My friend Aaron...

was visiting.

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 grew up in Rutland, Vermont.

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.

okay, so that's a little dramatic. This "B" is the Brooklyn Dodgers "B"...

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

This is Professor Loic Wacquant, an "I am a SOCIOLOGIST" Professor at Berkeley - he's very important. A very smart and important scholar. I sent Prof Wacquant an offer of a copy of my book, to perhaps use in his classes. I apparently made the mistake of sending two email letters to him. The dear professor wrote back: "If I didn't respond, obviously is that I have no interest in the work. There are tens of narrative books of this kind. Every author (parent) thinks their book (child) is unique. I don't use narratives in any of my classes, I'm a sociologist, not a story-teller. Regards, LW"

But of course, we all use narratives, we are all storytellers, and sociologists and all other academicians are engaged in a long process of telling stories. Elevating certain stories to an anointed realm of "truth." "Truth" is a story. Isnt' it?

I wrote back to Prof Wacquant, asking about the difference between being a "sociologist" versus a "storyteller," but he told me I was just bothering him.

I wish he would engage in a dialogue. I'd love a dialogue. Students in a course have to accept a certain bullying from a pulpit - you are just story tellers, I'm a scholar; you aren't special, I am special (you think your book and your children are special, but there are tens and tens of you),

But as a person, just a person outside the institution of the Academy (think Erving Goffman) fleeing from dialogue is an invisible way of being like the bully being stood up to and fading away; "I'm melting, I'm melting."

"I am a sociologist - not a storyteller" !! ~ that seems cute, it seems precious, it seems a touch haughty and a bit supercilious. It's sad some "scholars" hide behind self-defined terms to look down on the rest of us out here.

And yes, I am absolutely and completely grateful to the teachers, academics and scholars who have been using What Else But Home in their classes.

And I love you, Loic. Really, I do. Write to me, I miss you. Hugs.

Do that today, if you can, walk the block bound by Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, McKeever Place, and Montgomery Street. My favorite baseball team plays there. They're in Vero Beach now, getting ready for Summer.

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...

I have a passion for fountain pens. They're not disposable in a disposable world. I used to have a passion for fancy pens, gold nibs, beautiful designs. I'd look at them, pass by the window and store displays. Lots of money.

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.

If you go to the Museum of Arts and Design, on Columbus Circle beside Central Park on The Island at the Center of the World... and If you go to the Global Africa Project, open until May 15, 2011, then you'll be one of the graced people to see Kim Schmahman's "Apart-Hate" people divider.

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.