The loose threads
Got tied up, without any pleading or plaiting
Knotting and knitting themselves
Line, verse, chapter, braided, book upended

And like Gretchen, I often feel nothing
We’ve, he, her, they’ve, dumbed me down, just so
But maybe when I watch homeless children
And when my own, visits me for the last time
This summer on Spring Street

Those things we endeavored
The why of why we met
Those things we wished for
I do and don’t regret

When your pictures roll like finished film in my sleep
You are so attentive and kind
Unlike the you, I know
Delayed, blinded from white sheets I show

Outside, the Bob Marley woman dances
The man picks at his tattoos like plucking a heroin vein
The shirtless near-teenager loads the dishes
I think I got divorced today

The pieces and fragments
Threads bending for their sewing
Wanting so to be heard and fastened
A mind’s unruly skein, unwound and unattended

Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized

Lost Cause

ablastname

Posted on February 19, 2016

your way conceptual compass rose on white background

How could I be so completely wrong?

A lifetime away from any discernible mark?

Every unannounced nuance that hit so hard, so deep

Something pretended, imagined, illusioned, wanted

Something only real when I sleep

There truly was no deciphering

There was no puzzle to crack

But a combination of looks, thoughts, breathless whispers and moans

Led me down this miscalculated track

A compass? To navigate?

Sure, but intellectually, it points to the exact same spot

A misunderstanding of these misplaced coordinates

For a destination that it was not

Categories: Poetry

Protest in the Sky

ablastname

Posted on August 4, 2015

Sitting there as long as you like, who’s to bother you?

In your white shorts, cigarette choking the room, the only living thing, and half glass

Th 5 o’clock news slides into 6 and 7 and 8 and 9

24 hours a day, that’s about right

Damn Arabs you might say ( if you only knew )

A day without your comment, so befallen on us alive

A quiet night that heaved in protest with a rip in the sky

So loudly, but for you, my only, then, asleep

Categories: Uncategorized

Evaporation

ablastname

Posted on July 10, 2015

That sound you just heard

That simple, solitary sound?

Barely audible, but to the trained

Barely visible, but to the ordained

Disappearing act, no where to be found

The way she held her face

The way she folded the paper

The blank look she embraced

Her walk with such intended haste

With no clear destination in mind

A flit of her hand, a nod of her head, and onward she climbs

She watches from the back of the room

Never to be a part of, distant

She traces from the front of the stairs

She gives it all, all that she has

And it really never makes a difference

Whatever she wants, she does not get

Whatever her needs, goes unmet

Vigilance in obtaining, her only method

Due diligence in order, to be expected

They fade away, there they go

One, two, three, evaporation

Thoughts delivered only to scare

Words lost, no space gained

Just loss and acceptance

It’s all the same.

Categories: Poetry

Tiny Box

ablastname

Posted on August 5, 2014

Inside this tiny box

Cramped and fetally reimagined

A tiny pinhole, a pin prick of light

But from it spills sugar in the road

Suffocated by my own actions

Gulping for strength

In these compartments, you speak

Tightly packaged with your insularity

Unable to access the claustrophobic pain around you

Selfishly cloistered in your own world

Smothering, with relentless words all those close to you

Escape by a thread

A fly ball saved an inch over the fence

The loss of a wing but safe landing

A dropped stitch after glancing away only momentarily

A swim in the ocean precisely just when

Lightning scorched the shore’s breaking waves

And took you away

Further out there’s only stillness in that deep

Stroke to its middle, so hard lapping to solitude

Deep, still and dark now with only what ifs and whys

The attendant saw my mother’s tiny box

Transported across state lines

He pumped her gas for free with wisdom

And my cousin’s tear, just a child, as that box was buried so gently underneath

It’s contents so fragile

Categories: Poetry

The Loss of a Child

ablastname

Posted on July 31, 2014

Nick Fagnano

On July 27, 1972 my aunt gave birth to a full-term still born baby boy. He was named Joseph William Boyles, named after my great grandfather.

Since then, every July 27th, my Aunt Starr mourns his death sitting quietly in mediation and prayer. I remember a few years after Joseph’s death, I saw my aunt on this particular day sitting alone in her living room in North Carolina, the room blackened by the drawn curtains. At the time, her mourning frightened me. I was only 11 or 12, at the time, and did not understand her grief or the annual day of mourning she endured that day, and still does.

This July 27th, Joseph would have been 42-years-old and he would have had, by now, a life long narrative of climbing trees as a child, skinning his knees and skirmishes with his siblings Letel, Robert and Tom. He would have played a musical instrument and experienced the joy of making the baseball team or the tearful pain of being cut from the football squad. He would have donned a black tie and pinned a corsage on a girl’s dress before prom, thrown his cap beyond retrieval on high school graduation day, became best friends with his first college roommate, explored his passions through study and found a life partner.

At middle age, he might have succeeded in his field or failed; missed by inches the opening of doors of opportunity and carried with him regrets and gratitude. He might have known the pain and pleasure of parenting, the nuanced dance of marriage and he might have loved jazz as much as Jay Z.

In 1972, my aunt was not given the chance to held her dead child. He was buried a few days later in the city cemetery in Thomasville, North Carolina, alongside relatives I’ve only heard of but did not know: Bess Harville, Fannie Pachal and my great grandfather J.W. Boyles.

My aunt’s grief has tempered, but never subsided.

This July 27th Mary Fagnano lost her only child, Nick, when lightning hit the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach in California. An autopsy report released Wednesday, concluded Nick had died from electrocution.

Experts say there is a 1 in 7.5 million chance of being hit by lightning in California.

The community that knew Nick is grieving today. Hancock Park resident Michael Johnson, who knew Nick and his family–like many of us–through youth sports, said it best: “He was one of OUR boys. One of OUR beautiful, beautiful boys.”

We watched Nick mature from a pudgy kid that every parent loved to a 20-year-old lean and tall man who had graduated from Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, but without the grades to enroll in his life long dream school, USC. That was not going to deter Nick. He worked hard at both Santa Barbara Community College and Santa Monica City College after graduating in 2012 and was enrolled to start classes at USC just a few weeks from now.

My fondest memory of Nick was watching him pitch one particular baseball game for Wilshire Sports in Hancock Park. His pudgy boyhood had turned him into a teddy bear of a teenager–in some cases twice the size of his teammates. The game was not going well and in this particular inning, he was throwing ball after ball into the dirt. Frustrated, he tried to conceal his tears, kicking dust up on the mound with one cleated foot disgusted at his lack of performance as the game unraveled and became out of hand. His father Jay was his coach and met him on the mound to help him center and help him dry his tears. Jay looked Nick in the eye and put his strong hands around Nick’s shoulders, a coach’s embrace when, as a father, he only wanted to hug him.

Nick lost that game. But went on to win many more and played at Notre Dame in Sherman Oaks and for Santa Barbara City College.

Although she saw her son play ball and witnessed him incrementally grow from a teddy bear into a man, like my Aunt, Mary’s suffering will never end.

Nick’s trajectory and the beginning of his own life narrative had started to come into focus and then it suddenly stopped without warning, without a hint, with no premonition. Mary and Jay’s suffering is only compounded by the nature in which Nick died. Dying by lightning just does not happen in Southern California.

Any words said or written about Nick may come off as cliche. But he truly was that one-of-a-kind kid admired by parents for his courtesy and respectful attitude. He was that one-of-a-kind kid that was not only Christian, but Christian cool (or in today’s parlance “kewl”). Parents in our close-knit community, bounded together by years of weekends watching baseball on lawn chairs, have described the loss of Nick as “shocking,” “devastating,” and “haunting.”

A scholarship fund for undergraduate transfer students has been established at the University of Southern California in the name of Nick Fagnano. Donations can be made to the scholarship fund in Fagnano’s name at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Today, Mary will awake and prepare herself for her son’s funeral. I have thought for the last 24 hours how to end this piece and do not know how. There simply are no words, at all, to say except we are all better for having known and loved Nick and our hearts are breaking.

I refer to Kate Bush who said my feelings best in “This Woman’s Work:”

I should be crying, but I just can’t let it show.
I should be hoping, but I can’t stop thinkingOf all the things we should’ve said,
That were never said.
All the things we should’ve done,
That we never did.
All the things that you needed from me.
All the things that you wanted for me.
All the things that I should’ve given,
But I didn’t.Oh, darling, make it go away.
Just make it go away now.

Categories: Uncategorized

Cat’s Game

ablastname

Posted on July 7, 2014

Professor of time and circumstance
Wise of word and hand
Chemistry, a mixing, your explosion
Your hand unexpectedly strokes my hair

Chilean times and afternoons that nightly dissolve
A comfort, a knowing we cannot beware
After you held my hands, you found your lucky links
Then early morning hours, I watch you point your toes down my stairs

Time, it’s so unrealized
But these realities are so concrete
Circumstance, circumvent
What is and what could never be

To be done, with what?
A friendship based on two single solitaires?
Circumstance, circumvent
What is and what never was

Not unhappy but still searching
Tic tac toe games we played
And the outcome was always the same
Cat’s game

Categories: Poetry

Unframed

ablastname

Posted on June 20, 2014

I dug those stakes deeply into the ground

Pillars as deep as I could place

Framing a space for us forever contained

A protection, a canopy hung from those rafters

But then this little person came and blew it all away

Dissolving what I had painstakingly built over so many years

In one cocktail thrown in the center of my home

The trigger ordered by her companion

And since we’ve been aimlessly trying to rebuild

But the grounding and wood these days is harder to find

And the interference by some only threatens the effort

Didion’s fire has been all been put out

Of all the things we did in that space

Weaving, unknotting, loosening and tightening those bonds

They’ve all started going on with their lives, taking those scars along

And I will be left here unprotected, hands empty, unframed

Categories: Poetry

Trap Doors, Hairpin Turns & Minefields

ablastname

Posted on June 8, 2014

A newspaper columnist last year wrote about the ever-increasing malady of narcism today. Her thesis was built on today’s over usage of social media, where posters, bloggers and twitterers display themselves fully, for attention, for all to read and see.

I wrote the columnist a letter, indicating her presumption about narcism was partially true but wildly superficial. I wrote that if you have never lived with a narcissist you certainly cannot understand one. It’s not about being self-congratulatory or staring into a mirroring body of water as Narcissus did. It’s not about vanity. It’s about something much different; like living with a heroin addict, living with a narcissist means you can no longer predict from day to day or even minute to minute.

If you fall in love with a narcissist, all will be fine for about six months. And then, suddenly, strange things start to creep up, of which baffle you senseless. After this initial honeymoon period, a narcissist begins to show his or her true self and soon thereafter the love you felt transforms into a daily struggle for survival and care-taking of what is essentially an adult trapped in a two-year-old’s body. All two-year-old’s are naturally narcissists. The world revolves around them and they expect it to continue to do so. But two-year-olds grow out of this phase and become actualized persons. Narcissists don’t.

My first witness of true narcissism happened before we were married and were out doing errands on a late Friday morning. Having experienced hypoglycemia all my life (my mother would often say, “Oh, be quiet, you’ll get something to eat soon”) I had a similar drain of blood from my face that only hypoglycemics understand, followed by the inevitable and debilitating mental confusion. I simply needed something to put in my stomach: some nuts, a candy bar, a glass of orange juice, anything from the local 7/11.

He dismissed my needs, echoing my mother’s commentary: “You’ll be fine. We’ll get something for you to eat in a while.” And then the suggestion clothed as an admonishment: “You know, you really should carry with you something to eat.”

After three hours of more errands, we finally landed at a restaurant about 2 p.m. (his family’s restaurant where he could eat for free) where I engulfed a Monte Cristo sandwich. At this point, I was so sick, I was unable to speak; to listen; to hear or to communicate.

Dismissal of one’s needs is the key component of the narcissistic personality. I never forgot the brain fog I experienced that day due to low blood sugar and that which was not necessarily related to hypoglycemia: It was my first experience of his narcissism and there would be countless examples more for the next eight years.

A narcissist slowly chips away at your sense of self: devaluing and dismissing you followed by debilitating upsets over nothing much at all. Like trap doors, you never see these hairpin curves or minefields coming.

Once he invited friends to our home for a Christmas dinner. They were to arrive at 5 p.m. I left work at 3 p.m. to go home to start dinner preparations. But on this particular day there was a “One Day Only” sale for something he really thought we needed.

“I have to start dinner,” I said. “You go on without me and purchase it.”

But he was unable. Unable, he said, to make a decision on this very minor and inexpensive item. He always needed me to hold his hand for any purchase (and then when some of his purchases turned out to be scams, as they often would, he needed me to go back and fix, demand a refund, or convince whomever we wanted out of the deal). My narcissist also had a serious money problem, in that he saved like a mad-man but was incapable of spending any amount of money, no matter how little, on anything, without considerable evaluation and debate. Then he would turn around and throw thousands of dollars out the window on worthless schemes.

“I need you with me,” he implored. “You must come with me.”

This is what dealing with a two-year-old is like.

Exasperated, I went with him, made the simple purchase and arrived back home about 30 minutes before our guests arrived. Later I was scolded for not having dinner prepared and not being available for conversation with his friends. I overhead his friend say, “You would think she could have at least set the table for us!” And further, after dinner when I finally had a chance to sit down from all this dinner/narcissistic commotion, he refused to fetch firewood out of the garage to rebuild a fire in the living room, saying, “Oh, our guest isn’t that cold, but if you want, you can go get it.”

Three day upsets would occur with my narcissist if I merely signed up my children for soccer. His thinking: driving my sons to soccer practice and games each week took time away from him. Three day upsets would occur if you wanted to sit within eye range of your 10-year-old son (who really can’t swim very well at all) bodysurfing at the beach. (You see, my narcissist wanted to sit over THERE, he pointed 50 yards away.) Three day upsets would begin if you requested to wait until a Cross Country match of your son’s was over, rather than walking rudely through the course of the lingering finishers. Three days. And when you started planning a trip to Paris for your family, his response was, “I will go anywhere IN THE WORLD, but Paris.”

How do you explain this? You cannot.

The narcissist will tell you, “Just tell me what you need.” This is a trick, surely, as whatever request you make goes unanswered. If you do tell a narcissist what you want, it is merely a road map of which they now possess, a key to making sure you will get nothing that you need or want. Want to visit South Bend, Indiana to see your football team take on the Fighting Irish for your birthday? Instead, you’ll end up in Cleveland, Ohio.

Why stay? By that time you’ve married and made a commitment and you truly believe one day you’re going crack this narcism “Great Santini” thing. You won’t.

Narcissists also have a warped sense of time. They cannot quantify it. If you stop and talk to a colleague for a minute or two at an event, they will claim 20 minutes have passed where you have left them, abandoned them, for some other. And then when an argument ensues and you provide facts to support your argument, they will tell you “You cannot convince me of anything.” No matter how right you are.

They have selective memory and often rewrite their histories, as I have recently discovered. My narcissist has lived one lie after another his entire life.

A narcissist thinks nothing of doing an illegal u-turn in the middle of a street in order to flag down a police officer engaged in a traffic citation to interrupt that police officer to ask for directions. A narcissist thinks nothing at all of answering a cell phone and chatting it up while on the alter of church during mass. They also think nothing of lying or lying by omission. All narcissists believe they are above the law. Rules and prescriptions are only for others. Everything you have becomes their’s and nothing of their’s becomes yours; they make sure of that.

Traveling with a narcissist is also interesting. On more occasions that I count, my narcissist and my children would walk 20 to 30 yards ahead of me wherever we were, Rome, New York, Boston, Los Angeles. He had engulfed my children with his charm (narcissists are very charming, indeed) and you, the not-so-enamored-anymore, don’t really make for good company. You see, the narcissist sticks closely to where he can get supply. They are mere parasites in need of puffing up and possess a tremendous ability to cry, dry tears, on demand.

When you express concerns or upset with a narcissist, they listen quietly and then respond with, “Is there anything else?” And then they leave to go sun bathe for a couple of hours.

The day I stopped loving my narcissist was after I had committed a major, political blunder in a very public forum with my business. I was a moderator at a political debate for the Los Angeles City Council. One of the candidates was a friend of mine and in an attempt to be completely impartial, I went the opposite direction and was harder on my friend (and easier on his opponents) than I had intended.

After the debate concluded and I stepped down from the stage, a line of people with complaints awaited me. Lots of people. I was a little shell shocked fielding each and every spoken displeasure of theirs’. As I tried to leave the building, more people stopped me with unhappy commentary.

We were finally near the parking lot when I remembered I had left my notes back on the stage on a podium. By this time, my narcissist was involved in a conversation with one of the attendees on another matter. Not wanting to interrupt their conversation, I gently patted his shoulder saying, “I’ll be right back. I left something in the auditorium.” Of course, while doubling back to retrieve my notes, more attendees tried to stop and talk to me with their pot shots. At this point, I just wanted out, so I hurried along and retrieved my notes. With tears starting to well in my eyes, I stopped momentarily to compose myself in the ladies room.

I walked back to where I had left the narcissist. He was enraged. “You left me! You left me!” he shouted. “I’ve been standing here for 20 minutes!” (It was always 20 minutes.)

As I was clearly crying now, my only goal was to shuttle us both quickly to my car. On our way home, he admonished me for how rude I had been to him.

“Did you not see what just happened to me back there?” I said. “Did you not see?”

“I don’t care what happened to you,” he said. “You left me alone and standing there.”

That was it. I knew at that moment, this narcissist, as all narcissists, had no ability to empathize. I was but a mere prop in his life, only there to be used at his pleasure and to take care of his needs. I was his source to bleed.

And he blamed me for everything. Every upset that ever happened, because I had the health to not be eaten alive by him and fought back.

I have since pried my narcissist from me. I saw him recently. Without a steady source, like an addict, he now seems half his size, his clothes hanging loosing from his waist and shoulders. His face was ashen and gray even through his dark, California tan.

Me, I am back to normal, angry at myself for putting up with this as long as I did. But narcissists are smart in that way. They always seem to find those, like me, who are compassionate and caring and nurturers: all wonderful traits on the surface but vulnerable character faults for the narcissist.

I can see a narcissist a mile away now. Once you know, you just know.

Categories: Memories

Peter Kamau behind the wheel in Kenya, East Africa, 2007. Photo: Allison B. Cohen

Peter and My Tilley Hat

ablastname

Posted on May 29, 2014

Peter Kamau behind the wheel in Kenya, East Africa, 2007. Photo: Allison B. Cohen

When I travel, I am extremely fastidious about unpacking. I don’t spend much time packing. I always do it at the last minute and rather haphazardly. But whenever I finally get to my resting point, be it a hotel or elsewhere, I am very precise about how I “set up” wherever I am going to be spending my time. (This is in direct opposition of how I keep my office, which has been described as looking like a frat house on 28th Street in Los Angeles.)

This unpacking and placing ritual became a lesson for me about the importance of keeping, honoring and protecting those things that we carry while we are away. It became a lesson for me about the value of an item–a possession, no matter how mundane or precious. It became a lesson for me on how to handle a mistake with integrity.

In 2007, I was in Kenya, East Africa on an 19-day safari. During this trip my traveling companions and I made many stops to various parks like the Lake Nakuru, Tipilikwani Camp, the Maasai Mari in the Northern Serengeti, the Amboseli Reserve and Samburu. We had one driver for all our destinations, Peter Kamau, from Nairobi.

It was at the Samburu Reserve where this story and its learning takes place.

I have a habit of befriending bus drivers and all taxi drivers–that is how I know nearly every driver I’ve met in Washington, D.C. has children in Ivy League schools. And I befriended our driver Peter on this African trip as well.

Peter always wore an Anaheim Angels baseball cap. A gift, he said, from some earlier tourist. His other attire was a neatly pressed army green button down shirt and pleated khaki pants. He spoke infrequently but softly, gently and he reminded me of Morgan Freeman in the 1997 film The Shawshank Redemption.

Our accommodations at Samburu, along a beautiful melted chocolate river, were beautiful tents lined in a row erected with richly polished wood. Elephants routinely walked in between our various tents and as a result, we had to be escorted to and from our tents by local tribesman for our safety.

Upon arrival, I unpacked my few things and hung my Tilley Hat on one of the interior polished wooden posts framing the tent. A Tilley Hat is a lightweight brimmed hat that keeps you cool, keeps you dry and even has a hidden mesh pocket in the hat’s crown, where you can, say, hide cigarettes if you’ve told everyone you’ve quit and you haven’t; or, for most others, the pocket is a secret hideaway for cash or identification. My Tilley hat is very special to me and I’ve had it a long time.

At this camp we had early 6 a.m. safari drives daily to witness giraffes running at daybreak and elephants playing and splashing one another in the Chocolate River. We’d return for breakfast, rest and then would go out at least two or three more times during the day on “drives.”

Peter, in his quiet way, had quite a sense of humor. After one very long particular day, he was in on a joke with other safari personnel back at camp. Riding along the very bumpy, dusty “road” on our way back to camp, Peter received a radio call on his walkie-talkie. We could not make out what the full discussion was, but the outcome was this: “Friends, we have to turn around and double back from where we just were. Last night’s storm has left our “road” back to camp impassable.” (This was plausible because anytime in rains in Kenya the roads completely wash out.)

Only 10 or 15 minutes from camp and having been out for nearly three hours, this meant we had to retrace our steps and would not get back to camp for at least over an hour more. Every passenger in our white Volkswagon van groaned and sat back for more bumps in the road with no safari animals in site.

About 30 minutes later, Peter starting quietly chuckling to himself. . . and then laughing some more. In the short distance we saw the joke: a beautiful table with chairs, lit by candle awaiting our arrival.

“Hah!” Peter said. “It was a joke!”

As we neared the site and emptied out of the van, there was an elaborate setting, again along the bank of the Chocolate River, and a spread of cheese, fruit, cold cuts, fresh bread and welcoming red and white wine. It was as if we were contestants on “Survivor” and this joyful spread had been prepared for us by scheming producers.

I tell this story to illustrate that Peter, who played along well with the joke, first uttering his own frustration quietly under his breath at the thought of retracing an hour or more of our journey, to show that while he was quiet and stern he had great laughter and sense of humor.

We stayed at this camp for a few days and then it was time for most of my companions to go home, mostly to the United States but some to France. A handful of us, however, were continuing on safari to venture further north to places like Amboseli at the foothills of the Kilimanjaro.

So on the morning of some of my companion’s departure, we loaded up in the van for one last safari en route to the area’s one plane airstrip to say goodbye and then we would continue on to Nairobi before heading north to our next stop.

Those departing were thrilled to have one last safari ride, with the hope of catching another giraffe, more elephants playing or lions sunning themselves in the brush.

After 30 minutes into this last ride, I realized I had left my Tilley Hat were I had so neatly placed it back at camp: on the wooden post in my tent. I didn’t say anything to Peter, but my companion did.

“Peter, my friend,” Allison has left something important to her back at camp.

Peter, kept driving, but you could see is consideration of this error of mine. He radioed back to the camp; asked workers there to see if indeed the Tilley was hanging on its post and was messaged back, indeed it was.

He stopped the van and turned around to speak to us all.

“Friends,” he said. “We must go back to camp. We must turn around. Something important has been left there and it must be retrieved.”

Everyone groaned. I was mortified at stopping their last safari and pushed my way to the front of the van to the driver’s seat to speak to Peter.

“Peter, we cannot go back,” I said. “This is their last safari. It’s OK. I can get another Tilley Hat another time.”

But Peter had already made up his mind. He turned the van around and started to head back.

I truly felt like hell. My companions were annoyed and upset. Their last safari ride had been cut short–no actually completely circumvented–by my carelessness and my Tilley Hat.

I confessed.

“It’s my hat,” I said. “He’s going back to get my hat.” After all these days with these same companions they knew my hat well. I had worn it every day.

Needless to say, they were not happy with me. One woman, was really upset. I really felt awful.

We finally arrived back to the camp and I ran though the tents like hell trying desperately to remember which tent I had stayed in. They were unmarked and were identical in appearance. I peered into one. Nothing. I peered into another. No hat. I finally found my tent and yanked that Tilley Hat from its post.

And then I ran as fast as I could on my way back to the van, hoping some lost time could be re-found so my friends could finish their safari pleasantly.

Intercepting my sprint en route, however, was Peter.

He took me by the shoulders with his two large hands.

“You are to walk slowly and peacefully as if nothing has happened,” he said. “You are to hold your head high and not in shame. Do not ever run to show your shame or from your mistakes.”

I took a deep breath and did as Peter asked, walking back with as much integrity as I could muster having ruined everyone’s last hours in Africa.

I got into the van. Peter crawled into the driver’s seat. And then he turned around to all of us and said: “You shall never speak of this again. What’s done is done.”

We rode after that mostly in silence. And then we said goodbye to those departing at the airstrip with hugs and exchanges of phone numbers.

That same night, we stayed at a hotel in Nairobi where a very large, highly organized presidential political rally was being held in one of the hotel’s outdoor grassy courtyards. I discovered the rally by accident, but chose to stay as a spectator. At that time, I did not know how important that rally was, as Kenya would unravel with political and ethnically motivated unrest just seven months later in December 2007.

Only from home could I read of the 53, including children, that were locked and burned alive inside a church. Another 40 people were shot or killed by machete in Nairobi. Protests were rampant over the election’s results and police shot hundreds of demonstrators.

By January 2008 the death toll was 1,300 with 600,000 people displaced throughout Kenya.

Alarmed, I reached out to our guide on the safari via email and heard back from him. He was safe. I asked about Peter. He said he did not know. He had not seen Peter since the unrest began.

In a very short while, Peter had taught me how to show honesty and integrity in the midst of a mistake and that we often toss out what is broken or repurchase that which is lost instead of repairing or searching for the things we carry.

I then wrote to my wise friend Peter at the Nairobi post office box address he had given me.

I never heard back.

Categories: Memories

"Is it safe to be on this floor of the building?"

Stories post Sept. 11 and Before

Central Park

Loose Threads

ablastname

Posted on August 19, 2016

Lost Cause

ablastname

Posted on February 19, 2016

Protest in the Sky

ablastname

Posted on August 4, 2015

Evaporation

ablastname

Posted on July 10, 2015

Tiny Box

ablastname

Posted on August 5, 2014

The Loss of a Child

ablastname

Posted on July 31, 2014

Cat’s Game

ablastname

Posted on July 7, 2014

Unframed

ablastname

Posted on June 20, 2014

Trap Doors, Hairpin Turns & Minefields

ablastname

Posted on June 8, 2014

Peter and My Tilley Hat

ablastname

Posted on May 29, 2014

	barley swine on Central Park
	FRANCIS KELLEHER on Trap Doors, Hairpin Turns…
	FRANCIS KELLEHER on Peter and My Tilley Hat