August 9, 2006

What do you write about?

someone is asking me.

“I’m a generalist,” I explain. I write about whatever comes to mind. My sole assignment in life is to think things up and write them down.

A guy named Peter has squeezed himself in beside me on a loveseat at the Art House. I ask him if I’m crowding him. “No, I have a small one,” he says, referring to his butt. “Most men wouldn’t say that,” he continued. “Well I have a big one. That’s why I asked.”

NO, I AM NOT AN ARTIST.

I’m a writer, which he can no doubt divine, as I have pen and paper in hand. I have a column on the bulldog. A San Francisco politics and arts website. Am I interested in politics? I think for a second. “Occasionally.” Before he speaks again I say, “I don’t want to live in that world, I mean. I’d rather be here,” I wave my hand around the Art House. After all, I constitute the “arts” part of the bulldog.

THE HOUSE OF ART

“Here” is where reality is realest, to me. A friend of mine returned from a two-week retreat and said it was hard coming back to the real world. I suggested that perhaps it was the real world she had left behind and was reentering the false one. For think about it. What really means something to you, in your heart of hearts? We put up with whatever we put up with all day, come home, and that’s the way of the world. But if money were no object—needing it, earning it—what would you spend your life doing?

LISTENING TO MY MUSE, OR MY MUSIC AS THE CASE MAY BE

A familiar melody I can’t place is being played on the piano behind me. “Is that Rachmaninoff?” Chopin, says Riaz, the pianist, who surprises me with the information that he’s a physicist. How often does one meet a physicist, especially one who’s playing the piano in an art gallery? I smile, remembering once thinking to myself that I’d like to be with someone who excels in something that is beyond my ken so he could introduce me to new worlds—that I want to marry a physicist. A Bach-freak physicist.

THE PHYSICS GAME–LIKE THE PAJAMA GAME
BUT WITHOUT THE PAJAMAS

Leaving all that out I tell Riaz that I scratched and clawed my way, like I was climbing El Capitan with only my fingernails, to eke out a C in Physics for Nonscience Majors. It was one of only two C’s I received in college (the other was in Psychopathology). I took it after dropping out of the honors program at Temple and had to make up a science credit. Riaz, however, has “left the physics game,” and is working as an engineer. Right, I didn’t know there was a physics game. Oh, there’s a game all right, as Kramer might say.

IN RICHARD FEYNMAN WE TRUST

“I have no mind for math or science,” I tell Riaz, “but to me physics is religion.” It’s something to believe in and rely on. Certain things happen, and because they happened, some other thing happens. And I don’t mean a butterfly fluttering its wings in a rain forest. I’m talking, mix 2 parts hydrogen with 1 part oxygen, you get water. I take great comfort in the laws of physics. I feel that they will never let me down.

PASS THE ROTTEN SYRUP PLEASE

Then Riaz launches into the Nocturne in E-flat major, the very piece I went to the length in the 10th grade of learning to read music so I could play (I’d heard it in “The Eddy Duchin Story”). I now think it the sappiest syrup you can pour on a pancake—David Dubal of the Vancouver Chopin Society says it has been “played rotten with sentimentality and now deserves a respite”—but it is what it is and lovely in its way, as Riaz renders it. I tell him I dove right into this piece, without learning scales or chords or fingering, and he says sometimes that’s the best way, but I regret it, having acquired a thousand bad habits. I feel like I should “break my nose to fix my nose” and start all over.

THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF WORLDS IN THE WORLD

First, there’s the one we live in, commonly known as “the world.” This can be experienced by all. It’s the one that contains Paris, your local Walgreens, the Iraq war, the place you step into when you walk out your door. People travel through it, conduct business in it, interact with the people in it, are born into it and die in it. Within this world are many, many subworlds of their own—the opera world, the sports world, the philately world, the world of whatever you’re interested in—with their own populations, languages, history. There’s the world in your head, the world of your family and friends, the world of your dreams.

USE YOUR MENTALITY; WAKE UP TO REALITY

Then there’s the “real world,” the one you get welcomed to when you’ve graduated school and have to make it on your own. That world seems to always be harsh. People invoke it with sarcasm or irony. You’re living in a dream world! Get real! It’s the world of hard knocks, the one in which you have to pay rent and taxes, put food on the table, face facts you find unsavory. And it’s a world I often find hard to take seriously. A lot of it I simply dismiss as being irrelevant or unworthy of my attention. Tax regulations, for instance. Things that some people worry themselves to death about are beneath my notice. Do you think when your spirit is traveling at the speed of light in the ether of the universe that it’ll mean shit you didn’t file your taxes on time? Don’t you know that stuff is all crap! It’s all made up! It’s not real! This world, this life, is not the main event.

WHAT I THOUGHT WAS UNREAL NOW FOR ME SEEMS IN SOME WAYS
TO BE MORE REAL THAN WHAT I THINK TO BE REAL, WHICH SEEMS
NOW MORE TO BE UNREAL.

Huh? That was “the guy in front of the Palace of Fine Arts” in the Kindergartner’s Guide to Quantum Physics, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” But (I think?) I know what he’s talking about.

MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT

When I say “real,” it is in the sense of “of basic, essential, or critical importance.” One week I went to the symphony four times. That to me was the real world, not my return to work the next day, because what for many is entertainment, relaxation or distraction—a film, a concert, a book—is for me the stuff of life. MS Word’s handy little dictionary tool defines the “arts” as “activities enjoyed for the beauty they create or the way they present ideas, for example, painting, music and literature.” Art addresses my soul, the soul that prevails amidst the deadly chaos of the 21st century. This, above all, is the time to care for your soul. Don’t let it get trampled. Nourish it with beauty and joy.

THAT’S WHY

I’m writing this on the back of a $xx,xxx renovation proposal for my house in Portland, which needs an entirely new foundation, and yet I sit here at the Art House ready to buy. I have my eye (one each) on two paintings I have already placed in my home, and Todd can see it there in my eyes, that telltale look of of a junky whose next fix is within reach. “The one in the alcove is not part of the auction?” I confirm. “Then you just sold it to me.” And my soul thanks me. I can’t stop myself from thinking that it will complement the new chocolate brown sofa the Katzes are now busy reupholstering with cat fur.

Peter is drawn in by a painting of mottled colors interrupted by a bold horizontal stripe. He doesn’t know why he loves it, but he finds the stripe jarring. “Love is jarring,” I say.

MOSTLY HARMLESS

Not knowing exactly what I meant by “harmless,” I scanned the bookcase outside my bathroom one day for “something harmless” to read in the tub—I guess something I wouldn’t get too involved in, leading to one of my marathon 2-hour 3-hot-water-refill lemon-verbena-scented hydrotherapy soaks. Appropriately enough I came upon Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless, fifth in the Hitchhiker “trilogy,” a book I’d forgotten exists. The back cover calls Adams “a terrific satirist…He is anything but harmless.” Leafing through the book I fell upon a passage about the “famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MSPWOSO (the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious)” whereby a robot was “programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches.”

HERRING SANDWICHES? COUNT ME IN!

I actually love herring—my grandmother made the world’s most kick-ass herring in tomato sauce of all time—and I like it in sour cream as well. But a herring sandwich obtained from a street vendor in Leipzig, East Germany is the worst meal I have ever made the mistake of swallowing. I couldn’t believe I had stumbled upon a literary reference to herring sandwiches, but if I were going to, it is surprisingly obvious that Adams would have generated it.

A REAL WOLF OF THE STEPPES

Nevertheless I chose Steppenwolf for my bath—Steppenwolf? hardly harmless—because I always forget how good Hesse is until I read him again. The book is short enough to read nearly entirely in the tub. I have a “stripped” copy—a book that had had its cover torn off and returned to the publisher to prove it could not be sold (cheaper than returning the books themselves) from my days as a starving writer at B. Dalton Bookseller, at which chain I will never spend a dime of money as they have as much to do with books as robots have with herring.

SICKNESS OF THE TIMES

The writer of the introduction to the Steppenwolf’s manuscript says that he see it as a “document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of soul…is not the eccentricity of the individual, but the sickness of the times themselves…a sickness…that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.” Yes, my dears, now is the time to safeguard your soul.

THE TIME IS NOW

About the Art House: time stops here. It stops, that is, being “time,” that dictator invented by civilization so people would know when to meet at the mall. Time shakes off its imposed structure and is amorphous, flexible, pliant. Now there’s a painting, now there’s a song, a cello, a glass of wine, a guitar, a poem, a sculpture, a tango. What next? You are “in” time like you’re in air. It’s the state of things, it’s the element of existence. The time is now. When you walk through this door you enter the Church of What’s Happening Now. You are very much in the present and everything is to be discovered. And this again is the world that is more real to me than the real world.

I’LL LISTEN AS LONG AS YOU’LL PLAY

I wave at Riaz as he passes by at intermission. Hello!? Will you come to my house and play my lonely piano? Sure he will. And just like that, perhaps, I have a new personal pianist. When I lived in my little corner cottage in Berkeley with no neighbors nearby, I would pound the piano at midnight if I felt like it (and also sing opera or Judy Garland at the top of my lungs, taking care to raise my soft palette) but now that I’m living apartment-style with my five TIC partners—the one directly above me working on NY Stock Exchange time goes to bed at 8:00—I rarely play anymore and am grateful to anyone who will.

Riaz is Indian, as I have divined by his dark skin and soulful eyes. But he also looks a little like my former boyfriend, cab driver and contractor Antonio Raymundo Vincenzo Fusaro, who called himself “Zeek,” and whom I was in love with on two different occasions. Back in Portland, Oregon, he was a New York breath of fresh air. But that was another time…another world…

NEW VISION OF HELL

My top vision of hell is being stuck on a stuffy, overcrowded lurching MUNI bus in rush hour, uncomfortably overdressed, with nothing to hold on to, being jostled by strangers squeezing past me bearing giant Quasimodo backpacks, unable to position myself over my center of gravity without stepping on someone’s toes, my heavy handbag slowly sliding off my shoulder but not quite, and the Examiner I’d been reading at the bus stop awkwardly interfering with holding onto the pole that’s just within my re-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-each…and the ride never ends, because I…am in hell. We never even make it to Market Street, the bus just circles around in an endless loop. The sad part is that there are thousands of San Franciscans, every day, who share this very hell for 10, 15, 20 minutes or more. And they didn’t even do anything wrong, they’re just trying to go somewhere!

But this scenario was recently supplanted by a vision more horrible, more intolerable than any I could have envisioned on my own.

REALITY TV

Sometimes if I feel like taking a nap, I like to put on a movie I’ve already seen at a low murmur level so I can engage my mind with something I don’t have to pay much attention to as I drift off to sleep. Another reliable soporific is SFGTV, San Francisco Government Television, cable channel 26, a 24/7 snore-fest of droning white noise guaranteed to put you out like a left hook. Virtually anything will do, but most especially the Board of Appeals, where neighbors kvetch at each other about that pesky light-blocking addition someone wants to build or some self-righteous community group seeks to expose how evil some developer is.

CASPER THE LOQUACIOUS COMMISSIONER

But it was during a Rules Committee meeting that I was introduced to the tenth circle of hell: an eternity of sitting strapped to a hard, uncomfortable chair with one wobbly leg, my eyelids propped open by toothpicks listening to Commissioner Donald A. Casper of the Civil Service Commission talk about…anything, but most especially why he himself should remain on the Civil Service Commission. His testimony on his own behalf before the Rules Committee, which clocked in at close to twenty felt-like-forty minutes, was so tedious that instead of putting me to sleep it woke me up. Even with my face in a pillow I could tell that this was no ordinary stultifying speechifying but a marathon attempt for the world record currently held by your high school history teacher. I actually called it up later on the SFGTV website and watched it as a comedy routine.

I became fascinated by this man who has more mannerisms than Rich Little could ever master, whether pursing his lips, tucking his chin in, nodding in support of his words, tapping the podium with closed fists, or a host of others it would take an eternity in hell to list. Sometimes he would start off a sentence in a stuttering fashion, perhaps while gathering his thoughts, then accelerate into a high-speed finale so interminable it would rival Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.

If he paused, you might take hope, maybe this is it, but then would come that mortifying pregnant syllable that precedes another onslaught of rhetoric: “Now…” And the audience groans. I haven’t been so enthralled since Matt Gonzalez’s reading of the Magna Carta at SOMArts a while back, with its coincidental epidemic of squeaking chairs.

One of Casper’s qualifications is that he has delved into “psychometrics, the science of testing ability in occupational settings.” He explains, “I took apart the banding formula used as certification rules for the police department and fire department eligibility lists. What’s that formula? Competence factor of 1.96 times the square root of two, times the standard deviation of the test score, times the square root of the reliability coefficient of the examination minus one. I will spare you an explanation of any of those components.”

But in hell, he doesn’t. He does explain, and there are as many segments as a large intestine packed full of shit. God how the stuff of the world makes me weary, weary, weary! When I hear a man in a crisp tailored suit say in stentorian tones with perfect diction, “I have made it my business to master civil service rules,” about 750 megawatts of energy drain from my will to live. Doesn’t he know that crap is all made up?

But wait, there’s more. He opines that his reappointment by Mayor Newsom had come before the Rules Committee because he had voted on setting Supervisors’ salaries at $80,000 rather than $112,000. “I express,” he said, “at length, sometimes to my colleagues’ boredom…” why he votes the way he does and the transcript of his explanation of that vote ran to 13-1/2 pages.

The space-time continuum has begun to freeze over and we are all entering a state of suspended hibernation when finally, Gerardo Sandoval, whom Commissioner Casper had addressed as “Commissioner Gonzalez” (I guess all Latino Supervisors look alike) snapped out of the inevitable trance he had to have been in, and interjected to ask Chair Mirkarimi to please, please shut this guy up (my paraphrase). He does then wrap it up and steps away from the podium and the world starts turning again.

One can easily see that Commissioner Donald A. Casper is exceptionally conscientious, thorough, and perfectly suited for bureaucracy of any sort and I wish him a long and productive tenure on the Civil Service Commission…as long as I don’t have to go anywhere near the damn thing for the rest of my life and especially after it.

REVENGE OF THE NERTS

Finally, the inevitable. I done been certified.

How appropriate, the day after I become registered with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as a Disaster Service Worker Volunteer and a member of the San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), that we would have an earthquake! I didn’t notice it at all. I think I was massaging Zazu’s tummy and enjoying a slice of Mythic Pizza’s Haight combo.

Am I ready to suit up and dig in? Not! With one fake search and rescue under my belt, I really don’t know how any “civilian” gets ready for a true disaster except by getting their feet wet and hands dirty with the real thing. And you can’t exactly schedule a couple of practice disasters. Hey, I think I’ll be really good by my third disaster! Let’s have another! I’m getting the hang of this thing now! Nevertheless my yellow hardhat, orange vest and pink gloves (who dressed you, girl?) hang at the ready on my hallway hat rack. With this ensemble I will wear lime green bellbottoms with big white daisies on them. And Timberlake boots.

HEY! REMEMBER ME?

In just this first staged practice session the Team Leader and my partner and I were moving forward in a dimly lit room with our hands on each other’s shoulders and our Team Leader got me and my partner (and herself) killed when she touched a chair that had a pretend live wire draped over it. It happened fast and the details escape me but the instructor told us “Down! Down! Down! You’re dead!” But we had at least successfully triaged a corpse buried under debris and a shock victim. Then again we bypassed a fabric-draped table that may have hidden frightened children or other victims. The best way to learn to do something right is to do it wrong first.

WAS MY FACE RED!

I did something embarrassing as well—something very telling about me. You’re supposed to do search and rescue in teams of at least four—two inside and two outside. At fire extinguisher practice, I went first while my partner stood behind me with the back-up extinguisher that would get us out if the fire got out of hand. Well, I went up for my turn, awkwardly enacted the PASS routine (Pull, Aim, Squeeze, Sweep) and put my fire out—then I walked away, threw my gloves on the pile and moved to the rear of the group. I had completely forgotten my partner! OK, I’m done here, slapping my hands—carry on! That’s how used I am to being on my own. I don’t even stop to think there might be someone who can help me or needs my help.

Even on the last day of class when we’re all pumped, the final exam and hands-on day, when the teacher asked those of us who had 3 gallons of water stored to raise their hands, only a smattering of the sixty of us did, much to the teacher’s chagrin. Rule Number One: Take care of yourself first so you can help others. Don’t become a victim and add to the problem. The earthquake won’t wait till you’re ready for it, as we saw with the 4.4 in Glen Ellen. So get your act together, guys and gals. Me too.
The point, for me, because I am not a natural leader or group kind of gal, is to be more prepared and less freaked out than I would otherwise have been. OK, even this one piece of information may have saved my life in an earthquake. I did in fact have a chest-level shelf in my laundry room, on which a bottle of Windex and a gallon of bleach kept company. If that shelf came down and the containers broke on the floor, the ammonia and the chlorine would form phosgene gas, one of the famous “poison gas” weapons of World War I. So I moved the Windex to under the kitchen sink. That information alone caused me to make a change that could potentially have saved my life. So multiply that tidbit by 18 hours of training and you may save many lives, maybe one of them that of someone you love. Who knows?

Here’s a tip/strategy I loved: under your bed, keep a pair of shoes, batteries and a flashlight in a plastic bag tied to the leg of your bed. When your bedroom window implodes and spreads glass all over your floor, you don’t want the slippers you keep under them now to gravitate to the other side of the room—and even if they haven’t, they’ll still be full of glass. So now you have a safe pair of shoes that stayed with the bed and a flashlight to navigate your way through the glass. And by the way, move that bed away from the window and take down the full-length mirror you have mounted to the ceiling.

NERTIFICATION

If you’re interested in NERT training, they want you! Start here: http://www.sfgov.org/site/sfnert_index.asp

Graduation was fun. There were apples and bananas, cake and Pepsi. Unfortunately a clerical error prevented me from promenading up to the front of the class amidst happy applause to receive my certificate, which will be mailed to me, but I did get the obligatorily unflattering ID card on which my head looks like a cookie jar with ear-shaped handles—then there’s the crooked nose any plastic surgeon would love to take his scalpel to, and my cheeks where as always I’m storing nuts for the winter. Have you ever checked yourself out in one of those magnifying mirrors gals use to pluck their eyebrows? You’ll never leave the house again. But do so—to go to NERT class.

JACKSON LIVES ON

I want to acknowledge the anniversary of the passing of the cat of my life, little Jackson, my beloved buddy of 13 years. I was too blue to celebrate the date, July 4th, that was the last full day of his life. Last year I spent the entire holiday weekend, Friday to Tuesday morning, holding him in my arms. I watched movies and stroked him and kissed him, and Tuesday afternoon we said goodbye. I was far from ready to lose him. Despite my nascent love for Zazu and Zzyzzy Katz, my sister and brother kittens, I am always missing Jack. I have a little altar on my writing table with his remains in an inscribed cedar box. Sometimes I place them next to my heart. He is my spirit animal. I don’t know that I’ve ever had such a pure love for any other creature. People come with pain. Animals come with joy. Despite the excruciating goodbye, they offer the truest bluest companionship. Even one’s deepest friendships weather storms, but a beloved pet never disappoints. I love you, my little panther. You live in my heart now.

AMERICA THE UGLY?

(For a sweet accompaniment to these thoughts, open a new web window, paste http://www.llerrah.com/america.htm into it and minimize it.)

I’ve never been big on the 4th anyway. Fireworks are cool—for me the excitement derives from the violent explosion of beauty that symbolizes humanity’s brief tenure in geologic time—but I won’t thread my way through a crowd to see them. I thrashed my way through the Gay Pride Parade and it was so not worth the trip, though I did buy two t-shirts bearing the slogan “San Francisco my favorite city, where the women are strong and the men are pretty,” from none other than “MynameAbdahlungari,” a citizen activist who makes a Tuesday afternoon career of public comment before the Board of Supervisors. One of his heavily accented expressions has entered my personal language: “I am mad more than hell.”

AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE

Mad more than hell that Congress is not mad more than hell and is still taking it. I guess they are slowly and painfully working out the surprisingly obvious. I’m mad more than hell that America has become a dirty word in the world. Of all ugly Americans, Bush is the ugliest of all.

NOMINATION FOR THE NEW ANTHEM

The only July 4th tradition I observe is my own of lying on my living room floor in front of the stereo listening to Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” the song I think should supplant “The Star-Spangled Banner” as national anthem.

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
But I’m all right, I’m all right
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
For we’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
 we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
But it’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest

Then there’s “America.”

I’m empty and aching and
 I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America…

THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER IS HARD TO SING

and I doubt many Americans know the lyrics to all four stanzas, written in an English no longer spoken by living generations. Some people think “America the Beautiful” should be the National Anthem. But the lyrics are also dense and there’s that pesky God shedding his grace. God Bless America? God, again. DISqualified.

AMERICA IS BEAUTIFUL

I have crossed this country every which way, from Seattle, WA to New York, NY, from Portland, OR to Philadelphia, PA, Burlington VT to Jacksonville, FL, from Jacksonville, FL to Los Angeles, CA, from Los Angeles, CA to Seattle, from Chicago to LA and various points in between.

WHAT’S RED, WHITE AND SCARY?

I estimate I have traveled perhaps 75,000 miles by train in this country and others–from Dublin to County Kerry, up the Swiss Alps, from Vienna to Paris on the Orient Express, from Vancouver, BC to Toronto, QC, from Los Angeles down through Baja, California to La Paz, and, as Sam Shepherd said, “I would live on a train if someone gave me one.” But I love nothing better than watching this country of mine unroll itself through my picture window on America. But there is something scary about displays of American patriotism in the heartland. When I see the red white and blue painted on the roof of a barn I am more likely to think “redneck” than “patriot.”

PUT AWAY THE FLAGS

The American patriots I know are mad as hell. I’ll fly the damn flag when America uses it vast resources for the good of its own people, not bombing the life out of others. Public transportation, higher education and health care should be free. Howard Zinn advised us in The Progressive, to “put away the flags” this year. “On this July 4,” he said, “we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed…Is not nationalism–that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder–one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking—cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on–have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power…We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.”

Look at our first lionized hero, Christopher Columbus. He was the one who tripped over the Bahamas and introduced genocide and slavery to the Americas. Hip, hip, hooray! Let’s have a parade! Reading a What’s Right with America piece in one paper, one does not want to argue with optimism. Sure one would like to have a Hallmark-perfect celebration of our wondrous land. But I am reminded of a comment Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of “Amores Perros” made: “Love can be very destructive. It also has very sharp edges, it’s not like Valentines.” This love of ours for the American nation is not so benevolent a love. In the wrong hands it’s a double-edged sword that cuts both our enemies and ourselves. Yes, our love for America is a jarring love with very sharp edges.

The author’s spirt animal

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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

Independence Day
The nuclear family
Is exploding
In backyards
All over America
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What would you write about?
8/9/06

axfiles@sbcglobal.net

copyright Alexandra Jones 2006