32 minute read
Unsung Heroes
COLUMNIST Unsung Heroes
By Queen D. Michele queendmichele@yahoo.com
Advertisement
There’s a saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the
tree. So true is the case of North Shore locals Mariana Kyle Rivera and her mother Fabiola Rivera Gonzalez. Their story of determination and courage began once mom was diagnosed with a debilitating degenerative disease, in Spanish called Spondylitis Anquilosante. Her prognosis was not good, and the medication she was taking had horrible side effects.
Fabiola, determined not to let the disease get the best of her, began studying and looking to replace her medications through more holistic and natural ways. During her research, she discovered a little village in Argentina where honey farmers were extracting from bees healing properties that they make naturally. These properties are extracted from the Melipona bee, native to warm areas of the neotropics ranging from Sinaloa and Tamaulipas (Mexico) to Tucuman and Misiones (Argentina).
Fabiola set out to learn all that she could about the healing properties and began her own regimen of ingestion.
Mariana Kyle Rivera
Coincidently, Fabiola’s husband once worked on a Melipona bee farm with his family before moving to Guadalajara. His knowledge was instrumental in helping Fabiola with her regimen. Over time, Fabiola’s symptoms became lighter and lighter which allowed for a better quality of life. Mariana, bearing firsthand witness to her mom’s research and subsequent ease in her symptoms, came to understand the scarceness of bees. She felt their natural healing properties had literally saved her mother’s life.
There came a time when Mariana, armed with her mother’s courageous spirit, would help sustain an entire bee farming community. The Kito Community is made up of descendants of an ancient Maya tribe. Many descendants are still tending honey farms in that Yucatan region. This is the region where Mariana’s father’s family is from, and where he once worked before moving his family to Jalisco. One day, Mariana’s father told her about the plight his family and friends were facing back in the Yucatan region. They were closing the bee farms! This would cause a terrible economic blow to many families. Mariana, determined to preserve the Maya Kito Tribe traditions and maintain a thriving bee community, began looking for ways of sustainability. There were two main components that assisted Mariana in saving the bee farms from going under; it was her father’s knowledge about bee farms and her husband’s financial backing. Loaded with knowledge and money, Mariana pulled the trigger. As a result, the families in the Kito Community were equipped with whatever was needed to continue bee farming. Today, Mariana is now a beekeeper… there’s that apple falling.
Mariana named the honey Abeja Reina (Queen Bee) ~Tesoro Maya (Treasure Maya). A beautiful balance for the Maya civilization that has been extracting honey and the healing properties of bees for centuries. It continues to be a part of their ancestral gift to this planet. Mariana always says, “Queen is the bee! They are the small engine of our ecosystem, because without them we would not have oxygen, plants, food, or life!”
Mariana’s light shines bright as she endeavors to not only share the wonderful taste of Earth’s natural elixir, honey, but also the knowledge of their importance to our planet. A true Lakeside unsung hero, you can inquire about Mariana’s honey at ar.tesoromaya@ gmail.com
Cell and WhatsApp (33) 11488531
Queen D. Michele
St. Nikephoros of Chios
It was actually more of a tree platform than a treehouse, a plain square board nailed into the fork of a huge box elder in our backyard overlooking the neighbor’s cow pasture. There were three trees in a row alongside the line fence, and we neighborhood kids had similar tree houses in all three.
Yet, my treehouse was a place of solitude most of the time. It was perhaps ten or twelve feet above the ground, but somehow I took smug satisfaction in my belief that nothing could get to me up there. When you are up in a tree, you can enjoy the companionship of other trees. Treetops become your neighbors. A good, serene place to while away summer hours while watching cows grazing contentedly in the adjoining pasture and the wind wafting across nearby fields of wheat and oats, creating waves that resemble those on large bodies of water.
I was free to indulge my boyhood fantasies of living a wild free life in a tree like Tarzan or Bomba the Jungle Boy. Bomba was accompanied by a friendly monkey and Tarzan had his simian buddy Cheetah, a loyal chimpanzee. I had to be satisfied with my terrier Buddy, whose dog house was beneath the next tree. Of course, Cheetah and the monkey could swing on lianas among the treetops with their human companions, while Buddy could not.
My dad worked as a shipping clerk for a local manufacturer of pumps. Sometimes, he brought home large numbers of surplus narrow leather rings called pump suckers that were no longer being used by the manufacturer. Those, he wove together into pump sucker whips, which we could go around cracking like Indiana Jones. One lengthy pump sucker whip was knotted onto my favorite limb, enabling us to swing about as though in a rainforest.
For communication purposes, we had tin can telephones strung from tree to tree. We imagined that we could actually sense sound waves running along the lengths of the attached kite string as we dispatched secret messages back and forth. It would never have occurred to me that the trees themselves could transmit messages to one another
It has been said many times that two lovers recognize themselves in one another. In a similar sense, we may recognize our kinship with our fellow creatures. DNA analysis has enabled us to better comprehend the relationships between all living things. We now know that we humans share 98.9% of our DNA with our nearest mammalian relatives, chimpanzees and 98.7% with the chimps’ lookalike bonobos. In his latest publication Four Fifths Grizzly, biologist Douglas Chadwick reminds us that humans share 80-90% of our DNA with Ursa arctos horribillis. He goes on to point out that we share 84% of our DNA with man’s best friend, the dog, 85% with pesky mice, 85% with cattle, 7% with bacteria and 18% with bakers’ yeast.
Turning from fauna to flora, how closely related are we to trees and other plant life. The difference between a molecule of chlorophyll and a molecule of hemoglobin amounts to only a single atom, one of magnesium to provide chlorophyll for plants and one of iron for animals. Atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen coalesce around each. We humans are biologically akin to all living things, even trees.
The world’s great religions teach that all men are brothers. Biologically, all living things are related, even those creatures we would rather not think about, the black mamba and the brown recluse, for instance. We share DNA with those fell creatures as well as with more friendly puppies and bunny rabbits.
The writings of German botanist and forester Peter Wohlleben have shaken up the scientific world in recent years, causing sometimes uncomfortable questions to be asked, such as whether or not plants feel pain. Wohlleben suggests that trees communicate with one another, a groundbreaking view in itself. In his book The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben goes on to say that trees warn one another of impending threats and share nutrients with ailing or wounded others nearby, a bizarre concept to many, but not surprising to the ancient Celts or to some Native American cultures such as the Ojibwe or the Potawatomi, those much wiser for living lives in close proximity to nature.
A recent article in The Science Times reports on research with plants conducted at Tel Aviv University. The results are, to say the least, startling. Plants emit high frequency sounds when subjected to stress. Plants that have been denied water or that have had stems severed emit ultrasonic noise, between 20 and 100 kilohertz, and send out distress signals to other plants. When, for instance, a tomato plant’s stem was cut, it sent out 25 stress sounds per hour.
Some plants register pain when leaves are plucked. Some release unsavory tasting chemicals when threatened, probably to repel insects. In the King Arthur legend, it is said that the Druidic seer Merlin would converse with the blades of grass while crossing a meadow. In reality, grass that has been recently cut emits chemical distress signals, creating the fragrance we associate with, for instance, a newly mowed lawn or field of alfalfa.
Other research at the University of Missouri in Columbia has revealed that plants respond to the sound of chewing while being eaten by insects or caterpillars. Plants create chemical responses in order to poison enemies or warn other plants of danger. Some emit signal reactions in order to attract beneficial insects.
If a tree is a sentient being, then a forest is a living entity. Whenever we scale a fence to enter a wood, if we are aware, we are immersing ourselves in life itself, inundated with Spirit, much like Emerson’s concept in his essay “The Oversoul”. Given such realities, how, then, are we to live, given that all living things are both eaters and eaten, including humans. With our elevated powers of reason, we are probably the only creatures who can limit our footprint upon the creation,
Continued on page 44
From page 42
place restrictions upon the amount of pain and destruction we cause, develop a more kindly and sensitive view of the world around us, cliches and platitudes no less accurate for being so.
Our vandalistic treatment of trees stands as horrific affirmation of the dark side of the human character, that typified by cruelty, rapacity, greed, and mindlessness, the obsession with immediate gratification, enthralled by an image of ourselves as special entities separate from the rest of the natural world. Truth be told, we humans could not survive without trees. Trees provide more than lumber, construction materials, firewood, and wood pulp for paper. Trees provide food, carbon storage, energy production, and prevent soil erosion as well as providing places of spiritual peace and renewal.
It is estimated that there may be up to 3 trillion trees existing on the earth today. And yet, an estimated 24,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed by human activities over the course of the last ten years. Other rainforests in the Congo region of Africa and Southeast Asia, even Australia continue to be decimated by humans, while forests in temperate zones in the US, Canada and elsewhere are being tragically and violently clear-cut. Attempts are being made to reforest parts of the world. In 2019, Ethiopia planted 352 million seedlings, while India planted 220 million during the same year. The Trees for Jane program, a UN initiative to plant 1 trillion new trees before 2030, is being fostered by the worldfamous primatologist Jane Goodall.
And yet, Goodall quotes an old Chinese proverb that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. It takes time for trees to grow to maturity, years during which the massacre of the world’s forests continues. Unlike the world of Middle Earth depicted by J.R.R. Tolkien, we have no entities like the giant ent Treebeard to protect trees.
As a boy sitting high in my silvan sanctuary in my parents’ backyard, as fascinated by jungles and the creatures who inhabit them as I was, I am sure that I had no clue as to the fragile nature of the trees we lived among. With age comes awareness, and with awareness comes responsibility. As Dr. Seuss’s character the Lorax warns, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
A few days ago, my wife LaVon and I picked eleven bushels of apples in a friend’s orchard, bountiful gifts of the trees that would otherwise have gone unharvested and unappreciated by passersby. Apples, walnuts, pinion nuts, almonds, pecans, bananas, all fruits and nuts as well as botanicals, perhaps many yet to be discovered, that ease pain and treat serious medical conditions, are manifestations of the generosity of trees.
Over the years, I have inwardly and sometimes outwardly winced at the sight of a living tree being pared back to make room for power lines, sometimes chopped down altogether in the name of someone’s distorted concept of progress, but I did not consider that the horribly dismembered trees had experienced pain.
The old tree that once held my treehouse still stands in the corner of what was once my parents’ backyard. During those carefree summer days of my youth, it would never have occurred to me that the spikes my dad drove into the tree’s flesh may have caused it pain. In fact, such a possibility had never occurred to me until quite recently.
Lorin Swinehart
Korean War Memorial, Washington D.C.
Apatrol moves silently through the perimeter.
The darkness shrouds their movement and the cascading rain muffles their progress. It’s a large patrol, a dozen men, led by a sergeant who has been in the line for eight months. Occasionally lightning in the distance glints off the shinny surfaces of their rain gear. They still move single file, led by the point man who has been on patrols for the past year, and knows his way through the mine field by rote.
Back in the file, a man shifts his weapon to the opposite hand and takes the arm of the soldier in front of him, a newcomer to the unit, and guides him through the process of avoiding the deadly defensive weapons.
They emerge from the mine field and enter a new danger zone. The sergeant taps the man in front, signals him to stop and pass the word on, puts a hand on his radioman to halt him and moves back through the patrol gesturing to them to spread out. He reaches the newbie and notes the hand of the veteran on his arm, nods and moves on.
The sergeant returns to the middle of the formation and whispers loudly, “Move out.”
Each man has assumed his rehearsed position, knows his areas of responsibility in the tactical sweep. Knows where the next man is located, the location of the men who will cover his back, and that of the men whose backs he will cover. They all rely on the point man’s ability to spot trouble and on the rearmost to cover their back trail.
This is an infantry patrol. It could be Virginia in 1863, Mindanao in 1901, the Argonne in 1918, Guadalcanal in 1942, Korea in 1950, Vietnam in 1968 or Afghanistan in 2013. Small unit tactics change, adapt to technology, geography, and idiosyncrasies of the adversary. But one thing has never changed. The members of the patrol develop a deep sense of cohesion; each member relies on the others, as the others rely on him.
The story could be of a fighter pilot and wingman.
It could be AA gunners on warships.
It could be a radar technician, or an electronics specialist in a CIC.
It could be a supply sergeant or an armorer in a support role.
It could be a nurse in a field hospital.
Wherever, whenever, they were rigorously trained and perhaps at some time subjected to the stresses of the real thing, the varmint. But most important each received a responsibility the failure of which could have catastrophic consequences for those depending upon him; and consequences for him, if others upon whom he depended failed in their responsibilities to him. That experience changed all of them forever. * * *
At coffee one morning in Ajijic a poll among American retirees produced the following results: 4 served in the Army, 2 in the Marine Corps, 1 in the Navy and 2 in the Air Force. One did not serve in our military, but he had held a critical job with access to nuclear secrets, prohibiting his exposure to military service. * * *
In our Lakeside community for a large share of our male population and many of our women, the preceding anecdote, in training, or within reach of the varmint, was a seminal event. It reflected in the remainder of our lives: the workplace, among friends, in the way we raised our children.
Salute our veterans on November 11th. Their freedoms are not just a birthright; they have earned them.
Robert Drynan
By Don Beaudreau wbeaudreau@aol.com
Once upon a time, a dog of independent mind strolled this planet, refusing to think, feel, or act a certain way simply because other dogs were doing so.
His way of relating to the world began during birth, when his eight siblings fought for top exiting position. Instead of joining in that dog fight, our puppy Socrates, merely observed the conflict. When there were no others left to go down the matriarchal chute into the light of day, he easily slid on through — much to the amazement of his mother, who thought she had finished.
She noted that unlike her other new pups, this one was injury-free, did not fight for position onto one of her teats, and had wide-open eyes that moved around the room, but were mostly focused on her.
“I’ll wait my turn, Martha,” he told her in well-enunciated English.
His mother did not understand a word of what he said, because she was, in fact, a dog. Nor did she know that her name was Martha. What she did know, was that this pup was not like his brothers and sisters, or like any of the other pups in all the many litters she had produced before this one.
Indeed, every time she urged him to fight for his right to suckle one of her teats, she heard him make this same odd sound, or ones similar to it. But eventually the other pups had their fill of Mom’s life-sustaining milk shake, and drifted off to sleep. That is when Socrates strutted over to Martha, and observing which teat of hers might need his assistance, looked up at her and said, “May I?” She merely smiled at yet another odd sound coming from him, and then felt his lips upon her. Gentle lips, not like the lips of any of her other kids…
As the days went by, Socrates preferred his own company to that of his family’s. He did, of course, continue to relate to his mother — always waiting his turn at her fountain. And always asking her before he indulged: “May I?”
His eight brothers and sisters thought him odd in his waiting his turn, but were only too happy because this meant one less dog fight over their place in the buffet line.
And after a while, they didn’t care or even notice that his responses to life were different from theirs. He didn’t bark, whine, or growl; nor did he frolic with them, chase his own tail, or try to bite them. He was no fun at all, they thought.
Martha was busy enough without adding the role of therapist to her duties. But one day she commented on Socrates’s behavior to George, the father of her children. He merely suggested to her that she wait and see what would happen.
That day arrived soon enough. It even had a name, as observed on the front lawn sign: FREE PUPPIES HERE TODAY!
It was all over very soon, when his brother and sisters we chosen to begin their lives with their new families. Not that he cared if he ever saw any of them again. As long as he had Martha around to keep him from starving, he would be fine. Although later that afternoon when he attempted to nap for the first time in his life without his brothers and sisters around, Socrates felt uncomfortable. It was too quiet! Not a whimper, not a grunt. So he couldn’t sleep!
After a couple hours of restlessness, he began to wonder how things were going for his siblings. They all were so excited when picked by humans who seemed equally excited to welcome them into a new home. But Socrates didn’t really care that he wasn’t chosen. Did he? He certainly did not play the cute-and-adorable puppy game the way the others did in order to be picked. Instead, he just watched while this foolishness went on. He did not whimper in supplication to be noticed; he did not lick any human’s hand as a token of adoration; he did not allow anybody to touch him. Whenever he saw the possibility of the latter occurring, he scurried away as far as he could, and then turned his back toward that person as his way of avoidance. Truly, all those overly stimulated adults and children were causing so much commotion! Running around the outside of the little fenced-in area where his brothers, sisters, and he were! Watching their every move; deciding their fate:
“Her coloring doesn’t match the furniture!”
“Oh, look! He’s jumping up and down!”
The last comment was made about Socrates, of course. The dog of independent mind.
Socrates had avoided being picked a number of times, until he realized that his last sibling had been scooped up, and there were no more people around. He was, in fact, alone. But then, wasn’t that what he had wanted all along?
Still, that did not explain how sad and uneasy he was feeling now. And he wondered how Martha and George were feeling about losing their family — well, except for losing him. But then, neither one of his parents ever seemed to care about him. Indeed, he knew that he was not somebody who was easy to care about.
He was contemplating all this and was beginning to wonder what his life would be like now and into the future, to the point of his getting a bit sad, when he heard a tiny cough, and when he looked up from his revelry to see who had made the sound, he saw a little boy, who perhaps was six years old, standing behind the small fence that separated him from the puppy. The boy’s eyes were cast down. Socrates noted that the kid looked as equally forlorn as he, himself, felt. He saw that the boy wore glasses, and was not just forlorn, but shy. Socrates saw that there was a woman and a man who stood a little bit behind the child, who he presumed were the kid’s parents. They watched him to see how he would react to the puppy.
Socrates looked at the boy with wonder and curiosity—two feelings he had never experienced. And not understanding why, he felt compelled to move toward the boy. When he did, he caught the boy looking at him. And suddenly the boy smiled. And the puppy felt another new feeling: connection.
Then he saw the kid turn around to his parents and say to them excitedly: “Mommy! Daddy! Can we bring him home! He told me he wants to come home with us!”
His parents were smiling now, too, and when his mother asked him what he was going to call the pup, the boy answered, “He already has a name!”
“How do you know that?” asked his mother.
“He told me, of course! His name is Socrates!”
By Zofia Barisas
It was a Tuesday late afternoon. I was watching the Conferencia de Prensa Sobre COVID 19 with Dr. Lopez Gatell and
Dr. Alomia. Suddenly I heard a long scream from outside, followed by a deep silence and then the sound of many voices. I went to look out my bedroom window that overlooks the street. There was a small body lying next to the gates at the end of my driveway.
I thought ‘it’s one of the construction workers, one of small stature.’ It was hard to gauge the size of him, and how badly injured he was, from the distance I was at and the fact it was approaching dusk. The body was lying on earth and gravel at the intersection of two streets. The street coming down the slope of the mountain had been recently repaved in cement, with stones embedded in it, and planters for trees alongside. Children came in the afternoon with plastic carts, and rolled down and came up and rolled down again.
A huge house was being built on the second lot above my place on the mountain side and another house was being built right behind my house, a meter away. Trucks were constantly bringing building materials and other trucks were taking away piles of rocks and earth. Young men, from the rehabilitation center, were brought in every morning in pickup trucks to do the rough work.
Gabriel, the young man who lived rough in the disused lot next to my house, was walking by. He took off his jacket and lay it over the small body. The small body never moved, never made another sound. Two ambulances came within minutes, one big, one small, brand new, followed by five police cars. There was a big truck, engine still running, next to my driveway stone wall. It was one of the many trucks used to deliver construction materials to the two sites.
The policemen were all in spotless, well-fitting uniforms, all the vehicles were of the latest vintage, like something out of an American movie. They sealed off the streets, put up bright lights. A young girl, about 14, was screaming, her back pressed to the brick wall of the house across the street. I, a foreigner, stood back from the French doors to my balcony that overlooks the street, not wanting to intrude in this time of deep grief, not wanting to be seen watching.
She was trying to run to the body. A young man stood in front of her, arms wide open, keeping her from going. She kept on screaming. She never stopped. More people came. The street was full. More women were crying and keening. A man, probably the father, stood alone, surrounded by people, tears running down his face, making no sound. He walked to the police tape that sealed off access. He wanted to go to the body but the police refused to let him in. He stood, weeping, looking at the body on the ground.
The body was that of an 11 year- old boy. He had been coming down the street on his bicycle, coming down the mountain, and the truck coming along the cross street had run over him. There is a two-meter high brick wall that goes right to the corner and continues up the other side. There is no way the truck driver could have seen the boy riding down. I heard later that the driver had run away.
A big tow truck came.
More people had arrived and they all stood there, some weeping, some loudly moaning, some talking low. Three hours the police were there. The ambulance had taken the boy’s body away.
The engine of the construction truck was still running. It started raining. The truck was taken away, the police cars left, the people dispersed.
How unexpectedly a small life had been taken, leaving a wealth of grief.
The following day I drove my car out of the driveway to go buy milk, bread, fruit and vegetables. There was a small construction of loose bricks in two separate piles, with roof tiles bridging them and lit candles in glasses inside. On top of the roof tiles was a crucifix leaning against my wall and next to it a statuette of the Virgin Mary and a fresh rose in a vase. On my property in a way, on the cobblestone sidewalk I had had built. I thought of my need for order and privacy and I thought of an 11-year-old boy and I thought of a grieving family.
Later in the evening I heard a clear woman’s voice praying, every sentence starting with ‘Santa Maria, Madre de Dios’, a litany. The voice, the makeshift altar near the place of death, that way of grieving, everything felt deeply right about it. She came to pray at the same time the next day, just as the sun was going down, the same time the boy had died. I saw her standing looking at the small altar, as if she were seeing him there. Every day she came and prayed and I felt comforted by her voice and her presence.
A few days later a man and a boy with a bucket arrived and built a small cement base and put up a metal frame against my wall on which was written the boy’s name, Santiago, with his surnames, and the date of his birth and the date of his death. The same information was scratched into the fresh cement. A permanent shrine.
A couple of days after that I respectfully (in my heart) took away the nearly empty bottle of orange pop that had been left in my planter that holds the bugambilia plant that grows over the arches over my gate. I also took away the broken glass, half filled with sand that was there, and neatly piled the bricks that were left loose. And I left a small pile of colorful tiles I had leftover, on the edge of my planter, in case they would like to use them to cover the bare cement.
I was nearly finished when a young girl about twelve came up the street and asked me if she could light the candles.
“Si, of course,” I said. “Was he your brother?”
“He was my cousin,” she said.
She seemed very mature for her age. I looked for words to express my sympathy but none came that would not be trite or artificial.
“Es muy triste,” I finally said.
“Si,” she said.
The children who used to come up and roll down the hill in their carts every late afternoon no longer came. The mothers had put a stop to that. Construction resumed on the two houses. Trucks came and went throughout the day. When the workday was done, Santiago’s friends came to the shrine
Continued on page 52
From page 50
and talked and played and kept him company.
Sometimes men came and sat on the boulder nearby, that was embedded in the sidewalk, and talked and left empty beer cans. Some days I left small potted plants on the boulder, free to anybody who wanted them. The last two I had left were now on Santiago’s altar.
On the Day of the Dead the family held a big party at Santiago’s shrine. There was eating and drinking and loud music and singing that went on for many hours.
On his birthday in February there was another celebration with a great many people. Bunches of balloons were taped to the wall and attached to the ‘bugambilia’. A big teddy bear sat on the bricks. The shrine was full of small, bright-colored metal cars and two plastic guns leaned on the statue of the Virgin Mary. A bouquet of flowers lay below his name.
“It’s the custom in Mexico to remember the person who died at the place of death,” she said.
I thought about this later, trying with my Lithuanian mind, raised in French Canada, to understand a Mexican custom. I understood—and I might be wrong—that this is where Santiago’s earthly life left him, that this is where his soul rose free, so this is the place to come to. The body in the cemetery is but a decaying shell.
An old man started walking over in early morning to water the two plants and to stand for a few moments looking at the shrine. He walked slowly, with pains of old age. He was one of the old world Mexican men, tall, slim, neatly dressed, obviously well cared for by his family, courteous and friendly. I met him twice a week when I went out to water the two ‘bugambilias’ on either side of my gates. The few words we exchanged left me feeling good. He reminded me of the world of civility and kindness that I grew up in.
He has stopped coming. I wonder if he is ill, if he is still alive. I am old myself, with my own assortment of emerging physical and mental malfunctions. When I water my plants I also water the two plants on the shrine. And I think of Santiago whom I never met and think of my three sons and my four grandchildren, all of them healthy, with good lives, and wonder what runs it all. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s all random.
It’s been two years now since the accident. The shrine has grown dingy, the toys dirty and in a mess, a lump of something rotten and smelly is inside. Four bricks are missing so there’s not enough height to hold up the roof tiles. Decay. The end of something that has had its time. And then, looking up my wall above the altar, on top of the roll of razor wire that runs along it, I see a dingy cloth doll with the head and hands and feet torn off. Thoughts of witchcraft. This is a very old country. Some people still distrust the foreigner. To some, a woman living alone is suspect. For a while I have sense of danger, in the one lived-in house on the whole block, surrounded by houses under construction and empty lots at the foot of the mountain.
In the morning I go out to the shrine and clean it out, put all items in order and take down the doll. It feels good to make order. There is nothing sinister about any of it. The doll might be a prank to scare me, something young boys would do, nudging each other.
Santiago lives on in the hearts and minds of people who love him.
Beautiful, sunny day. Flowers everywhere.
Zofia Barisas
By Tom Nussbaum
It was late at night just before
Halloween. 1968. Maybe ‘69. Several of us were crammed into a small, third-floor bedroom in our college fraternity house talking. The conversation meandered, appropriately, to scary events in our lives. Power outages. Near-miss car accidents. Unexplained phenomena. Ghost stories.
“So,” one of us asked, “your aunt sees ghosts?”
“Has your aunt demonstrated that she’s crazy in any other ways?” one of us asked.
We all laughed. “Pee break,” Jack announced and dashed out of the room.
The stories continued. One fraternity brother related witnessing a football player from his high school breaking his leg in a game. “I could see the protruding bone,” he said. “I still see it.” Another brother told the tale of unexpectedly coming upon a cluster of bats during a late dusk walk down a shadowy alley. A third described a haunted house a local radio station created every Halloween in his home town.
A startling noise against the window interrupted the conversation. Whether seated or standing, we jumped in unison.
Another bang against the window triggered another group heart palpitation
“That sounded like a rock. A pebble.”
We stared at the window and realized we could hear a muffled voice. Calling. Groaning. Aching.
I leapt to the window and looked down into the unlit passageway between our place and the neighboring boarding house.
There was Jack, covered in a white sheet, a flashlight glowing from under the linen. Jack was gyrating like a disjointed ghost. “Ida! Ida!” he howled.
To this day, I don’t know if Ida really existed or, if she did, had she really seen ghosts, or if Jack had masterfully set-up all of us. But it is a Halloween tale that has humorously haunted me for decades.
Tom Nussbaum
