Remembering April

Click on "Remembering April" for a brief view of April


Click on "Remembering April" above

Sliding Through May

May seems to slide by always. Is it because it is spring? Better weather? Or because my birthday forces me to leave all personal missions slide, and I stop and breathe in life?

I sat down on a stone ledge beside San Francisco City Hall to rest in the sun before meeting Paul Harmon for dinner. While not terribly tired, I fell into the antique position of the weary, elbows on knees, eyes fixed on the ground before me, thoughts wandering while I saw only the legs and feet of those passing on the sidwalk – scuffed work boots and spattered work trousers; perfectly shiny black dress shoes and creased dark business trousers; tennis shoes and jeans; a family where the little glrl, in my line of sight, questions me with her gaze. I was making a film of shoes and legs, but it was time to go, and I stood up, faced at that moment with an African-American woman, not very old, whose hair stood out in all directions, perfectly round, like a dandelion when it has gone to seed. She was singing a soft, sweet song. “Beautiful,” I said, of her song and of her face, for her eyes were luminous, like someone having a vision. Seeing her only briefly as I was on my way, I walked to the other side of the street, and felt compelled to look back. I saw that she would follow passersby, like a magnet, following the next person after each one ignored her, turning to the next person approaching from the opposite next direction, herself going back and forth in both directions, doubtless hoping just her song and her face would cause them to give her a hand-out. She held an empty Coke bottle in front of her, close to her chest, as if it were a sacred chalice.

Now I had an appointment to meet, but I regretted not giving her a coin, and I regretted not giving her some suitable amount to justify asking if I could take her picture. Many people would see that as exploitation, but, for one thing, I do not feel different from her, as I have been close to where she is, although not quite that mad and usually begging only for a cigarette – desperately needing money for a meal, but more desperately in search of affection, and a cigarette is the nipple of a love that belongs to the phantom of smoke. But, those memories almost faded, I felt it would be wrong to NOT record her strange beauty – to record an image of our age or our world; or to photograph Persephone returned to sunlight with no-one there to remind her who she was before she had entered the underworld, or how to return to life now. It is gross, of course, to see myth where the reality is rough and real.

Some of us live on the edge of the world of the desperate; cannot be ignorant of them for even a day; cannot forget the social crime that is their misery. We watch murder in slow motion, and only because it is not as abrupt as a gunshot or a stabbing from a knife does our society fail to see that it is murder of the worst kind.

May slides by, and in another day or two, I see another woman I should have photographed, selling her art along the Embarcadero. It is Saturday, and some of us do tai chi on a pier near the Ferry Building.

It is cliché but true to see that a city is a stage, everywhere a theater, and its citizens are actors. As usual, in an age of economic depression, the street acts and musicians become more amazing.
With the white tents of the vendors nearby, in the space at the end of the Ferry Building, I see a man seeming to be made of newspaper – hat, suit, seeming to be made of newspaper, tailored from newspaper, and even his face was partially covered with newspaper – an immobile entertainment.

There is a band playing for money. And each week there is also the young man from Witchita who is the classic one-man band, like someone who is a living mobile. His singing and his playing are good, and people are impressed by that, but also fascinated by the energy it takes to be a one-man band. With ropes tied to his legs, he can beat the drums hanging above him as he plays his guitar and leans forward, when not singing, to blow on the harmonica. Other sound makers are taped or wired to him.

Walking back along the Embarcadero after tai chi breakfast, I come across the other woman I should have photographed – a willowy, young African-American woman, draped in beautiful silk dyed in shades of blue, seated on the ledge that runs parallel between walkway and the Bay. Her tiny paintings lie on the walk in front of her, held in place by inkwells and other objects, for it is a very windy day. Paints of all hues are in the many cups of a paint tray, and she is painting one of her tiny, detailed paintings, seemingly indifferent to the wind that is whipping everything about. If she is mad too it is with her vision that she tells me about when I kneel in front of her and her paintings, and we speak of how it is to be possessed by vision, whether poet or painter or auto mechanic.

One of her little paintings is picked up by the wind and flies along the Embarcadero, and it keeps leaping away from me as I run after it, but it does not go into the water, and I catch it and bring it back. She thanks me but seems so much in her own world that everything could blow away and she would remain tranquil and preoccupied. I cannot pay the price for the painting I like most, and at the same time I am admiring another one. What seem like abstractions are comprised of marks that to her are code for specific meanings. As I ask the prices, she says I should pay what I can. We talk more, sharing some spiritual sense, and she says, “Follow your heart. You like those two? Take them please.” She picked them up and handed them to me. “I could only give you – “ She interrupts me, ”Take what your heart needs.” I give her less than the cost of one of the paintings, but I do take them both away. I hope to stop and talk to her again. Perhaps I will bring her a poem.

On Justin Herman Plaza, teenagers seem to be auditioning in groups of four:



Between stopping to jot in my notebook or stopping to take a photo, pulling things out of my back and stuffing them back, it is rare that I do not lose something. In this case, it was my new BART card for trips underground (under the Bay) between Oakland and San Francisco. After discerning the loss as I prepared to return to Oakland, I walked back to a table on the edge of Justin Herman Plaza, and was correct that I had lost it while sitting there. It lay on the table where I had been sitting in front of the man who was sitting there now. “I left this here,” I said in tone more tentative than assertive. He smile without rancor and said, “I found it there.” He pointed to the cement beside the table. “O.K.?” I asked as I reached for the card. “Oh, yes,” he said amiably, as if there was no question that I was right to retrieve the lost card.

How many time, as I got up from a BART seat, has my cap, that should have been stuffed into my bag, fallen on the floor, and someone has called after me, “Sir – you lost your cap”? Where is the cold inhuman city I hear about?

Returning to Oakland I see a blue bust of a woman, and I finish the little collage that is a purposeful "waste of time."

I slide through May, and the two Pauls and Fred treat me to the classic birthday lunch – on the deck beside the Bay, at Sam’s on Belevedere. Then we walked along the water.

Some more impressions are visible if you click above on the title of this section.

The Verses of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln's childhood home in Southern Indiana

I was intending to send to an old friend, about to visit our native Indiana, the “one” four-line verse written by Abraham Lincoln, especially as the friend is returning to southern Indiana where Lincoln spent his childhood.
On the Internet I was surprised to find that he had written several verses, but I had to search a while to find the one I remembered, that four-line verse Lincoln wrote on one of his returns to the landscape of his childhood:

The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread,
And feel I’m part of thee!

The other verses that I read for the first time reinforce the fact of Lincoln’s melancholy, especially as he identifies with a suicide in one of them. Whatever their literary value, it is amazing that we had a President who wrote poetry, and poetry that was thoughtful, serious, and heartfelt.


Recalling the time when he wrote most of the verses, Lincoln wrote, "In the fall of 1844 [age 35, as he was born in 1809] I went into the neighborhood in that state in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question."

My Childhood’s Home I See Again
Abraham Lincoln

I.

My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world
‘Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that’s earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye,
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar—
So memory will hallow all
We’ve known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, how few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.


Lincoln explained why he made Matthew Gentry the subject of Part II of "My Childhood Home I See Again”: "He is three years older than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of our poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When, as I told you in my other letter I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood I could not forget the impression his case made upon me."


II.


But here’s an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains—
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.

Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright,
A fortune-favored child—
Now locked for aye, in mental night,
A haggard mad-man wild.

Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first, with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
And mother strove to kill;

When terror spread, and neighbours ran,
Your dang’rous strength to bind;
And soon, a howling crazy man
Your limbs were fast confined.

How then you strove and shrieked aloud,
Your bones and sinnews bared;
And fiendish on the gazing crowd,
With burning eye-balls glared—

And begged, and swore, and wept and prayed
With maniac laughter joined—
How fearful were those signs displayed
By pangs that killed thy mind!

And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.

I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone—
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.

To drink its strains, I’ve stole away,
All stealthily and still,
Ere yet the rising God of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.

Air held his breath; trees, with the spell,
Seemed sorrowing angels round,
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the listening ground.

But this is past; and nought remains,
That raised thee o’er the brute.
Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains,
Are like, forever mute.

Now fare thee well—more thou the cause,
Than subject now of woe.
All mental pangs, by time’s kind laws,
Hast lost the power to know.

O death! Thou awe-inspiring prince,
That keepst the world in fear;
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him ling’ring here?


What caused the depression in 1844 that led Lincoln to write “The Suicide’s Soliloquy”?

The Suicide’s Soliloquy
Abraham Lincoln

Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.
No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.
Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!
Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never know;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?
To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.
Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.
Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!
Sweet steel! come forth from out your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!
I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!



I don’t know what man first wrote an account of a bear hunt, or how many more have been written since then, but Lincoln’s account, written on that 1844 visit rolls along, full of action, reminiscent of moments in Faulkner’s “The Bear.”

The Bear Hunt
Abraham Lincoln

A wild-bear chace, didst never see?
Then hast thou lived in vain.
Thy richest bump of glorious glee,
Lies desert in thy brain.

When first my father settled here,
’Twas then the frontier line:
The panther’s scream, filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.

But woe for Bruin’s short lived fun,
When rose the squealing cry;
Now man and horse, with dog and gun,
For vengeance, at him fly.

A sound of danger strikes his ear;
He gives the breeze a snuff;
Away he bounds, with little fear,
And seeks the tangled rough.

On press his foes, and reach the ground,
Where’s left his half munched meal;
The dogs, in circles, scent around,
And find his fresh made trail.

With instant cry, away they dash,
And men as fast pursue;
O’er logs they leap, through water splash,
And shout the brisk halloo.

Now to elude the eager pack,
Bear shuns the open ground;
Through matted vines, he shapes his track
And runs it, round and round.

The tall fleet cur, with deep-mouthed voice,
Now speeds him, as the wind;
While half-grown pup, and short-legged fice,
Are yelping far behind.

And fresh recruits are dropping in
To join the merry corps:
With yelp and yell,—a mingled din—
The woods are in a roar.

And round, and round the chace now goes,
The world’s alive with fun;
Nick Carter’s horse, his rider throws,
And more, Hill drops his gun.

Now sorely pressed, bear glances back,
And lolls his tired tongue;
When as, to force him from his track,
An ambush on him sprung.

Across the glade he sweeps for flight,
And fully is in view.
The dogs, new-fired, by the sight,
Their cry, and speed, renew.

The foremost ones, now reach his rear,
He turns, they dash away;
And circling now, the wrathful bear,
They have him full at bay.

At top of speed, the horse-men come,
All screaming in a row,
“Whoop! Take him Tiger. Seize him Drum.”
Bang,—bang—the rifles go.

And furious now, the dogs he tears,
And crushes in his ire,
Wheels right and left, and upward rears,
With eyes of burning fire.

But leaden death is at his heart,
Vain all the strength he plies.
And, spouting blood from every part,
He reels, and sinks, and dies.

And now a dinsome clamor rose,
’Bout who should have his skin;
Who first draws blood, each hunter knows,
This prize must always win.

But who did this, and how to trace
What’s true from what’s a lie,
Like lawyers, in a murder case
They stoutly argufy.

Aforesaid fice, of blustering mood,
Behind, and quite forgot,
Just now emerging from the wood,
Arrives upon the spot.

With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair—
Brim full of spunk and wrath,
He growls, and seizes on dead bear,
And shakes for life and death.

And swells as if his skin would tear,
And growls and shakes again;
And swears, as plain as dog can swear,
That he has won the skin.

Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee—
Nor mind, that now a few
Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be,
Conceited quite as you.


I have not searched for the dates when Lincoln wrote these little verses:

To Linnie
Abraham Lincoln

A sweet plaintive song did I hear,
And I fancied that she was the singer—
May emotions as pure, as that song set a-stir
Be the worst that the future shall bring her.


To Rosa
Abraham Lincoln

You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not—
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—
Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Teach your beau to heed the lay—
That sunshine soon is lost in shade—
That now’s as good as any day—
To take thee, Rosa, ere she fade.


On Lee’s Invasion Of The North
Abraham Lincoln, writing that this is

Gen. Lees invasion of the North written by himself—

In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees the got arter us, and
giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.


Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen:
He will be good but
God knows When.


Abraham Lincoln Is My Name
Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read



Following are other people’s verses, said to be among Lincoln’s favorites, as ever concerned with death and loss:


Mortality
William Knox
Job, iii. Ecclesiastes, i.


Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passes from life to his rest in the grave.

The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, the low and the high,
Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.

The infant a mother attended and loved;
The mother that infant’s affection who proved;
The husband, that mother and infant who blessed;
Each, all, are away to their dwelling of rest.

The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye,
Shone beauty and pleasure—her triumphs are by;
And the memory of those who loved her and praised,
Are alike from the minds of the living erased.

The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne,
The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn,
The eye of the sage, and the heart of the brave,
Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.

The peasant, whose lot was to sow and to reap,
The herdsman, who climbed with his goats up the steep,
The beggar, who wandered in search of his bread,
Have faded away like the grass that we tread.

The saint, who enjoyed the communion of Heaven,
The sinner, who dared to remain unforgiven,
The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just,
Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust.

So the multitude goes—like the flower or the weed
That withers away to let others succeed;
So the multitude comes—even those we behold,
To repeat every tale that has often been told.

For we are the same that our fathers have been;
We see the same sights that our fathers have seen;
We drink the same stream, we feel the same sun,
And run the same course that our fathers have run.

The thoughts we are thinking, our fathers would think;
From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would shrink;
To the life we are clinging, they also would cling—
But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing.

They loved—but the story we cannot unfold;
They scorned—but the heart of the haughty is cold;
They grieved—but no wail from their slumber will come;
They joyed—but the tongue of their gladness is dumb.

They died—aye, they died—we things that are now,
That walk on the turf that lies over their brow,
And make in their dwellings a transient abode,
Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road.

Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;
And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.

’Tis the wink of an eye—’tis the draught of a breath—
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

The Last Leaf
Oliver Wendell Holmes

I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o’er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
“They are gone.”

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said—
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow.

But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,—
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

Happy 73rd Birthday to Me

This is the cover of an edition of Collier’s magazine dated two days after my birth on 20 May 1937. The back cover is, of course, an ad for Coca-Cola.


One of the full page ads is for Parker pens – the Parker vacumatic – price $7.50. “BE ON YOUR GUARD Against 1937 style pens with 1907 Mechanisms. Read why sacless pens failed to ‘click’ until Parker’s revolutionary Diaphragm Filler was invented by a University Scientist – know your facts, and you can’t be misled.”

Quentin Reynolds, later known as a novelist, is their Sports writer. The editorial page concerns anxiety about the growing strength of unions under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Any Week,” the chatty section recording comments from readers, suggests that readers “might ponder with Mr. Alex Bougainville of New York City the deviousness of Mr. Adolf Hitler, the German Colossus. Mr. Bougainville has just returned from Berlin, where, says he, ‘the roars of “Heil Hitler” by friends greeting each other on the streets are so loud one can’t hear oneself think.’ Says he: ‘The country went wild with joy when Mr. Hitler nobly restored to the citizenry the right to meet one another on the field of honor.


"'This re-established dueling in Germany. This, my dear fellow, is sheer cunning on der Fuehrer’ part. It may happen that some unsuspecting Hans or Heinrich would be suspected of a mildness in his love for der Fuehrer. He is so accused by one of the Nazi’s trigger men. His heated denials will be taken as a personal affront. He is challenged. If he doesn’t accept he is doomed to the fate of the public coward. If he does accept he is going to be done in by an expert. All together now – three cheers for liberty.’


“Or he might join Mrs. Edna S. Ring of Santa Monica, California, and worry about the predicament President Roosevelt may be rigging up for himself – or which is being rigged up for him. ‘I’m as impartial as anybody can be in this worker-employer controversy,’ says she. ‘But I’m wondering whether we aren’t going to find that rule by labor is apt to be as harassing and freedom-crippling as the old-deal rule by the plutocrats. Personally, I’m still working at being a housewife, ten to fourteen hours a day, no salary and nothing for overtime. I do manage a sit-down now and then, sewing on buttons, darning socks, knotting clothes and paring potatoes. Mr. John L. Lewis hasn’t been around shaking his finger at my boss. Wall Street, the C.I.O. and the A.F.L are all one to me. And now I’ve added the chore of worrying for Mr. Roosevelt.”

Spending one’s infancy at the end of the Great Depression, before war industries proved to be the final solution for causing an economic recovery; living ages 1 to 8 in the dark days of World War II, listening to the horrors described by soldiers on leave, or reading it in the faces and behavior, counterbalanced with extreme denial expressed in manic dance styles and sentimental songs, was a long sentence that ended with such a tiny period – the atom – which nevertheless blew a giant and permanent hole in reality. Where did we go from there? As the Parker Pen people say, “Know your facts, and you can’t be misled.” And, of course, trust your “University Scientist.” They all have integrity –

At three weeks of age.

James Thomas Eilers was born 20 May 1937 at 7:45 a.m., at St. Catherine Hospital, City of East Chicago, Indiana. His mother, Ethel Ruth McColley Eilers was 25; his father, Thomas John Eilers, was 32. Doctor: A.S. Yoder.

From the first, grumpy...

Golden Gate Bridge Walk 1987

CLICK ON THE TITLE ABOVE IF YOU WOULD LIKE A SLIDE SHOW OF THE WALK.


The Golden Gate Bridge and I both turned 50 in May of 1987, and so, of course, I had to be among that crowd who walked across the bridge. No one thought what would happen when the people from Marin ran into the people from San Francisco in the middle of the bridge - colossal pedestrian gridlock, with no-one paying any attention to that blond shouting for people to return to where they did not care to go -- Charlotte Maillard. With so much weight on the middle of the bridge, the natural curve in the surface flattened out, and the cables above began to swing wildly, and we all felt a certain delight knowing that we were going to die in a major event. Or, at least, everyone stayed calm and amused, as San Franciscans will. There were the odd elements, of course, someone walking across on top of a giant ball; one person seemed to be intent on crawling across. I was fortunate to be with Peter (Panayotis) Arvanitis, Evmorphia Stratis, her brother Eustathios (Stathi) Stratis, and Stathi's lover from Thailand, Prayot Anusak, and their friend Cecilia Cabanag.



When a helicopter hovered beside the Bridge, everyone comically mimed panic, gesturing at the helicopter, waving their arms, and shouting, "Save us!"


It was a lot of fun, but we did not look forward to being stuck on the bridge hours, and so Prayot had us form a single file snake, and he, the head of the snake, wormed our way through what seemed an impenetrable wall of people -- I don't know what he was doing at the head of our snake to make that work. That was only 23 years ago.

As birthday approaches...

I skip through the past -- all the way back to when Michael Cheda made a five-minute film of me making a mobile -- Only a fragment survives, visible if you CLICK ON THE TITLE ABOVE..

Or call up a charcoal portrait by Penelope Schloss from another era:

Buds in a Garden

In spite of coming from a four-hour gig, The Buds, when they gathered for the afternoon, could not stop playing. Click on this springtime title, "Buds in a Garden," to see them at play: Elisa Welch, Bryan Harrison, Dave Coan, Jim McLaren, Danny taking Jim's guitar for a while, and Mikala Cortez sitting in with bongos. Toy, Meia, and I were treated to a private concert on a very pleasant afternoon. To find out more about The Buds or to get on the list of their Bay Area appearances, often very accessible places, go to http://www.thebuds.org/

Jim McLaren

Elisa Welch

Dave Coan

Bryan Harrison

Thanking Kenji C Liu....

....Oakland Word Grants Coordinator for publishing my profile among others on Oakland Word (If you want to see click on title above).