"Unlike the bell lost in its spire somewhere far away, the silent Sky always expands as you go to meet it. It’s not at all like that hawk circling high above which, as it scans the earth, pauses now and again to consider you as a target. The Sky never condenses down to a point. It doesn’t choose any targets. It always opens up to you as you approach. If it had arms they’d be wide and waiting, forever. So different than the bell, which echoes and disappears and then reappears when you least expect it. The Sky is always present. It never leaves, it never arrives. It knows no past, no future. But it knows you and it definitely knows me. It knows us both. And it wants to know the Earth and that’s where we can help. That’s where we, like the trees, are truly kings. Kings who can reach up and pull the Sky down to them."

young love      When Little Pete was four years old he fell in love. Her name was Payton. She was a year older than Pete. She had an older sister, Shana, who was Anna’s friend and classmate. When he was two and then three years old Little Pete had a serious crush on Shana the older sister. Perhaps it was just an infatuation. Shana would visit Anna at our house and Pete would follow her around with love in his eyes. Shana would laugh, shyly. Finally, after a year or so of this, Little Pete was bold enough to ask her for a kiss. She consented. She was maybe thirteen years old when Pete kissed her. She leaned down and Pete toddled over and tried to kiss her on the cheek but he didn’t quite manage to kiss her. He ran back to me and then turned and looked at her. I encouraged him to try again. Once again she leaned down, he toddled over, and once again he missed. His lips couldn't quite connect. He ran back to me and he again turned and looked at her. She was practically blushing. With all the discretion I could muster I urged Pete to try again. This time he succeeded. Anna and Shana thought it was the cutest thing in the world and I was surprised at how sweetly Shana blushed when his lips finally touched her cheek.

Little Pete fell in love, truly in love, with Shana’s little sister Payton at the South Harrison Elementary School dance. He was older now, as I said four years old. The dance was held in the afternoon in the school gym. They pushed everything over to the walls and they had a student DJ on the stage with his records and they had tables with soda and cake and the wild young boys ran around the edges of the gym and the girls stood in groups here and there. I think Nick was in the 6th grade, which was as far as you went before moving up to the middle school which was in Swedesboro next to the high school. Our elementary school was just down the road from where we lived. Anna and Payton were both at the dance as visiting alumni, and our Maddy was there clinging to her mother’s hand. They had piled up the blue foam gym mats by the wall, and one of the piles was just the right height for kids to sit on. Since Little Pete was in danger of being run over by the wild running ten year old boys, I plopped him down on the pile of gym mats and then stepped back out of the way so he wouldn’t feel I was hovering over him. That’s when Payton’s mom, who was a friend of my wife, walked over with her little girl in hand and struck up a conversation with my wife.

As she spoke to my wife she almost absentmindedly hoisted up Payton and then set her down on the pile of gym mats behind her, beside Little Pete. I had the perfect angle to observe Little Pete and Payton. Payton’s mom stepped away and continued her conversation, and Little Pete turned his head to the right and found out that a little girl was sitting beside him and looking directly at him. Their eyes met just like in the songs. I was already at full attention waiting to see what would happen. I watched Little Pete as he held her eye. It was only for a moment, and then he smiled. Payton smiled back. And then Little Pete reached out and offered his hand and she took it. They both jumped down from the pile of gym mats. Payton’s mom turned and saw that they were walking away together, and then she turned back to my wife and they both laughed and they let the two children wander off. Little Pete and Payton spent the dance together walking around hand in hand. Afterwards Payton’s mom brought her little girl over to our house so the two children could play. They ran in the yard with our dog Berry and played on the swing set and the slide. When Valentine’s Day came around, we found a homemade Valentine’s Day card sitting in the mail box. It wasn’t stamped so Payton’s mom must have driven her little girl over and let her put the card in our mailbox which is out by the road. My wife had to hustle to get crayons and paper for Pete so he could make his own card and then she drove him to Payton’s house and he put the card in her mailbox. I don’t know when they stopped playing together. Payton also went to South Harrison Elementary school but she was in the grade above Little Pete. Maybe the age barrier was just too great a barrier to overcome.

A few years later my mother took us all into the City and we saw the Cirque du Soleil perform. There was a big open lot at Broad and Washington Avenue just below Center City and that’s where the “Circus of the Sun” set up its tents. Our whole family went that afternoon, all four children, plus Grandmom and Grandpop, all of us standing in line in the bright sunlight, waiting outside by the white tents with so much excitement buzzing around. And once inside, in that cool dark space, we had seats right down in front, and then the lights in the center came up and the show started. The story they told using dance and acrobatics was the story of young love. A young woman and a young man danced and flew through the air on trapezes and the story showed you how they met and got to know one another and how they went back and forth in their courtship and at last how they surrendered to one another through love. You understood that it was first love for both of them, and that they would love one another their whole lives. They were both very beautiful and very kind, and it didn’t seem that either one of them was capable of ever telling a lie or intentionally hurting someone, least of all one another. A singer stood off to the side, a pretty woman with a fine voice, and her songs helped tell the story of the two lovers. Her name was in the program guide. I forget it now though I can still see her face. She had a Nordic name, it was something interesting. Before the show started a couple of the performers came over to me and they said to me, seriously, “Are you so and so who’s the friend of our singer in this show?” I wished it was true, I wished I was her friend and I wished I could be part of a show as wonderful as this Circus of the Sun show. But I had to say no.

"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.

"The lazy birds and the clouds painted on the sky and the tops of pine trees -and this night which is now moving quickly towards you- all these things bring back this memory. Of the day you simply got up and left and went in search of something else. A bell swinging and loudly echoing, perhaps. Something with a voice you could recognize. Afterwards, as I already said, you discovered that you’d never gone anywhere at all. That you were only walking across your yard, and going inside your small house."


two women      When Maddy was four years old, Little Pete arrived. Pete was born in early July, and Maddy turned four in the beginning of August. We now had our complete family. Anna was nine and a half years old, and Nick was six. I had my first software job. I had gone from bar bouncer to truck driver to software developer. Like it or not I was now in the corporate world. When Pete showed up in the house on that summer day, it meant that Maddy was no longer the baby. She had been de-throned by this new creature. It’s not easy when you’re a diva to be suddenly demoted to the regular troupe. I remember having Maddy on my lap and then putting her down because my wife was handing me the baby. My parents were visiting. I sat at my place at the end of the table, behind me the windows looking out at the back yard, and my Dad was sitting at his place at the other end of the table, and behind him were the front windows looking out at the porch and the trees in the yard and then, past the trees, the road. My Mom was keeping herself busy helping the new mother do chores. My Dad was happy because we had named the child after him. My Dad was named Peter, my younger brother was Peter Junior, and now we had Little Pete. By naming my new son Pete, I had atoned in my Dad’s eyes for my previous sin, when I had failed to name my first son after him. I had named my first son Nicholas and not, as custom demanded, Peter, which was the grandfather’s name. My Dad had often told me the story about when I, his first son, was born, how he went to his father and said to him, “Well Dad, there’s another Joe Scuderi in the family.” My Grandfather had cried. He was a gentle man, easily moved to tears. Now there was another Pete Scuderi in the family.

I put Maddy down and told her to run off and play with the other kids, and then I took the baby in my arms. A rite of passage was completed. Maddy ran off to join Anna and Nick, who were in the living room behind where my Dad was sitting. They lined up, Anna first, then Nick, and lastly Maddy. Anna was leading the pack, and they all took off at a run down the hall, and disappeared out of sight. But before Maddy followed the others, she gave me one last look. She was not angry with me or accusing me of hurting her feelings. I didn’t see any bitterness in her eyes, and yet we both knew, with that one look, that something very definite had changed between us. Then she ran off with the others. When I was maybe eight years old I remember two women who came to visit my Grandmom Scuderi in her house on Jackson Street. Grandmom’s house was a large row house. You walked in and that was the living room with lots of light coming in through the two big front windows. The stairs were to your right. The next room, which was really the same room with only a hint of an archway separating it from the living room, was a formal dining room only used on special occasions. Then there was a real archway and that was the big kitchen where everybody ate. This room had windows on the left because the houses were separated at this point to create a small alley between them, but the sunlight didn’t shine brightly in this room, in fact it was always a little dark. Then past this big kitchen was the small kitchen where Grandmom cooked, with windows looking out at the little concrete yard, and the alley behind it, and then the backs of the smaller row houses which fronted the little street behind our Jackson Street, which was a main street.

When these two women arrived I was standing in the big kitchen, and it’s the darkness of this big kitchen, though daylight was coming in through its side windows, which I especially remember, because my Grandmom stood with the two women in the doorway of this big kitchen and they were lit up by all the sunlight from the front of the house. They were very old women, dressed in black as was the custom for Italian women in those days, and they spoke with my Grandmom in the Italian language. They stood beside her and they looked at me with great affection. My Grandmom called me over to meet them and I felt how proud she was of me, and taking my cue from her, I treated the women with respect and greeted them as I had been taught to do. I had never known my Grandmom in any capacity other than as the eldest of our tribe. And yet here she was, clearly paying deference to these two old Italian women. I had the idea that these two women were sisters. But in later years when I remembered them and tried to figure out who they might have been, I was never able to get a definite answer. Something inside me wanted them to remain a mystery. Because the two women were for me a link to another world. They stood in that doorway, two mysterious old women in black speaking our ancient language, and beside them, my Grandmother, smiling, proud, respectful, telling me to come near and greet them, and they put their hands upon my head, as old ladies used to do, and told me I was a good boy. And by accepting their blessings I felt like I entered into something much greater than myself.

This something greater is something very wonderful. It’s the past which lives forever in the present, the timeless quality which all time has. But nobody seems to care about it. It’s like litter on the pavements, like bits of windblown trash which brush past you when you walk down city streets. Those who seek treasure search elsewhere, and pass it by. But it’s right here, even in the most ordinary stuff. Especially in the most ordinary stuff. The look which four year old Maddy gave me just before she turned and ran off with her older siblings was like a distant church bell ringing out, and as it rang those two mysterious old women from my past were summoned into the present. For a moment Maddy stopped, and the three windows behind her were full of afternoon light, and through the windows, there was the front porch, so familiar, and then the trees heavy with summer leaves. In that moment we shared something. I had lifted her from my lap and told her to run off with the other children, it’s true, but now I gave her something as well. In the moment before she ran off, when our eyes met across the room, just before she turned and ran away in pursuit of Anna and Nick, that’s when I believe she saw in me the two women who lived in my imagination. I gave them to her, she saw them in me when we shared our look across the living room, down the long kitchen table, my father with his back to her, intent upon the baby in my arms, my mother off to the right, helping my wife in the kitchen. Someday maybe Maddy will do the same, share those two women with a child of her own, pass them on to the next generation, and it will all happen in this reality we call the Imagination.

"When the lights come on in the kitchen of our house, and when behind the closed door and closed windows you know their Mother is cooking the evening meal, and that the children, Anna and Nicky and Maddy and Pete -and Berry the big dog as well- are gravitating towards the table, and that soon it will be time to head inside-  but not yet, not quite yet- that's when you seem to remember what you’ve always known. That it’s your own perfect self you see in everything you turn your eyes to. That there’s nowhere you can look where you won’t see your own perfect self. And that your own perfect self is not just you but it’s me as well, and everyone else, every creature on this Earth. That we’re all the same single, perfect self."

golden flower      I had fallen asleep in the front bedroom. It was a nap before dinner. Our house was a two story house, and outside the bedroom windows the tree branches were shaking violently. You could hear the wind. I was just waking up, and I was in that perfect peaceful state you sometimes find when coming out of a nap. The late afternoon, early evening summer light was flooding the room. Everything was completely golden. My mother’s voice pulled me out of it. She was downstairs, at the foot of the stairs, and she was calling me to dinner. When I came into the kitchen I felt a tremendous darkness all around me, as though thunderclouds were gathering over my head. I knew I wasn’t fit for human company. I had finished the collection of short stories which I had worked on for two years, and I wanted to start something big, which would take a long time to complete, a really large work. I felt like lightning was crackling around my head. I went outside after dinner and some of my friends were already hanging out. One girl, who we called Wacky, shivered and said, “Oooh, sweater weather.” It was mid-July and yet there were these strong cold winds. But the sky was clear blue, completely clear. The slanting light was so bright, and it seemed like the winds were blowing the light through the leaves and giving it a green gold glow. I absolutely loved it. I never would’ve considered putting on a sweater. It felt like the winds were blowing right through me, chasing away all things old, all things borrowed, giving me the chance to fill up with things completely new.

I left Wacky and the others and walked down the street, towards Ritner Street, and then crossed 21st Street and knocked on the door of my friend Sonny's house. I was twenty four years old. It was 1978. Sonny was several years older than me. He was working as a school teacher but he was unhappy, was looking around for his next move, a way to change his life. He was living in his parents’ house but his parents had moved out, had retired to Florida, and he was living in the house until he decided what to do with himself. In the meantime, the house was a sort of party house for Sonny and his friends, who were older than my crowd of friends. Most of them were unmarried but had careers and, like Sonny, were looking around for less conventional ways to live their lives other than settling down and marrying. Sonny answered the door and he said, “Joe, your Grandmom is looking for you.” When he saw me hesitate he said, “Go see her, Joe.” My mother’s mother, Grandmom Esposito, lived across the street from Sonny in a first floor apartment. It was only half a block down from my parents’ house, on the same side of the street. They had moved her there when she could no longer take care of herself in the big house in which she and my grandfather had raised my mother and her brother. Grandpop Esposito had died many years ago. I would run chores for Grandmom. When Sonny told me to go see her I hesitated because Grandmom Esposito was a very eccentric hypochondriac who could hold you for long periods of time in rambling conversations. I didn’t like the fact that I was always trying to escape her clutches, I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help myself. I crossed the street and went to see her. Then I went to the store and got her some trivial things which she didn’t need but which made her happy, and then I managed to get away fairly quickly.

It was dark by now. The winds had died down. I went back down the block to my house and my friends were already standing around my porch. Out of that whole bunch I had two or three close friends who could easily see what I was feeling, and they knew right off the bat that something was going on with me. Very kindly, they simply let me be and just carried on with their conversations. Though the winds had died down it was still a little chilly, especially considering it was a mid-July night, and it felt like Autumn. Later on that night five or six of us left the others and went to the backyard and sat in our chairs under my big sycamore tree. Sometimes the winds might kick up briefly and wave the big branches which were over our heads. Donny was there, and Franny, and Greg, and maybe one or two others. We all had our usual chairs. Mine was a sort of outdoor rocking chair with pads. One or two of the metal slats on the seat had come off, and I had tied on some rope to replace them. It was definitely my favorite chair. Everybody always just let me sit in it, nobody ever tried to jump into it and claim first rights. I was sitting there flicking my Bic, flicking it over and over, watching the spark, then the flame, then watching it die out before beginning again, while my friends talked back and forth. It was right around midnight when everyone broke up and went home. I decided to stay a while. This sycamore tree was around fifty years old when we first moved here to 21st Street. I was four years old then. All my life my brother and I and our neighborhood friends had played around it. When we were small we had little football games right there in the yard, or wiffleball baseball games. Once, when I saw some sap dripping from the tree, I asked my Dad to call a tree guy and the tree guy did some things to make sure the tree stayed healthy. Now that I was grown I had my weights set up right under the tree, and in the evenings my friends and I hung out there. After my friends left I sunk down into a sort of meditation. I wasn’t asleep but I was totally peaceful and my mind got real quiet. I was happy beneath my tree. 

And then something happened. I felt like I dropped down into the earth, and I was looking down, maybe ten feet beneath me, at a scene which was incredible to me. I saw four things arrayed around a circle, like they were on the four points of the compass, and in that moment I knew just what they were. I knew that they were the four things out of which everything else in the world is made. And then they started to rotate, slowly at first, and then rapidly, till they were spinning fast like an airplane’s propellers, and then just like a propeller which is rapidly turning they became one thing. And the four things which had joined into one thing raised up from their position beneath me, and I was looking at a blood red circle, and in this circle there was a golden cross, equal armed, and around the arms of the cross there were green roses. And I guess I said “Ohhhhh!” I completely lost my cool, I was awestruck. And that’s when I came out of my meditative state. It’s almost as though, if I hadn’t been awestruck, if I could have just kept a cool head, then I wouldn’t have lost that vision, I could have maintained it, at least for a little longer. I never told anyone what happened to me, not for maybe thirty years, except for one fellow I met at a meditation conference a few years later. That October I started work on a book which I wrote for the next five years. I always felt like the purpose of the book was to find a way to put that vision into context. To help somehow make it real by tying it in to everything else that was happening to me. Now, nearly forty years later, I’m satisfied when I tell myself that I went down to the crossroads that night, and whatever decisions I made afterwards as a result had life-long consequences. It was an hour of decision, and I gave my life in service to what I experienced that night in the backyard under my sycamore tree. Right or wrong, that simple fact stands.

"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."