From Touring with the Chinese to Twerking with the Caribbeans –how we roll

by:  Norman J. Olson

back in the beginning of October (2016), our two Chinese friends came to spend some time with us in Maplewood, Minnesota,…  we did some local site seeing, driving to Taylors Falls, for example to walk along the St. Croix river and see the beginning of the fall colors…  we walked around Beaver Lake (across the street from our house) and spent time visiting and working on the yard, cutting brush, and getting ready for winter…  it was very interesting to learn that most of what we consider Chinese food was said by them to be very Americanized with added salt and materials that were prepared differently than they would be in China…  anyway, we traveled with them to California, flying to LAX on October 11 and renting a car…  we drove across the desert from Los Angeles to Las Vegas…

since they like to travel cheaply as we do, we made great traveling companions…  we stayed at Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas for three nights…  our friends are younger than us by a lot and they enjoyed going out in the evening and sleeping in while we did our usual Las Vegas activities with Mary spending some time in the casino and me finding a quiet corner to sit and draw or read…  we saw the sites including walking on the strip and finding an authentic Chinese drink stand on the strip and seeing the seedy street performers downtown…

then we spent a whole day driving to Three Rivers, California where we spent two nights in a nice lodge a few miles from the entrance to Sequoia National Park…  we spent the next day driving up the mountain and walking among the giant Sequoia trees…  Mary and I had been to Sequoia Park last spring but it was really cool to see the amazing giant trees amid the colored foliage of the brush and small trees of autumn, without the snow…  I asked one of the rangers about the drought and he said that while the drought and a beetle infestation was killing a lot of the pine trees, the sequoia trees should be okay unless the drought lasts longer than another 25 years…  as in their long lives, these trees had experienced many climate fluctuations…

the drive up and down the mountain to 7000 feet where the big trees grow is very spectacular with switchbacks, hairpin turns and long vistas looking out across the valley to the jagged soaring snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains…

the next day, we drove back up to the big trees and across Sequoia Park to Kings Canyon National Park…  in Kings Canyon, we found the second largest of all the Sequoia Trees, the General Grant tree…  in a lovely grove of enormous trees…  it was raining lightly and we could see ribbons of mist going through the branches of the trees a hundred and fifty feet up…  and the old trees seemed to be loving the rain…  I felt like I could almost hear them purr, there was such a feeling of calm among the ancient trees in the misty rain…

we then drove down to the Central Valley and stopped at a fruit stand…  driving through groves of citrus and other trees and vegetable fields…  we stayed a night in a nice cheap hotel in Fresno and found a Chinese restaurant that was not very authentic, but we all agreed that it was good…  the next morning after eating waffles at the hotel’s free breakfast, we left for Yosemite…  we spent two nights in a kind of rustic hotel just outside of Yosemite…  we drove into the valley and saw all of the amazing sites of Yosemite, El Capitan, Bridalveil Falls, Half Dome and the other enormous granite cliffs and peaks which make Yosemite such a scenic wonder…  we parked and walked on the paths back into the woods for a closer look at Bridalveil Falls which is an enormously high waterfall with sprays and mists of water coming down to make a small creek…  Yosemite valley is flat and easy to tour by car and with a bit of walking in the woods makes a very nice day for tourists like us…  the next day, we drove back through the valley and then up to Glacier Point where you look down from a three thousand foot granite cliff over the Yosemite valley and out across the surrounding mountains…  it is an enormous and spectacular view…

the next morning, we drove across the Central Valley to Carmel by the Sea just south of Monterrey on the California Pacific coast…  Carmel is maybe the prettiest town in the USA with small but expensive homes going up the hill from a lovely beach…  there is an area of expensive shops and restaurants and we found good Chinese food…  we stayed there two nights…  we drove into Monterey one day and had a wonderful seafood lunch at a fancy restaurant looking out on the bay were we saw a whale arching through the water and had a great meal…  then back at Carmel, we sat in the shade of one of the weird old trees on the beach until the sun dipped into the ocean beyond the foamy surf…  then walking through that lovely town in the warm evening breeze…  it was very nice…

we then drove down the coast through the Big Sur region with its massive cliffs tapering down to the crashing waves of the Pacific…  there were lots of places to stop and take photos and I wandered if the vista had somehow faded from being so often photographed???!!  then after a night in a nice hotel in Lompoc, we drove on past Oxnard, where my brother was during his time in the Navy and across the Los Angeles Megopolis to Riverside where our oldest daughter and her family live…  the next day, when our daughter and her family went to work and school, we drove into Los Angeles to do some site seeing…  we drove through Beverly Hills and Bell Aire, looking at the massive estates of the very rich and wound up on Hollywood Boulevard, just looking around before going back to Riverside…

this was the week before Halloween, and our Chinese friends had to move on, so we said a sad goodbye to them at the Bus station in Riverside…  they were wonderful traveling companions and in spite of our difference in age, we had a terrific time driving around California and Nevada site seeing with them and I hope that like us they enjoyed some of the enormous beauty of this amazing part of the planet…

after a few days watching our grandbaby and a weekend getting ready for Halloween, we had a great Halloween with our grandkids…  then Halloween night, we drove into LA and dropped the car off to catch the red eye back to MSP…  that week we arrived in Maplewood Tuesday morning, spent a few days with our other equally wonderful grandkids in Duluth, Minnesota came home on Friday, had breakfast with our son and his wife on Sunday and on Tuesday, November 8, we got on a flight to Miami…

we spent the night of the 8^th in a cheap hotel by the airport and after a few hours sitting by the pool enjoying a truly lovely evening, warm with that light spicy breeze that you only find in Miami, we retired to our room to watch the election returns…  yikes!!!!

anyway, the next morning, we took the shuttle to the cruise pier and boarded a beautiful ship called the Norwegian Pearl…  the ship is decorated with painted vines and flowers along the bow and on the superstructure and is a largish ship holding  when full some 2400 passengers…  (for comparison, about 80 feet longer and twelve feet wider than the titanic…)  this was a cruise that we had booked a couple weeks before because it looked like fun and the price was right…  it was a theme cruise and the theme was Caribbean music and dancing, so there was a line up of djs and artists in those genres…  we are not great dancers, (too old and fat for one thing) but, we love to meet new people from different backgrounds and in general love music, so there we were, two old fat white folks on a ship full of young black people, mostly from the islands…

we had a wonderful cruise…  we both agreed that it was one of the friendliest cruises we had ever been on and hearing the music and watching the young and fit dance and party was fun…  as usual on a cruise, we spent our two sea days on the Promenade deck drawing and reading…  the weather was gorgeous with temps in the low 80s and a light breeze…  the sea was very calm and this huge ship sailed calmly through the small waves as we sat in the shade and breathed the lovely sea air…  the itinerary included, one day at sea, one day at Ocho Rios and a final day at sea…  so four nights and three full days on the ship…  during the day in Jamaica, there was a huge party on the beach put on by the Caribbean music people with free booze and a huge stage with massive speakers and an all day program of djs, artists and Jamaican instrumentalists…  apparently at Caribbean music parties like this, it is the thing to pass out spray bottles of paint and for the participants to squirt each other, so with all the red paint flying, we were all painted and powdered too…  Mary and I found a picnic table in the shade and read our books while the party rocked on…  the water was lovely and I spent a long time doing the back float hearing the base pounding through the water… my old white polo shirt splotched with red dye is my souvenir…

on the beach as elsewhere, the people were all very friendly and kind to us and the few other oldsters around and we even got a few demonstrations of what we called “the booty dance”…  which seems to involve a species of twerking that sometimes becomes pretty graphically sexual…  at the beach party, this very muscular white guy was on stage with an enormously fat black woman and they were doing the booty dance so energetically, that he wound up holding her up with her legs around his back while they simulated sexual intercourse until they finally tumbled to the stage with the guy flopping on top of this very large woman to the enormous applause and cheering of the audience…

on the way back to the ship, a Jamaican woman talked us into letting her and her friend braid one small braid into my short beard and three into Mary’s equally short hair in exchange for a damp $20 bill…

back in Miami Sunday November 13, 2016…   it took a bit of doing and about twelve hours in the Miami airport to get a flight home, but we were back in Maplewood about 1 a.m. Monday morning, tired and ready to spend some time at home…  the cruise was a lot of fun and the people were so beautiful and kind to us…  it was an altogether amazing experience and I got three nice drawings…  it is still fairly warm in Minnesota with highs in the 40s and low 50s so I had better take advantage of the nice weather to get the rest of my leaves mulched as it is supposed to show on Friday…

Trees

by:  Norman J. Olson

from gigantic trees

laughing softly in misty

California rain

to gnarled cliff edge pines

of Big Sur, trees

follow each other through

the gray

tangles of my brain…

this planet carrying its trees around the sun is my home for now

the palm tree in my daughter’s yard…

the cedar tree in my son’s yard…

the lilac in my other daughter’s yard…

i sometimes think that love looks

something

like trees…  with branches like ink drawings,

tangled and complex

now it is time to mulch the

leaves from my own maple and oak

trees…  i thank “whatever gods

may be” for my luck

and for my trees….

my dad loved trees…  may he rest in

peace…

When Green Fades

When a wife, Snigdha Sarkar Dipa Kills her husband, Rathis Chandra Vhowmic and plays their adultery or sex game with her lover, Kamrul Islam through out the whole night—

When Beauty, a name of a young girl raped and killed by the rapists and her dead body found in the green field where the national flag symbolizes the color of her with the natural beauty ——-

When a competition goes on the high ways and snatches away one hand of Rajib and after struggling some days in the hospital with life dies on the hospital bed, when the other day Najim Uddin run over by the speedy bus in the same case ——

Not only that

When every day at least ten or fifteen people die in the road accidents —–

When people are yet begging from door to door

When today our daily Newspapers publish fifty suspected drug peddlers killed in the gunfights across the country in the last ten days —–

And MPs are advised to buy expensive mobile sets from the govt. fund —–

And we celebrating and broadcasting to be developed or developing one

And that Stock Market falling down regularly, for this depression of the investors losing all the money bring down in the darkness of the night not to move, not to die, though even many died by themselves. People are groping and rushing under the shade of the banyan tree and their eyes fixed on the green fields that mark the national flag —–when and where the farmers are very busy with their cultivation. We always miss the glory of the color, green.

My  Sleeping Cat

O my cat, why are you sleeping

In the morning sun and shade on my roof?

The sun is going to be so hot but

You don’t have the sense of cold or hot

Deep in sleep as though you never slept

You make me think the days when

I was in depth of sleep like you

Having no attention for timetable

After waking from bed

I felt so fresh to the eyes and heart

I am sure you enlightened your eyes for love and care

And it is for the whole night you guarded your surroundings

And did your job burning the eyes as the lover’s red sparking those

O my loving cat, you are my love mate, love is sleep like

Show me the path to go ahead

With the passionate eyes throughout the whole night

Love is peace; love is sleep lying side by side.

In Chain

When I see your face

I can imagine a light

When I reach your home

I can think for rest

When I see the marks on your wrist

I can think for devotion

A sanctuary where I want to be regular to serve

When you make a journey

I can think of the life you led

I always try to struggle with me

To travel from this to that new

But I see myself always in chain

Not to move in the open sky, on the land or water

Always in chain.

Hyphen

I raised my head towards the sky

The sky is so high

Then kept my eyes down to the ground

Where only grass and soil lay vast

To the horizon – the mixing point

The ground and the sky

I found another sign of joy

There goes long and high

A thin branch of a tree

Separated from others seem to dance in the breeze

The leaves spreading a light

A glow to my eyes

Souring higher and surrounding the earth

A shelter to have a rest for joy

I am the branch separated from others

Make my songs and play on my tune

Just at the time the heart to dance

I find myself hidden to the bush

Only birds cry. 

Football, Another Name of Heart

The heart is like a football

You play with

Again the football is like a sun

You burned with

Look before you kick

Don’t try to maze the eyes

You can shoot the ball to the goal post

A source of joy for the audience

A joy for the love I wish you desire

I must be the one of your shooting point target

You play with me

The world will appear then

The new sunny morning with the new dewy scented rose

We both open the door

You, I and the new born one

I like to stick to for ever and for ever

Take a great attention before the kick

Take care dear or get lost.

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh

28/05/2018

—————————–———————————————————————

Secrets

So, mother, like Johannesburg, you cut me in deep, imaginative and raw ways. A cut from you was a project. Thinking of you, staring at you, looking at you, your progress illuminated the world around me. Everything was brighter and so, I was always regaining strength.

The love I had for you was lost on the pages of my journal. Lost (always lost). You laugh and say nothing and it hurts. The bright heights of it. Lying on my back I’ve been draped with a blackening world’s information. When evening comes it is even more poetic than the previous day’s evening. And when I spy the afternoon sun, that great yellow balloon, I am a woman found who dares not speak of the insanity found in her family and whose shell of pain is wet and bitter.

I have lived in chosen exile. On the surface prayer is like a vision, cold is a delight, the silver lining that passes by, salt and air meeting on the wind. In poverty there is always decay, the song of a choirgirl, crystals of light, a graffiti of them. I trace them on my arm, the windows and my palms. What he, the lover does not know won’t kill him like it kills me?

I am slowly destroying myself. I have nowhere to go but down, down, down and there is no one to rescue me, to pull me out from under the dark towards the light. His roses looked like cabbages. Red cabbages, a red song for the mad girl, a flower for my bleeding heart.

The boy I used to play chess with in the park, sit on the grass barefoot, walk to the library with. He doesn’t have a name. His face doesn’t exist in my memory anymore. He has become a dark line, a dark fantasy although I can still hear his voice but it is from far away.

All these affairs of the heart have made me feel strangely creative. They slide through me, teach me, whisper to me in the dark. I hate the dark. I need the light to burn bright even in the middle of the night. I pull sheets over mirrors. And I imagine the lover whose dark hair smelled of rain. The rain of a child’s world. This is my sky, my grass, my rage (I view the world as an Outsider).

Girls are drinking beers in fancy restaurants trying to make conversation. Crystals of light evaporate in winter rain outside my window. Sexuality is really not of the flesh although most people think it is. It is of the mind. It is of the ego. It is intellectual. When is childhood ever at an end? This planet is unstable. I am unstable. I was tangled in an obsession for being a ghostly not of the flesh sexual object. I thought that that would open doors for me to humanity for humanity’s sake. I thought I would be able to hear the chords of the earth’s harmony. It kills me to say this. Madness can be as magnificent as euphoria.

If only my childhood was different. Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath. Robert Lowell. Confessional poetry down a brick lane. Confessional poetry for a coquettish girl. How beautiful and extraordinary those words seem to me now and forever more. When is childhood ever at an end for a writer, years of history and the educating of a young girl’s mind? I saw pictures of a formidable brick wall seeming to close in on me in those affairs of the heart and the mind.

Disjointed, evaporated fragments of the spirit. And every one becoming more and more apparent to me as the long days and the longer nights went by of my late adolescence and early twenties. Everything is disjointed, in fragments, there’s no clarity in what I have written down to me the reader. Everything is a journey. I’ve had enough of feeling this wretched way. Enough of the dead of a hot summer season, a season of fruits challenging me to think and to escape into a voyage in the dark, a sheltered experience, the blue-eyed wonder of the sky, stars falling down, stars in my lover’s eyes pleading with me with a clean perception during the midnight hour, scrutinising me openly with likeminded possibilities like clouds gathering across the sky.

Everything in life is a journey. One must walk the path of inexperience to get to modernity, influence, perception and wisdom. I think a writer, writers like Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Keats, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a poet like Emily Dickinson knew this. Two Muslim girls are standing outside my office window smoking as if their lives depended on it.  I hated the taste and smell of cigarettes when I lived in my hometown before I left for Johannesburg.

I don’t know where the children get the impulse to smoke from these days. At this moment I am concentrating on improving myself. Having a set routine, sleep hygiene, working on not having sleep deprivation, writing in my journal. And I wonder do they think of me, the men, as often as I think of them or do not think of them? The sexual impulse is sacred but I never saw this between a man and a woman, never grew up with it only with the realisation that sin matters.

I couldn’t stand to be happy. When darkness fell upon the city of Johannesburg, I came undone under his fingertips. I didn’t know why I hated myself so. Why certain books changed my life? Why I could only surrender when a man touched me? Love comes with paradise, tears, the explanations, the words, the observations that comes with gravity, the love songs, and it will leave you wanting lying in the dark.

There is no such thing as organic time or a clock. White meringue weddings are for girls, for orchids, for arum lilies, for tea light candles, delicate material like lace (not meant for a wonder guts like me, a tough cookie). I will not appear the same in the photograph as I do in memory. What do children communicate when they laugh, when they smile? Is their world not filled with joy? Why not mine? The faded leaves of grass under school shoes, bubble-gum stuck under a school desk, reading Athol Fugard’s A Road to Mecca, remembering all of these childhood things brings something temporary to the surface. Not tension, not indifference, but a feeling of love for being young and not being in an adult world yet. A feeling of being fearless, so motivated that I got the lead role of an archaeologist (or anthropologist, I forget) in a house play. I don’t know what courage means anymore.

Can you see the fragments now? How disjointed the narrative is? But is it enough? Is it enough to want desire? Sometimes I think that is enough. The sexual transaction can be far removed from being ‘a moveable feast’. Dampness seeps into the lining of my coat as I enter the hotel in Johannesburg (fifteen years ago) with someone else this time. He does not put his hand in the small of my back. He does not offer to buy me a drink. He falls asleep almost immediately as his head hits the pillow. The relationship is over before I know it for sure. They don’t come back to me.

Am I so forlorn? Is youth and wisdom wasted upon me? Maybe they’re seeking much more high maintenance girls. I just wanted someone to understand me. It wasn’t so much the educating part of it that I wanted. Dead writers have taught me that the pinnacle of creative expression is to challenge conventional wisdom always. I’ve surrounded myself, invoking their spirit, reading and rereading lines of their work, succumbing to their world of madness.

The world is not the same for women as it is for men. The role that women plays is still a diminished one in the equilibrium of space and time although there have been women who have been visionaries just as much as men have been. Women have taught by example, led by example just as much as men have but what these women have known is that wisdom comes later rather than sooner. It comes with maturity. Darkness falls and I feel an emptiness inside. I am alone and I’ve finally surrendered to it. I am more in love with love than being in love with someone. I am Eve taken from Adam’s rib. A daughter doing what her mother did and did not do.

Secrets, keeping secrets is a demanding world. And then there is the rural countryside filled with patches of grass, the history of how to grow pomegranates, catch fish, the heritage of ruins, rain pouring down like a ritual taking its place in the hierarchy of the food chain, seasons that come upon us and pass, steps, leaps, stars, human stains, animal stains, blood, shark teeth, a school of fish, whales.

This world is meant for sessions of personal injury, hurt, deep pain, smiling laughter, you calling your daughter darling, the grim existence, and the caged existence of the young poet. I am capable (every young poet is) even though the cigarette smoke’s vapour’s injury starts with a mocking signal. I am not lost. Bold Heaven is pulling at vital me. I am a Romantic as I become more and more curious and the objects around me transfix me. The death of a relationship is in the air like horses in a race to the finish line, an aloe’s sap and tears, mirrors, your reflections, encounters with angels above and angels below on the earth’s alchemic plane as consciousness travels the globe, alongside the dimensions of spirit, the elements of soul. The poems of Ted Hughes is the music that has shaped my nutritious isolation, my night swimming, my eternal waiting, and my frantic, hysterical weeping.

My night swimming comes with its own frequency and rhythm. My limbs take on a life of its own (so poetic, I am guarded against humanity, my imagination, inspiration, the Milky Way, the knowledge of other galaxies, the light of the shy laughter of a couple not far off from me swimming in the dark), suspended between the pull of gravity on earth’s plane and other parallel dimensions. The parallel dimension of my pure flesh and intricate bloodwork, my dreams and goals, the gift of my personal space (that most private area), an arena that so few have viewed.

Daughters do not always become mothers and mothers are not always perfect. They have their flaws. Ordinary mothers. Extraordinary mothers. Put them in a box. Every goddess-mother. I see my mother’s brilliance pick a valuable and beautiful object up and suddenly I’m transported to the room in a mansion. And there I shut Pandora’s Box. Plant a flag there. If only God could hand out a medal for every birth-pang. Every mother has pulled funny faces when she was a child, held a cloud of a helium-filled balloon in her fist by its string before it became a shred, dreamed of a childhood continued when she became a youth in her sleep, as she paged through fashion magazines reading her horoscope not knowing yet that her future was predestined, that she was predestined to be a sexual object on her wedding night, a friend and confidante when she was wooed by her future husband, that her eldest daughter would be a failure, her second a major success and her third child would be a Scout, a quiet, bookish, loner as a boy who suffered from asthma and a beautiful intellectual, funny and sweet, a deeply imaginative-thinker, oh-so-serious who would be charming and artistic, sensitive and understanding as he grew older, and that this introverted leader would be both spiritual and show humility when it was called for in political meetings, a man after Winston Churchill’s and Abraham Lincoln’s own heart.

Betrayal is lethal. Plath a gone girl in young womanhood reaching dazzling heights like me. Live or die. Those were Anne Sexton’s words. Pure. Introspective. Demanding a haunting interpretation. Yet their craft and bittersweet verse still defies terrifying and manipulative electricity, attachment, movement. Clever girls. Mother had daughters who were clever girls. You were no woman in black, mother. I put my suicidal illness inside a jar like a butterfly and leave it there for the moment. I escape into the pages of my journal, those hard lines, the physical, emotional, and mental appetite beckoning.

The landscape changes every day in leaps from green. Once I was in pursuit of Hughes, advancing upon him, closer to the flame in his psychological framework’s psyche, harvesting his cool gaze, that tower, that secret winter. His throne burns me, my guilt flares lap after lap in the Olympic-sized local swimming pool like diamonds in the sky marking the distance to the stairway to Heaven, the ladder to the Milky Way. Hughes sits at my table (I want to say that he should explain himself).

Mice in the kitchen, tails between their legs in the universal-solitary-shape of death after being wounded by the mousetrap, no survival guide for them, escape-route, seductive exit and their whiskers no longer move baffled by the world around them, there’s just an ode to the mute and I begin reading my letter from home that serves to improve the fragile, loved half-lie I’ve been living. Where, when did Pablo Neruda find the time to write twenty love poems and a song of despair?

Hughes is in my life again. His Winter Pollen. I’m staring at his photograph. He comes to me as if in a dream sequence. He is even more handsome than I remembered. I remember going back to the city’s elements. The city of Johannesburg. The watery-prophetic eyes of women and children, decay, dirt, spiritual poverty and that there’s nothing pretty or picturesque about the pain of the mind. It can be more acute than the pain of the body. Johannesburg to me is a kind of Hemingway Paris. A psychological construct made up of childhood dialogue, the female writer who speaks in code, the young women who would slip away in the early hours of the morning arm-in-arm with their dream man of the night after a nightclub closed.

Johannesburg was a Freedom Land’s anchor, a feast where the abnormal became normal, running with scissors, poetry in my twenties, knives, guns in the air. Sacrifice is not effortless. Midnight is but a voyage into the goal of a dream. Laughter keeps me alive. I seem to have been born with this intuition. Even now Johannesburg makes me think of the stale smoke of a cigarette and men who have moustaches. Boats have become arks. Girls have become quiet women. Here there are no ducks in the park in their own world of silence marking time with their song.

My sister adores her reflection, her face is a lake, the face of a scholarship girl. I watch her swallow shiny things, flicker, go up in flames, rise towards truth in the flesh and the spirit, her celestial madness and I ask myself does she never feel fear or vulnerable, does she never meditate on the sun only on our silence. She was a pianist when she was younger, tap-tap-tapping the clouds of the keys.

I can only survive with the memory of my Johannesburg. I can no longer kill the sirens with their elegant-shapes. The sirens who slit their wrists, jump off bridges, leave the car running, and hang themselves. They’re becoming as rare as the rainforest, pilgrims. Perhaps they were too pure for this world, the heat of their sensitivity could not withstand any thing, withstand a pilgrimage, listening to the noise in a glitter-ball-world, arrows of ballads flying through the air landing at their feet like dew, sounding like a symphony or Beethoven.

Every dress, every heel, silk stockings, perfume is a gift but who will receive them? Daughters? Orphans? The Salvation Army? A fete’s jumble sale? Is it for a wedding, a baby’s christening? Beautiful women become ghosts of themselves like leaves. Now, weaving delicious spice sinking inside a curry-pot, (wet masala, mother-in-law, ginger and garlic, turmeric, fragrant curry leaves), I concentrate on the bowl, open my mouth wide to taste.

Jessica

and the fog only a dream

high into the sky

not even a sniffle