Between Sidewalk and Sky

by Daryl Edelman

(c)2010 Daryl Edelman

Kafka and Me

by Regina Edelman

Summer 2009 the United States is in recession. My husband and I don’t have jobs. No company wants to employ us as if we’re infected and undeserving to continue living after our fifties. Money enough, we make our own world as we boldly head to the future. I believe my studies of man and nature will be helpful to the blind journey of humankind.

Wind rattles lanterns on the sun-roof and chops green water in the bay below. I pass delicate purple tulips trembling among blowing leaves and bikini girls sunbathing on long deck chairs and then sit under a maple facing west.

I have my books around my beach chair: Jung’s Synchronicity, Confessions of Saint Augustine, and Collected Stories of Franz Kafka.

I read a good part of Jung's Exposition and as I marked the page for tomorrow’s studying, I noticed a wasp carrying dry branchlets to an anchor embedded between bricks at the bottom of the wall. Why does it work so hard to do that? To secure its fertile eggs for the future?

I finished one more chapter of Saint Augustine. He confessed he stole pears as a kid, regretted sexual pleasures of his youth, and described how his stressed mother fond of wine wanted him to be a priest to satisfy her. There was nothing more glamorous than to have a son become a Catholic priest in the third century, and Augustine became an obstinate priest fond of wine too.

I picked up Kafka. The wasp brought another branchlet to knit inside the anchor. I waited for it to finish its labor and fly back to get more material for its home. The Stoker the story marked to study, I read:

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

A sword? No, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t raise a sword, but a torch, doesn’t it? To search the truth, I got up and looked to the statue in the bay. The sun illuminated a torch in her upraised right hand. The Staten Island Ferry’s foghorn lowed. Sluggish sailboats fled down the Hudson. There came the little wasp loaded with one more branchlet. Lanterns rattled. Happy girls turned their butts to the sun. Big white clouds slowly passed.

The wasps never went to Harvard to learn their precise navigation.

©2009 Regina Edelman

Reply to Kleo

Dear Kleo,

Thank you so much for sharing your view and sympathy for my personal story.

I will tell you another story from a chapter of my experiences: A homeless child scratched the door of a car parked in front of the boardinghouse where I lived in São Paulo. The owner of the car arrived coinciding with the moment the boy practiced his crime. The boy ran. The owner of the car ran after him and caught the boy by his torn collar and then seized the boy's arm. The man dragged the boy to his car, his face and lips white with hate. The boy cried loud, his mouth opened and distressed. The boy could be ten, but the bad nutrition these children get on Sampa's streets made this boy look like seven years old. The owner madly shook the boy, and almost crying, screaming, asked the boy several times to see what he'd done to his valuable car, and then asked one of the people watchers to call the police. The police came and carried the little creature away. People said they'd kill the boy. Kill the boy? others asked. I know him; he wanders around, one said. I think he stole my mother's Swatch, another was sure. My feeble sister described a criminal like that boy who bumped her to the ground to steal her school bag from her back, another anonymous voice accused. Kill him! Kill him! they all agreed in whispers. I think the watchers talked in that tone afraid to expose their angry assassin instinct. A month later the boy errant showed up back in the area I lived. I have good memory. I'd never forget his dark face. I saw him at least twice before I learned he was executed with three shots, two in the heart and one in the center of his little head. Nobody cared to know the anonymous who killed the boy, and time brutally went on.

My past experiences however didn't make me disbelieve that somewhere there are still people like you, Kleo, who care for a triumphant better future for our children of this world.

Yours,
Regina Edelman

[Editor's note: Regina wrote this in response to a comment about the Edelman-Eggers Letters, Parts 1-10, the first ten posts on this almost year old little blog.]

Grand Central Gentleman

by Daryl Edelman

South Lake Tahoe, 1970

by Daryl Edelman

I was twelve. Burlinda, wise fourteen, said she liked my writing but didn't understand it. I remember her family's frowsy black bird walked on the kitchen counter and left peck marks on the soft butter bar there. She wrote on my FaceBook wall today, "Absolutley nobody calls my brother Squeaker anymore. Remind me of the past." She's still pretty.

Ahmadinejad at Battery Park Ritz-Carlton

by Daryl and Regina Edelman

Ironically, at this moment, New York City police are on the roof of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, protecting Iranian tyrant and holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is staying across the street at the luxurious Battery Park Ritz-Carlton where he is enjoying a sweet view of the Statue of Liberty!

While the U. S. economy is in a tailspin, American taxpayers are shelling out their hard-earned bread to pay for a three block radius of FBI and police security for the Iranian strongman, including ambulances, firetrucks, police cruisers, German Shepherds, and mobile command centers to guard the madman from American citizens walking their dogs in the imperious dictator’s Battery Park compound. Trucks of special food are delived for his banquets there.

It’s not only us Americans who are outraged about Ahmadinejad’s sickening polices and presence. This afternoon, about a hundred peaceful Iranian protesters marched against him up and down Battery Place across the street from the Ritz shouting, “Freedom and Democracy for Iran!” They carried, as one protester explained, “the old Iranian flag, our rightful flag, not Ahmadinejad’s flag of tyranny.” It was a protest that would not be allowed in Iran under the tyrant’s power. With all our flaws, America is still a place where you can have your say, and the police left the protesters their's, though we were not free to walk the sidewalks we walk every morning because of a foriegn tyrant.

© 2009 Daryl and Regina Edelman