and armed forces billetees--took it very seriously. But no music. Or only in the church across the way, where we sang hymns and psalms.

So, with my highly under-developed ear for music, I won't even begin to attempt to say anything smart or useful about the concert, except to say that I found Molly's songs to be sweet, and sometimes arch, and often powerful in their emotional reach; and that the main act, Graeme Winder, provided a smooth smorgasbord of sound, featuring Winder himself, the writer/composer, on piano along with drums, bass guitar, violin and cello and a female vocalist whose name (forgive me) I did not catch. I wish there had been a program to remind me. Suffice it to say that it was a lovely experience, sitting in the small theater in the company of an enthusiastic community of supporters and listening with pleasure to the experience of live music.

The evening did not pass without a reminder of our current political morass. Graeme ceded his microphone at one point to Rob Max, Communications Director of the charitable organization Sweet Relief, which exists to offer assistance to musicians in financial difficulties due to problems with health, joblessness or aging. Rob's plea, while it properly avoided politics at such an event, could not but remind us eloquently of some of the dire consequences for musicians--and of course artists of all kinds--of our country's inexcusable lack of access to health care insurance for all its citizens, particularly those whose economic situation is the least secure.

Sweet Relief is supported in part by concerts and donations from a vast and impressive array of prominent musicians, but it still needs the support of the wider public. I plan to do my part, as a gesture of thanks for the pleasure of the concert--and for the pleasure that musicians generously bring into our lives. Can I ask that you check out Sweet Relief's website and chip in, as you can? And, if your lives are brightened by the passion and dedication of hard-working musicians like those we heard last night, can I ask you to pass the word?

School Days

(Can you believe that Baucus? Two months of posturing, teasing and delay, and now this? No wonder stock values for the insurance companies shot up. And after all that appeasement, not a single Republican supporter. Still, on to the important things...)

It seems to be the week for school day reminders. Last night as I was driving home from one of my men's group meetings, I found myself listening to a classical music station that was playing some rather cacophonous 20th century music. A glance at the information read-out panel let me know that I was listening to a symphony by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, and I remembered that the composer's son had been one of my school mates at that public (read private) boys' boarding school I attended in the late-forties/early fifties--a tall, serious-looking lad, as I recall, with glasses. I don't remember his first name...

I don't remember the first name, either, of a handful of other scions of musical and artistic families who were attracted, for some reason, by the school. Among my contemporaries in my house alone (we lived in "houses", smaller units with dormitories, home rooms, and corridors of small studies for senior boys) were the sons of the composers Constant Lambert and (am I dreaming this? I know he was gay, but I can see the boy's face. Did he have an early marriage, as might have been useful cover for a gay man in his day?) Benjamin Britten, and the artist John Piper. I do remember Britten visiting the school, long with his lifetime partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and the soprano Margaret Ritchie, for a performance of his "Noye's Fludde"--that's Noah's Flood, for the rest of us--in the college chapel.

Anyway, here's the thing I noted as I was driving home last night: I remembered all their last names and the faces to go along with them, but none of their first names. Because they were never used. It was always last name only. Lambert, Piper, Vaughan-Williams. Clothier. I was always Clothier, never Peter. And I thought how odd and sad it was that I should have spent twelve years in boarding school without every once being called by my familiar name, either by the boys with whom I shared my life or by the teachers. There is a single exception I remember from the earliest days; that was Ben, Benjamin Hopkinson, with whom I recently renewed that ancient friendship.

Can you imagine what that's like? Growing up without ever hearing yourself called by name at school? It was only during the holidays that I became Peter again, for a short while. Then it was back to being Clothier.

Oh, and I remember, too, long after school days, learning that Lambert had traveled with one Mason, who had been the head boy of my house, to the Amazon; and that he, Lambert, had narrowly escaped Mason's fate when they were attacked by Indians and Mason was killed in a shower of forty arrows... And I remembered having borrowed a book from Mason that I had never returned, and still have today. It was "Two Tales of Shem and Shaun" by James Joyce. It has an orange cover. I can still recite some pieces from the book by heart...

If You Care About Health Care Reform...

... read this. I plan to do SOMETHING today. Tomorrow, too. And the next day...

A Tiny Lizard, and...

Ellie found a tiny lizard in the bathroom this morning. It was about two inches long, including tail. She cornered it and caught it--by the tail. Naturally, the tail came off. By now in something of a tizzy and not knowing what else to do, she dropped the tail in the toilet bowl, where it continued to wriggle pathetically, disconnected from its owner. She shrieked. The tail's rightful owner cowered in a corner. I arrived, helpless as usual in such situations. I'm squeamish. Hate to touch creepy-crawlies. With more courage than I have, Ellie picked the little creature up whilst I emptied the plastic trash container and held it out to her. She dropped him in, and I took him out to the Buddha garden and let him loose--still tailless, but otherwise quite chipper. He scurried off in the direction of our small Buddha statue and disappeared.

So much adventure for a Tuesday morning. Then the tree guys arrived. We are fortunate to have a virtual park of trees and shrubbery behind our house, but the climate seems to favor their growth; in half a year, they grow immensely, expanding from each side of the yard toward the center until it seems barely half its size. Alvaro and his crew come in to help us twice a year. Here's the man himself, perched in one of the two tall eucalyptus trees that tower beside our balcony. (That's Hollywood you see, in the distance). The picture actually gives little sense of the height at which Alvaro's working. The long, slender trunks of these trees reach up to a height of, I'd say, forty feet. It's quite a sight to watch him shinny up this sheer length of tree trunk before he even reaches the branches. We're happy to note that he has a system to rope himself in securely, in case of that moment of inattention when he could slip and fall.

Back to my editing work this morning. I hope to have my work on the text completed in the next couple of days--after which I should have more time to return to blogging...

A Kindness Remembered

I took a sleeping pill last night. Well, half a pill. I have a few on hand, in case, and I had slept so fitfully the previous night that I wanted to be sure to get a good night's sleep. Today, Monday, is a busy one, with the tree pruners arriving for the first of their two-day annual visit to trim the yard and the electrician arriving this morning to help clear up a problem with the lights. And then... I got back yesterday to find my desk-top computer on the fritz, so I have my part-time assistant coming in, unusually for a Monday, to see if he can help me get it fixed. But back to that sleeping pill...

I don't usually like to take these things, but in such circumstances, I figure I can use the help in getting off and sleeping soundly through the night, so I took a half of this tiny pill. It was in the state of slight wooziness that overcomes me before going to sleep that my mind dredged up this memory from my seventeenth year, the first time I ever took a sleeping pill...

It was the last term of my last year at boarding school. I had just returned from an exchange with a German student of my age, having spent a trimester at his school in Schleswig-Holstein, the very northernmost tip of Germany, whilst he had taken my place at the boys' school I attended in the South of England. I had experienced, for the first time, something what for normal boys of my age, I imagine, must be normal life: going off to school in the morning and coming home in the afternoon each day, and sitting in the class with... girls! I had fallen in love with one of them, of course. Her name was Annaliese. I would never have dared admit it, though I was teased about it a great deal.

Going back to school in England was like being sent back to prison. Though I had only one term left to endure, I fell into a bleak depression. The loneliness seemed unbearable. The daily bustle of life in the cloisters and the classrooms, the dining hall and the chapel was oppressive beyond description. Having escaped this darkness once for a short while, I found the prospect of a short while more to be unendurable.

My three-month stay in Northern Germany, at the tail end of winter, had culminated in a car crash. I had been invited by friends on a trip to a neighboring town, and we drove there in a DKW--a car that has since been known, I believe, as the Audi. In those days, the joke was that DKW stood for "Das Krankenhaus Wartet"--the hospital awaits. In my case, that proved literally true. I was lucky: I was sitting in what the Germans called the "Todesplatz"--the "death seat", next to the driver. On the way home, in total darkness on a country road, the driver lost control of the car and we skidded at high speed into a farm tractor. The impact split the tractor in two, and threw me through the windshield. I remember only trying to protect my brand new copy of Dylan Thomas's "Collected Poems" from the blood...

Back to the sleeping pill, then... After returning to school in the emotional state I have described, I began to suffer from a serious of severe headaches. Attributing them to the accident and worrying that they might be a symptom of something more serious, The school doctor sent me to the "San"--the sanatorium, our little school hospital, located a little way up the hill from the main school in an area shaded by trees and surrounded by nice green lawns. It looked like heaven. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life. The school nurse seemed like an angel. To this day, I can still recall the kindness in her face...

I was alone in the "san". The rooms there had six or eight beds, for those times when an epidemic of measles or some other disease might strike, but at this time I had the whole, bright room to myself. Because she had no other patients to attend to, the nurse gave me her full attention--and I basked in it unashamedly. In part, I think now, as I look back on that moment in my life, it was that she brought the feminine energy that I had been deprived of, and yearning for, throughout my twelve years at boarding school, in the almost exclusive company of boys and men. I felt for her, and from her, an overwhelming sense of love.

It was she who brought me the sleeping pill, with a glass of hot chocolate, perhaps, or Horlicks--a wonderful, milky, malty late night drink. Here, she said, this will help you sleep. And I took the pill, and popped it into my mouth, and no sooner had I finished the last sips of my Horlicks than I fell into this state of glorious wooziness, a feeling of being sucked up irresistibly into the universe, surrendering consciousness in exchange for sleep. I can imagine no more beautiful way to die...

Such a small act of kindness, remembered so long, and with such absolute clarity. I wish I had some way to thank my compassionate benefactor, but alas, I imagine she must have left us long ago to enjoy the rewards of her good karma. I hope so.

Cherry Blossoms

If there's a more beautiful, more poignant and compassionate movie about human mortality and loss than this one, I have yet to see it. I'm guessing that many readers of The Buddha Diaries will have already seen Cherry Blossoms; if not, I suggest they dash out and rent it right away. That said, I judge that it's best to simply shut up. It's one of those experiences that words can only make seem far less than it is... Let me know if you agree.

The Speech

I watched the Obama health care reform speech last night. From what I've read and heard, I'm not alone in thinking that he did an outstanding job. He laid out a full and persuasive justification of his sense of the urgency of the need for action: he established a clear historical context and outlined a workable approach; with eloquent ease, he swept away the pile of scurrilous bullshit that had accumulated in the course of the summer; and without kowtowing to opposition ideology, he rejected the easy option of slamming the door in their face. His reframing of the fraught issue of the public option kept it alive and vital, reaching past the objections of his progressive supporters. Finally, he dispelled any notion that he is weak or vacillating and added, in his brilliant peroration and its evocation of the spirit of Ted Kennedy, a note of real inspiration.

Of course the mainstream media opened its morning coverage with the single "town hall" moment when one Republican yelled out his accusation that the President was a liar. That he was obviously and utterly wrong in his charge received less coverage than the drama of the moment; and his "apology" failed to include the acknowledgement that his charge was baseless. The fact that it warranted headline attention is but one more indication of the fecklessness of the media, and their elevation of a tiny and essentially meaningless drama over the central fact of the evening: that the President gave a spectacular speech, addressing the issues and his opponents on both sides forthrightly, and laid out his own position on a complicated issue with remarkable clarity.

He did better, actually, than I thought was possible. My blog entry yesterday described what I believed to be a no-win situation, and I was both delighted and amazed that Obama managed to come out with something very much like a win. Of course there is more work to be done. Of course we can expect more controversy and bitterness. Of course we should expect more roadblocks along the way. But the groundwork was laid last night, the determination unambiguously expressed. The President managed to be gracious and open to his critics without caving to their contrarian demands. His supporters have been fretting about his supposed betrayal of his campaign promises; he answered them. He showed the spine that people have lately been accusing him of missing.

Already the second-guessing is filling the airwaves, but I'm choosing to trust that this speech will pave the way for a health care reform bill for the President to sign before the end of the year. If it doesn't happen, shame on us.

The Rock/Hard Place Conundrum

Okay, here you are, faced with a decision, perhaps the most important you’ll be given to make and the one with the most lasting consequences. You’re a smart operator. You know the numbers because you’ve done the calculus. You know that you’re a pragmatist surrounded everywhere by dreamers (isn’t that what all good Americans have been taught to do: dream?) You’re a realist with nothing but idealists—okay, ideologues—to left and right. It boils down to two choices.

Choice one, you outright reject compromise. Right off—who knows for how long?—you please those who voted for you under the delusion that you were some kind of Superman or Messiah, or at least a magician who could bring about the “change we can believe in” with the wave of a wand. You get to feel good about yourself for demonstrating that you have the spine that others in your party lack. You will also have done “the right thing” by your conscience, since this is clearly the right thing to do. You get to fly boldly in the face of your opponents…

BUT/AND… your calculus tells you that you could very well lose the bet, that the numbers don’t add up. Staking everything, you risk losing everything, and your deep sense of responsibility tells you that you could at least achieve something for those you have come here to serve. That you could open a door that might otherwise be slammed shut—and stay that way for years to come. Do you owe it to all Americans to do that little bit, even though it’s far less than you yourself might want, and far, far less than your supporters expect of you?

Choice two, you embrace compromise. Immediately everybody hates you. Your erstwhile supporters castigate you for having betrayed their trust, for wimping out to loud-mouthed ignorance, and for failing to stand up to the oligarchs in the insurance business. Your opponents at once despise you for your weakness and gloat over what they construe as your defeat.

BUT/AND you have come away with something that has eluded your predecessors for decades: the glimmerings of promise for the future, a door left open just a crack—one that might just give way under further pressure in the months and years to come. You will have done this as an act of service and sacrifice, for the sake of people who will recognize it as no favor but rather react as though you had just spat in their face. But still, in your heart you will cling to the belief that this was the best you could have done—though not one other person in the country shares your opinion.

Faced with such a choice, I honestly don’t know what I myself would do. The easy one is the no-compromise option. I don’t have the actual responsibility to countless millions of Americans, so I can settle for the self-satisfaction of pretending that I’d hang tough, I’d show those ignorant, self-important critics who’s in charge. I’d be “presidential.” I’d lead the charge into the teeth of the opposition. But then I ask myself: is that my ego talking, or my rational self?

I don’t know the answer. I do hope that Obama holds firm with some form of public option as his bottom line. At the same time, it would be an act of willful ignorance on my part NOT to acknowledge how hard a choice he faces, and how much depends, one way or the other on his resolve. I wish him well.

The Sabbatical Ends...

It's Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. After seven weeks at our Laguna Beach cottage, Ellie and I are back in Los Angeles, thankful that the worst of the heat wave seems to be over. They promise only 82 degrees today. We'll see...

I was pretty good about that sabbatical I promised myself back in July--at least until the health care thing became so outrageous that I simply couldn't help myself. My initiative did not go viral, as I (ever-optimistically!) hoped it might, but I know it did some good. There's a great deal more activism in the air right now, but back in those doldrum days of summer, it seemed like the political platform had been handed over to the ignorant and the hateful--backed up significantly by the media who, I must suppose, had nothing else to keep them occupied. It continues to infuriate me that they give equal coverage to the voices of unreason along with those of reason, as though both had equal validity and need to be heard. They don't. I was infuriated this morning again, when NBC gave their prime time slot to Newt Gingrich and allowed him to infiltrate the air waves, unopposed, with his contrarian views.

I have been more political, then, than I would have wished these past few weeks. But I have also good news to report on another front--and the reason I decided to give myself the sabbatical in the first place: I have finished the book I was planning to put together, and it is now well on its way into the production process. The title (plus the lengthy subtitle that seems to be de rigueur these days) is: "Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad With Commerce." As I think I mentioned in pre-sabbatical days, I realized a few months ago that I have been writing broadly about this topic over the past thirty years; a number of the essays have been published in magazines, and some of them on The Buddha Diaries. The heart of the matter is this: what allows the artist (writer, actor, musician...) to continue to produce at a time when the hoped-for rewards (publications, CDs, roles, gallery exhibitions...) are realistic prospects only for a tiny number of those of us who define ourselves by our creative lives? I think that it's a timely publication, particularly at this moment of economic hardship. It's NOT a how-to book, by the way, but rather a book which asks these questions of myself, and reflects upon the answers. Those who have read it describe it variously as solace, healing, inspiration... I'll take any of those, gladly!

With the book now at the professional editing stage and the cover design in process, I'm beginning to spend some time preparing for the publication--now set for January. Paul Gerhards, at Parami Press, who is publishing the book with me, urged a January, 2010 rather than a year-end 2009 publication to give the book some currency for an entire year. Seemed like good advice to me. Besides, that now gives me the remaining months of this year to devise strategies for getting it into the hands of readers. I trust that readers of The Buddha Diaries will be among them!

I was not the only productive member of the family in the past couple of months. Ellie has been hard at work in her new studio. For those unfamiliar with her work, she has been in her day a gallery dealer (the Ellie Blankfort Gallery), an art consultant to private and corporate collectors and, in recent years, a coach and mentor for working studio artists (check out her website.) Up until two years ago, however, she had always refrained from making art herself. She got hooked, first, by the invitation to share some studio time with an artist friend; and, when we started to think about doing some needed work on the Laguna cottage, took the plunge and created a studio for herself in what was once the basement. She has been hard at work there all summer, with some wonderful results. Now she can't wait to get back down there... (Evidence of my secret plot for us to spend more time in our beach paradise!)

So here I am, back in the cabin of The Buddha Diaries, taxi-ing, as it were, down the runway as I prepare to take off once again, testing out the neglected engines for power and the wings for lift. See you up there...

Another Letter

Forgive me that I'm stuck in this political rut as I approach the end of my sabbatical (I have the day after Labor Day in mind as my planned return to the usual Buddha Diaries action). But this feels to me like a make-or-break moment not only for Obama and for the trust we placed in him but also, more broadly, for the political future of the country. We're about to see in how tight a grip the oligarchs hold those we elect to "represent" us! In view of which, I can't just keep my mouth shut. So...

A friend, a comrade, a man who served this country well in time of war and who is, well... more conservative in his political views than I in our advancing years, wrote to let me know that he disagreed profoundly with my position on health care reform. He included a long article exposing what the author claimed to be Obama's "lies" about the administration's health care reform plans. Without his permission, I choose not to share my friend's letter, but here's the response I sent him, lightly edited to protect identities...

Hello, my friend... and thanks for writing.

Yes, we do disagree on this--as I'm sure on many other political issues! But it's still good to hear from you. I'm sad to hear that your wife is having to deal with a frightening disease, but pleased that she is winning the battle. Good for her!

My own years of experience with national health care systems, both in Europe and in Canada, have been very different from those you allude to; in my experience they do address the needs of the less fortunate, many of whom are finding that our system, here, has been failing them in disastrous, if not catastrophic ways. I can't agree with you that a system is "the best in the world" when it fails to meet the health care needs of so many of our citizens, leaves so many uninsured (because they can't afford the premiums) and uninsurable (because they have a condition that would require an insurance company to actually fork up!)--and runs many other, responsible people into bankruptcy when their insurance proves inadequate to cover long-term illness, expensive surgery and medications, or disability.

I am obliged to trust our government to provide for numerous services, from education and public safety (fire and police) to the Medicare that currently serves my needs; and a good deal of other things in between, most notably the military, as you well know! I don't see any of these as signs that "my freedom is being taken away." I'm also not sure why the government should not do a good job (not perfect! Nothing ever is!) in providing for the insurance (NOT the health care itself! That's where choice comes in) that would offer protection to so many of our citizens who are currently without it. According to countless polls, there are statistically few seniors or veterans who express dissatisfaction with the coverage provided for them by the government.

And by the way, with reference to your footnote: it's surely indisputable that National Socialism was a hideous mockery of everything that socialism was about. You're too well-informed and, I believe, too good-hearted a man to hold it up to me as an example of the supposed ravages of "socialism." Please. If anything deeply angers me, as one who lived through the horrors of World War II in Europe, it's the bandying of that word "Nazi" as a political weapon.

Them's my sentiments, friend. I honor yours, and wish you all good things.

Blessings, Peter

And for good measure, as a complement to the article he included for me, I sent him this excellent op-ed piece by Nicholas D. Kristof in yesterday's New York Times.

A Letter to the President

Noting President Obama's intention to speak to both Houses of Congress next week, I wrote this letter to him today:

Dear President Obama,

My wife and I were delighted to hear that you plan to personally address both houses of Congress next week on the health care issue. We voted for you with great passion for the social and political changes on which your campaign was based. One of our major concerns at the time of the election was the decades-long neglect of our dysfunctional health care system.

We write now to urge you not to surrender the public option that has recently been under attack by your opponents. Our first preference would have been for a single-payer system, but we understand that this option is politically off the table. However, unless your administration can provide an alternative that will require insurance companies to truly serve the needs of all Americans, we regard the public option as the absolute bottom line.

From the news reports we read and hear, it now seems clear that the bi-partisanship you hoped for will not become a reality. Given the intransigence of the Republican opposition in Congress, we urge you to do everything necessary to pass legislation, as seems necessary, without their cooperation.

We believe you to be a man of honor and integrity, and are grateful to have you as our President. We also believe in your strength of purpose, and trust that you will draw on it in the coming days in order to make good on your promise to the American people.

Your sincere supporters,


Peter & Ellie Clothier

Just a Quick Note...

... to thank everyone who joined my PO/PO demonstration yesterday. As I said in the original post, I'd have settled for just me and a handful of friends. From the many enthusiastic responses I had from all parts of the country, I'm choosing to guess that there were dozens, if not hundreds of PO/PO envelopes mailed. Here's one going from the tiny village of Willits, CA!

AND a request: if you missed my arbitrary 09/01/09 deadline, keep them coming anyway. Refer to my prior entry and follow the other steps. If you mark your envelope with a bold "PO/PO", it will help set it apart a little from the rest of the senators' mail.

I'll be back at The Buddha Diaries soon. In the meantime, thanks again!