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

Miró at Sea

LaValle at McNally

by Daryl Edelman

He's funny and thoughtful and opened his first free reading from his third book, Big Machine, by showing the first fifteen minutes of John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing, popcorn included, at McNally Jackson Booksellers in Little Italy last Tuesday.

The story shows the mythical origins of a religion among many, a sort of spiritual X-Men, LaValle told the respectable-sized crowd before reading excerpts from his latest book.

The hero, Ricky Rice, a bathroom janitor by trade, receives a mysterious letter, quits his job, and begins his Homeric journey on a Greyhound bus across America.

Mona Lisa smiled with LaValle's good humor.

Hypnotized by the beauty of human instinct that LaValle conjured, we were drawn into the mystic journey of self-awareness that took him seven years to write--Big Machine.

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