Stacked Spirals of Stardust

 

October 2, 2010

After witnessing the dedication of the luminous stacked spirals of Stardust, which now hang forever in memory of Esme Louise Kenney at the new School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati where she attended until she was taken from this world, I found myself seeing metaphors in kind everywhere. I heard a poem read about stacked layers of hot Earth and cold ground laid out and looking up at  the Milky Way, arms spiraling from its center, just like Stardust. After the dedication, I watched a stack of prone admirers under the memorial gazing up, legs spiraling from their center, just like Stardust.

At Spring Grove Cemetery later in the day I saw an ant with a dark abdomen and red thorax and head emerge with wings from its nest on the spot where angelic Esme’s gurney had been rolled. It crawled around in the grass, not sure what it was supposed to do with its newly sprouted wings. Then it suddenly took off and spiraled, just like Stardust,  around the nest opening before flying away from its wingless neighbors, a terrestrial creature now an angel too, telling stories about flights to heaven and back.

If there are trees in heaven of which the ant can speak, then I’m sure they include trees like this memorial one that adorns “Esme’s Spot” where I saw the ant in Spring Grove. A weeping variety called Higgins cherry, it serves as an enduring, yet growing, changing symbol of her organic spirit, its branches weaving, elongating throughout her survivor’s memories of her and reminding them that her light can help them grow too, just like leaves in light that serve as windows into the souls of trees. I couldn’t help but notice also how its branches seemed to spiral from the trunk, just like Stardust.

After this I was witness to a prone supplicant during a long, wet, and windy night gazing up at Star Tower, the red beacon blinking slowly atop its highest point like a metronome as it marked the hours the supplicant spent in the lonely and terrifying stack of invasive shrubs behind the reservoir where Esme was killed, its bowery brambles spiraling, just like Stardust.

And on the lonely trek back to Chicago, astonished by what I had seen and felt that weekend, I stared awestruck up at a stack of cumulus clouds over an Indiana wind farm that stretched from horizon to horizon, the turbines of each mill slowly spiraling, just like Stardust.

Treachery in the Wild

My wife was on maternity leave with our first-born, and I was hired to help fill the void of her absence at the nature center in central Illinois. It was high summer, very hot and humid. So I wanted to stay inside making pen and ink drawings for brochures, figuring out an artsy way to render the calendar of public events, and illustrating labels for jars of locally gathered honey to be sold in the gift store. But I knew enough about nature to lead public hikes on the preserve’s upland oak/hickory woodland acres. That’s when I ran into mimicry and murder during the annual courtship amongst fireflies.

Crystal structure of the bioluminescing enzyme lucerferase

Firefly displays intrigue anyone who has ever witnessed them on hot, humid nights in the eastern seaboard and also here in the Midwest. The mesmerizing blinking is due to cool temperature chemistry called bioluminescence, and is used to attract mates in the sex-crazed high summer nights of July and August. Roaming males of the genus Photinus use one pattern of flashing, recognized only by females of its species, and those of the genus Photuris use another. The male recognizes the correct duration of the interval between his flashing and the female’s single blink response, and zeros in on her where she hides with her expensive cache of eggs.

Unfortunately, Photinus males often zero in on the consummate femme fatale. The carnivorous Photuris females have evolved to use the same duration pattern. When crooning Photinus males reach these females, they’re lunch. That’s because Photuris females can use a defense chemical that male Photuris fireflies make. This molecule, lucibufagin, proves an effective chemical defensive against certain spiders and other enemies.

Such trickery, committed during a perfectly innocent attempt at a romp in the grass, is common in the insect world. Still sounds like a solid basis upon which to make a complaint. “But officer, my alleged date ate me when I went to pick her up!” After I told this tale of woe to one group of fascinated folks on an evening’s stroll, they stood in stunned silence before finally offering hesitant applause.

Lest it appears that the natural world is the only culprit concerning conspired means to lunch on unsuspecting others, I list below a running tally of terms I’ve compiled for similar occurrences in our world.

Billed, infected, charged, arrested, fined, tricked, stalked, interrogated, ambushed, investigated, ripped off, targeted, sued, assaulted, held liable, put under surveillance, burgled, suspected, wire-tapped, gypped, broken into, penalized, foreclosed, stung, fired, sneak-attacked, drag-netted, dismissed. The list can be extended.

We all have our stories. Administrators do things that impinge on others. Lovers do it. Politicians do it. Revenuers do it. Even children in their sandboxes do it. Interactions between living entities in any world are often just plain hostile.

For instance, I pay a hefty annual “wheel tax” to the city in order to park on the street in front of my own residence. But I better not forget to go out to the curb to move my car. Street sweeping occurs on the south side of the street on Tuesday, and the north side on Wednesday. The parking Gestapo likes to cruise immediately after 9 AM for easy pickings. It’s the city’s Department of Revenue to whom the parking police answer. The street sweepers often don't even show up. I’m sure that the steady rate of income from parkers who just can’t always remember where they left their car is built into their budget. I’d swore that this summer I wouldn’t get hit. But I did, once. Happens to the best of us. So add ticketed to the list above. I wouldn’t put it past the city to deliberately hire administrators with a background in Biology.

Hubert

Everybody stopped what they were doing when Hubert came to town. Memories of my meeting this cavalier German in Corvallis, OR, and a crazy road trip I took with him to New York City are fixed like ants in fossilized amber and just as visible through the yellowed years.

Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main

Hubert was a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt at the time, studying the ways the artist Edward Hopper captured the alienating forces of modernity that were reaching their zenith in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. And, like many young transcendental romantics from crowded Europe who imagine wearing cowboy boots and ten gallon hats, Hubert was smitten by the American West. Its wide open spaces, lacking in Europe, offered decompressing relief from the constipating effects of post industrial consumerism in the modern western nation states. “Howdy, podner,” he began a letter to me once.

My friends became Hubert’s mentors of American culture when he attended Oregon State University as a foreign exchange student. Helping to fuel his dry wit, they taught him the meaning of American colloquialisms. He asked about the expression “so and so ‘got screwed,’” for instance. After being told, Hubert peppered his rollicking language with this deprecating remark to which he added the postscript, “only slightly though.” My friends adored him.

I finally met Hubert when I flew in on a few weeks furlough from a wilderness camp counseling stint in North Carolina. A party lasting three weeks had taken us for a day to the Oregon coast. I’m on the left in the picture below. Hubert is kneeling.

Some years later Hubert flew from Frankfurt to New York and then hitched across the country to Corvallis. It was during a time of tumult and general disaffection in my Corvallis crowd. Old cohabiting couples were breaking up. My friends in Iron Rose, a loose confederation of anarchists, were pamphleteering patrons of the coffee counter cultures at Sambo’s and the Big “O” restaurants to rally behind waitresses and other oppressed wage slaves, but were growing disillusioned with the lack of public response. Others belonging to the “lumpen intelligentsia” were feeling growing pains and spoke of trying out new intellectual and artistic horizons in Portland and New York City. But Hubert’s arrival forced a freeze frame in the film followed by a frolicking free-for-all that lasted two weeks. He just had a way of doing that.

Inside the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

Toward the end of his stay, Hubert described to us over beer at Squirrel’s Tavern in downtown Corvallis how he had found a way to get to the east coast for free before boarding a plane back to Germany. He was going to drive a VW bug belonging to a professor who was soon moving, along with his family, to Princeton, New Jersey. The owner had just given him $300 to pay for expenses, beginning with, I suppose, the cost of a round of beer as Hubert announced his intentions. I stopped and stared at the bar table, the conversation becoming a dim rumble in my ear, in my sudden realization that I was going to get into that car with him. I had incentives. The degree in science education I had returned to Corvallis to earn wasn’t producing any job offers that fall. And, like the protagonist played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting, who leaves job prospects in Boston for Palo Alto, California, I had “to see about a girl” in Illinois with whom I had been corresponding.

Playful mockery of bland mainstream status quo society quickly became the modus operandi of our cross-country boondoggle. We decided to document our journey on yellow legal pad paper at rest stop coffee counters, which quickly received copy write status,

HUBERTANTICS ©

For instance, we cut up the ticket a cop wrote when he busted Hubert in a Safeway parking lot for peeing in the bushes, and pasted its parts into our travel log to especially document the number of people the citation stated Hubert had offended with this behavior. The officer had "reasonable grounds for believing that said offense against ordinance 841.7-1, Urinating in public, was committed by the Defendant against the peace and dignity of the City and County of Denver, and the people of the state of Colorado.” The demand for justice on the part of that many people necessitated in no uncertain terms that the rights of the Defendant be protected. So we checked 846.5-4, Unlawful to give false information, and role-played the following scenario.

“Seeing a strange looking foreigner wearing a red bandanna around his neck, Levi’s, and leather boots (‘Howdy, podner’), the cops, on inquiring as to the identity of said person, were told he was Hunter S. Thompson. Defendant then pulled rank by shoving a card into their faces, which said, ‘Bonzo Journalist.’ Defendant stated that his partner was his attorney, who told both cops that they would be turned over to the governor if they didn’t clear out pronto.”

“We continue to journey into the core of the Great Amerikan Mistake,” Hubert wrote. “There’s Dwight D. Eisenhower’s boyhood home. He symbolizes the ’50’s, the enormous decade of monstrosity revisited, which leaves us helpless, helpless, helpless, of course....starry night auf der Autobahn and sticking human bodies into that metallic apparition dependent on combustion. Corn, corn, prairie, cattle, gas station, billboard, irrigation madness, grain elevator reinforced by church without steeple, rising to the point of burnt eyes, burnt stomach, burnt cigarette, you betcha.”

Lawrence Kristina Dodge building Kansas City Art Institute

Hubert wanted to hang out with the painters who were pulling an all-nighter in their studio at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Ironically, 27 years later, my recollection of such an intense commitment to their art, and recognition of that same intensity in one of my students at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, helped get her accepted there. “I watched students at KCAI in all night studio marathons. She'd fit right in,” I wrote on her behalf.

In Columbia, MO, our bonzo journalist bought a tape recorder. At a local diner, he orally observed the following.

“The tension has risen to the point where the employees keep dropping the china and overreact by madly polishing the chrome stools. The hostess has just started to take off her clothes. We are determined not to take such bullshit, and give her that ‘Hey, that’s kind of you’ grin, which makes her considerably nervous. She starts punching absurd codes into the cash register only to make it spit out coins, and yells, ‘Jackpot! Jackpot!’ Amused, we munch on the half-and-half containers like jelly beans until the creamy drooling is all over the place, and try to figure out the relationship between chrome, jelly beans, and the presidency.”

On the campus of the University of Missouri, Hubert introduced himself to a group of art majors painting watercolors on the lawn, and gave a lecture. One of them, “Lisa,” reluctantly mentioned that she had a boyfriend. “Sad Lisa. Oh Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa...”

On the way to St. Louis, we discussed the popular genre of literature about post-apocalyptic survivorship and personal redemption, retelling on tape the dystopia tale  of the The Time Machine by  H. G. Well’s, of the reluctant hero Max Rockatansky, played by Mel Gibson, who attempts to save a surviving remnant from marauders in The Road Warrior,  and the Nebula Award-winning novella of A Boy and his Dog.

 

St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri

Hubert’s left-leaning eye triggered a litany of one-line commentary. Seeing the St. Louis Arch, Hubert suggested that, “There’s got to be more,” because, like the Golden Arches © in our consumer culture, “Two is better than one.” Visiting the St. Louis Art Museum, he remarked on seeing a cherub holding a compass, a protractor, and a plumb bob, “Yes, implements of the technocratic imperative.” Gaudy paintings of Americans clad in flowing folds of Greek garb symbolized “Manifest Destiny.” Hubert quoted a bumper sticker clandestinely stuck to a trash can in the hallway, “Death to Corporate Capitalism.” He was quick to notice a statue of Siegfried of the great Nordic myth, who represents the human (er, German super) race, which, at the dawn of history, is just coming into its own in ascendancy over the gods. Later, commenting on a skewing of class identity, Hubert remarked that soccer in Europe is a sport of the lower classes, while, here, he noticed suburban middle and upper class youth everywhere playing the game.

"Uh oh. Dave's getting nervous," Hubert said. The “girl” I had to see about lived in Urbana, IL, and the road sign said it was near. We were to stop by before she and her date were to see a movie. “Her date?” asked Hubert. “Sounds like her fruit. Hey, don’t worry about the trauma of crashing her date. See, over there? Trauma Center.”

We sat on her living room floor. She eyed me as I recited the time I gave Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmental group Earth First! a ride to Eugene, Oregon for a recruiting lecture, and continued politely to sip her wine with her date. Little did either Hubert or I know that I would eventually be married to her for twenty years.

On the way to Chicago, Hubert suggested that I acquire a little “patina” by downing some Jack Daniels we got when leaving Urbana, which smoothed the way out of the “trauma” of interrupting her date, and helped facilitate the distracting relief of a half hour drunken recitation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.

For Hubert, going to see Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Art Institute of Chicago was like embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

An American friend of his attended the Art Institute. We crashed the place that she and a rabble of international roommates literally were crashing themselves rent free, an old, abandoned warehouse with broken windows that somehow never had the heat turned off. So they weren’t paying for the heat, either. They had no furniture, slept on the floor, each separated by walls that were just two-by-fours without drywall, and ate out of electric frying pans on the floor. We all went shopping after midnight to prepare an elaborate international meal that we ate at 3 am. German, American, Irish, and Scottish partiers laughed, drank, and told stories, reminding me of Kierkegaard’s The Banquet in his great treatise of a proposed sequence in character development, Stages on Life’s Way.

It was my first time visiting New York City as an adult. We stayed with Corvallis acquaintances, a couple consisting of an Oregon State English professor on sabbatical to write novellas, and his wife, a student at Pratt Institute. Their apartment was over the Good Luck Grocery along Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. I quickly learned that the bustling streets there can be dangerous places when I pulled out my buck knife to punch open a pop can with a broken tab. People on the street froze and stared. Even the coin laundries had burly changers who were there actually to guard the change.

Over a period of four days, we migrated between Manhattan and Brooklyn, each day ending with a hard crash at 5 am. We hung out at St. Mark’s and Washington Squares. Hubert and I wandered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum, home of Hubert’s beloved Hopper. We drank Rolling Rock at the Red Bar near Cooper’s Union, admiring the early ‘80’s new wavers with their Hitler cuts or swept back long hair, shaven on both sides, and peg legs. We waited until 1 am to hear the main act at the Peppermint Lounge, The Jim Carroll Band. People sported t-shirts with the logo of the band The Dead Kennedy’s. The sound system’s base capabilities made us resonate down to the nuclei of our molecules.

But you better get ready
If you're going to Freddy's
If you're going to Freddy's store

We saw the film Badlands on the upper east side, starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, and attended opening night of an off-Broadway Sam Shepard play, True West, starring John Malkovich, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village.

Hubert returned to Frankfurt, and I took a bus far enough west into New Jersey so that I could start hitch hiking back to Oregon. The makeshift sign I posted for drivers-by read, “Urbana, IL.” There I stayed with my future wife for a week before getting back on the road. The match between us may have already been struck, but the trip, replete with a hitch across the country to Oregon identical to Hubert’s, was like an enzyme catalyzing a too-slow chemical reaction by lowering the activation energy needed for it to flame up at low temperatures.

I’ll blame that on Hubert.

POSTSCRIPT. It is late February, 2012. I just got word of Hubert’s premature passing, apparently of an accidental overdose of a sleeping medication. It is a time of mourning. My resolve is to commemorate my friend and how he changed my life with a fitting memorial the likes of which I am sure you can guess..............In the words of Jim Belushi of Animal House fame:

ROAD TRIP

Penance in a Two-Room Carriage House

Saturday January 31, 2004

The kids are with their mother, and I am in a two-room carriage house, separated, alone. The pipes have frozen in the winter chill. I wash my face with cold running water and ease back into the chair, draping my Denali expedition sleeping bag with its three pounds of down over me.

I think this is it. I’ve hit rock bottom. I can do nothing but pop another dollar rental video from the library into the VCR for the third night in a row. Such addictions of escape are in the making because there’s nothing else that I feel like doing.

WHERE ARE YOU? I suddenly cry out, like I did on a hike at that state park along the Illinois River, alarming her in front of our kids. What good are you towards whom I scream prayers only to be met with dispassionate legal steps in the drawn out continuum of divorce…and silence?

I give up. I am sorry. I really am. All she had to do was forgive me. But she couldn’t.

I think of the wonderful places I’ve been, the events I’ve witnessed, the thoughts and feelings I have had, and try in desperation to have these remembrances mitigate my feelings of loneliness and despair. There was a soothing bath, for instance, in the hot spring leading up from Kaweah Canyon below Mt. Whitney during a contiguous five week solo journey from Giant Forest to Yosemite without leaving once to replenish provisions. There was the refreshing spray on my face from Multnomah Falls along the Columbia River Gorge and puffy white clouds banging into Mt. Hood up from Camp Howard in which I taught high school kids to interpret nature for sixth graders at my soil resource station. Oh, and there was that bubbling creek sending sparkling drops flying below Mt. Goddard in the terrifying “terre incognita” of the south fork of the San Joaquin River. And I remember late night epiphanies at coffee counters in Sambo’s and the Big O Restaurant during my town freak days in Corvallis, Oregon, such as during an eight hour stretch reading Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript for the first time.

It is winter, and it is dark. So I think of light, waiting for the light. I think, for instance, of the “aha” light of sudden understanding in the faces of so many students over the years. Then what occurs to me is a centuries-old corn cob I found lying on a floor in an unexcavated Anazazi granary in Canyonlands and the heart-stopping sunlight striking the deafening silence of the canyon bed below it. I remember details of the light reactions of photosynthesis that only a fitful dream while sleeping beside her in my early years as a teacher could piece together correctly for the benefit of my Biology students. There are also the brilliant washes of pthalocyanine blue and alarizon crimson on the 100% cotton rag of my watercolors, now in storage.

We all have an innate understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Do not steal, for instance. Everybody knows that. But the penniless will steal to feed their families. The true oppressor that must be vanquished is hunger. So it is right to steal, sometimes. Forgiveness depends on the case. The movie Magnolia I am watching tonight, for instance, depicts a cop who judges the fitness of each case for forgiveness on his beat, letting some people off, even helping them make restitution, and busting others. The law, both secular and divine, is not black and white. Becoming one flesh that no one is allowed to tear asunder, for instance, cannot be taken at face value.

You call everyone to yourself. You are relentless. If nudges don’t work, then you use a two-by-four, a friend in Oregon told me recently. The stronger is the temptation, the blunter is the two-by-four. “Knock, knock. Do I have your attention yet?”

You came to seek the lost, those who would become as children and would respond like children of a parent. A child is helpless, weak, lost without the parent, rather, a guiding Teacher, as Kierkegaard wrote in that treatise. Failure can conjure up in men and women the teachable child at their center. So you do lead into temptation, situations involving right and wrong that demand a choice, in order to carry out your divine purposes, don’t you? My Oregon friend told me I am being tested. You are testing my soul, aren’t you? She said I have been called to a graduate seminar.

My friend spoke of an acupuncturist/healer who takes in internists. To work with him is a privilege, she said. I told her of the student teacher who, after observing me, said that she had yet to observe a teacher “of my caliber” in any other classroom. So I was an excellent teacher. I treated teaching as a calling. I loved it and used everything to achieve success at it. But my church challenges me to consider that there are only two divine callings: ministry or marriage. My calling had really been my marriage. Teaching was an interesting way, a way of "right livelihood" that made use of my interests and talents, to effectively put food on the table in order to feed the object of my true calling.

So here I am In my little hovel in despair, reaching rock bottom, not knowing what to do with myself. I can’t read. So I feel. I cry. I write. It’s the heart that keeps count, not the mind, right? Wait and watch. Lord God, heavenly king, the father, the almighty. What are you going to do now?

Strength Made Perfect in Weakness

CINCINNATI March 31 Judge Charles J. Kubicki, Jr. pronounced sentence this morning on Anthony W. Kirkland in the capital offense case involving the murder of Esme Louise Kenney and three other women. As recommended March 17th by the jury who convicted him on all counts March 12th, Kirkland received from the court at 9:33 a.m. two death sentences, one for aggravated circumstances involving the death of thirteen year old Esme and the other for same involving the death of fourteen year old Casonya Crawford. He also received two 70 years to life sentences for counts that included the murders of the two other women, along with Tier III Sex Offender status. The trial started on the 1st, so the month of March, 2010 resolves this horrific story, at least in the legal sense. Since the news of Esme’s death a year ago, I have sensed tremendous power in the story’s unfolding.

It began with a conviction about the power of Esme to astonish people when she was alive, based on the many reports and pictures taken of her that testify to her kind, gentle, and all-loving embrace of everyone near her. Esme’s beloved nieces and nephew “delighted” in her. Her older siblings “adored” her. Teachers, friends, and strangers gravitated to her. She gave everyone a hug. No longer is it any wonder to me that she is being remembered in event after event, so many, in fact, that members of her family are hoping for a break.

“I think sometimes we hear of another tribute being put together, and we just think, 'I can't take another memorial service,’" says a family member. "’I just need to let it be, or even ignore it all for a little while.’”

Something else has struck me lately, however, something about Esme that is no less astonishing and which keeps me from being able to "ignore it all for a little while"…until it is said. And that is the transcendent power of Esme’s spirit during the passion of her excruciating ordeal at the hands of her assailant, a power that continued to influence events with far reaching consequences after her death.

Even as Anthony Kirkland was attempting to rape her, she did not resist. "That's what was surprising about it,” Kirkland told detectives. “She was calm. I don’t know. She didn't fight me.” In one of the most dramatic displays of the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek that I have ever heard, she instead quietly asked him, “Do you have any children?” She thus appealed to his conscience, his sense of fatherhood. And it made an indelible impression on her killer. "What did you tell her?" asked the detective. He replied, "I looked at her, and I told her, 'yeah.' Then I stopped." As it turns out, Anthony Kirkland had a three year old son, Anthony Kirkland, Jr.

Kirkland left the scene of Esme's murder, but returned right afterward, because he felt an unusual compulsion to do so. "I was actually called there to go back," he said. "Don't misunderstand me, it was like ... a thought that came into my mind that said...that said 'go back to her, go back to where she is.’ When I got there, I sat up under a tree, and something told me to, just to relax, sleep.”

Kirkland was apprehended because they found him asleep under that tree just a short distance from Esme's body, her possessions on his person, presented as if on a platter to the authorities for indictment.

I agree with those who say Esme's spirit was responsible for the instruction that Kirkland return to her, which he obeyed. He obeyed despite the lack of lighter fluid he had intended to procure that was necessary to render the evidence untraceable. Not only did he come back without it, he came back bearing on his body all the DNA evidence required to tie him to the crime. During past investigations, police had asked him about shaving his body hair and bathing in bleach in order to obliterate evidence. During this investigation, however, even his usual denials, lies, and crafty games to elude the detectives failed him. He broke, giving a full, detailed confession.

Kind, gentle, even in the face of death, Esme’s power proved greater than Kirkland’s, so much greater that it apparently began to trouble him and take from him the desire to live. In the realization of what he had done to her, he tried to induce his captors to pull their guns on him. “I need to keep my word to her,” he told the detectives. “What was your word to her?” a detective asked. “That, uh, well, hell, my word was that I’d be joining her. That was what my word was.”

The result of all these things is that Kirkland, with this sentence, will never kill again. Esme's sacrifice, and the strength of her spirit during her ordeal and afterward, save future lives, and bring justice to three other women who Kirkland is convicted of killing.

Where does such a powerful spirit like Esme’s come from? I believe it comes from God. Perhaps there is a higher purpose for her to which we ought to give our assent. Perhaps Esme is an example of the paradoxical power of God’s love, best exemplified, not in lordly pomp and circumstance that elevates the beloved to some lofty station and status befitting God; rather, in lamb-like weakness, such as the gentle love of a young girl, even in the lonely and terrifying face of her death.

I can’t help but see a message in Esme's life and death, the message with which she herself was “smitten,” so her mother says, and that is the message of Christianity, that God reveals himself through suffering love. I believe that this is her life and legacy, God’s love extending way beyond her immediate world, reaching out to many, many people. My desire is that Esme’s example of hope and love spreads ever farther afield to those who needn’t have known her when she was alive.

A friend of hers remarked at a memorial, “It can’t be her. Esme was going to save the world.” To all who have eyes to see, it is her; it’s Esme, a saint in my eyes, who is indeed going to save the world.

Unsung Achievements

This past Friday, I attended a talk sponsored by Fermilab National Laboratory in Aurora, IL. Speaking that evening was a 2008 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Martin Chalfie.

Chalfie’s demonstration of the use of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria earned him the prize, shared by Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien.

A model of Green Fluorescent Protein

Normally proteins in cells are not visible, but they can be visualized by means of GFP. Blue light shined on proteins of interest to researchers that are linked to GFP absorb the light and reradiate it as green light. They fluoresce, becoming visible. This allows researchers to observe how these proteins function and where they go in cells. As a biological marker, GFP is quickly becoming the microscope of the twenty-first century.

Proteins marked with GFP glow green under blue light.

Noticeably absent at the podium at this talk was a man named Douglas Prasher. It was Prasher who was first to isolate the gene for the glowing jellyfish protein. Dr. Prasher, at the time of the Nobel prize announcement, was driving  courtesy vans for a car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama.

Trained as a biochemist, Dr. Prasher was interested in the chemistry of how certain animals are able to glow. In the late 1980s, he applied for a five-year grant to track down the gene. Dr. Prasher said his proposal included investigations on how the fluorescent protein might be used as a beacon to light up structures in cells. But the application was turned down. An application put elsewhere proved successful, but it gave Prasher only two years of financing, enough time to isolate the gene, but not enough time to pursue any applications. When time was up, he went looking for another job. Before he left, Dr. Chalfie and Dr. Tsien independently contacted him, asking about the jellyfish gene. Prasher generously shared the gene with both of them.

Experiencing dissatisfaction with employers to whom he transferred his work, he eventually landed in Huntsville, where he worked for a NASA subcontractor that was developing mini-chemistry laboratories, used during potential human flight to Mars. Dr. Prasher loved that job, but NASA eliminated the financing for the project. For family reasons, he stayed in Huntsville, which restricted his opportunities. After a year of unemployment he went to work for the car dealership.

In a self-effacing and generous gesture, Prasher gave tribute to the three Nobel winners, saying that their harder work over their entire work lives made them more deserving of the prize. (Rules stipulate that no more than three persons can share a single prize.)

I think I understand Dr. Prasher’s attitude. I have found over the years that those in my line of work, high school science teaching, regularly give away discoveries of innovative methods for conducting traditional lab experiments and the like. We are more than happy to share “shop secrets” with interested colleagues in school departments or at conferences. The reward for us is not professional recognition by our peers, job promotions, or more money. It’s usually just the thrill of finding better ways for students to better understand science concepts. The “aha” light turning on in student’s eyes is my reward.

A special thanks to Bryan Bacon and The Huntsville Times

On the One Year Anniversary of Esme’s Passing

The man who killed Esme Kenney precisely one year ago this hour is on trial for his life. Meanwhile, there is a memorial service in the Quaker manner this evening at her old church in Cincinnati.

Bereavement is ambiguous and unique to each carrier of grief. Powerlessness and the sense of loss are usually constant companions. Esme’s absence will forever mark the passage of time. She will live forever in the consciousness of her loved ones. The living telling their dead how much they are loved is a communion of the highest spiritual form.

The only question is will her killer get the death penalty? Past deaths cannot be rescinded. Future deaths would be prevented.

I did not know Esme when she was alive. My knowing her now cannot pass for possessing empirical accuracy. But I will say the following. From my distant perspective, you could not pick Esme out in a lineup. There was nothing particularly special at first appearance. She tried rather garish shades of nail polish, for sure, and various types of dangling earrings, but she wore little makeup and let the hair dye of 2007 grow out. She was unpretentious. Hollister and Abercrombie sold little by way of Esme. Simple hoodies and sweatshirts seemed to suffice. She wore the same purple pajamas for years as well as the same white-striped, gray running pants, even on the last day of her life. Though her style of dress was unique and informal, printed tops over t-shirts and jeans and the like, Esme blended right in.

She YouTubed, blogged, skyped, and rocked with ear phones behind outdated styles of sunglasses. Though she didn’t have a cell phone, she certainly knew how to program one. She was known, as most tweens and teens are, as a “tech head.” Through this modern consumer technology, Esme entertained the interests of tween American culture along with her friends. On her YouTube account were Carrie Underwood, Jordin Sparks, Denni Lavato, Taylor Swift, Jonas Brothers, a Twilight trailer spoof, and lots of Ali and AJ. Esme swore by tart and sassy Avril Lavigne. It is said she listened also to JoJo and Fall Out Boy. She was listening to Hilary Duff on her IPod when she ran into her killer. If she had entertained a secret crush on Robert Pattinson or Daniel Radcliffe, then I wouldn’t be surprised.

But what would you say about her after even one conversation with her, one shared moment? Would you say that here is someone special, maybe even a Saint, seamlessly and unconsciously integrating God’s business into her daily interactions with people? Not having met her myself, I still have good reason to wonder.

I can be certain, however, of one thing, the juxtaposition of extremes. This extraordinary young person, lit like an alter candle by the testimonies of others and the stories her pictures and videos tell, makes a claim on me when I think of the improbable and extreme circumstances of her leave-taking from this world. The jury this week will hear every word of her killer’s confession of what happened on that fateful day exactly one year ago. How many vulnerable young women lived in her neighborhood, and what were the chances of them leaving the security of their homes that afternoon? What was said at the time was, “that she did an unusual thing for her: she went for a jog…” What were the chances of anyone being there, let alone him? Never should a violent predator be randomly lurking in the woods near a child's home. "This is a once-in-a-career experience,” Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher had said. “This is not the rule. This is the rare exception to the rule."

This is also shock therapy as higher calling. I am wide awake. Like her namesake in the story by J. D. Salinger, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Esme has restored my faculties to keen receptors of what goes on around me and distilleries of precision in separating the important things in life from those that are not.

The dead claim the living and tell us how to live. The loss of her corporeal love teaches us to love on a higher level. It is imperative that we listen and adhere to her sanctions. We are required to work as though this lost loved one is still here with us. It is a call to duty that proves efficacious over time. We send messages to a spirit and get no material answer. There is, however, the compelling assumption that she is there, and we are here, and we must not falter at our task. There is no human horror that the persistent application of love and devotional consciousness cannot transcend.

Esme Kenney will not return to Earth as a 13-year-old girl. Her role now is to impart courage in her invisibility. The brilliant light of her fragile, ephemeral spark so quickly doused must become the enduring afterglow of community love she built with everyone she met. Esme offers us a survival manual, written in her own blood. We are urgently charged to honor her and seek the perpetuation of her gentle kindness.

Special Thanks to James Ellroy

Tracing the History of Civilization to a Pair of Bumps on a Bone

The plan for a lesson is often written in the heat of the moment right before delivering it. I’m a science teacher who teaches in a high school that specializes in the creative and performing arts. This year I have four different classes, including a freshman science course that I developed only last year, Biology, AP Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body. There are days when prep time just runs out. All I knew was that it was Musculature of the Arm Day for the Anatomy class. Students had seen the muscles in the dissecting tray of the white rat. Today they would turn in the coloring page based on the chart of names, origins, insertions, and actions of these muscles. And today I was going to work up a quiz. As students stumbled into class, I noticed that two bone markings were listed three times each, the medial and lateral epicondyles of the humerus or upper arm bone. Aha. It occurred to me right then and there that these two places were the key to my impromptu lesson plan.

“Yes, Mr. DePrez, I see the flared end to the upper arm bone. So?”

“It’s called the humerus, remember?” I retorted.

“Oh, yea.”

“Now think about it, people. You dancers can’t do pirouettes without the solid floor underneath your feet. The Olympic figure skaters this week can’t do those fancy axel jumps without leverage. They need the ice to launch those spin jumps, don’t they? In other words, dancers and skaters need a foundation against which to push off.”

“Yeah, yeah,” came a response from the back of the room.

“Now consider flexion and extension of the wrist and fingers. If you’re going to curl these bones and bring them back to their original position, don’t you need a similar launching pad? Look down the list of muscle origins where the forearm muscles are anchored by their tendons. How many times do you see epicondyle of the humerus? Lisa, read them for us, please.”

“Origin of the flexor carpi ulnaris: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the flexor carpi radialis: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the flexor digitorum: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor carpi ulnaris: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor carpi radialis: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor digitorum: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus.”

“Well! Just one pair of sites provides the origins for the muscles that work the hands, huh? Humans are tool makers. Ever since the Neolithic Revolution, during which they domesticated plants and animals for a steady food source, humans have grasped and manipulated their world with their hands. The one anatomical feature that provides the foundation for grasping and manipulating, and thus has enabled our fine minds to work their magic in making things with tools, is a pair of epicondyles on the humerus. The means of empire-building boils down to a pair of bumps on a bone. Now what I want you to do is pull out a sheet of paper, number it one to six for listing the six flexion and extension muscles of the wrists and fingers, and, oh, skip a space so I can ask you what bone markings provide the leverage for these actions.”

Not one student failed to state every time the epicondyles of the humerus.

Esme Kenney: The Self-Reciprocating Power of Happiness

Readers of this blog know about thirteen-year-old Esme Louise Kenney who was murdered March 7, 2009 by a convicted killer and sex offender while she was jogging near her Cincinnati, Ohio home. As the first year anniversary of her death approaches, and the trial of her alleged killer begins officially Thursday, March 4, I ponder her story, which has been one of overwhelming positivity. More and more people rally to celebrate her spirit through songfests, memorials, and dedications. In her parent’s words, the explosion of love and light in the wake of her passing is indeed imbedding shards of goodness and kindness in hearts everywhere.

Esme’s power to touch lives, a godly power, follows a pattern. I see in her the same power that was exhibited in the life of Anne Frank. This power is manifested paradoxically in weakness. Young, innocent, vulnerable, vibrant, cheerful, precocious, and so full of life, both Anne and Esme outlive the random, senseless, and brutal forces that vanquished them. I think that the power to do this is rooted in the happiness they felt through meeting and interacting with others. This infectious happiness, a refreshing alternative to an attitude of cynicism and despair in an age that seems to have lost its way, was no accident in their lives. That is because happiness is self-reciprocating. What follows is an excerpt about the nature of happiness and how to acquire it from a book by Andy Andrews, entitled The Traveler’s Gift, copyright 2002. The protagonist in the story meets the persistently bubbly and talkative Anne Frank who tears out two pages from her diary and gives them to him.

“Today I will choose to be happy. Beginning this very moment, I am a happy person, for I now truly understand the concept of happiness. Few others before me have been able to grasp the truth of the physical law that enables one to live happily every day. I know now that happiness is not an emotional phantom floating in and out of my life. Happiness is a choice. Happiness is the end result of certain thoughts and activities, which actually bring about a chemical reaction in my body. This reaction results in a euphoria that, while elusive to some, is totally under my control.

“Today I will choose to be happy. I will greet each day with laughter. Within moments of awakening, I will laugh for seven seconds. Even after such a small period of time, excitement has begun to flow through my bloodstream. I feel different. I am different. I am enthusiastic about the day. I am alert to its possibilities. I am happy.

“Laughter is an outward expression of enthusiasm, and I know that enthusiasm is the fuel that moves the world. I laugh throughout the day. I laugh while I am alone, and I laugh in conversation with others. People are drawn to me because I have laughter in my heart. The world belongs to the enthusiastic, for people will follow them anywhere!

“Today I will choose to be happy. I will smile at every person I meet. My smile has become my calling card. It is, after all, the most potent weapon I possess. My smile has the strength to forge bonds, break ice, and calm storms. I will use my smile constantly. Because of my smile, the people with whom I come in contact on a daily basis will choose to further my causes and follow my leadership. I will always smile first. That particular display of a good attitude will tell others what I expect in return.

“My smile is the key to my emotional makeup. A wise man once said, ‘I do not sing because I am happy; I am happy because I sing!’ When I choose to smile, I become the master of my emotions. Discouragement, despair, frustration, and fear will always wither when confronted by my smile. The power of who I am is displayed then.

“Today I will choose to be happy. I am the possessor of a grateful spirit. In the past, I have found discouragement in particular situations until I compared the condition of my life to others less fortunate. Just as a fresh breeze cleans smoke form the air, a grateful spirit removes the cloud of despair. It is impossible for the seeds of depression to take root in a thankful heart.

“My God has bestowed upon me many gifts, and for these I will remember to be grateful. Too many times I have offered up the prayers of a beggar, always asking for more and forgetting to give thanks. I do not wish to be seen as a greedy child, unappreciative and disrespectful. I am grateful for sight and sound and breath. If ever in my life there is a pouring out of blessings beyond that, then I will be grateful for the miracle of abundance.

“I will greet each day with laughter. I will smile at every person I meet. I possess a grateful spirit. Today I will choose to be happy.”

Andrews simplifies who in fact was a complex, multifaceted teenager coming of age in order to outline his recipe for happiness. Esme herself exhibited a complexion of sometimes contradictory personality traits. Who doesn’t? But one of Esme’s traits stands out in my estimation, a spiritual one that allows us to realize a higher calling in being human, and one that aligns with that of the  totemic figure of the Holocaust, a deliberate optimism about others and a desire to share with them the simple joy of living, a joy that is self-reciprocating.

In Defiance of Entropy: Lessons from Coyote

I was aghast. My roommate had just returned from a summer night on the town in Flagstaff with an implement used in Navajo religious practice. It was a coyote skull with feathers atop a two foot-long wooden staff. Quite a character, he must have used his considerable charismatic charm and entrepreneurial powers of persuasion to obtain it from one of the shamans at the evening’s public drumming ceremony. To celebrate his acquisition, he proudly recounted how a man exiting a bar saw him with it and recoiled in fear. Coyote is a sacred totem in many Native American cultures. Coyote represents the archetype of godly trickery, meant to teach lessons in humility to humans who tend toward hubris over their creative achievements. My friend obviously stood in need of such a lesson, I remember thinking.

He and I were among thirty teachers attending a three-week, all expenses-paid workshop on advanced placement biology at Northern Arizona University. One of a number of free “education vacations” for teachers I have enjoyed over the years, it was an outreach to the general education community as a stipulation of a university research grant. I remember that the labs and lectures helped cement an important principle that I bring to every class I teach, that biological systems are in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, called the law of entropy. Take a living cell, for example. It is a system that imports energy from outside itself and uses it to become more organized. Increasing organization in living systems is counter to entropy, the natural tendency for the bits and pieces that make up matter to spread apart, losing the energy of organization, until all of them are uniformly distributed in the space they are allowed to occupy. This defiance of the law continues as long as there is an outside energy source that can be harnessed to do work.

In such an important case as this, religion informs science. Coyote in Navajo mythology is a destroyer of order (thus, an entropic force) as well as a creator of order out of chaos (in defiance of entropy). He is a composite of characters known as Ma'i, which includes the actual animal in the wild, the symbolic character of disorder in the myths, and the personification of Coyote power in life (trickster, creator, and buffoon). Ma'i is not a composite but a complex, and the Navajo do not distinguish between his separate parts.* I can see how our creative triumphs invite lessons in humility from time to time. Coyote visits in ways we cannot always predict.

*(Ma'i Joldloshi: Legendary Styles and Navajo Myth in American Folk Legend, 1971)

The weekend following my roommate’s hi jinx, I rented a car and headed out with camping gear for Wupatki and Hovenweep National Monuments. They protect ruins of the pre-Columbian occupation of the Colorado Plateau, the former on the wind-swept flatlands south of the Little Colorado River, and the latter along shallow canyons of a broad plateau north of the San Juan River.

Wupatki is thought to be the result of a real estate stampede that occurred after Sunset Crater to the south blew in the eleventh century. The volcanic eruption spewed ash across the landscape, providing the Sinagua dry farmers with a moisture-preserving cover for bumper crops of corn, squash and beans. Wandering over the landscape pocked with unexcavated ruins, I fell, hurting my foot.

Undeterred, I continued on to Hovenweep just across the border of Utah in Colorado in view of the Ute Mountains to the east. There is an interesting fortress along a shallow canyon rim with peep holes that allowed the occupant views up and down the canyon without being seen. It is thought that a drought in the late twelfth century put pressure on the Kayenta Anasazi to build stone fortresses, which, in the case of Hovenweep, may have been to protect scarce water springs at the heads of the canyons. In-fighting amongst related clans over scarce resources might have been a reminder by Coyote of how the forces of destruction go hand in hand with those of creation.

I wanted especially to sit in a strange house on a boulder in Holly Ruins. To get to it required a four mile hike up one of the canyons. I found that without a wool sock, just the liner, my swollen foot withstood the hike just fine. I reached Holly and climbed up into it. Hours of sitting inside it sent me to lofty reaches of my intellect that from time to time requires a visit from Coyote.

That visit was to occur over twenty three years later.

By that time I had a son, now seventeen. My sister organized a "car-capade," driving with a daughter from her home in Massachusetts to pick me and my son up in Chicago on her way to San Diego where our mom lived in a retirement community. The journey included what was an immensely personal pilgrimage for me, a return to Holly. I thought of it as a metaphor for mythic return, outlined by Mircea Eliade's thesis of the "myth of the eternal return," periodically coming full circle in important cosmic creation events.

My son and I hiked the trail late at night, arriving after midnight, with a full moon shining overhead. I sat with him inside the musty ruin in a pile of desert rodent droppings. I was out of shape and feeling painfully tired, which reminded me of the pain in my ankle years earlier. Undeterred, I was hoping to transfer to my son the significance of this revisit to an odd fortress built out of desperation so long ago. However, Coyote was to have the last laugh. My son thought me peculiar and just couldn't understand what I was getting at.

Passing down traditions, by means of ritual reenactments of past events, once an important act of "world maintenance" for our ancestors, is harder to achieve today in a culture that discredits the past as obsolete. Modern generations are eschewing the past, putting a premium instead on new ways of thinking and acting. But I know that despite my failure to instill in my son a respectful regard for these ancient puebloans' struggle for existence that took such an interesting form in these ruins, wandering up that sliprock canyon for half the night resulted in cool kind of father-son "bonding" experience.

Nick Toombs

Coyote dropped in again recently in the guise of a friend of mine in Cincinnati. I have learned that this woman possesses the wisdom of the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. I remembered again about sitting in the Holly ruin thinking about lofty concepts, such as those that explain the modern mind, which include abstraction of social functions, greater importance of the future as opposed to the past, the individual as more important than the collective, liberation from past constraints, and secular values as more ideal than sacred ones, and not about the truth of simply living on the land that, with hard work and a little luck, bequeaths its bounty in support of family and community. This truth was posited by a delegation of Hopi elders, descendents of the ancient ones of the cliff dwellings, to the “Washington Chiefs” in 1894.

“…The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her...”

My friend in Cincinnati, who bakes, cans, garnishes meals with herbs from her garden, and harvests eggs from her hen Henrietta, all with clay crockery she makes herself, wrote me last summer,

“…I find the spiritual in everyday life as ultra grounding. I trust what I know. I find the domestic rituals humble and restorative. I am fine holding the mystery and don't need to find all the answers….”

She admonished me in regards to these things,

“The biggest obstacle is knowing everything! Get a mentor. I suggest a Buddhist.”

Or, perhaps, a Hopi tribal member, such as Rina Swentzell of the Pueblo Santa Clara, who says,

“...for us life is shrouded in mystery, and the world defies explanation...humans do not need to know everything there is to be known. The human past, we feel, is a universal past. No one can claim it, and no one can ever know it completely.”

Paul L

I did learn a lesson on that journey I will never forget, one that I can now attribute to Coyote. The lesson took place during the last weekend while at Walnut Canyon National Monument. Sensitive to how it was once the home of some four hundred Sinagua pueblo families eight centuries past, I carefully defied the rule of staying on the designated trail in the name of public ownership, tip-toeing down Walnut Canyon off trail in order to view unexcavated ruins. Many had graffiti from the days of discovery and vandalism in the nineteenth century. I stopped to contemplate one cliff dwelling, sitting and musing while fiddling with two potsherds found lying in the darkened interior. Just like at other sites on my wanderings, the ancient ones here in the Walnut Canyon community grew crops at scattered plots in the surrounding forest, raised children, made stone tools and other implements, talked, laughed and played, and followed the ceremonial cycles that had been passed down for generations. And then it happened. The two potsherds in my hands suddenly fit together along the crack that entropy had caused between them eight hundred years earlier. Waves of emotion rippled through my being. I felt an overwhelming sense of humility as I realized how this chance reconstruction out of simple earthen shards was a revelation from the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. They might have just been pieces of hardened clay from a simple water pot for washing or drinking in this household centuries ago forgotten. But for me their coming together was an epiphany, a gift with a divine origin, a lesson Coyote means to teach, that each of us is temporarily granted a life in defiance of entropy, one which my friend suggests ought to be lived through humble domestic rituals in the service of family and friends.

Absolution Under a Winter Full Moon

Photo copywrite R. King Used by permission

It was six weeks past the solstice, and the distinctly brighter light shining from higher in the sky during the sunny trip down from Chicago granted him the hope of eventual summer. But the sun had dropped low in the sky by the time he arrived in the old and well-worn city district near the Ohio River. The winter chill enveloped him as he emerged from his car. There appeared a distinctly Bohemian quaintness to the wooden houses along the street. “Need a marrying minister?” queried a makeshift sign in front of one of them. “Inquire here.” Brightly painted quarter moons adorned another. Others shown colorful pastels like those in the social realist murals of Diego Rivera. A sign across the street next to the chiseled stone and mortar of a church read, “Jesus is Alive!’ but it just made him add, “So is Esme.”

He was surprised that the doors to the tavern where the benefit to raise money for the memorial to her kind and gentle nature would be held were not locked, because it was two hours prior to the start time, and there appeared to be no one there. He sat on a bar stool and let the seconds tick away in the eerie silence.

Silent auction contributors and display organizers began to show up by means of the back door. Knots of early arrivers mingled in corners. Within time, the benefit was in full swing. More than 500 well wishers and supporters of the cause were packed into the back room before the stage. Local vocalists and instrumentalists were gracious and generous in their outpouring of lively, tuneful reverie for this sainted child’s insuppressible spirit. “Yes, Esme lives,” he thought.

Feeling like a votary in veneration, he got his play bill for the event autographed by the sculptor of the memorial that would eventually hang in the new school for the creative and performing arts where Esme had attended. She knew Esme when a baby.

Of the silent auction’s offerings, only one stood out in its explicit expression of her name. “For Esme” had been carved as part of the wooden block print by a lion of the local arts community. It depicted a bedeviled pilgrim with the air of a medieval crusader who ascends a path that spirals to the top of a pointy mountain with a cloud hovering around it. With mischievous disdain, a cocky figure beating on a snare drum comes down the spiral path in an eventual juxtaposition of inexorable intent and futile resistance. Which figure represented which attitude was unclear, but he identified with the pilgrim. He wrote his name on the form that would claim a $250 copy of the print, one of four. Mission achieved, he returned for the last set of the gig for Esme.

Afterwards, he pointed out to Esme’s mom how the spiral path up the mountain in the print is identical to the way a silver wire spirals up around a quartz crystal and explodes into a tightly coiled sun in the pendent he had won at auction to help fund a scholarship in Esme’s name for an arts program at a Ohio university and had given to her. “I see it as a sign,” he told her.

The music ended, but the party went on. He went out for some air. When he returned, he ran into a relative of Esme's. Polite greetings over, the relative fastened onto him, eyes riveted onto his only inches away. The relative's steely question, “Why are you here,” reiterated his very own question, which had resounded deep within for months. The question was a fair one. The visitor was not a local. He had not known Esme, her kin, or her acquaintances before she had been murdered while jogging near her home the previous March. He was, ultimately, a stranger. His presence could easily be mistaken as an interloper, an awestruck rubbernecker in the company of legitimate mourners in the community that was reaching out to embrace the grieving family and celebrate the extraordinary young person who had been one of their own.

He mutely stood there for the longest time searching for an answer. Later he would recall a weary, sorrowful comment the narrator in the movie Titanic makes regarding the yearnings of survivors in forlorn life boats bobbing on the high seas on the morning after the sinking, “They waited for an absolution that would never come.”

He tried to list plausible reasons but finally replied that none of the listed credentials mattered. That he might be a sympathizer angered by the loss of an only child in so cruel a manner, a teacher in an arts academy similar to the one she had attended who was trained to understand the vicissitudes of emerging adolescence in a young artist like Esme, a father of a daughter of his own who could theoretically experience a similar fate, a believer who had come to face the threat her death was having on his faith, did not matter at all. He was just simply there. He was forced to admit that he had nothing to offer the relative that could help members of this community mourn the loss of Esme except that he too loved her. The steely look slowly began to soften. “I get that,” the relative replied, especially when seeing tears appear in the visitor's eyes. The relative reached out to embrace him.

It was two in the morning. The chill air outside the closing tavern told him it was in the teens or lower. The full moon’s light bathed the city. He had come prepared to endure the night in his car, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The only question was where, probably in some church’s parking lot. He drove around looking for one. The road climbed the hill that held the woods behind the reservoir where Esme had been slain. Something overcame him, and he had to stop. He found a place to put the car and hiked into the woods. It was a bramble of silhouettes in the stark moonlight. It was also his ground zero. Holding onto a tree to keep from collapsing, he bawled out loud at the moon, his glasses fogging from the water in his eyes that quickly vaporized in the bitter cold. “There are people, don’t you see?” he just about screamed, “people who matter here, whom you love, who have lost the dearest thing they had.” He stopped to remove the frosted over glasses. “For some there is nothing left. What are you doing!?” came more words. He shuddered, sank down onto the snow-frozen ground, and curled up at the base of a tree. He sat there for the longest time. The stone cold quiet made a deafening impression in his ears. “Just one more resurrection,” he pleaded. “Just one more…She’s cold. I will take her home where it’s warm, which is just over there,” he murmured deliriously. He glanced behind him hoping that there might be a rustle made by someone in the dead, snow-covered leaves. Then he sank into more silence. He felt no chill, probably because of the alcohol in the blood of his arteries and feverish brain. He thought of those back home who figured that this was some kind of personal pilgrimage he was on, one he hoped would hurt no one. Very spiritual people, they had given him permission to ask boldly. But he really hadn’t planned on this.

Adorned mailbox, roadside memorial, and the distant reservoir

The hours sublimated into the silence. The moon made a slow wink each time it slid past another branch above his eye. He realized that it was exactly one month since the last full moon, at which time he had been put up after a birthday party to sleep in Esme’s room a few hundred meters away. Being in Esme’s room that night, consecrated by her things left the way they were last March, had been the most moving event he had ever experienced. He had hardly slept because of waking up to what he felt had been Esme’s presence. He had spoken to her, he remembered. Feeling humbled, he had crawled from his sleeping bag on the floor where her bare feet had trodden over many years to the round window where the reflected light of the full moon shone through, a circle of light in a circle of window. But he felt no presence of Esme this time. Not here, not in this place. Good comes paired with evil, and only God, if anyone other than evil, would be found here. Attempting more prayer, he prayed what they had sung that night, that hard times not come around here anymore.

“Are you all right?” the man asked, his long hair falling from behind his head when he stooped forward in the frigid morning air. The man he questioned had just begun to emerge from the car in the parking lot of a nursery. “Can’t figure out how you made it in this frightful cold. The insides of yer windows are all frozen over,” he said. “But I see you gotcher sleeping bag, so there, I reckon.” Pulling on his boots, the crasher in the car apologized for the man’s concern and replied that he was fine. “Just on a road trip, is all,” he said. “Part of the journey.”

Dedicated to Corey on this eleventh month anniversary of Esme’s passing.