"Look into a mirror, hold it up to your face. It’s this Autumn evening Sky you see, bright at its western edge. Now it’s showing the first white light of a Moon ready to rise. Look again into the mirror, and you’ll see the night’s first star. This star is at first only a far-away voice, but then it becomes something more. Like when someone unknown approaches, and finally you recognize your friend as he hails you from a distance. And this damp chill sneaking past your sweater. Look into the mirror. The little snowy veins of ice have taken shape on the glass where your reflection struggles to maintain itself, like a windshield at night slowly defrosting, showing a face you only half recognize in the darkness. How can these things be anything but you yourself, in your own perfect fullness? I must be the sky, you tell yourself. I must be the wood smoke. I know I’m that star."


small house       My father was a United States District Court Magistrate, and he performed our wedding ceremony in his judge’s chambers in the Federal Building at 7th and Arch Street in Philadelphia. For the official ceremony we only had immediate family. The following week we had a big party in Joe and Ellen Tiberino’s Art Gardens, and this party was for our second family, our family in the Philadelphia arts community, many of whom we knew through our bar, Bacchanal. As it turns out some of our closer friends, such as Joe and Ellen and Donny and a few others, were unhappy that we didn’t invite them to the legal ceremony in my Dad’s chambers. We didn’t realize it till afterwards. By the time we were married, in 1989, only months before Anna was born, none of our grandparents were still living. I would have especially liked my Grandmom Scuderi to have been there, and afterwards, for her to have seen our Anna when she came into the world in December. But we had aunts and uncles and all our first cousins there. My Dad’s chambers were filled up. I invited my poet friend to give a reading from one of our favorite literary texts. It was severely modernist literature and most of the relatives were puzzled by the unusual language. But we were happy with it. Our Anna took her name from the main female character in the story. I doubt Anna will ever read that difficult book, but the spirit of it watches over her anyway. The following week we had the party in Joe Tib’s yards, and it was a blast according to plan. We had maybe a couple hundred friends from widening circles of acquaintance. The yards had no problem accommodating everyone. I had gone through the phone book of my life, and invited friends from every page. Childhood friends were there, and friends from grade school and high school, and college friends, and of course the old neighborhood friends showed up. Plus we had our arts community, and all the gang from the bar, and lots of others in between. My mother and father were there, and Aunt Jan and Uncle Joe, but my cousins and other relatives didn’t come to the party in West Philly. None of them were bar people anyway. 

In South Philly, on Jackson Street where my Dad grew up, there were two kinds of men, those who went to bars and those who didn’t. Those who didn’t go to bars would still make their own wine and drink with their friends, but they drank at home, they didn’t go to bars. That’s how my family was. I spent ten years in the bar business, but I’ve been out of the business for a long time now, and the older I get the more I revert to my roots. I don’t hang out in bars. When friends come to visit we drink at home. Sometimes if Joe and his son Raphael come out to the country for a visit we might go to a local bar, and sometimes when I visit them in the city we’ll go to a bar, but that’s about it. In this sense we had two separate families, our blood relatives, and our arts and bar relatives, and they rarely mixed. Our third child Madeleine was born in August of 1995, and we had her christened in Father Newns’ church in West Philly, and then we had a big party at our house in South Harrison, and that’s the only time that our two families mixed. My aunts and uncles and cousins came to our house for the party, and so did many of our artist and bar friends from Philly. We have a small house but we have two acres of land, with a front porch and a back deck and the front yard and back yard, and there’s plenty of room for many different groups of people to mingle. My mother was in charge of things which meant that there were tons of food, but since she was disapproving of alcohol, we had to take care of that ourselves. My mother retired as a District Superintendent of Schools in Philadelphia, and she was extremely efficient in everything she did. So she ran a tight ship in terms of organizing everything, and meanwhile all of us from the arts community did our best to skip around her rules and regulations. But she was fearless and formidable, and if you were careless enough to leave a drink unattended for even a few unguarded moments, you might find to your regret that it had been whisked away and trashed. My cousins were amused by their wilder artist counterparts, many of whom were great storytellers and singers, and they were happy to watch some of the crazy artists give their party performances. When Madeleine was born I was driving a truck delivering soda for Canada Dry. But a few years later I re-trained and wound up as a software developer. My first software job, in the late ‘90’s, was for a young company near the Philadelphia airport. That’s when our last child, Little Pete, was born. 

Several years after that I had a conversation with Father Newns, who had baptized all our children. It was at the Tiberino’s annual Christmas party. I told Father Newns about the experience I had one day when I pulled into the driveway, after work, and the kids were all playing in the front yard. It was Autumn, and they’d already eaten dinner. Only our dog Berry saw me and came over. As the children played their voices seemed to bounce off the early evening sky and ring out, echoing in the way distant church bells do. I stood very quietly and watched them and they were entirely unaware of me. It's as though I was a ghost peering through that almost casual veil, that veil serene as any mild afternoon with the window open and the wind gently stirring up the curtain, which separates this world from the other. I told Father Newns how I had this most unusual, this most unexpected feeling when I watched them play, and heard their voices echo off the high clear Autumn sky. That somehow I imagined, or no, that somehow I really felt how it would be like many years down the road, when they were all grown and so many years had passed, and yet I knew I would remember this one particular moment out of all the many possible moments I might remember, and that this moment would keep safe for me my memory of my children as children. For some reason it made me incredibly sad, and I was glad none of the children saw my tears. Father Newns looked at me with real compassion, and he said to me, “You were feeling your mortality, Joe.” Then in 2005 I went to work for IBM Corporation in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for a year I was only able to drive back home every other weekend. After that first year, my boss told me I could go back home for good and work remotely. So we bought an Amish-built shack, and they dropped it in my backyard eighty feet from my back door, and I spent seven years working there before that too came to an end. The inside of the shack was unfinished when it was delivered. The shack was ten feet by twelve feet, with a little porch. One of our friends called it “le petit chateau.” My father-in-law and I built everything on the inside, including the desk and chairs and book shelves, and on the back wall, which has no window, we built a ten foot by twelve foot bas-relief. For many years I had trained with a Tibetan Buddhist meditation lineage, and they had an image in their system which was very similar to what I had seen in my midnight meditation in the 21st Street backyard many years ago. We used cedar slats to build up the three dimensional bas-relief layers, and my wife, who is a ceramic artist, made me four plaques, each with a different Sanskrit letter. Those were the four things I had seen, beneath my South Philly tree many years before, arranged as two pairs of opposites, which had rotated around the center, and then had risen up and formed a golden cross set in a blood-red circle, with green roses alongside the arms of the cross. 

The shack became my home away from home. I worked and made my living there, and I wrote stories and songs there. But now it’s again a memory of Autumn which comes to my mind. I remember how one day, after the work was done, I was sitting on the little porch of my shack and looking across the yard at our small house. The windows were lighting up now as night began to fall. In a little while it would be too cold to sit here, but for now it was okay. Behind those kitchen windows the wife is making dinner, I know, and the kids are all in there as well, by the dining room table perhaps, and our dog Georgia is at their feet, and even the two cats Jerry and Spooky, who get along well enough with the dog, are waiting by their bowls. Soon I’ll cross the yard to the house, but for now I sit here on this porch, with night coming in. The Sky is very familiar. It’s not some infinite distant thing as science tells us. It's very near. It’s small and it curves round and meets itself, and its only job is to wrap around the Earth and keep it safe. All the stars, all the galaxies, that's their job as well. And this Earth, the grass which is all around me, and the trees, everything which is right here to my hands and my feet, this Earth is also very near, and very familiar. If I kneel down and put my hands on the ground, if I pat it and play it like a drum, then I touch the whole Earth and not just a part of it, because it’s all here, all of it is right here. When I reach my hand up to the Sky I touch every star, I touch the farthest galaxies and constellations, each and every one of them, with a simple wave of my hand I touch them all. Nothing is not in contact with everything else. Nobody needs to tell me this. I don't need to read this written down by any scientist or philosopher. My small house is lit up now in the darkness which has finally arrived, but behind it to the southwest the last blue light is still a presence. The faintest trail of smoke goes up from the chimney. It’s a small house we live in, small Earth, small Sky. We're not wandering, we're not lost in space. We're always at home. I get up from my chair, step off the porch, stand quietly under the sky.

"The old-timers called it "that which gives birth to itself."  An infinity of reflections. This Present which makes no motion towards its Future. A Past which waits and lingers like a woman at the door as you go down the road. The roof on a house with a chimney from which the smoke is only barely seen as the sky behind darkens. A small child's laugh disappearing so quickly in the distance, one happy moment which against all odds gets past the high white vinyl fence and finds you even as you’re thinking of going inside. It’s the deep chill of dusk as you get up from your seat, and then at last, the true darkness of night as you take your first step."