The confessions of a bus rider (4)

The bridges of Armstrong County or how to persuade your Republican representative to fund public transportation

After the most recent pre-election campaign I realized -like this was not common knowledge already, noted Nim - that Republicans do not like taxes. Or so they say… To be more precise, they oppose both taxation and centralization. So, to write a republican and ask them to establish a dedicated state fund for public transportation in Pennsylvania, because that would raise two issues he (or she) likes to oppose (or at best avoid discussion). One issue is revenue –more taxes, more fees? The other is redistribution of funds (who will get what) therefore centralization. So instead of asking for dedicated funding, what I'd like to ask them (the Republicans) is to reduce taxes. Yes, you read it well: Reduce Taxes. More specific: reduce state taxes. Give each county the ability to re-direct that potential revenue towards whatever that particular county needs more. And if you do look at the numbers, it may even make sense…

For example, when the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission had to vote recently on a new "band-aid" funding solution for the Port Authority of Allegheny County, 22 of the 49 commissioners present decided to oppose it. For example two out of the three Armstrong County commissioners present voted nay. So if it were up to Armstrong County the funding solution as pernicious and temporary as it was, it'd fail. But if you listen to their point, you cannot but nod in agreement. They too have roads and bridges in dire need for upgrades and repairs and when some extra money is available at state level, what does the state do? Patching public transportation budgets in Allegheny County.

It does not seem fair, does it? said Yuri

Well, to be fair, if one uses the 2000 Census numbers and a median 3.3% state tax (excludes unemployment contribution)applied to each median income to figure out each county's contribution to PA revenue from payroll (1) taxes only, it results that Allegheny County's contribution is about $651,783,921 and Armstrong County's is $25,563,236 (2). (And these numbers do not even consider all other contributions such as business taxes, tobacco & alcohol fees, sales taxes etc. ) So what if we wouldn't pay any state taxes from our incomes?
This means the Port Authority's budget shortfall is about 7.2% of what we pay in state taxes. And why we ask to pay less in state taxes, so we could pay more towards local projects without paying more taxes. Same for other taxes the county businesses do pay to
wards the state budget - instate of increasing them, just lower the percentage that goes to the state coffers so more can get to local projects. As for Armstrong county, they shall finance their bridge and road projects from their own residents revenues - after all it is only fair...

Or not? asked Anais -after all this is one state we all live in.

Yeah, but I ride the bus in Pittsburgh and I could not care less about the crumbling bridges of Armstrong County.(Annamari)

Notes:
(1) adjusted gross earnings for individuals
(2) these are very rough estimates of the actual tax contributions that will make most accountants cringe. But they do reflect an actual ratio ... In Pennsylvania the
 counties in major urban metro area generate significantly more tax revenue than rural areas.

Sources:
@lndaley  reports from Dec.13 SPC comission meeting
Census data for Allegheny and Armstrong Counties from :
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/42/42003lk.html
respective : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/42/42005lk.html

the meaning of things?

Forty days had passed since the death of our dearest friend, almost six weeks. Two weeks since I moved here and started my new job at the Library.


I found the living accommodations very suitable –your friend is even nicer that I was expecting it. And yes, my job at the library keeps me very busy. To my surprise I find it captivating, it is much more about it than re-shelving the books and helping with the new catalogs. Next year I may be the one leading the writing program for young writers.  You may tell Annamari not to worry; I try to accomplish meaningful things.


Surprisingly, the more I get involved into all these noteworthy activities, the more I fall apart from the real meaning of things. This is why I was unable to write poetry lately. The more I do, the less I have something to tell. Isn’t that strange ? (Of course, you shall not mention this to Annamari).


As always,


Anaïs

Gifts: and alphabet letters according to...

Yuri:
Achievement culture:
The culture of self-appointed gods.
Annamari:
Business education (American style):
To go global with a company that has not started doing business locally yet.
Nim:
Civility:
The behavior exhibited by our artificial alter-ego.
Anaïs:
Destiny (acceptance): to belong, humbly
Mona:
Freecycle:
Currency free trade market based on one's desire of objects another has but does not want any longer.

The blog author:
Grace (religious):
A gift of love from friends and family.


and a graceful gift is a gift that gifts beyond the original intention, such as
Yuri: One Laptop Per Child
Mona: Autism Romania
Annamari : Invisible Children
Nim: Color Online Book Donation
Anaïs: the Book of Hopes and Dreams

Foreword

June 24; shattered.
The evening Ieronim’s body fell for the first time.
He was raised. And his body kept on falling ...

I turned as the sound of breaking glass startled me. Nim’s body collapsing along with the shattered crystal crumbles of what was once my praised Riedel & Schott Zwiesel wine set. His bones made a dry crackling noise as suddenly they were also crumbling glass and his flesh seemed to give away under its own weigh. With a puzzled look on his face he released a low, gurgling sound (He was trying to say sorry). As Yuri rushed to stop the fall, his chair resonant crush on the wood floors like parched foliage crushed by jackboots.

Few moments before, I was talking with Yuri and Annamari about the possibility of recession proof investments; we were trying to help with one of her papers, one she had good chances to publish in a specialty journal. Bored by our discussion, our two “English majors” started taking the dirty dishes to the kitchen. This was by now routine: since Annamari started to join us during the weekly dinners, Nim started to help with the dishes pretending our business talk bored him. Yuri claimed that the real reason was that he could not stand Annamari. (I think that he was becoming keen on Anaïs).

Shortly, he retrieved his balance ; his voice and quirky sense of humor:
" How are you feeling"
"Featherlight. I am free now - Hieronymus, the angel, has fallen"

Nim's Christmas

In this sunless city in North America winter is one cloudy, smoggy season. Nim lies in bed covered only by his memories of childhood with all his strength drained by his effort to breathe in the wintry dampness. Memories of his mother and older sisters, plump healthy women, Rubens like beauties puttering in the kitchen. Memories of his father , the wine flows from barrels carelessly and the house opens for villagers and distant relations or old friends that came from afar to visit once a year in December. (His father was the village priest and wine was never in shortage for even more wine bottles would be received during all year longs’ services he’d have to celebrate; baptisms and funerals and memorial services). … He’d use to rush home from school so he can breathe deeply all the smells of December. He loved to hide in the damp basement among smoked meats and sauerkraut and the wine barrels and the jars full of pickled tomatoes and peppers. He’d hide in the basement and read books at the light of an old oil lamp, books about other boys that read books hidden in their attic.


* Nim can follow dear Anaïs from the comfort of pillows stacked on top of his bed. She busies herself with housework (since chemo is draining most of his strength, his friends are taking turns helping with housekeeping lately.) In his paroxysmic state he can hear the sound made by her plain, large clothing hitting the furniture; the sharp sibilant sound of her long skirt dragged on the floors, almost covering her silent footsteps. He raises his hands as to cover his ears with his arms. Nim is drowning within the muffled pillows and dozes off. But the thought, that she takes so much trouble to dress a lot plainer when she comes to visit alone, awakes him. As she is the woman who can stray me away from the righteous path, as there was a woman that could…He smiles.

“You are the apple of my eye, not the one of my sin”
“You were saying?”

She sits by him. Her hands hide in the large sleeves of her purple cloak, not precisely a chador for she never wore one, but equally shapeless and dull as it fades into its own shadow. Her hair is completely hidden under the scarf, her childish features cut abruptly, the round alizarin mouth looks almost severe. But today is a bad day. Smells make him sick – even her perfume. Not the light scent of rose and lilies, but the heaviness of sandalwood. The fragrant sandalwood reeks painfully his swollen airways as the sniffles start to bother him again. “Breathless again, I’m afraid. My skin is blue violets, my chest will crush under purple carnations, the crimson rain… “
She opens the window:
“It smells like winter”
“It smells like Christmas”


* Nim’s dream memories are usually blind. The Ignat is the smell of fresh blood and burning hairs. Saint Nicholas preserves the sweet smell of oranges and chocolate, fresh baked cookies. “And Christmas, how does it smell? “ she asks …Oh well, Christmas… Too many smells are melting into each other, he finds hard to peel their remembrances from his cortex.
Was it the sour smell of fresh dough?
Meat cabbage rolls?
The sour crude oil tang slinking into the homemade wine from the tar treated barrels ?
Freshly smoked pork?
Nim shuts his eyes. Christmas used to smell like his playmates. They came along each year, steadfastly, as he decided that the time was just good to go caroling. A handful of young boys cutting through the unsullied snow in the cold, damp smell of winter. They walked side by side laughing and singing, and when they opened their rounded, childish mouths, from the red delicious apple exhaled the smell of freshly baked sweets so to warm their frozen fingers.


* He drowns again in the fresh smell of whitewashed bed linen and drifts to a quiet sleep under her small damp hand as she touches his feverish forehead cooling it off.

Readwritepoem #94

We often misrepresent the devil
paint him dark(red)
like a rust stained angel of some sort…

when the devil was merely tinged
by a standard deviation (or two)
from redemption.

Now you believe that you must stay
right in the middle
no matter what stats, hypothesis ,interpretation …

for you fear God, as He’ll measure all justly
one step away from the path and you fall
no exception.

Once you taught yourself to ignore variances
like evil,
feeling safe beyond this blindness to color

for the Devil to loom closer. A made-up angel
you follow (now) in all faith.
See: you forgot it was just a matter of shade
When you made yourself blind to your color.

for the image prompt : Read Write Poem #94

are you ready for diversity? (G-20 is coming to town)

Pittsburgh does surprise, it is true, for beyond his yuppie appearance, it is a hub for culture, higher education and top research. However, the yuppie appearance is rooted in a much deeper reality for your average "Picsburgher" had lived in the area for generations and is a little bigot, racially biased and dwells on the border between a moderate conservative and a moderate liberal. Not to mention that his average age is above the average US age and that it is still has, among all cities of its size, the lowest immigrant population. Thus big demonstrations and organized protests are quite uncommon for this city, and the protesters that the G-20 summit brought along are quite a reason to worry for the locals. as one of my co-workers noted" If they could not handle the Super Bowl , why did they imagine that they could handle a G-20 summit"?

So, on one side the city has to allow protestants -though a few Greenpeace members are already in jail- and on the other side it is totally unprepared to face the protests. And I do not mean logistics, I mean mentality.

for as my Earthwalking friend notes:

"the only protests left in this tamed and polymerized world are full of crazy anarchists and undercover policemen , disguised as members of the left. But, among them, there are serious resolute activists taking big chances. The protesting groups represent a diversity of opinions, including those belonging to Thomas Merton, the most peaceful among Americans, the ones who organized the 2005 protest against the war in Irak.[...]

Leftists from all over the world are hosted nowadays in your average american home , some of them are even sleeping in churches, in sleeping bags"

I spoke about her post with two of my neighbors and they did agree that some of the protesters are very serious and they do have a point to make, however their attitudes are no less panicky. On one side, they do not have the experience of such events. On the other side, they are just expressing the worries of the average American, worries voiced during a school discussion on the impact of the Patriot Act on the average citizen's right to privacy. We do voice our freedom, but we are also scared that the most unreasonable among us are free as well.Many more people seemed more scared of losing their lives than they were of losing their freedom, not knowing that to lose your freedom can be worse than losing your life...

The issue raised by the need to deal with Factions, especially the most violent among them, is as old as the United States itself, maybe older. In his 1787 article (the Federalist #10), James Madison stresses the importance of factions for democracy. "Liberty is to faction what air is to fire". Beautiful metaphor -- Factions , like fire, are as necessary to our life as liberty or air is. For fire is the source of progress and we could not imagine our life without . But fire can also be a source of pain, destruction and death. And so are factions-they stand for our individuality, for our beliefs , our passions that move us forward but also push us to destruction.

...and from Shakespeare to Iris Murdoch

Nim:

That which was the source for my a-ha moment I call art. And this is why I will call it art even if it is a popular movie. Even if the "elite" will label it as commercial, as mere entertainment.

Iris Murdoch considers art to be a path out of Plato's cave. Art brings us closer to the forms. Art is one of the bearers of truth (1). Reading of her stories I had been awakened to the truth beyond many other stories: some were about me, some were about ordinary people that passed through my life and some were just stories I read long ago and could not really understand until Iris Murdoch.

Dame Iris Murdoch is, of course, at best, controversial. She sets her standards high: there are Plato, Shakespeare... And she sets them in the open: a Shakespearean plot is present explicitly in most of her novels. In Bruno's Dream, two women that are close one to another, two sisters exchange places. One starts as the attractive beauty, the one that gains the passerby's attention. The other hides hers under a vail of (apparently) bitter sadness. And the two men are helpless, they can only fall in love with one, and than the other...(2)

However, Shakespeare is too much a poet, whilst Murdoch is too much of a philosopher. With time her style becomes more rigid, dry and her characters: caricatures of ideas and symbolism, much more like the ones that play in philosophical dialogues. In Bruno's Dream the molden, rotting, smelly house is a symbol of Bruno's decrepit body, a reminder of the sickness, the condition that leads us all to dead. But as symbol the description ceases to be veridical, real (3).Murdoch is correct when points that repetition, conceptualization, sound arguments and a reason belong more in the work of the philosopher than in that of the writer. The story more like life itself only reveals the truth by veiling it, I'd say.

But, in spite of these shortfalls I have to humble myself whilst reading her books. Bruno with his spiders and his obsessions is as real as you and me. The men as helpless as children when confronted by their own passions are very well sketched. She is equally convincing when drawing the black Eros as the source of major art. As for Charles Arrowby , well he is the work of a master. And the Sea, the Sea is, to quote Sam Jordison ,"at least as ludicrous as it is brilliant" (4)

I wonder how many of us had not been able to identify with at least one of her books, one of her characters? For me it is still The Bell with the controlling husband , and Michael whom learned too late that even imperfect love is love to be given and accepted, and I like Dora do look sometimes back with a certain wonder but also a sense of satisfaction because I had survived.

Anaïs:

If it is beautiful it is art. One can recognize God in

the beauty of his creation ,

the beauty we recreate through art.

Notes:

(1)Another path is philosophy. And another is goodness, but "the good are unimaginable",(the Sea, the Sea , p.441)us

Thus they pass among us unknown (see also Tolstoy: Father Sergei). and there is also religion, but in my opinion this is

the most personal path of all.

(2) see also Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

(3) symbolic but yet real is, for example, the pine forest in Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux

(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/10/iris-murdoch-sea-booker

tu te rapelle...(you remember...)

"Marjane: Mamie, tu sens tojours bon. Comment tu fais?
Mamie: Mais tu vois, je cueille des fleurs de jasmin chaque matin et quand je m'habille je les glisse dans mon soutien gorge. Et comme ça, je sent toujours bon"
Marjane:Oh!C'est super" 

nostalgic memories of childhood-from Persepolis, the movie

a movie for anyone that had ever wondered how the world looks beyond narrow borders...a movie full of history, love and memories of jasmine...

The place where you belong (draft)

May is almost half over and the weather is still gray , the sky heavy of rainclouds. And our Anaïs kept quiet for days in the state of dark humour that resulted from the argument she had with some people in school, the one about fundamentalists and religions. She tried, in vain to point that fundamentalism is not specific to Islam but it taints each and every religion, but her words bounced from some people as they bounced of the hallway's walls. Her words lost in an echo....

"They do tolerate us, it is true, but they do not accept us ...How could I..."
"You cannot change their ideas once they decided to embrace their biases. And you should not beg or argue for acceptance, it is nothing wrong with whom you are and what you believe in"
"But, Nim, it pains me that their ignorance will do us so much injustice. And now I ask myself why did I travel so far from my dear ones if I still have to pretend to be someone I am not? "
"Ignorance will always cause injustice and blind is the one that chooses not to see.

Why? that is for you to answer yourself , it is only up to you to accept what you feel and believe. Yes, I know it's yet another cliché, another platitude. But, just look at me...

I was the only son and my father, the priest, was an important person in the village. Not because what he was, but because in each village the priest was the important person...I had my future made for me : spoiled as a child, my way through college planned and paid and a position which was more than a job waiting for me at home. All they asked from me was the least effort: You just have to study well enough to graduate from college. You just have to try to be a decent husband and father. The college, the degree did not matter much. And, since I had always been a good child and a good son they never worried that, the one I loved and chose to marry would not be proper for a wife and mother. Yes, I was a good son. And my father was a good man, his biggest sin was to get drunk from times to times and eat pork during lent. He hid in the basement and worried that "his flock" will find him out and know his weaknesses. He never suspected that they worried more about him finding out that they knew it. It was a small village after all...

But for me, to be what I felt and love what I loved and still live among them, it was unacceptable. So I chose to never return and to move so far away that the rumors of my loves and the shadows of my feelings would never travel back home. I always thought that, if my mother would have found out, she'd die of shame. Fortunately, it was not unusual for young people to escape to the west back then for other reasons than mine, reasons my parents understood and accepted.


So look at me know: am I accepted, do I belong, did I love how I felt? No. Haven't I judged them for not accepting me, and judged them more than once? But it was I who failed...And my mother who knew that it will be so much harder among strangers. I left and she cried :Why do you think you'd rather belong among strangers more than you belong here where it is home?"

Life is full of tiny cute miracles (1)

“Life is full of tiny cute miracles like yellow butterflies”
“Or like unexpected flowers blooming (I read this somewhere)”
“ Did you know that if somebody touches your ear with his lips you could hear his soul?”
“ Do you think so?”
“ I know so.”
“How come?”
“Because I believe it. (But not as in ‘I have an opinion about it’, I have faith…)”
“Ok. Than come closer …can you hear it?”
“No.”
“See!”
“It has to be done with the right intent. Nibbling my ear does not count.”
“ I guess I haven’t been given your faith”
“Faith is not given. Faith is demanded. To believe is an action…”
“Yes”
“ Than faith is something you ask and take. It’s a choice. Same for love”
“You can not choose to fall in love. That just happens”
“True. But to fall in love is not same as to love. To love is an action. So you get a choice: to love or not to love…”
“So you can love anyone than? Any person that is, ‘cause is your choice”
“ I guess. If you’re God or a saint. In theory, you can go to a store and buy any clothes you want. But you don’t because what you do actually buy has to fit your size, your pocket, your taste…”
“You trivialize love. People are not clothes”
“Not as simple as fashion, I admit. But don’t they come in different colors and sizes, aren’t they used depending on occasion and taste?”
“That’s silly”
“So it is. So it is”

(1)this post is a comment to this one: " O minciuna repetata..."

Readwritepoem #56 (an almost Anaïs poem for Nim)

To my community organizer

Part 1

Even the prophet shouts:

"They have become a burden to me:

I am weary of bearing them." [1]

You just bow , patch your pain with a little smile

as the poor man mends to his clothes.

We are all beggars knocking at your door

with dull eyes we creep in our gray dusty rugs.

You call us in to take from yours

teach us to walk again with poise

as laments of the mendicant are forgotten.

(but as we walk away, behind, you stumble.)

Part 2

There were servants in the house of your father:

to take your order was their only purpose,

you thought in your youth as you rode naked

the horse into the highest tide. Lighter than water

you were, blithely crossing the streets and the markets ,unaware

that it was your body the poet once loved, for:

"The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more

You linger to see his back , and the back of his neck and shoulder-side" [2]

Part 3

« Muss es sein? Es muss sein. » [3]
Blitheness has gone as our years weigh your neck down to the ground and your back cowers ("did not have to be your burden" he once said) and all we remember is an old man.
The mothers that hold hope now will not sing your beauty but loved you'll be no less for this (heavy) choice you made.

Notes:

[1] Isaiah 1:14

[2] Walt Whitman - from I Sing the Body Electric ( a 2005 Signet Edition with a Billy Collins foreword). And I suppose I do not need to remind you Whitman was gay so there is a secondary connotation for this song ...

[3] The motif for Beethoven’s fourth movement of the last quartet, Opus 135 is also the leitmotif for Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being -translation (mine): 'Must it be? It must be'

[4] I started to write about the unnamed community organizer some time ago when it had been implied that the result of material sacrifices, dedication and generozity of some thousands or more Americans (that I do admire) is kinda of light occupation, more of a hobby. So I mainly wanted to stress that there is plenty of weigh and seriousness in it.

Now, the first part of this poem is about a real person (but does his name matter?), however for the sake of the prompt I tried to let my imagination fly a little so :

did he rode once a horse (naked) into some tsunami sized wave? Probably not. And if he did, I wasn't there to see it...

And also since my two previous posts are again about my five characters , this poem is almost like the one Anaïs wrote about Nim (thus the note on Whitman).

Nim on Christmas

Today
I posted a note, under
“not to forget”:
-my beloved is blue violets-
so frail I’m afraid
his airways will crush under
crimson rain, purple carnations
and breathless he’ll die from my hands.

When Nim found the poem ( a note flew out of her notebook ) all he could think was:
“Anaïs , Anaïs “
This sunless season, all his strength draining by its effort to breathe in the wintry dampness as he lies covered by only his memories of childhood. His mother and sisters, plump healthy women, Rubens like beauties will putter in the kitchen while his father will let the wine flow from barrels careless. (He was the priest and wine was never in shortage for even more wine bottles would be received during all year longs’ services he’d have to celebrate – all baptisms and funerals and memorial services).
His dream memories are blind. Ignatul is only remembered for the smell of fresh blood and burning hairs. Saint Nicholas always smelled sweet as oranges and chocolate hidden in his boots and Christmas –so many smells melting into each other that he found hard to peel their remembrances from his cortex … He’d use to rush home from school so he can breathe deeply all the smells of December. He loved to hide in the damp basement among smoked meats and sauerkraut and the wine barrels and jars full of pickled tomatoes and peppers.

But today strong smells made him sick – even her perfume. Not the rose or the lily but the heaviness of sandalwood. Heavy smells weigh on him and make him dizzy and nauseated. Today he has to hide from them withing his freshly scrubbed sheets and their wintry dampness...


PS: because of a mauve post , though the author also notices the beauty of the color in the likes of royal purple or the perfect balance between blue and red (the yin and the yang)
PPS: and I jumped on the Monday Poetry Train ( a little late)

"Thalassa! Thalassa!"

…the sea! the sea! cried the Greek warriors after they spent weeks, no, months searching their way back through foreign lands, enduring many hardships.

The land ! The land! Shouted the watchman at the first sight of the foreign continent hundred years of ago, from the ship that searched its way through storms and dead calm for months, or was it years?

Money !Money! cried Annamari when she saw her scholarship funds in her account at the University, after a month and a half of hardship and fighting with the bureaucracy. For the hardships of our life are not in the battles we fight on foreign lands, or in the sailing of foreign seas searching for new continents (after all there are no more continents to be discovered). The hardships of modern life are in the small unnerving events of every day; a scholarship that takes to long to be deposited in your student account, a computer that broke, a bus that is late, the misery of a cold day: "I had been sick as a dog ", she'd say.

"Yes, Anaïs, this is how we die today, slowly, with the miseries of each and every day" said Nim.

"But there is hope, shouted Anaïs, there is faith and there is love".

Anaïs on Annamari

Annamari is my one friend that gets upset about my love dream, she calls my Nim a figment of my imagination, for she does not think much about him. But I think I guessed him right and I think that there is a man to be loved.
We often disagree Annamari and I. She calls herself pragmatic: she will not allow herself a foolish love. One should know where her interests are since no woman had benefited from such a foolish love before. It will break your heart and kill your laughter. This is how she speaks about love and life.
But you should not think that she is without ideals. She believes that women should have equal rights and incomes; that most children born with a disability can succeed and they have the right to live a normal life; that there should not be social classes and hungry people. She tends to think that anybody can become a millionaire.
We all love her keenness. She is full of energy, of all the sun that blessed her childhoods. She reaped the love of her family, the cheerfulness of her friends, the admiration of her teachers.
And I loved her the day of the day of the trip to this Romanian Orthodox Monastery sixty miles north of the city. The four of us in the car: Mona, Yuri driving, Annamari and I, chattering about Sci-Fi books. She was paying close attention, her look intense, charming as a four year old captured by the mastery of finger painting. While she hadn’t read as much fiction as we did, she always showed a genuine interest for knowledge, points of view to be remembered, details to be noted and events that are worth mentioning. She wanted to borrow some Ray Bradbury books, since a friend of hers, a boy at her university, liked him and spoke greatly abut Bradbury. But as we chattered and chattered, Mona mentioned the Handmaid’s Tale. The dystopian novels. Yuri and Mona became more serious in their discussion, the skewed ideology that governs these ‘perfect’ worlds was not a genre but part of their past.
Always eager to impress Mona, Annamari recalled how she read once, as a child, a dystopian novel about books and their importance, a novel named after the papers’ burning temperature.
“Oh, but that is Bradbury’s 451 Fahrenheit. So you read it after all”
“I guess I did”, she said and blushed. She said nothing until we got home. Her self-conscious gaucheness in front of Mona, was one of the few things that shadowed her gaiety.
So was Annamari and all the treasures she held inside under the chaotic memories of childhood games and laughter.

Anaïs on Ieronim (Nim)

“The only quality Nim brought to this small group of friends was his ability to listen. Mona and Yuri, they are good people, but they are so caught in their busyness that they even forget to listen to themselves. This is why they needed him, they needed somebody that will listen, just listen. For Nim rarely did more than listen to you, he tried not to give advice or judge your actions. Seldom, when he said something, he always seemed to understand better then you did, though those were your words and actions you were talking about.
Nim was nothing more than a librarian, a useless job if you ask Annamari, for she can not understand their purpose. For me, they are the keepers of the books, the ones meant to protect them against a new Savonarola and his maddened sacrifices. When I told this to Nim, he laughed, but I knew he approved, for his only wisdom came from listening to books as much as he was listening to people".

I had not knew about the treasure of Anaïs , until the day that Mona took us all, like children, for a walk to the park...It was one of those parks with more routes for cars than walking trails and picnic shelters all over.
We stopped for a short time to feed the ducks and utter all those oh’s and ah of city dwellers when a poor groundhog ventured too close.
Anaïs stood apart, rapt by the view of an old cage and a poor peacock with his bald tail. An old captive, all alone, feeble image of his own past beauty.
It was soon after the trip to the park (Nim was there as well), that I caught the trace of this poem on her book with shopping lists and to do’s.

Around you, I am the peacock
parading my feathered beauty
just to see you gaze
and savor your look as soft silk hugging me.

Anaïs is our molten gold. Anaïs , Mona's houseguest as much as she was her housekeeper. She has no ornaments. Too boney to be called pretty. Too tall to be called petite, but not tall enough to be called “grande”. Long, dark brown hair curled beyond her delicate, childlike, almost perfectly round ears. Anaïs is skinny, almost breastless, like a child woman, but she is not frail. She is rugged, dark skinned, strong enough to broke a bone with her bear hands. Her childlike ears, only, are delicate, and there is the gentle way she looks at you, at people and things the same, molten gold flowing in her brown eyes. And, if anyone could chop vegetable with grace that is Anaïs . We all agree, this is Anaïs , beauty beyond ornaments, graceful simplicity, when cooking and washing dishes as well as when reading poetry...