"This Autumn Sky above you now is a roof, an ever-expanding roof. A deep blue roof darkening as it loses its Sun at evening. If you seek its protection it will always give you protection. The Sky, whose rim, like the edge of a metal goblet which, if struck with a spoon, will echo with a voice like the voice of that long-ago bell, was once your proper roof. It was a roof whose protection at some point you abandoned. You had sworn you would never abandon it. And lo and behold, once you did abandon it, then you swore that you had never taken such an oath. But no one was near enough to hear your denial."

fire      In 1976 I was twenty two years old. It was the year of our American Bicentennial. I had come back home and I was living in my parents’ house on 21st Street, where I’d grown up. I had turned my old bedroom into a writer’s studio, and I was working on a collection of short stories. In the summer I washed and waxed cars, and in the winter I just tried to get by. A large group of friends had gathered around me. Some of them were my childhood friends who were still in college, some were just starting out with their first jobs. Some were new friends who had recently moved into the neighborhood. Others were friends of friends who would pull up in their cars and hang out for an hour or two. The front porch and pavement might have ten or even twenty young people hanging out on any given night. We had teenagers from the neighborhood who’d stop by for a while before moving on. Even some young school kids, from a few houses down, might be popping in and out. It was multi-generational. Later in the night, some of us, the ones who were closest, would go to my back yard. We had a big sycamore tree in our back yard. Our tree’s branches hung over the neighbor’s yard on one side, and over the neighbor’s yard on the other side. Years ago my Dad had put flagstone down all around the tree because grass would never grow there. It made a sort of patio, and we had chairs and ashtrays arranged on the flagstone under the tree, and some of the best times I ever had were hanging out with my friends under that tree late into the night. 

In the early 70’s a new technological innovation had arrived which changed all our lives. They called them disposable lighters. The brand name was “Bic.” A Bic was a disposable lighter. You’d buy it, use it, toss it. None of us ever carried the old school sort of lighters which old men had, the kind you have to fill up with butane. We were always looking around for matches. But with the Bic disposable lighter all that changed. You had instant fire, always on tap. It was great. The only problem was that it was easy to borrow a Bic and then innocently, without even meaning to do it, slip the Bic into your pocket. Sooner or later somebody's saying, “Hey who’s got my Bic!” You reach in your pocket and there it is, and you have to fess up and hand it over. Sometimes you might be sitting there and all you’re doing is flicking your Bic, striking it over and over, watching the flame shoot up and then die down. Bics became great favorites at 70’s rock concerts when thousands of people all together would hold up their Bics and light them. And like I said, once the fire was gone from your Bic you’d toss it and get another. It was America in a nutshell. Those were good nights under the big tree with my old friends, hanging out and solving all life’s problems, city night sky waving between the branches, maybe a couple stars still peeking through, and you couldn’t even see the lights in the street out front because you were safe in a backyard patch of grass with a wrought iron fence and a sheltering tree overhead. When that summer was over I left the neighborhood and went to Jerusalem. Made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When I came back nothing was the same. The neighborhood wasn't the same, I wasn't the same. Which is to be expected. Show me something that doesn't change.

Not far from the walls of Old Jerusalem, back down what they call the Jericho Road, is a small garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, famous for its ancient olive trees, and as the place where Christ prayed before he was taken away by the soldiers. When I was a child I had a picture of Christ praying in Gethsemane. He was in so much pain, it was terrible. Sometimes I think his pain when praying in Gethsemane was worse than his pain on the cross. I wish now I'd gone in there. But two young men were sitting by the entrance to the garden and they both gave me nasty looks. I passed by the garden and entered through the gates of the ancient city, Old Jerusalem. No one cheered but that didn't matter. They rarely do. Conquerors ride in and conquerors ride out. It's the story of Jerusalem. The Israelis had half-tracks patrolling the streets. A young Arab asked if he could borrow my pen, and when I asked for it back he told me he could easily cut my throat and disappear into the crowd. Then he returned it. I walked through narrow empty back streets where tiny churches suddenly appeared. Men of great wisdom must live in this place. I had a question. I'd come all this way to ask this question. Maybe here, at last, in Jerusalem, someone could answer my question. It had something to do with the Messiah. A group of children followed me, begging for coins. It was hard to shake them off. Afterwards I made the mistake, on someone’s recommendation, of visiting a museum not far from Old Jerusalem which is called the Yad Vashem. It’s the Israeli memorial to those who suffered the Nazi Holocaust. Over the doors are words like these, “Remembrance Is Salvation.” But after going through the Yad Vashem, I just wanted to get out of Dodge. The suffering was unbearable. What we humans do to one another boggles the mind. My best friend from college had written me a letter. He had a place on the beach in Hawaii. He said I could get work and live there. So I left Jerusalem and took a bus down through the deep desert, the Southern Negev, bordering the Sinai where Moses kept his people for forty years.

At the bottom of the desert is a shipping city called Eilat. I hoped to get work on a merchant marine ship heading east to Japan. Eilat was once called King Solomon’s Mines, famous for its copper. When I was nineteen I had spent a month in the American Southwest desert, Big Bend National Park. It's a place full of color and life, with rock formations straight from the bottom of the sea. But this place, this desert where Moses and his people had wandered, this was nothing but sheer and stark terror, seen through the windows of a bus. In the middle of all this the bus stopped, and a man got on. He was a Bedouin, dressed in the robes those people wear. The core of Muhammad’s conquering armies were Bedouin warriors. But it’s not what this Bedouin wore that I remember. What I remember were his eyes, his face. His eyes were like no eyes I had ever looked into. If, in the midst of that inferno of a desert, you had found a hidden spring and formed it into the likeness of a man, that’s what this fellow might have looked like. Water born from fire. He was the world in its most extreme and utter state. It’s as though he were truth, and I was nothing but falsehood. I never made it to Hawaii. Months later, in California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, when I was hoping to head west across the Pacific, I got turned around and headed east instead, recrossing our continent. I was Columbus on the wrong compass. And as winter came down upon the city of Philadelphia I was back home in the neighborhood. I went to work on my collection of short stories. I was once again with my old friends. If the nights weren’t too chilly we sat in the chairs on the flagstone patio under my oldest of friends, the big sycamore.