I left my backpack at Karen’s Temescal Cohousing home last night,
where I’d gone for a community dinner in the new common house. Very beautiful stucco job with cantilevered second floor flat and first floor dining room—with a simple but gorgeous acid-washed concrete floor— kitchen, kids’ playroom and laundry facilities. Because all parties added a significant dollop to their hefty mortgages to build it, because it’s a substantial, indisputably physical edifice straddling the lot lines between the four, formerly discrete nuclear family-owned properties, the common house is as much as testament to their long-term commitment to this project as are their bylaws (& other documents). Hurrah for Temescal and other such projects!
After dinner Karen and I went to the Congregational Church at 27th and Harrison to hear Kathy Kelly (of Voices in the Wilderness) inspire us—Dennis Bernstein (looking a bit like Ben Franklin these days) and a mostly KPFA crowd—out of our post-election funks. Because she’s done such heroic humanitarian work in Iraq over many years, and is also a faith/personal integrity-based Plowshares activist, she’s been recognized with 3 or 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations plus several stints in US maximum security women’s prisons. She had the audacity to suggest we need to listen carefully to Osama Bin Laden, and all “enemies” hating us so much that they’re willing to give up their precious lives to cause us harm. Whew! This is something I’ve thought but didn’t really have the courage to publish. Like my former housemate, Bonnie Urfer, Kathy once planted flowers on a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. These are impressive human beings!
OK, because
I left my backpack at Karen’s Temescal Cohousing home last night, I had to pick it up today (so I have my gear to do my evening workout). Today’s weather has been gray with a steady, slanting rain. So, rather than bike I took a walk south on Dover to 50th (by Children’s Hospital), east to Shattuck and south a half block to Temescal Plaza, where the wrought-iron fence was covered by lush waxy leaves and large, intricate passionflowers blooming profusely. I cut through the plaza to Telegraph and then crossed to 49th. The first block down 49th thick stems of squash plants curled their wet orange blossoms out onto the sidewalk. Retrieved my backpack at Karen’s on 45th and then headed north on Broadway to College. On the east side of College just north of the Rockridge library branch, great pink blossoms of an amazing rose bush released all their perfume (scented, then seen). After two crispy chicken tacos at Cactus, washed down with an horchata, I cut over to Forest, crossed Claremont, up Howell to 60th, west to cross Telegraph to reach the park at Racine, a half block north to 61st, then west to Shattuck. In this usually nondescript block a violet bougainvillea smothered one house’s front; near the corner on a clump of tall stalks beige almost beaten ginger blossoms created a heady cloud of exotic scent. I made it home only slightly dampened but much invigorated to write this. To those wired to cell phones in cars whizzing by I say—even riding my bike I miss a lot—my other bike is/are my rollerblades are my feet.
(from a letter to Jeff Banks, 11/11/04)
posted by Paul at 9:57 AM
