He keeps recommending a "How To" book on writing he says I should read. He says my writing "is hard to parse."

Parse: (used with object) to analyze (a sentence) in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc.

He wanted duck. This is Aaron:

sucking out the brains.

That's the truth. And a metaphor.

Dear Mr. William Cox,

I hope this letter reaches you before your mother's memorial service this Sunday. People who loved Mary are trying to find you.

Mary said you are in or near San Francisco, and that you work in computers or finance. She was more interested in who you are, than what you do.

Your mother - Mary Spink - loved you. She loved your sister. She loved a lot of us and took deep care of many more than that; probably because she couldn't take good care of you and your sister when you were young. Mary was haunted by her failure till the day she died. All the years I knew her, Mary was trying to make good what she had made bad.

Mary didn't hide much about her past. We know that she arrived in New York as a haunted young woman. A girl, really. Abused in childhood. Pursued by demons and alone in a hard place. She told us that she became an addict. She whored and pimped. She ran bad checks and fell for men in their power who hustled others, supplied drugs and could execute those who wouldn't pay for what they'd taken.

With pride, Mary shipped rifles for the Black Panthers and helped hide these in the empty basement pool the Christodora House, where the Panthers were running a nursery and free breakfast program. She was showing heart.

Mary told us she fired a gun and shot off part of a policeman's nose. She was convicted of various crimes and served Federal time.

You and your sister might have been born before then. Maybe after. Mary spoke about your father always in respectful terms, about keeping you warm and safe in the open top drawer of a dresser in their apartment.

She spoke about hardship. About being addicted and an inadequate mother and losing you and your sister.

Mary was released from prison and opened a tiny newsstand in the Lower East Side. She eventually opened a hardware shop with Henry Gifford, her dear friend. She cleaned apartment buildings, learned them from the inside out and grew to manage them.

Mary said that volunteering was the best way for anyone without credentials to gain experience, build trust and prove him or herself in an organization.

Mary spoke from experience.

She grew to become the Executive Director of the Lower East Side People's Mutual Housing Association, Inc., thankfully LESPMHA for short; rehabbing and constructing buildings throughout our neighborhood, creating hundreds of affordable homes. Many families are able to remain in the Lower East Side, keeping a community here, only because LESPMHA keeps rents affordable.

Mary, from her own pocket, funded scholarship after scholarship for young people in our community, to maintain the Lower East Side as a place of diversity, creativity, acceptance and opportunity.

Mary earned many awards in the past years. All deserved.

As much as anything, she earned the respect and trust of many.

Some years ago, it seems like five, she said she'd reestablished contact with you and your sister. She was proud of that. She was also chaste, anxious and timid.

She flew to San Francisco, said she visited with you and your sister, and was slowly making amends face to face and on the phone.

Then your sister died.

And Mary's explanations of being in touch with you seemed far away after that, nothing she really touched. She told us she spoke with you now and then, and you would agree to see her if she traveled west. But you wouldn't come to New York.
We wanted to tell you how ill Mary was, that her liver was finally failing, her kidneys were going, we hoped you'd visit.

There's no record of calls from you to her, or her to you.

Mary's memorial will be this Sunday at the Cooper Union building at East 7th and 3rd Avenue. At 5:30 PM.

Mary always let us know that you were deeply hurt by who she was. Please come to the memorial for who she became.

I hope this letter finds you,

Michael Rosen

I attended Lincoln School for a part of my elementary education, then Northeast for the rest, then Rutland Junior then Rutland Senior High School. And all the time, for nearly as long as I remember, I sat hours then more at the Rutland Free Public Library.

Back before the Internet, maybe back before color TV, back in the days of card catalogs and Jimi Hendrix and Pete Seeger.

I had to write a report on my favorite animal, sometime in the Northeast days, and the Library had books on lions. With pictures. With explanations.

I grew up believing books are sacred. Books needed to be stacked and shelved right side up, with respect. The way books are bound best is art. Silence was to be kept so people could focus on what they were reading. Librarians were heroes devoted to the mysteries of the word. Authors, those mysterious people far away from my hometown, put down these words and their words ended up on our Rutland Free Public Library shelves.

So later in my life, I went off and wrote books. And one day I went to the online card catalog for the Rutland Public Free Library, hoping to see my What Else But Home there: like going home again.

My book wasn't there. So I clicked again on the Library's website and wrote to the librarians and introduced myself and asked that they might consider adding What Else But Home to their collection. I wrote about my report on lions. I wrote about the hours and the sanctity inside the walls of their building. About riding my bike to the library. About my parents' office down the block.

A senior librarian wrote back. He told me that the Library only purchases books in the first year of their release. That I was out of luck.

I love to write on airplanes. Especially during long trips - no emails to read and write, no phone calls to answer or make. Headphones and a little fold down table.

I was away, wanted to get back to see our sons, see friends. I got to the airport a day early, almost by accident, and Continental had plenty of open seats. I asked to change my ticket; $250, to push a button, print a boarding card, rearrange things. Since the plane had empty seats all the way to New York, an economist would say there was no marginal cost to Continental, only a marginal opportunity -- I gave them the chance to sell the seat I'd originally booked on a flight the following day.

The man at the Continental counter was embarrassed by the $250 charge and suggested I write to the airline via their website. So I did.

Mr. David Risinger, Senior Executive Specialist, answered in an email. I'm "Case 5050495"

If you can't see, he told me: "Service charges help cover costs associated with processing ticket changes, adjusting passenger manifests, and filling empty seats."

Pushing that button, and giving Continental the opportunity to sell my seat for the following day, probably cost the airline all of... $0.01 ? Or maybe an even $1 ?

I do love to write on airplanes. And I love reading corporate double-triple-zero speak. Mr. David Risinger was really saying, "Tough luck Baby, we gotcha!"

I'm going to write back to him now. They serve good ice cream. I read a great book, Why Read Moby-Dick, by Nathaniel Philbrick, while flying across the sea.

and it's the Brooklyn Friends School "B" as well. And one high school team went 18 - 1 this year, and the ONLY loss was at a half-squad capacity game, so that hardly counts, and someone named Morgan Rosen...

is Captain of the team, which just won the ISAL Championship today.

I'm proud of Morgan. I'm proud of Brooklyn baseball (before R Moses drove the team to a Ravine...),

and I'm proud of a BFS Captain before Morgan too...

Ripton.

and I wish BFS luck & Morgan love... Dad

Sandy Koufax and Tommy Lasorda are kids. Carl Erskine, Don Newcombe, Clem Labine will each have a year. Roy Campanella. Gil Hodges. Carl Furillo. Pee Wee Reese. Jackie Robinson. Duke Snider died today - the last of The Boys of Summer.

It's just an apartment building complex now, but from Opening Day in 1913 till Robert Moses drove another nail into soul of New York, 1960, Ebbets Field...

was baseball.

Roger Kahn will say it best. Something happened today.

Baseball left New York, for me, when the Steinbrenners were miserable to a man who deserved no misery, who West to manage in LA. I'm too young, only by a touch, for the Dodgers in Brooklyn.

But I do know that was baseball in immortality.

Walk that block in Brooklyn. Tell the kids you see that the stadium was there, and the best baseball that was ever played will always be played there. Just close your eyes, and listen.

They're there...

And all the others.

If Murakami kept seeing the same thing...

Perhaps the clock would say...

Then I found Muji, the Japanese department store group that makes everything you'd want for your home, your office, for outside your home and everything else, and without logos, and simply. Muji makes steel tipped fountain pens, with extra fine nibs, out of plastic and aluminum, the same as in soda cans, but not flimsy, not disposable.

I'm sure this pen is made by Sailor, but it's sold by Muji, without any company ID, & it's my favorite...

But Muji doesn't sell this aluminum type of fountain pen here in the US. They sell this pen...

It's plastic, and it leaks !


I went to Muji's store on West 19th Street over the weekend, and the staff person said they couldn't help, but he gave me this person's business card at Muji, and told me to reach out and let them know...

I have to do that, I will - I hope. And for anyone who cares about inks, these aren't the fanciest - 3 bottles here of Noodler's Ink - but they're fun. And finishing even one bottle will take - well... - years. They're filled to the top!

I can only edit by hand. For nuance, for cadence, for what I want in writing.

Kim Schmahmann - I first met him as a planner at the NYC Department of City Planning (they do planning - for NYC), and he was trained as an architect in South Africa, and he moved to NY to be with his wife as she did her PhD at NYU when I taught there, en route to her career in Boston. Kim also made the journey to Boston (okay, "Cambridge"), learned to make beautiful things from wood beginning without (electric) power tools, and went to making art - ten year projects. The Smithsonian took home Kim's first piece for a place in America, his Bureau of Bureaucracy, a decade worth of transcending function for meaning from beauty.

"Apart-Hate" - it takes your breath away, on what we too often are to each other, on what we can be. In Tucson, Barack Obama said.... "We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us." And it was like the day I realized that racism exists only because, for whatever reasons, we want it to.

"One problem I have encountered," Kim Schmahmann says, "is that people think that the piece is just about apartheid, when of course I am trying to get them to think more generally about how societies create systems that divide people with hate... and apartheid is just one of the many examples of this practice, with the Arizona immigration legislation being a more recent case."

You can look more closely... "We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -- but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others." - President Obama, in Tucson.

The Bible was used to legitimate all the horror of Apartheid

...and to make a place for love... "As Scripture tells us: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day." - President Obama

If you make one piece of art once a decade--more or less--it's hard for the conventional art world to make a place for you. So Kim Schmahmann makes his art hours each day after week after month to years.

I've realized he's making places. For us to go. Places of pilgrimage, where we can take stock of moments in history and how we might have lived in those moments, and how we can live our moments now in treating each other...

A painting, a story, a sculpture, a decade's worth of labor in wood, inlay, sweat and inspiration - places of pilgrimage.

...as in Solar energy. This are heliostats - ala Buckminster Fuller & the structural principle of Tensegrity. Bill has patented and tested his mirror arrays in Vermont the past few years. The energy output is there, the price is cost competitive.

Bill is my oldest friend, from 7th grade. We took the same classes - he did better - and Bill was our high school Valedictorian, a Dartmouth graduate, graduate work first at The University of Iowa then a Rhodes Scholar who finished his Oxford PhD and went off to alleviate hunger and poverty in Africa. Where he lived for a good many years, helped pioneer Internet research, made a business of that, sold it and "retired" back to Vermont. Where he is raising a family and, with the inevitability of a relentless mind, has turned his entire ground floor then his entire yard then a big old industrial space into a business pioneering a particular type of solar mirror.

So, can we talk ? - do YOU need a 1000 gallons of hot water a day? Do you own or run a college, university, private country high school, brewery, food processing company, a resort, hotel, restaurant, spa or any other user of a good deal of hot water ?

Bill is looking for a test site to install 15 heliostats that will produce 1000 gallons of hot water a day. He's one of the brightest, most honest and competent people I've ever met. He'd make the opportunity worth your economic interest.

You can say, "They should make solar energy work better," or you help do that...

email me at rosen@michaelrosenwords. com - if you have an interest, or ideas.

So... Merry Christmas ! I'm at Everyman. With Eric Jesus Grimm and the neighbors. I took photos along 13th Street this morning, On my way.

a community garden...

a sidewalk wish...

and a Savior

someone's fantasy (last night)

someone's nightmare - and we're all alive, till we're not

and a hero. Pee Wee has nothing over Eric, and Everyman - Sam & Sarah and here...

a homage

and Sam's note - here @ Everyman

So, Thank you for being here. Where Christmas cookies are free, where the coffee is better than good, where Eric's 5 hour Holiday playlist is made with thought, where we want to be good, and cared about. And have a place to be. Just like you.

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I'm in Love - a Coffee place & its People...

Michael Rosen http://www.mlrosen.com This place !...

Everyman Espresso, inside the theater lobby... Sam Penix, the honcho you don't want to cross there, is a coffee genius, has the press to prove it, but far more important, has the best coffee I know and has made a loving room in New York for people to sit and be.

Sam suggested having copies of What Else But Home to sell by the coffee counter...

And then Sam did the most extraordinary thing...

The baristas - the coffee dudes - at Everyman not only make the greatest coffee, but they make New York the precious place that it is...

Some of my buddies and heroes there....

Eric Jesus Grim, and click on his name to his blog...

Sarah Harlan: Who "make pictures, that look like paintings, that feel like drawings, that are photographs" - and click on her name to her photo blog...

And a celebrity citing, for real...

So go love them, go love Everyman of them. Buyer remorse guaranteed impossible.

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Carla Cohen has died, and the world is emptier...

Michael Rosen http://www.mlrosen.com I've just heard, in an email from a friend, that Carla Cohen has died. Carla was a co-founder (with Barbara Meade) of the extraordinary Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C - a bookstore you can nearly live in, a bookstore where people love books. A bookstore as bookstores can be. This is a Washington Post obituary about Carla.

Carla was joyous, a force, a person with the hottest burning passion for books I've known. I'm sad to hear of her death, and humbled by her life - respectful of how deeply we can live this life.

Carla became a great champion of What Else But Home. She invited me to a reading at her store in August, 2009, and produced a full house. Carla believed deeply in the need to end poverty in America, and tirelessly promoted my book from this passion. I'm shamelessly including a link to purchasing What Else But Home from Politics & Prose HERE. Because in the business of books, which I know a little and not a lot about, we're always told to include a link to buying a book at Amazon and B&N and the Indy way, but I wanted specifically also Politics & Prose, and nearly always put a link in somewhere.

That's Carla, from last November, with (L to R) William, Phil & Juan. We stopped for lunch with Carla when we were speaking in D.C. Carla INSISTED we come so she could meet some of the guys, she INSISTED to them that they read ! She told them it was okay to stop reading a book if they didn't like it. Just put it down and go to the next book. She lectured me on what I was doing wrong and right. And she was so filled with passion it was hard to disagree with anything she said.

In Politics & Prose, last autumn, Carla featured my book as her specific recommendation:

When I spoke at a bookstore in Philadelphia, two women came up to me, introduced themselves as Carla's sisters, that she insisted they come! When I spoke at a reading in New York, a young woman told me she was Carla's niece, that Carla insisted she come! Carla also insisted to me that President Obama had to read What Else But Home. The woman had vision.

Carla took me by the arm at a book association meeting, brought me to indy bookstore owner after owner. She mentored and pushed and taught me.

So Carla, love and love, appreciation and appreciation.

To David & Aaron, thank you, sadness & joy. To Carla's larger family of relatives and friends, thank you, sadness & joy.

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"elders"

Michael Rosen http://www.mlrosen.com My son Ripton isn't passionate about books. To say the least. Except for Juan, none of our "boys" (now young men), read for pleasure. They read and write text messages, Facebook posts and emails (seemingly less and less). They read the ESPN sports website.

Thom Jones? John Updike? Jhumpa Lahiri ? Nathan Englander? John Cheever? Hardly.

People say it's our Time. Bookstores go out of business. Remaining booksellers aren't selling so many books. Publishers and journals struggle at best, close at worse.

I love to read. My friend John loves to read. Some years ago, talking about Ripton growing older, never touching a book that wasn't assigned and only then reluctantly, we decided to build a book club around my teenage son. Davon, Jon & Evan. Rabbi Charlie used to come before he moved to Jerusalem.

Davon is from Jamaica, originally, and I've written about Davon before. He's one of the main gears at WHEDCo. Jon is from Norway. He used to lie in the snow and wait for the Russians to rumble over the snow covered mountains. When he was with the Norwegian army. Now he's a daddy and works in new media. Evan is younger. He makes watches and other things people consider precious. John builds companies. Charlie builds a better world, or tries to. So does Davon. That's a circle.

No women. Women read good books, short stories and poetry. Far more than men.

We decided to build a safe place for Ripton. What we hoped would be an exciting place. Of ideas and conversation, food and laughter. Clean and ribald. Male. A place for us to be together.

And we are. We read two short stories before each book club meeting. We talk about the stories during a dinner. We used to meet once a month. Now we meet when Ripton comes home from college.

It was very hot when we met two weeks ago. We read Jhumpa Lahiri and Isaac Beshevis Singer. Only Davon and I liked the Singer story. It was about a dybuks and lost worlds. Everyone liked Lahiri. It's easy to like Lahiri.

This is Jon, on the left, and a visiting friend of his, Paal....

This is a bad photo of Ripton, and a good one of our food...

Evan started dipping a napkin into cold water. Most of us followed. It was very hot. That's Evan in the middle, Ripton to the left, John to the right...

Davon took the photos, and I'm apparently not photogenic (??), so he and I aren't in these.

Last summer John, Ripton and I went fishing. I thought I'd put in two of those photos here...

In the nuclear family moved far from grandparents, aunts and uncles, in our mobile society, in our inner cities of urban poor, communities of men mentoring the next generations don't have the place of prominence people speak about when I've heard some speak of their "elders." I'd not quite thought of my friends as "elders" with Ripton, but they do let him into their worlds, share their thoughts and concerns, and it always works.

Our group feels special. Yet it's something we can all make in our lives.

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