Author is a retired attorney who started writing stories for something to do in his rusting years. He has had seventy some published in online magazines, including this one, and a half dozen or so in book anthologies. He may be reached at bcgrafton47@gmail.com. ​

​   What drew my attention to the book The Boston Massacre A Family History by Serena Zabin was its cover that showed four black caskets with a set of initials at the top of each and a skull and crossbones underneath them. I was interested in learning about the Boston Massacre so I jumped to the conclusion that this book was about these four victims and their families. I was wrong. In fact the names of the deceased are not disclosed in the book. I knew of course that the initials C A were for Crispus Attucks and his name is mentioned at the end concerning the trial  of the British soldiers charged with murder. But nowhere is it pointed out that he is one of the deceased. Being a Texan, I also knew that the initials S M stood for Samuel Maverick. There is a famous Texas patriot by that name and I wanted to know if there was a  connection between the two of them but I never got one. Also I wanted to know why this Boston Samuel Maverick’s coffin was different from the others. Why besides having the skull and crossbones on it, it also had  a scythe, an hourglass, the number 17, and a symbol before the number that I assume stands for his age.  I never found out.  As to the names of the other two,  J C and S G,  they remain a mystery. There was also a fifth victim who died later of his wound and his casket and initials are on the book’s spine and the book does tell us who he was but like the others it too doesn’t disclose his family history.
    That’s because the book is not about those who died at the Boston Massacre. It is about the women who were married to British soldiers there at the time of the massacre. The book’s title should have been: Women Married To British Soldiers At The Time Of The Boston Massacre.  It was the old bait and switch trick and I fell for it. Thank God I got the book from the library and didn’t buy it.
    On the other hand though I admit that at first that I got drawn in but after I read a little further, I felt as if I was being taken for a ride down the underrepresented women of history road and the author was on a mission to resurrect and honor these women for no other reason than they were women and they were there. 
    What  I wanted to know was the story of Crispus Attucks, the mixed race man, and the story of the Maverick family and the other fellows whoever they were. Instead I got fed  stories about women who got married to or got pregnant by British soldiers, how they interacted, being a mixed nationality family, with the other Bostonians, how the British kept shuffling their troops around disrupting  family life, and how unfair it was that these women weren’t eligible for public aid from the city of Boston.
     Okay that’s fine but don’t be drawing  us in with false advertising. This book boils down to chick lit history and does a good job at it. But the five people killed at the Boston Massacre were men. Duh write about them. They were the heroes not the women. And furthermore don’t be making these women out as if they were victims of some kind or other. They chose the army life when they married a soldier.
    At the end the author says. “We think of the American Revolution as a political event, but it was much more like a bad divorce.” With that statement the author totally lost all credibility with me. I had been a lawyer in my previous life and had fought a battle or two in a few bad divorces back in the day but no one ever got killed in them like they did in the American Revolution. Though one client did kill himself to stick it to his wife.  To suggest that the American Revolution was like a judicial proceeding is laughable unless of course one is desperate for a simile or metaphor or whatever to show off one’s literary poetic writing skills.
    So in conclusion if you want to read about the women married to British soldiers stationed in Boston at the time of the Boston Massacre and their problems this book is for you. If you want to read about the men in the coffins on the cover and their family histories, forget it. Remember: Don’t judge a book by its cover.

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.​

Have you heard?  There’s herd-immunity.  Seriously?  Not cattle, although in the old-west they were usually called that in a bunch.  Today we might say a flock, although we city dwellers are totally unfamiliar with ranchers.  Maybe the “Oklahoma” gang, yeah, from the Broadway show, knew that ranchers and cowman can’t be friends.  Wasn’t that a song from the musical?
 
As a verb, for you who so like grammar, it’s to assemble.  But isn’t a group traveling together, the noun, also an assembly?  English is sure a difficult language.
 
Okay.  Heard and herd are homonyms.  Pronounced the same, but totally not the same meaning, why did this confusing language even start having homonyms!  Air and heir.  Geez.  No wonder the takers of the GED to get a high school diploma have problems passing the test.  And that’s not even the prepositional phrases that sound too-wordy to them.  Imagine if logic and a syllogism were put on the exam; lots of college grads are confused about syllogistic reasoning that may be valid or maybe invalid.  So weird.
 
Well back to the summer 2020 statement: our community has ‘herd-immunity’.  Hm.  How come the whole world doesn’t yet know that.  So I looked it up: “the immunity or resistance to a particular infection that occurs in a group of people or animals when a very high percentage of individuals have been vaccinated or previously exposed to the infection”. I thought that happened in the spring of 2020 as the planet Earth’s inhabitants, well, humans so far as we know, have been exposed.  Shouldn’t everyone now be immune?  Vaccine.  Will take time as a virus is tricky, not like the bacteria I used to put in a Petri dish and find an E. Coli, or Staph Aureus.  I remember that course with its long-long labs and having to check those dishes even on weekends to see if my unknowns could be ‘known’ by me; guess the professor knew.  No one ever had a virus in a Petri dish back then. 
 
All the spray disinfectant cleaners sitting around under bathroom sinks rid bacteria. Never saw one that said destroys virus stuff.  Now that would be worth a lot of money to some manufacturer.  “Here ye, here ye, get your virus ablation product here!”  Oh, ablation is too-wordy.  Okay, ‘here ye, here ye, get your virus removal wipes from us’.  Much more accessible language.  But not on the market yet.
 
Hate to do this but back to the peculiar word syllogism.  It’s sort-of a deceptive argument.  The conclusion is what you want, so you just build a case to support that.  Conclusion first, facts or such subordinate.  ‘We can gather in large groups, unmasked, share food from a buffet table, shake hands, hug or kiss one another as we specific people in this particular area have herd-immunity.’  So I asked how that happened.  Was told that the old folks, who absolutely had underlying diseases as old folks always have, died already from the virus, and the rest in town are not sick nor dying so we are all immune.  We can gather in private houses, and never need a mask around one another, and just get on with our lives as we are safe.  Really safe.
 
This is what I heard.  Is the herd correct?  Maybe this bug that is country/race/religion blind is to cleanse the overcrowded Earth from old people?  The meek won’t inherit but the young will.  But how young is “young”.  To a teen, old is anyone 30!  Is maybe 60 called old to a person 40?  Hm.  Shall this be a bug to rid families of grandparents?  Now that’s a thought, and no protester has caught that yet.  Protestors are too busy damaging property, hurling bottles at law enforcement, pulling down historical monuments, and such; perhaps the next wave of harm can be challenging grandparents to life.  Ha.  What IF the grandparents, having built up decades of immune responses, didn’t die but the little children, not having lived long enough for some natural protection response from the body, developed Covid 19!  Oh, no.  We definitely don’t want a herd of geriatric people who don’t go to bars, hang-out on corners, stay up all night at parties, hug and kiss and dance with strangers around. 
 
So I looked up cattle branding: “a long-handled metal rod with a stamp at one end, used for branding livestock, especially cattle, with a registered or recognized symbol or character to indicate ownership”.  Society could do that!  Yeah.  Those who are branded, or done by tattoo, are the ones with absolute herd-immunity.  I like that idea.  Easy to recognize who you can hang with and not get sick.  And proof that your skin is tough enough to handle the symbol that screams you’re safe.  Go try that on a wrinkled and frail oldster!
 
Back to “Oklahoma”.  “The cowman ropes a cow with ease, The farmer steals her butter and cheese, That's no reason why they cain't be friends”.  Now I see another problem; in our unisex 21st century, ‘cowman’ cannot be used.  Cowperson is politically correct.  No more manhole cover for street sewers, it’s a sewer cover.  No more fireman, it’s a fire person.  No more single public bathrooms that say women or men, as now these must be gender neutral.  So our Covid 19 really is totally modern, claiming lives or health wherever it chooses, doesn’t care if climate is hot or freezing, and is making a global statement.  But, who is the ‘master’ of the ‘herd’?
 
 
 
 

​Most popular; large crowds; long waits to get in validating its superior status.  “Wall-to-wall people totally says this is the ‘in’ place!”
 
Was it only months ago that Black Friday Sales had people standing for hours just to have the stores open?  Is it politically correct to say Black Friday now?  Maybe Grey Friday would be a better choice.  No skin tone that’s grey denotes anything except disease probably.  At any rate, big-box became an important term vs. Mom and Pop places, and mostly only local supporters went shopping in the latter for some items patting themselves for helping out their own community’s small stores.  But ‘the little guy’ (also no longer correct noun) was just that, ‘little’.
 
Madison Avenue ads push variety, price comparison, even customer service at popular venues much like clothing sewn by children in a foreign country that shows a ‘designer’ label is promoted as better made.  Better-made ought to be banned or tell me better-than-what!
 
But Covid 19 and Pandemic have shifted more than just social distancing.  A place that sells appliances, and has 24 locations, now advertises: “100x safer than the big box; be safe and shop at a low volume...” noting the large and familiar names have about 2,000 daily customers while this place only sees about 15-20 per day.
 
The Wall Street Journal, in a piece by John D. Stoll, July 31, 2020, spoke about a bike shop owner, ...”entrepreneur who has spent 10 years molding a business plan only to see it turned inside out overnight. His shops are jammed these days with beat-up Schwinns, Treks and Bianchis that need repairs. A line of people stand outside in the hot sun waiting for same-day remedies on bikes that are often older than the 37-year-old Mr. Hughes....”   There are no new bikes to sell!   
 
So, now, smaller and less familiar/popular’ is safer as life is navigated through the Pandemic, and some that used to sell new are getting more like the vanished shoe-repair place that once made a living with re-soles and re-heels. Are there even parts for bicycles almost forty years old?  Is there trained-personnel for this, or mostly a sales-force that has nothing to offer a customer?
 
Neiman Marcus, long ago, had Christmas catalogues that featured costly electric-powered toddlers cars and even diamond-studded women’s undergarments.  On May 7, 2020, it filed for bankruptcy.  JC Penneys lasted about a hundred years, as probably Brooks Brothers, yet Penneys filed for Chapter 11 on May 15, 2020, and Brooks Brothers July 8, 2020. Even the incredible acrobatics of Cirque du Solei might vanish permanently as June 29, 2020 it, too, filed for bankruptcy. In 1882, Luchow’s, restaurant in New York City opened; it closed for good in 1984.  Not from Pandemic, but it moved, in 1982 after a hundred years in one spot, to a different location and the geniality slowly disappeared.  (Memory can be evoked by just a name, and the last lunch my dad had before his age 45 heart stopped was at Luchow’s.)  It took 80 years for the famous Copacabana restaurant/nightclub in Manhattan to close; the 1947 movie, with the same name, filmed seven years after the dance-hall with live musicians opened, also gave Barry Manilow a hit song.
 
Popular has lost its popularity.  Crowds are either protesters or those who believe they’ve some kind of magic immunity to the virus.  Big box centers have online orders and curbside delivery service.  The lyrics to A Bicycle Built for Two, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I'm half crazy over the love of you” needs construction in China, perhaps.
 
Maybe that appliance place, that insists its small amount of customers make it a safe option, now, for selection, will change advertising for many more months; maybe even Chicken Little knew something when he yelled “Help, help the sky is falling!”  Maybe if adherence to masks and distancing happen, lives may be saved and the virus that challenges us will burn up in the atmosphere and Chicken Little will be a hero. 

Want to comfort a cold?  A magazine article said that steaming the face can ease mild cold congestion especially when fragrant oils are added to the water.  I smiled as I scanned this 'new' idea. 
            Before decongestants, and even antibiotics, my mother treated my colds, sinus infections, and any other head ailment the same way.  Full circle.  I can almost visualize a common incident:
            "Whatever are you doing?"  My mother passed by the bathroom, shook her head, smiled.  "You're supposed to be inhaling vapors to get rid of your sinus congestion.  Inhale.  Stop singing."  She pretended to say this as an order but it was playful.
            "Chickory chick, cha la, cha la,"  I chanted and wiggled the towel that formed a tent over my head.  "Cha la.  Cha la."  Then I sang, "What shall I do with my mother, mommy, ma?"  I giggled at the rhyming.
            My mother tapped my small behind.  "Steam!"
            The porcelain basin was filled to the drain-out hole.  Hot water with chamomile leaves made the rising steam have a characteristic odor.  I didn't think it was fragrant, but rather smelly.  I'd had tea with chamomile leaves, de-tangled my hair with chamomile mixed with water, and now had to inhale its moist fumes.
            Appearing in the doorway again, my mother stated, "Now.  Before the water gets cold."
            "Okay.  Okay."  I whined.  "Yuk."  I bent over the sink, re-making a tent over my head with the terry towel, and inhaled.  I wanted to keep my eyes closed so I wouldn't have to stare at the small cracks in the sink, the stains that stayed even after cleaners, the film that formed on the water's top.  If I pressed my lids together too long, however, I felt dizzy then imagined my head plopping into porcelain and drowning in misty droplets.
            "You sure look weird."  My older sister, Carole, came up behind me.  "I'm lucky I never get sinus infections."
            I pulled myself straight, let the towel drop onto my shoulders, and answered, "I don't have Hay Fever, a-choo."
            Carole noticed my face was red and puffy from both the position and the heat, began to laugh, then walked away.
            Uncertain what Carole was laughing at, I felt angry.  I released the lever and watched the water drain away.  The mirror above the sink was steamy so I couldn't see my reflection.  Using the towel, I wiped a small section.  My silky hair was moist and matted.  My cheeks were slightly swollen.  "I'd rather be congested," I told my image.
            "I'd rather not be up all night with you," my mother responded as she heard my words.
            "Can't I even have a conversation with myself without being overheard!"  I rolled up the towel and forced it into the metal laundry chute.  I stuck my head near the chute to watch the towel flop into a wicker basket a floor below.
            My mother laughed.  "Come help me fix dinner.  It's better than a mustard plaster when you get chest colds, isn't it?"
            "Are you kidding!  Breathing smelly vapors, bent over a sink.  And it has been 'laugh at Lois day' and now you want my help?"  Then with a dramatic gesture, I uttered, "Dahling.  I am too sick with sinus trouble to peel potatoes.  Ask your healthy older daughter.  It isn't Hay Fever season."
            My mother continued to chuckle, then called, "Carole?" 
            Now, so many-many decades later, for those people who don't want to take medication for congestion, combining hot water and oil fragrance then inhaling scented steam is being promoted.  And chamomile tea is back.  I wonder if mustard plasters will...nah.
 
 
 
published in hardcover book "Old-Time Home Remedies"  ©1998 House of White Birches  issued January 1998

 
            A rented car turned and settled into a space between two defined white lines;  I put the transmission in Park and turned off the motor.  Epcot.  Orlando, Florida.  1994.  I'd heard exclamations of 'space', 'don't miss', 'oh, the countries', 'foods'...and was excited about its newness for me.
            A monorail moved silently high above me.  I thought about New York's EL and the clanking of rails overhead:  did windows in nearby buildings tremble when the subway soared into daylight and passed like a bridge atop of automobiles?  No eel-like monorail with its slithering could shudder even the air's silence.
            A sphere glistened in the Florida sunshine.  Epcot's logo.  Was this new to those dressed in casual clothing and rubber-soled sneakers who pushed collapsible baby strollers?  I had a sense of place, lapse of time, feeling I'd been aware of this once before.
             In my white Breton hat with its long blue streamers, a navy blue two-piece outfit, blue ankle socks and Mary Jane patent leather shoes, I climbed into my dad's unheated brown sedan.  The wool car seats itched against my exposed little-girl thighs.  We drove along Northern Boulevard and pulled into Flushing Meadow Park where the World's Fair was set up.  My mother straightened out the seams in her silk stockings, pulled her cloche cap securely around her finger-wave hair-do, and stepped on the car's running board to help me out.  My dad's double-breasted suit jacket got re-buttoned as he always unbuttoned it when he sat down;  he creased the seam in his wool hat.  We were ready to walk around.
            What has lingered all these years about that Fair?  What could any child remember with eyes that had not yet seen war, and belief that the tooth-fairy was a real person?
 

            I met Mr. Pickle and he gave me a pickle-pin to wear.  Honestly, it was Mr. Pickle, and I also ate the tiniest pickles I ever ate---free, too.
            Men blew glass vases.  I didn't know what kind of magic it was but holding a rod then giving a-huff-and puff a jar came out...kind of like bubble gum blowing I guess.
            I had pictures taken of me sitting on a small perisphere;  so did every other daddy sit children on it.  And I got a coin bank shaped like the trylon and perisphere with the penny slot in the big circle;  I didn't like the trylon as it was pointy and stuck my small hand.  Why couldn't it have a flat top that couldn't stab my palm?
            The movies where I wore green paper glasses really frightened me.  An airplane flew right out of the screen and came right over my head.
            Big auto tires were so big close up and they weren't even on any cars.  Some make-believe fake rubber or something like that was going to one day be made.  I didn't know about tires or cars except that I often needed the wool blanket that hung on the strap behind the seat where my daddy sat and drove;  I got cold in winter or when I took a nap during a ride home from visiting relatives.
            But my very favorite fair thing was being in Japan.  I was too!  It smelled different so I knew it really was Japan...perfume aroma but sweet and strong.
 

            Epcot's space ride couldn't duplicate the fascination and wonder I felt when, on television, I saw American astronauts stand on the moon.  The ride into the 'future' had been done weekly on television's "The Jetson's", and advertisers' sponsors' logos were reminiscent of the World's Fair.  I guess I expected to be transported into magic not media.           
 

            The second time I went to that Fair, we parked by the Prospect Movie Theatre on Flushing Main Street and took the trolley.  I loved the trolley.  I also loved the dentist, hated haunted houses, and looked forward to Sunday drives to Brooklyn to Grandpa to see brides.
            Grandpa had his own photo studio and let me see how he made white paper magically make a picture of a bride.  He stuck his head under a sheet, stood in front of a wooden box that was propped up on tall wood legs, clicked, uncovered his head and then pulled out a big glass plate.  Then we went into a room with no lights and abra-ca-dabra pictures!  Grandpa's nails were always black;  he said it was from the magic water.  When I was bigger, he let me put pictures on the backs of real mirrors people can hold in their hands;  I used a real machine.  But I couldn't trim pictures on his cutter which looked like a tiny checkerboard; on one side, there was a knife I couldn't see unless I lifted the metal blade thing way up and saw the sharp edge.
            Grandpa always had a nickel for a Charlotte Russe snack-treat of white cake topped with whipped cream all squished into a round paper cup, and free passes to the movies on the next street.  But he didn't go to the World's Fair with us.  Why?

           
            Epcot's Japan didn't smell of incense.  Seiko watches filled a display case, and Bonsai trees could be boxed and shipped via UPS to my New York address.  But I can buy Seiko and Bonsai's a mile from my door, or have a jet fly them within a brief period of air time from any distributor.  Epcot's England with its Royal Doulton china shop, and woolen dry goods, had the very same merchandise local department stores have...and British tea sits on my supermarket shelves.  Since I smiled with pleasure at someone dressed as a Disney character, and related to a little girl who got a hug from Goofy and believed it truly was Goofy, why couldn't the exhibits convey the same sensation?
            A robot drew my picture after I sat before a computer that made graphics of my face for the robot to copy.  I missed the darkroom that Grandpa had invited me to share.  Another concession, by Kodak, took snapshots that could be rapidly developed then made into postcards from a selection posted.  Disney pictures were pressed into the fabric of tee-shirts.  Where was the 'future' as seasonal greeting cards and tee-shirt iron-on's are available in my shopping mall?
            A double-decker bus circled the area of 'worlds' and one could ride with the Florida sun bouncing off strands of hair.  I used to ride a double-decker bus from Jackson Heights, in Queens County, to Fifth Avenue in New York;  I loved it, and I loved the Epcot one also. 
            Epcot is for adults, I'd been told.  Maybe I, who like walking barefoot on wet grass, still allow a sprinkler to shower me on a hot summer day, squat in a cardboard box while playing store with my grandchildren, wear macaroni shell necklaces when made for me, am not adult enough.  I won't ever be.  I want a ride to illuminate, or educate, or scare, or just be fun.  I want a visit to a country to be more than eating and shopping;  I want to smell and touch what fragrances, goods, and customs represent it.
            In the rented car, I pushed the air conditioning lever to high speed, pressed the seek/scan radio button and exited the large parking lot.  Overhead signs directed me back to the highway I needed.  The sky was darkening but pink streaks glowed and left traces of a beautiful day.  I'd been to a mini fair, but I missed cotton candy....
 
published November 1995 © Rochester Shorts Magazine
reprinted March 2019 Clear Mountain

            When does all this mothering stop, I wondered as I pulled out writing paper?  Even grown children expect unconditional love and attention on their schedules.  Didn't I, too, have enough to cope with since my father-in-law, living 1200 miles away, was hospitalized with a little pneumonia?
            I felt irritable.  My parents, unlike my husband's, didn't have the luxury of long life and I guess I resented having to be sympathetic.  And our daughter daily visited his dad.
            For a spunky girl who could manage alone when she moved to Miami, become a Registered Nurse after getting a Summa Cum Laude from an Ivy League university and then another Summa Cum Laude degree in nursing from a college in Florida, marry, have two children, why did she believe I could still wipe away baby tears and make bad stuff all-better? 
            January 18th.  I began the letter as ball point ink smudged my fingertips. 
            The phone.  My daughter's voice... hysterical.  "Stop crying.  I can't hear you," I shouted into plastic holes transporting words from Rochester.  I knew 'stop crying' was a stupid remark but it seemed to just automatically discharge from my mouth.
            "I'm in Grandpa's hospital room.  There's a body bag on the bed.  No one called me that he died."
            "It's not Grandpa," I insisted.  "We also were not telephoned," I reasoned, "so he must be having further medical tests for his pneumonia and the bed has another's remains.  You're a nurse, so open up the bag and you'll see it's not Grandpa."  I jabbed the ball point onto a thick pad;  it made dots not doodles.  She stopped nursing for full-time mothering but was still a nurse, right?
            "Oh. Oh."  Sobbing sounds seemed like background noise. "It's him.  The toe tag.  And I looked.  It's Grandpa.  Oh. No one called me.  No one stopped me from going into his room.  He's cold.  He's been dead at least two hours." 
            More stupid words like 'calm down' came out of me.  I felt helpless and rambled ridiculous phrases.  Cupping the mouthpiece, I told my husband that our daughter found his father in a body bag, and, thankfully, our grandchildren were in the hospital lobby with their dad as they'd seen him previous visit.
            I crumpled the stationery.  Why hadn't I allowed myself to be sensitive to this painful situation and people I loved?  I blacked-out the vision of my child going to the lobby, facing her children, and I told her to go home I'd phone later.  Then I called the airlines.          
            Burial was January 20th in New York;  my husband and I flew to Miami the 21st.  He'd sort through his father's personal items and terminate an apartment lease;  I'd help our daughter cope with an anticipated recurring nightmare.
            My superstitious grandmother had believed bad luck comes in threes;  my daughter's agony wasn't over.  She related that the recession had claimed her husband's job, and health benefits would terminate January 31st.  Was I calm on the outside?  Inwardly I started feeling overwhelmed.  Well, tomorrow there'd be some joy;  she was hoping to be pregnant again, and an ultrasound was scheduled.  Oh.  No health insurance.  I realized, that's a big “oh”.
            Blow three came Tuesday the 22nd when the ultrasound showed a growing uterine fibroid not a fetus.  How can she believe I'm able to kiss away boo-boos when I'm helpless to even comfort!  Why can't I tape a Care Bear Band-Aid to these enormous wounds?
            As a choo-choo train rails a rhythmic pattern, so did a beat chug through my mind:  think before speaking, think before speaking.  I didn't want a repeat of careless and seemingly thoughtless words I'd transmitted as she stood beside her dead grandfather.  I took cues from her body movements:  when to embrace, when to give space.  I grandma'd her children yet insisted she keep a semblance of routine requesting she prepare lunch.  She went through the motions.
            I allowed her necessity of self-pity, grief, bewilderment.  She exposed fears.  I had to be wise with words and never say 'you've got a boy and girl child so what's the difference' re uterine growth, or 'your husband will get another job', or 'time will take care of the horror scene' re her grandfather.  I wouldn't have believed those even if my lips had spewed them.  Was I growing up, finally?  Weren't my telephone thoughtless-phrases a cover-up for my own weakness and lack of knowing how to help in a long-distance and futile situation?
            Wanting more than three children myself, and knowing a medical problem prevented it, I really understood that pain.
            I embraced her, ran my fingers over her smooth hair, and told her she shouldn't downplay the hospital sight for I knew she'd carry that as long as she lived.  I couldn't advise concerning the specialized job her husband had lost, and saw embarrassment when I offered money.  I felt as if I were on a balance wire trying to control my steadiness in boots rather than ballet slippers.
            What could I do?  What would my own mother have done if it were me?  I shook my head as if my mother had dropped down special information from the clouds:  I could remind my daughter of strengths and courage she showed even as a child.  I could praise her sensitivity, minimize frustration with emotional support not criticism or advice, let her know parents' money for continued health-care coverage isn't paying her bills nor will make her mate feel less manly.  I said sharing love with her grandpa the eight years she'd been in Miami should bring tears of missing, and to allow them to fall.  Did she notice that I, too, was learning how to live and be a better person?  Maybe not, but, I confess, I wondered what had taken me so long.
            On the Rochester return January 23rd, my eyes spilled drops which wet my cheeks and dripped into my blouse collar.  My own mother, a widow for 32 years, had been strong and supplied me with unconditional love until she died;  I could learn to muster up my own resources and do the same for my offspring.  I reached over the armrest of the narrow plane seat and touched my husband's arm.
 
published June 1997 Rochester Shorts
 

​What Triggers Off Child Marriages?
The Congolese say that to love someone who doesn’t love you, is like shaking a tree to make the dew drops fall. Another Sierra Leonean proverb goes, it is better to be loved than feared. One question this prompts then is, ‘is there love in child marriages?’ I believe there is none.
Child marriages are an antithesis to youth empowerment and community development. These are a cruel slap in the face of key initiatives to advance gender equality. According a World Economic Forum of 28th of October 2019 titled ‘’Child marriage in North Africa: still a lot to be done’’, it is predicted that in 2019 alone about 12 million of the world`s children will be married before they turn eighteen.  UNICEF figures suggest about 18% of them will be boys and 82% girls.   Economic, social and cultural factors trigger off underage marriages.  In spite of the fact that child marriages are not confined to poor societies and families, the same report cites poverty and old traditions as some of the reasons which drive girls into child marriages.
Imagine the pain and plight of a 12-year-old girl who tries to run away to no avail after being married off in an arranged union. Imagine the unkindness and selfishness of parents who secretly negotiate these marriages and keep their “deals” behind the backs of their daughters for fear that once the girls get wind of those arrangements they might run away from home. The sad reality is that girls in some communities are traded by their fathers for goats, cows and camels. Child marriages are not a myth. These practices are alive, destructive and disconcerting.   
 
General Definition Of Child Marriage   
What is child marriage? According to an article of 27 October 2019 by Daniel Selby and Carmen Singer, titled “Child Marriage: Everything You Need to Know Global Citizen” child marriage is the formal (or informal) marriage of a child under the age of 18—most often the marriage of a young girl to an older boy or man. It adds that child brides are more likely to experience domestic violence. In many cases, child marriage involves the marriage of a young girl to an older groom—sometimes old enough to be her grandfather.  
 Child marriages usually fail to give young girls rewarding and long-lasting relationships, which every partner deserves.  On one hand, arranged marriages tend to push the life, the concerns, the plans and the dreams of the girl child into the backseat, and on the other; they strive to keep and protect the selfish interests and decisions of the main actors and the beneficiary in the front seat. On the wheel are the materialistic, money-pocketing older people who seem to overlook that in today`s world, girls need to be empowered to be self-reliant and game-changers of their time, destinies and dreams.
 
Shattered Dreams And Bitterness
The Guardian newspaper of the 4th of January 2019 carried a story titled, “My dreams were destroyed’: poverty costs child brides dear in Zimbabwe’’ about a 13 year-old girl who was married off to a man three times her age by her poor father.  She fell pregnant at 13, and when she gave birth after spending three hours in labor, the baby did not survive.  Three years later she found herself being cared for at a hospital with other scores of underage brides who were suffering from obstetric fistula, an injury caused by prolonged labor. She claimed that she was surprised when her parents told her about the arranged marriage since they had always given her the impression that she was their most intelligent child, and because of that they would help her pursue her studies. The man she was married off to was abusive verbally and physically, especially after she lost her child. “I haven’t forgiven my parents for doing this to me. I had a bright future but now they treat me like an outcast”, she disclosed. 
The same newspaper reported that child marriages in Zimbabwe are often driven by poverty with dowries offering a welcome, if brief, reprieve from penury in poor households struggling to weather a vicious economic crisis. In spite of underage marriage being illegal in Zimbabwe, and local organizations have been fighting against it as an economic transaction, the financial meltdown has worsened the situation. In 2016 Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court outlawed child marriage so that no one may enter into any marriage before the age of 18. The ruling includes marriages under the Customary Marriages Act which had previously not had a minimum age requirement.                      
A Human Rights Watch report of the 25th of November 2015 states that child marriages in Africa often end girls` education, besides exposing them to domestic violence and serious health risks from early childbearing and HIV. In a survey carried out in 2014 by Zimbabwe`s National Statistics Agency, one in three women aged between 20 and 49 reported that they married before age 18, an estimated 4 percent marry before age 14.
 
A midwife who is a member of an apostolic church told Human Rights Watch that the church doctrine requires girls to marry between ages 12 and 16 to prevent sexual relations outside marriage.  Despite that the Health Organization determined that virginity testing is a discredited and abusive practice without any scientific basis, Archbishop Johannes Ndanga, president of the Apostolic Churches Council of Zimbabwe , told Human Rights Watch that  “virginity testing” which includes the insertion of fingers into the vagina—of girls  as young as 12 , was widely practiced in the apostolic churches. He added, “If found to be virgins they will get marks on their foreheads. Older men in the church will then choose these ‘fresh girls’ to become their wives, often joining polygamous unions. If a man marries a woman who is not a virgin, she is required to find a virgin girl for her husband to marry as compensation”.    
 
Inculcation Of Good Family Values
Child brides often become pregnant during adolescence and this is when the risk of complications during pregnancy and child birth upsurges --for themselves and their infants.  It is sad and unfortunate that many innocent and precious lives are lost year in year out through the vulnerabilities associated with child marriages. Many a girl has perish during child-birth. Our collective strength lies in having good family values.  Africa needs robust, comfortable and caring families. A family tie is like a tree, it can bend but it cannot break. 
Conclusion
To tackle this scourge, there is need to identify the key factors that facilitate or promote it. The roots of this detrimental practice are multifaceted and differ from community to community, country to country and from culture to culture. Some of the causes of this practice entail poverty, limited access to health and education. Norms and stereotypes around gender roles and marriage age and socio-economic risk of pregnancy outside marriage also contribute to this practice.
 
N.B
This article is an abridged except from the author`s new book titled The Dangers Of Child Marriages: Billions Of Dollars Lost In Earnings And Human Capital
 

Martin Luther King once said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light cannot do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love cannot do that". Ndaba Sibanda's poems are dedicated to what is left of peace and honesty. Indeed they advocate for peace and honesty through a wide range of concerns and subjects that vary from gender relations, nostalgia, nature, politics, race relations to social responsibility. The tone in most of the poems is scathing, satirical, animated whilst the pieces maintain and sustain an alluring rhythm. 
In ' Family Time', the poet is nostalgic as his desire to fly on a plane and tour the world is replaced by an ache to spend time with his family.
they say jewellery is timeless and can be
passed down from generation to generation
but now my treasure is quality time with family 

 He also expresses the frustrations of a long distance relationship in the poem, ' A Solid Impression'. The poet expresses his love for nature through the idyllic journeys to places of attraction. He is mesmerized by the beauty of the Namibian lands, the incredible rivers, waterfalls and beaches of Angola, the majesty of the Victoria Falls, the grandeur of Matopo Hills, the mystery of the caves and the splendor of the Esigodini Hills.
Visiting Namibia is like taking an excursion 
To a heaven of deserts and wildlife reserves;
It is like exploring the lovely curves of a lover.
A rich experience that transports and transforms,
And leaves one mesmerised tenfold times ten!



Poetry in this book is interspersed with wordplay and figurative language. It is one of the ingredients of this publication, and by extension, the signature of the author. For example, the poem 'Just A Jostling Village' is alive with humor and wit from the first line to the last one.       
 
they say they do not want to live in a city 
where police stations are robbed every day
where marriage counsellors are in the habit 
of filing for divorce, where working is not working for many
where flameproof fire stations have an appetite for burning down
where purity is as clear as mud, where love is cash, poverty is worthy!
where normalcy is as sweet as seeing pregnant virgins high on the pill!     


Relations between men and women are scrutinized in a number of poems. These are marked by either passion or conflict. In ' Hotel Music ', the persona fails to sleep because of a couple's passionate love- making sounds which he finds distractive.  In ' Romance Tourism', a couple's love and intimacy is explored in what can be summed up by the axiom, ' shooting birds with one stone '. Whilst they explore their romance, they also get to appreciate and experience the tourism of a country.  On a profounder note, the poet bravely casts lights on the racialized, exoticized, and hypersexualized stereotypes involving local men, usually in Africa, the Caribbean or in Asia and the female tourists from economically well-off countries, usually in Europe and North America.
Rich older women in the young loving arms of poor local men who received gifts and cash
They seemed to enjoy succulent seafood and topped it off with beer and romantic carousing 

In 'House Number 12 Foot Street ', a bitter wife is tipped off on her husband's shenanigans and she exposes the illicit affair. Like a number of pieces in this collection, this particular one is a shape poem.  
Sibanda's poems also touch on social responsibility.  In ' Fierce Fiesta', people are merry-making and indulging excessively in food and drink. The poet plants a reminder that in the midst of all the fun people should not forget about the future and different fees that have to be paid. In ' Listening To A Guest On The Radio ',the poet is raising awareness on the need for a healthy lifestyle while in ' From Scars To Stars ' ,he is encouraging the inhabitants of a certain city to move away from the hurt and pain of political marginalization to working hard to improve or free their lives. In poems that forge for social responsibility, he is also pushing the audience to frown on all forms of immorality and laziness but to find responsibility in hard work, creativity and resilience. 




The poet also touches on the importance of one`s identity, heritage and history in the poem, 'That Is Where My Umbilical Cord Is'. The persona speaks with pride and passion about his city of birth, Bulawayo. A royal city, it symbolizes his cultural roots and childhood years and their impact on him.  

Today you stand tall in defiance of all the challenges
Right in the southern ­western part of the country

Just like in the year 1893 when a Union Flag was raised
As the huts of King Lobengula's capital were up in flames

Did Dr Leander Starr Jameson not congratulate himself
For scoring a British South Africa Company`s victory?

Some of the poems also speak on challenges that writers experience in their careers. In ' Roar To Life ', editors encourage a young writer to write quality work.  In ‘Hallmarks Of Unprofessionalism ', a female writer is frustrated by the insensitivity of her publishers who fail to give her royalties for the work she has done. Some of his poems have a rousing touch to them. In ‘Crazy, Be Really Crazy Young Man ', the persona is reinvigorated to take up writing not only as a career, but as a challenge to reach dizzy heights. 

the profession of  writing chose you
like birds building their  nests on trees

the prophet said sorry young man
I cannot exorcise you without 

getting hurt myself and my conscience 
because that`s your forte and science    

The poet further probes into race relations, where he questions some sections of the white race's half -hearted acceptance of the black race.  In ‘ Is there Dignity In That Immensity ', the poet lambasts those who are still imprisoned and driven by blind feelings of supremacy, unilateralism, racism and greed instead of embracing true values of decency, democracy, humanity and unity. 

The bulk of the poems in the collection are an attack on the political terrain of a country.  The poet mocks the self-centeredness of a dictator.  In the poem,' As If They Didn't Know ‘,he mocks the lavish lifestyle of a dictator who preaches patriotism and progress, yet he gallivants about while the masses are forsaken in peril and poverty. The poet has unkind words for a claimant who pretends to better than his predecessor, yet in practice he is just a product of the same undemocratic and tyrannous regime. In the poem,  ' Of Sycophantic Peacemakers ', the inheritor pretends to be sympathetic and peaceful yet he is the engineer and perpetrator of the hatred, chaos and division in a country. When the country seeks to make a fresh break with its scared past and is in need of a true reformer, sadly an antipode takes over.  In ' Haunted By His Mentors` Disastrous Ghost ‘, the poet also ridicules the successor for pretending to be different from or  be better than his prototype. The poet also laments the state of the dilapidating economy. In the poem, 'Finally  ' he shows a country going through the worst economic meltdown in years. In 'Of Policies And Capacities’ the poet exposes and satirizes corrupt tendencies that he blames for bringing the country to its knees. The poem has an interesting end rhyme scheme.     

this economy has whiskey
how can it be so drunk and risky?
the poor say the prognosis is easy
for this country has a terrible leprosy 
termites and maggots of corruption
and governance constitute its destruction


There is a spiritual dimension to the presentation of his poetry.  In the face of gloom and doom, the poet paints a picture of hope, vitality and victory. For example, in 'A Done Deal' there is a biblical allusion of Isaac.  
 

the view could be blurred by
roaring and furious mists over
high mountains and sharp rocks
the road could be filled with thorns
and bottomless potholes and explosives
like an eagle Thembani---soars beyond
the hurdles and prevailing situation around him
like an eagle he knows that as he soars the snakes
he is clutching  in his fist are a done and defeated deal
like one Isaac he is prospering in the face of adversities! 

Ndaba Sibanda has proved once more that he is a socially, culturally, spiritually and politically conscious poet who is a voice for the voiceless. His poems are a pleasure to read. They are a must-read for both leisure and academic purposes. Sibanda uses language in a gripping fashion because he breathes life into his words. For Betsy Perluss in Wilderness Guide says, "If language is our way of describing the world, poetry gives it life ".

Biography of the author
Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, Sibanda is the author of Notes, Themes, Things And Other Things, The Gushungo Way, Sleeping Rivers, Love O’clock, The Dead Must Be Sobbing, Football of Fools, Cutting-edge Cache, Of the Saliva and the Tongue, When Inspiration Sings In Silence, The Way Forward, The Ndaba Jamela and Collections and Poetry Pharmacy . 
https://www.pagespineficshowcase.com/ndaba-sibanda.html.
https://ndabasibanda.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/first-blog-post/
https://www.amazon.com/Ndaba-Jamela-Collections-Sibanda/dp/1712864173    
http://ourpoetryarchive.blogspot.com/2020/03/ndaba-sibanda.html
https://poetrypoeticspleasureezine.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/ppp-ezine-poetrypoeticspleasureezine-volume-4-issue-3-march-2020/



​

San Francisco writer Penny Skillman often writes about the marginalized citizens among us. Her fiction, non-fiction and poems have appeared in diverse publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Bay Guardian, AVA, and California Poetry Quarterly. Her novella, The Cats’ Journal, was a Small Press Book-of-the-Month selection, and was excerpted for a radio reading. A section of her novella, What Happened to Easter, appeared in City Miner magazine and was read on Jennifer Stone’s Berkeley KPFA radio show. The author is at work on a travel memoir about Spain, tentatively titled, Two Footprints.

​In the last year I’ve been learning Spanish by watching films with Spanish subtitles I get at my neighborhood Russian-European store in San Francisco. James Bond to Lethal Weapon II, the gamut. These movies are one factor responsible for young men with assault weapons periodically blasting away in public places I’d argue. Simple conditioning. In these gun-filled movies the men get the girl, and all. Crimey! Because of this overload of violent movies, four films I came across stood out like leaf lettuce on a pizza. I’ve learned the Spanish words for shoot, goddamn, shit, and fuck by constant reiteration. No problema. But I found myself starting to throw films in the garbage after a while, and I’m not a censoring person, don’t believe in that. But with such an imbalance of subject matter, I felt I had to even things out on the smorgasbord table. Then I started thinking maternally, that I wouldn’t want a young son of mine to see this film. And so I started re-watching movies that might enlarge a more sociable Spanish vocabulary. (Although I can’t say I don’t like very much the phrase “Maldita Sea,” for “goddamnit.” It sounds perfectly cuss-like while somehow classy.)
Here’s four films I related to:
“84 Charing Cross Road,” starring Ann Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, 1986, Columbia Pictures. A New York script writer, Helen Hanff, sends a letter off to a London antiquarian bookshop searching out English classics. The English bookseller answers her and a correspondence is struck that spans twenty years. It slowly reveals the characters and lives of these two and the people who work in the shop. Helen is a sarcastic, outspoken New Yorker, and Frank a reserved English husband and father with a deep love of books and the book trade. We get to see their day-to-day lives, dreams, and disappointments, as Helen works towards financially managing a trip to London to meet in person the booksellers at Charing Cross Road. She’s held up by her script reading and writing jobs, and finally the need to have a mouthful of expensive root canal work. So much like life. The pitch perfect dialogue in the letters led me to believe this story happened for the most part as she told it. Do these two classic book freaks fall in love? Of course, in a way, but it doesn’t represent the denouement of the relationship. Anti-climactic. Like real life. The acting is excellent. Much of it is conveying interior movement only; desire, wonder, sparks of humor, disappointment, etc. Fine to witness, and it vibrates one’s heartstrings. No nudity. No slobbering. No guns. Spanish words about writing and books.
 
“Notting Hill,” 1999, by Polygram Filmed/Entertainment, a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, takes place in London. One thing I love about English location portrayal is that the actors are real-looking – the exception here is the two stars – people like those we know, looking like we ourselves look, ordinary and with varying idiosyncrasies. And there’s that English wit. Maybe the film is somewhat unrealistic. But this I think is a credible essay on fame with its whistles and bells, its sinkholes and glue pots. And I wanted to be charmed by it.  It’s not harmed, this movie, by the fact that the acting is some of the best I’ve seen in a rom-com. One scene of nudity -- no, two scenes of near nudity – or maybe three. Hugh Grant owns a book store in Notting Hill and tries to tell Julia Roberts what to buy. She doesn’t. Books; no pistols; one package. The Spanish word “lectura” means both” reading,” and “ reading matter.”
 
“Last Call,” about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, 2002 by Showtime Networks, Inc., starring Jeremy Irons and Neve Campbell. I found after I got it home it had no Spanish subtitles after all, but it has beautiful 1930’s Los Angeles architecture inside and out. It’s based on a book, Against the Current, written by Frances Kroll King, who as a young woman worked in 1939-40 as Fitzgerald’s secretary while he struggled to put aside alcoholism and reclaim his renown as a first-rate literary writer. Another real life story. F. Scott totters between helpless has-been, financially drained writer, and hopeful come-back kid writing a new novel about the movie industry. (What he’d thought was a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, didn’t sell well at the time of publication.) F. Scott had contempt, as did many writers, for the Hollywood movie industry. One pistol. One shot. One semi-nude scene. No physical violence. Zelda (Sissy Spacek) is a torturesome ghost, along with Scott’s past life of celebrity. He didn’t have a chance, F. Scott, not a chance in hell, once he came back to America. Yo lo se.
 
“Bandits,” with Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, and Cate Blanchett, made in 2001 by MGM. This movie is as far into violence as I’m willing to go nowadays, Spanish subtitles or no. But the violence in the film has reason. Despite pistols, rifles, and explosives, I couldn’t help but continue to watch, enticed by the beginning scene in which Billy Bob Thornton, prisoner and hypochondriac, runs to his pal Bruce Willis, who’s busy sparring in a boxing ring, to complain that the warden won’t allow the sale of fresh garlic in the commissary. He’s a health food type. Willis, an individualist in his own right, breaks them out of prison and along their escape route they meet Cate Blanchett. There’s medical talk, culinary talk, painting of fingernails, eastern philosophy, wit, and more. The Spanish word, “fingir,” means “to pretend.”
 One of them doesn’t get the girl, no; and they leave America to go on to Mexico. Actually, this is an American movie with brains, beauty, and beast, in a slightly different mix, with a bit of density.
But don’t get a wrong notion.
I don’t dislike American films or America. At least, I didn’t until America voted in a sociopath as president. But I also don’t like that red stuff in my Organic Spring Mix either, the stuff that rots in just two days time despoiling it all.
Las manos arriba!, Hollywood!  Drop yer guns and pull on this pointy hat.
 

​Their tears are the mountain of hell. We climbed on their purity without knowing that we have offended them. Their life is the epitome of lost and pains trailing the vest roads that spell their names backward. It might be very obvious that life itself is a calamity that fell upon itself. We try to make mouth swell to the direction of the wind but ended up pushing our own in to the den where going and coming becomes terrible and unbearable to their kind. We watched hell on them yet, we try as much as possible to frustrate their efforts in Lagos traffic, we made them chase after our car with lots of loads on their head. Sometimes, they receive this money for their efforts in chasing cars to collect their money and the other times, they don’t. Some of them get killed during this hot chase. Some get brutalized by others. Many things happened to these children in the street because of poverty where as some of our leaders have this money perfectly stored in their account abroad. Our children are in pains. They need our help! They need the best advice from us. They need shoulder to lean on whenever they are in trouble. They can’t do without having you as a back up to them. We need our children back to school and be taught how their life live in maximum.  We need these children back to school to be brought up in a way that could be more important to the society at large. We may not help them make choices but we can help to pattern their life to the right channels for a better future.
Breaking and arranging back these generational plights is possible when we gather our hands together to get those children off the street where they smell pains always is possible. I would have the template of this atmosphere utilize when the principles of Love is applied. In love and aspiration, we could drive fate into the palms of fortunes. We could hold up the rivers into patterns, we can faithfully return peace in the heart of those boys and girls left in the street to suffer. Don’t take a child out from the comfort of his or her parents and bring him or her to Lagos to sell Sachet water for you in the street of Lagos. Don’t convince their parents that you can take care of them and you bring them to the city as sex workers. These children have emotions also. They have feeling just like you have. They have right to be treated as humans just as your children also have.  Don’t treat them less because they are not your children. I have seen children under the bridge battered. Some raped and some killed in the process of searching for reasons to live a reasonable life. I know how it hurts because I have been in the same shoe. I have been humiliated also. I have been made to see life as being worthless.  The street made me weird and wild clearing the rushes of who was yesterday. I have made mistakes as a boy growing up where love is not found but I found the other side of me trying to hold my fragments together. Same as these boys and girls acquainted with life in a miserable way. Nothing is given freely I know but life could smile on them when a handful of mercy is parted to them through the love we show to them every day. I think we have come of age to revise these abnormalities passioned in the leveled arms where our future is traded in the eyes of greediness and selfishness. If these dreams are murdered before our very eyes, then, the future is certainly blank and without hope of these ones defining who they are when tomorrow comes. Truth be told, when we gather those firewood of greediness and revisit our yesterday to pick up those fragments of those dreams wasting in the grave yard, if we hold unto those fears that betrayed our yesterday , we would faddishly name ourselves failures because we have failed to do the needful. Our future is in danger. The government of the day has ruined our brain.  They blackmailed all of us with the economic situation in the country.  
A neighbor of mine once travelled to the village. She was looking for a girl that could help her in her restaurant. So, she travelled down to her village and brought this small girl to stay with her. According to the small girl, she convinced all parents with the story that she would send her to one of the best school in Lagos so that she would be useful to the family and to, herself. Her parents were reluctant at first to release her but when she pushed on; she was allowed to bring her to Lagos. When they got to Lagos, she could not put this girl in a school rather the little girl spend all her days in Lagos in the restaurant. Not only that the little girl was spending her precious time in the restaurant, she also became a modern slave to the woman. She always got beaten on slightest mistake. Life became miserable. No one cares for her. Sometimes, she would not eat throughout the day but; she must work.   The little girl got tired of this and saved some cash which she used as transportation fare back to her village. The lady woke up one morning and could not find her again. And many other stories like this happen every day in the street and in our different homes. Then, if the future is this blurring in the eyes of these children, what does the future holds for us? What do we stand to gain if we have nobody to hand over this history to? The children is our future, let’s take care of them.
How do we define ourselves without tracing those people we shared our love to? How do we call ourselves humans if nobody can boldly point at us as people who made them smile? Life is paradise if we could look backward and see what we have done or who we have made to smile. They are children not stones to be kicked here and there. These children have emotions just like those ones you cherish at home. They are so important to their parents just like yours are very , very  precious to their family just like yours are very precious to you, so, why kick them here and there? Why use them as sex worker every Night? Why trade their destiny because of money? If they happen to be your blood, would you have thrown them out in the cold because they pick a meat from your cooking pot? Why are you so heartless touching the most vital part of their life? Why do you have to sleep with that little girl in the street because you just wanted to satisfy your sexual urges? I am ashamed of you and the society is also ashamed of you. You are one of the cause of our problems in Nigeria. You are also the reason why the leaders are heartless to us. If you can plant thorns for these little ones to walk on that mean, when you are up there as a leader, you can see us all just as the government of the day is selling all of us. They put us all for sale. They value the cows more than us and you value your sexual urges than the feelings of these young ones. I must commend your effort Mr. man. Many things lie in the eyes of those little children you made to cry every day. They may not fight you but so9me where, somehow their god is not blind to see what you have been doing to them. And you woman who have modernized these children into modern slaves because they have no mother or father to fight for them, because they are helpless in your hand; because you don’t have your own children, god watches from behind. Karma is alive and would never die . it will surely come fully on us when the time comes. 
Some days ago, I was in a bus going to the Island when I saw what happened. A boy who was hawking sachet water was chased by kick Against Indiscipline (KAI) men on the road. He was running with his bowl of sachet water perfectly on his head. The men ran after him. Suddenly, a fast moving car hit him and he fell on the ground struggling with his life. He was a little boy of 12. The men stood on the side of the road s speechless. They turned back and started moving drastically so that they would not be lynched by the people around. They entered into their vehicle and zoomed off. People gathered to have a glimpse of what was going on. When his pulse was checked, he was long gone. His chapter closed in chaos and misery. I cried in the bus as other cried too. This boy probably should be in school by that time of the day but who knows what transpired between him and his family or his guardians.  He died and his dreams gone with him. How on earth would you take granted the  gift of Life? There are many people who seek for this but they could not find or buy it. And now, god in his infinite mercy have handed one to you and the best you could do was to send him to the street t to learn in the hard way. I know the economy of this country is not favorable to anyone. I know you need support to feed the family. I know it is not easy carry the burden of the family all alone. But, it is not also easy for these children. M it is not easy for them at all. I could remember when I was hawking in the street of Aba; I could remember the pains I passed through each day the sun made mockery of me. I could remember the abuse in the hands of men and women who supposed to encourage me then. I could remember how the rain drenched me and mixed together the tears and sweat that dropped from me. I remembered everything. How I was made to cater for my school fees. It wasn’t easy for mother that was why she had to put us in the street to help. Father was not there for us. He was good in impregnating than taking care of those who were born for him. Same thing I suffered are the same tales in every mouth of some children found in the street hustling to help  the family welfare which is certainly not their work but the society has made it so.  How it hurt me to see those children at Eko Bridge chasing after buses and cars in traffic, how it hurts to see those children in the street of Lagos looking for a mean in life, how it hurt trying to be you when you look every street in Nigeria and you see most children who ought to be in the school being left to the merciful hand of the street and we dream of a better tomorrow which they would hand. We have to call back our senses that have been corrupt by the problem this country have in us.  Try to visualize how tomorrow will be when an idiot handle it. It may be of passion and dreams trying to figure out what we have planted with our hands to grow and germinate another thing which we never planted. Until we keep these young ones in mind, until the thought of these children deny us sleep, until we give a helping hands to this ones who need our shoulders to learn on; things won’t be in it rightful place in our life because, their life is tied to our lives.
When I knitted these feelings together in the middle of the night, I remembered that God that created us said in other for us to be pure and holy, we should be like the ch8ildren. I housed my thought in the skeletal dreams that one day we would like remember that nothing is more precious than those children we neglected in the street because we needed more and more from life. This is my dream that one day we shall bring honest advantage closer to their bosom. We shall link up their feelings with ours and depend on what they have to tell us and which way they have to walk us to freedom. I think that day shall be a perfect match of feelings and emotions knitted into drives of understanding. Let’s have a new world of children who were not made to spend their entire life in the street but in the forefront of the society because they are our future generation holding the fragments that build this country and the world together. Let’s have a world of smiling children in a happy mood. It begins with you and me. It begins with our understanding of who they are and how to help them achieve their dreams.

​The “Godfather of contemporary travel writing” has probably chronicled more places in the world than almost any other author. The second page of his book lists the forty Theroux publications, which gives one a sense of what a prolific writer he is. This is his third volume of essays, following Sunrise with Seamonsters (1984) and Fresh Air Fiend (2001), for a total of 134 essays written over 53 years. This new collection of essays is a veritable cornucopia of sights, characters, and experiences covering the globe.  I concur with Theroux’s own critique for what makes a superior travel book when assessing this one, as “not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray in South American (in this case the world) topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations of books, music, and life in general; in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.” The collection includes varied topics and showcases his sheer versatility as a writer. As always, Theroux writes with irony and misanthropy, which partially explain his unique perspective on so many aspects of life.
The title of the book is based on a 1945 painting by the Irish-born artist known for his grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery, which is based on a photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park that, according to Theroux, sums up all travel writing and many essays. In order to visit the wealthy and powerful as well as the common people, one must travel on the cheap and dress down. In the introduction of the book he provides insights into what makes a good travel writer, such as seeing the “underside, its hinterlands, its everyday life” if you want to get at the truth of a country, which is what he strives to do in many of the stories of this book. He also cautions not to be in a hurry when traveling through a new country and always go low-tech. Theroux doesn’t carry high-tech items like a cell phone, camera or computer because they’re fragile and irreplaceable and are the target of robberies. As Theroux puts it, “Who steals notebooks?”
Theroux goes on with, “The freelancer is guided by curiosity and must, in its pursuit, be uncompromising, never betraying his or her gift by writing badly or in haste…” and “At its best, the freelance writer lives a life of happy accidents.” His example is an assignment in China in 1980, on a Yangtze River cruise, which led to more assignments in China and eventually a year-long travel for “Riding the Iron Rooster.” According to Theroux, one of the advantages in the randomness of this sort of freelance writing life is that one makes a reasonable living without having to, “put one’s work aside and enter a classroom, or apply for a fellowship, or be some sort of consultant…”
His reflections on the state of the media today seem most timely, “As I write, magazines are closing, few television programs interview serious writers, and (apart from NPR) radio is mainly music and sports talk. The writing professional that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid….”, leading him to believe that the “barbarians are at the gate, because they have always been there, giving writers a reason to be vigilant, and unsparing, and fully employed.”
His travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Hawaii, among other places. He even includes a chapter on the theme, “Traveling Beyond Google” where he rails against the “don’t go there” know-it-all, stay-at-home finger-waggers who warn against what are often the best travel experiences. He reminds us how the natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty that one comes across on the road can be “…an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the trophies of travel, the life-altering journey.” He was even forced to tell one genial Canadian who was complaining about the horrors in some of the countries he recently visited that the place they were talking about was just a few miles from what a local newspaper labeled, “America’s homicide capital”—Camden, New Jersey.
Theroux did heed one finger-wagger in 1973 while passing through Singapore who warned against visiting Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. He pointed to the difference of traveling in a country where the state of law prevails and one in a state of anarchy, so he went to Vietnam, which wasn’t without risks, as the country was “defenselessly adrift in a fatalistic limbo of whispers and guerrilla attacks…”  But the real story wouldn’t actually emerge for another thirty-three years when he returned on his “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” journey. He returned to Hue, which had been a “hellhole” during the war to find happiness after war and “almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness.”  According to Theroux, “Seven million tons of bombs had not destroyed Vietnam; if anything, they had unified it…”.   He went on to observe that Hanoi, which had suffered more than most cities from aerial bombardment during the war, looked “...wondrous in its postwar prosperity, with boulevards and villas, ponds and pagodas, as glorious as it had been when it was the capital of Indochina, certainly one of the most successful and loveliest architectural restorations of any city in the world.”  Lesson learned, “…while weighing the risks and being judicious, travel in an uncertain world, in a time of change, has never seemed to me more essential, of great importance, or more enlightening.”
Ecuador and the upper Amazon would be one of the first places Theroux introduces us in search of the “grail of psychotropics”, which was inspired by William Burroughs’ account of a drug search in Peru and down Colombia’s Rio Putumayo in his “The Yage Letters.” According to these letters, “Yage is yaje, Banisteriopsis caapi: vine of the soul, secret nectar of the Amazon, the shaman’s holy drink, the ultimate poison, miracle cure. More generally known as ayahuasca…” a word Theroux found “bewitching.” This trek would fulfil one of Theroux’s primary reasons to travel, “…to find obstacles, to discover my limits, to ease the passage of time, to reassure myself  that innocence and antiquity exist, to search for links to the past, to flee from the nastiness of urban life and the paranoia, if not outright dementia, of the technological World…”.
Theroux would consult his fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, friend and “self-exiled writer,” Moritz Thomsen, on the location of “ayahuasqueros” along the river people in eastern Ecuador. He signed up for an “Ethnobotanical experience,” whose organizers characterized it as eight days in the rainforest, for eco-awareness and spiritual solidarity, to learn the names and uses of beneficial plants. They’d live in a traditional village of the indigenous Secoya people on Ecuador’s Oriente region on a narrow branch of Burroughs’ Putumayo, “where the ayahuasca vine clinging to the trunks of rainforest trees grows as thick as a baby’s arm.”
Almost immediately Theroux felt uneasy being part of what turned out to be a “nervous and ill-assorted bunch,”  but fortunately he met the “vegetalista,” Don Pablo, who he could trust and according to Theroux, “remains one of the most gifted, insightful and charismatic people I have met in my life.” Theroux even confided in problems writing his latest novel, at which point Don Pablo spoke about the “Eye of Understanding.”  “This eye can see things that can’t be seen physically,” he said, “Some people have this third eye already developed. And for others, the Eye of Understanding can be acquired through ayahuasca or some other jungle plants.” On several occasions, Theroux was able to separate from the group with a local guide and learn more about the local culture and topography.
When reflecting on the trip, Theroux realized that it had not been an ethno-botany trip of shamanism as an encounter with child prostitutes, gunrunners, Big Oil, and blighted jungle, a place surrounded by FARC guerrillas. The diminishing number of Secoyas seemed doomed. That village would soon be swallowed by the encroachment of oil people, who were only half a day’s march through the forest.” The trip had offered glimpses of danger, but what separates adventure from disaster, according to Theroux, is that you live to tell the tale.
Theroux’s book includes some gems of literary criticism and reveals real depth about the work of one of my favorite travel authors, Graham Greene, and also of David Thoreau, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. Of Graham Greene, Theroux reminds us that he, “…lived and thrived, in an age where writers were powerful, priest-like, remote, and elusive…”  I’m one of those who worshipped anything Greene wrote, especially “Journey Without Maps” and “Heart of the Matter,” since I’d worked in Sierra Leone for several years. Yet Theroux brings a new level of insights into many authors and famous people.  In this case, he was familiar with Greene’s official biographer, Norman Sherry, who occupied the same office chair Theroux would hold at the University of Singapore. According to Theroux, “Aware that he led a hidden life, Greene developed a habit of evasion, which was an almost pathological inability to come clean. His secretiveness led him at times to keep a parallel diary, in which he might chronical two versions of his day, one rather sober and preoccupied, and the other perhaps detailing a frolic with a prostitute…” He goes on to say that “Greene was a restless traveler, a committed writer, a terrible husband, an appalling father, and an admitted manic-depressive…”
Much to my surprise, Theroux points out that “Green’s book is an ingeniously worked-up account of only four weeks in the Liberian bush by an absolute beginner in Africa. Greene admits this early on. “I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa. The book lacked humor, it was dark and broadly political, according to Theroux, and eighteen months after it was published it was withdrawn due to a threatened libel suit.  The book is filled with misinformation and distorted beliefs about Africa, according to Theroux. That Liberia was unmapped, and that cannibalism was a threat, although it was not practiced except in the minds of timid fantasists, whom one does not normally lump together with modern cartographers.”
When Greene returned to Africa in 1942 to do wartime intelligence work, he stuck to Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the backdrop for “The Heart of the Matter” and, according to Theroux, “Africa is not the subject, but the shadowy backdrop for this essentially inward-looking novel that questions the elements of belief and damnation, heaven and hell.” The reason the book is one of Greene’s best, “is perhaps that he was desperate the whole way through, and that in some important aspects the trip was the fulfillment of his childhood fantasies.” In retrospect, in his seventies, and on the anniversary of this trip, he wrote his cousin Barbara, who made the trip with him, “To me that trip has been very important—it started a love of Africa that has never quite left me…Altogether a trip which altered life.”
Biking enthusiast and comic extraordinaire, Robin Williams, is one of his most fascinating public figures Theroux introduces the reader to, and he could be better understood through psychologist Oliver Sacks, who was also profiled along with Elizabeth Taylor and a Manhattan dominatrix. Initially I was surprised at the profile of Dr. Oliver Sacks until I realized that Robin Williams starred in the Oscar nominated film in 1990 based on his Dr. Sacks book, entitled “Awakening”, which was published in 1973.  Although Sack’s story is fascinating, much of what he learned reveal some of the psychological issues facing Williams.
Theroux was fascinated by Dr. Sacks’ “Street Neurology,” which refers to the assessment of a person’s condition after observing their behavior in a casual setting. He said that Sacks has “something of Sherlock Holmes in this shrewd summing up of scattered neurological clues…” Dr. Sacks considered that Sherlock Holmes was possibly “autistic” and Samuel Johnson “tourettic” based on his neurological experience. Sacks proved that a person’s so-called handicap often causes the development of new skills or the discovery of assets. He was a listener of “seismographic sensitivity, a clear-sighted and inspired observer, attentive, with an eloquence that allows him to describe a person’s condition with nuance and subtlety.”
Actually, since the filming of “Awakenings,” he’d become a friend of Robin Williams and claimed that, “There is no one like Robin.” His insights would inform Theroux’s quest to determine, “Who’s he (Robin) when he’s at home?” After attending Julliard’s in New York City, Williams found that he expressed himself with the greatest freedom in stand-up comedy, especially late night comedy clubs, with such a crazed take on the world he seemed like a Martian, which led to his first success, Mork & Mindy (1978-1982). This period included a coked-out life marked by the death of his close friend, John Belushi, from a drug overdose. Williams freely admitted his lifestyle was self-destructive, which included excessive cocaine use and bingeing in general. Include heavy drinking, grossly overweight, using cocaine, under exercised, no discipline, “Just parties”—his self-esteem was low and he fortified his ego with performances in comedy clubs—the Comedy Store and the Improv.
 
During a day of biking with Williams in Marin County, Theroux got to know him better and was convinced that if he were not able to move people to laughter, he would be nearly “defenseless.” Dr. Sacks considered Robin” hyperspontaneious,” and suggested that he verges on the Tourettic,  given to alarming impulses and wild associations, those same shouts and barks. “He is never better than doing stand-up comedy in front of a live nightclub audience. It is vivid and transcendent obscenity.”  He went on to say, “Anarchic wit is not possible without experience of a very dark side.” When Theroux requested clarification, Dr. Sacks said, “There must have been grim and difficult passages in his past.” Both Dr. Sacks and Theroux identified many of the factors that led to Williams’ tragic death by hanging in 2014, and although this essay was evidently written before his death, since the essays in this book go as far as 2016, a “post script” from Theroux summing up Williams’ life and the tragic circumstances of his death would have been helpful.
One of Theroux’s several stories in Africa about the seizure of commercial farms by President Mugabe in Zimbabwe set the stage for his take on the continent, “I love the African bush; I hate African cities. After my last Africa trip, I swore that I would never go back to the stinking buses, the city streets reeking of piss, the lying politicians, the schemers, the twaddlers, the crooks, the money changers taking advantage of weak currency and gullible people, the American God-botherers and evangelists demanding baptisms and screaming, “Sinners!”—and forty years of virtue-industry CEOs faffing around with other people’s money and getting no results, except Africans asking for more.
Theroux builds on what he perceives as the negative impact of outsiders on Africa with his profile of the rock star, Bono, in his essay, “The Rock Star’s Burden” with, “…While there are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by an overpaid and semi-educated Irish rock star with a goofy name and a cowboy hat, I can’t think of one at the moment…”.  Much of his venting on the subject is due to return visits to Malawi where he was a Peace Corps volunteer and found that it, “…has worse education, more plagued by illness and bad services, and poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early sixties, but it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.”
He strengthens his point with, “When the Malawi minister of education stole the entire education budget of millions of dollars in 2,000, and the Zambian president stole even more a year later, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? Bono and other simplifiers of Africa’s problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared to the kleptomania of its neighbors, the tens of millions that have been embezzled by politicians in Zambia and Malawi. Donors enable this behavior by turning a blind eye to bad governance and the actual reasons these countries are failing.” Spoken like a true Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and world traveler who appreciates the complexity of real development.
The last four chapters provide a rare glimpse of what makes the man and one of the most prolific travel—Returned Peace Corps Volunteer authors of modern time. “My Life as a Reader” confirms that many great authors are prolific readers. “…Reading has been my refuge, my pleasure, my enlightenment, my inspiration, my word-hunger, often verging on gluttony. In idle moments without a book, I read the labels on my clothes or the ingredients panel on cereal boxes. My version of hell is an existence without a thing to read, that I would hope to correct it by writing something…”  He goes on to reflect, “Reading took off the long dark African nights and gave me relief and hope, for no matter how badly the day went, a book was waiting for me at home, and this has continued to be the cast.” He even divides the world between those who read and those who don’t “…reading cannot be compartmentalized; it is a skill and a pleasure that needs to be inspired, so that it becomes a lifelong passion.”
“I did not set out to be a writer. My desire was to be a medical doctor, but this was thwarted by ten years of travel, during which I fell into writing, served an apprenticeship, and fifty years went by, and I am still at it. To me, what writers read is as interesting as what they write… For my Tao of Travel, I read about 350 books and quoted from many of them. The pages of my work are filled with references to books I’ve loved.” As an avid reader, I appreciate an author who does his research and reads many more books that I ever could.
In “Dear Old Dad: Memories of My Father,” we learn some startling facts about the author. “My father—whom I loved and who loved me—never read a word I wrote, or if he did, never mentioned that fact. It was like an embarrassing secret we shared, of a creepy proclivity I had, something that we couldn’t discuss without awkwardness…” He further clarifies this disconnect with, “My father did not read novels—anyone’s novels, at least not modern ones,.. And I had not become a writer to please my parents, only myself. A writer is rarely able to do both, and I know that, far from wishing to please them, I wrote as an act of rebellion.”
Theroux had an even more estranged relationship with his mother who “was a mercurial, insecure woman—as domineering people often are—and she feared me for my defiant aloofness. I knew this, and made myself more noncommittal and cooler. It antagonized her that she didn’t know what was in my head…” This relationship was further strained when Theroux “fled” with a girl to Puerto Rico and upon her return she went to a “home” near Boston where she delivered a baby at the Mass. General. She gave the baby up for adoption, and he found out almost forty years later that the boy had been educated at an Ivy League college and ended up a multimillionaire. Both Theroux’s parents were disappointed, but according to Theroux, “But when I had needed them, they did not help, could not help, and simply were not there, except— in my mother’s case — to blame. It was a great lesson to me, a motto for my escutcheon: I am alone in this world.”
Theroux further reflects on his father with, “Memories, fragments, generalizations—what do they add up to? This recollection of mine seems insubstantial, yet that itself is a revelation. I thought I knew him well. On reflection, I see he was strange, and he seems to recede as I write, as sometimes when I asked him a question about himself, he backed away. In writing about him like this, I realize I do not know what was in his heart. He is just like those skinny old men in Burma and Thailand and Vietnam who inspired me to think of him.”
And yet Theroux sometimes felt that he was his father, “My father hated gabbers, gasbaggers, and ear benders, and so do I. My father had a way of inhaling deeply through his nose when he was impatient, and I do it, too…I have a similar temperament. I am generally humane, relatively serene, and like to be left alone, as he did. I will sometimes agree to anything to keep the peace, because he felt (as I do) that you can’t really change the narrow stubborn mind of a person who is set in his belief, and anyway why bother?”
Theroux felt that his mother was literally killing his father, and described the relationship between them as, “If there was a lesson for me, these family experiences resolved themselves in my horror of weak and vain, nagging and castrating women. As soon as I sense an echo of my mother in a woman’s voice, I recognize the snarl of a she-wolf and flee….but only the one thing I’ve failed to do, ultimately a cynicism and a merciless refusal to see my pain—when in my life I’ve heard those things, or heard something as subtle as a sniff, a snort, a harrumph, a certain tilt of the head. I have mentally shut myself down and vowed to end the relationship, because I do not want to become the person that my father became in his old age, reduced to dependence on an unhappy woman who not only didn’t know what she wanted, but needed, most of all, someone to blame.”
In the end, Theroux’s father wanted to be left alone. “He would have been appalled if he ever got wind of instances of my wayward behavior.  I had a mediocre school record. I was arrested by the police at a campus demonstration in 1962 in Amherst. I had fathered an illegitimate child. I was kicked out of the Peace Corp (“terminated early”) in 1965 for a number of transgressions, my first wife and I split up in 1990, I wrote umpteen books—and these events or topics were never mentioned at all, and perhaps in my father’s mind they never happened. Or was it because they were “faits accompli” that there was nothing to say?”
In the final essay, “The Trouble with Autobiography,” Theroux provides 500 words, which “are all I will ever write of my autobiography.” At the age of 67, he asked the question, “Do I write my life or leave it to others to deal with?” He has no intentions of writing about his life, and plans to put obstacles in the way of those who try, since, “Biography lends to death a new terror.” He claims that Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is “glittering miniaturism, but largely self-serving portraiture, was posthumous…” Theroux harkens back to the “mysterious B. Traven” (born Otto Feige in Germany), author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and ten other novels, who succeeded in frustrating any biographers by assuming multiple identities, changing his name three or four times, and living as a recluse in Mexico. He wrote, “The creative person should have no other biography than his books.”
Theroux goes on to say that autobiography is an “unreliable little creature, or even a loose and baggy monster. This form of personal narrative exerts a horrible fascination on me. When a writer’s autobiography is published, I pounce on it. I want to know what this lonely business was like for him or her…” In the end, he also provides the readers of this book with many fascinating details of his life.   
I totally agree with Theroux that, as a reader, we should not be reading books, but reading the author, “devouring all the novels and stories, and then whatever biography I could find.”  I’ve read about a quarter of his books, so I have many more adventures to look forward to.  Theroux was last sighted in Mexico, probably working on his next book. I can’t wait!
 

Reviewer Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. After earning an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas in Austin, Mark co-founded a Guatemalan development agency and then managed child sponsorship programs for Plan International in Guatemala, Colombia and Sierra Leone. He has held senior fundraising positions for several groups like CARE International, MAP International, Make-A-Wish International, and was the CEO of Hagar. Most recently, he completed a fundraising study for the National Peace Corps Association as a VP at Carlton & Co.
His involvement promoting “World Community Service” programs led to his receiving the most prestigious Service Above Self Award from the Rotary International Foundation, and all three of his children have participated in Rotary’s Youth Exchange program. His memoir, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, won Honorable Mention in the Arizona Literary Award competition. An article with the same title was published in the Summer 2017 edition of Advancing Philanthropy. He’s published several other essays, including the featured article in the May 2018 issue of Revue Magazine, “The Making of the Kingdom of Mescal: An Adult Indian Fairy-Tale”; “The Fundraiser: Running risks in Nepal and Bolivia,” in the Spring issue of World View; “My Life in the Land of the Eternal Spring” is in the July issue of “Ragazine,” and will be in the fall issue of the “Crossing Class Anthology,” published by Wising Up Press.  Mark’s wife and three children were born in Guatemala and now live in Scottsdale, Arizona.
 
Product details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 8, 2018)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0544870301
• ISBN-13: 978-0544870307
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars 19 customer reviews
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Travel > Africa > Zimbabwe
  • #252 in Books > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Travel
  • #264 in Books > Travel > Travel Writing

 

​Reviewed by Mark D. Walker
I learned about the author on an “American Masters” documentary, “Words from a Bear” that portrayed him as a voice of Native American Renaissance in art and literature, which led to a breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. Like many Americans, my awareness of the Native American was raised by historian Dee Brown’s 1970 best-selling book, “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee,” which told about the massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians (mostly women and children) by soldiers of the U.S. Army. The author was brought up around places I’d lived and worked in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, and this book had received a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
The main character, Abel, has come home to New Mexico from war only to find himself caught between two worlds. The one world is modern and industrial, claiming his soul and leading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and despair. The author expresses a wariness of the white man’s world and language,
On every side of him, there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language—for the World itself—as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
 
Alcoholism is often a part of the despair Abel experiences,
 
He had gone out the first and second days and got drunk. He wanted to go out on the third, but he had no money and it was bitter cold and he was sick and in pain. He had been there six days at dawn, listening to his grandfather’s voice. He heard it now, but it had no meaning. The random words fell together and made no sense.
 
In contrast, his grandfather would orient him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the Southwest, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people.
 
These things he told his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as on old man might lose his voice….And he knew they knew, (his grandsons) and he took them with him to the fields and they cut open the earth and touched the corn and ate sweet melons in the sun.
 
Considered by some as the “dean” of Native American writers, he was proficient in fiction, poetry, painting and printmaking.  He’s used his familiarity with Native American life and legend with the modern world, building a bridge between the two. He described this as follows,
“I lived on the Navajo reservation when I was little. And I lived on two of the Apache reservations, and lived at the Pueblo of Jemez (west of Santa Fe, New Mexico) for the longest period of time…I had a Pan-Indian experience as a child, even before I knew what that term meant.”
In an interview in the American Poetry Review, he recalls, “I saw people who were deeply involved in their traditional life, in the memories of their blood. They had, as far as I could see, a certain strength and beauty that I find missing in the modern world at large. I like to celebrate that involvement in my writing.”
In 1958, Momaday received his BA degree from the University of New Mexico and entered the graduate program at Stanford University, where the celebrated critic, poet and scholar, Yvor Winters, had first selected Momaday as the year’s only creative writing fellow in poetry and would become the aspiring poet’s advisor. He went on to get his PhD, and in 1962, he received the Academy of American Poets prize for his poem, “The Bear.”
He’d become an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley where he designed a graduate Indian studies program and developed a course in Indian oral tradition, which has been taught ever since at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Arizona. For twenty-nine years, he’d be a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.  
The New York Times Book Review found this book, “as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware.” And I’d agree with the critique of this book from The Paris Review, “both a masterpiece about the universal human condition and a masterpiece of Native American literature.”
 
Product details
·        Series: P.S.
·        Paperback: 224 pages
·        Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Anniversary edition (December 11, 2018)
·        Language: English
·        ISBN-10: 0062909959
·        ISBN-13: 978-0062909954
·        Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.5 x 8 inches
·        Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
·        Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars   127 customer reviews
·        Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
o   #32 in Native American Literature (Books)
o   #110 in Classic American Literature
o   #73 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
 

Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. He came to Phoenix as a Senior Director for Food for the Hungry, worked with other groups like Make-A-Wish International and was the CEO of Hagar USA, a Christian-based organization that supports survivors of human trafficking.

His book, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was recognized by the Arizona Literary Association for Non-Fiction and, according to the Midwest Review, “…is more than just another travel memoir. It is an engaged and engaging story of one man’s physical and spiritual journey of self-discovery…”
 
Several of his articles have been published in Ragazine and WorldView Magazines, Literary Yard, Literary Travelers and Quail BELL, while another appeared in "Crossing Class: The Invisible Wall" anthology published by Wising Up Press.  His reviews have been published by Revue Magazine, as well as Peace Corps Worldwide, and he has his own column in the “Arizona Authors Association” newsletter, “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why.” His essay, “Hugs not Walls: Returning the Children,” was a winner in the Arizona Authors Association literary competition 2020 and reissued in “Revue Magazine.”
 
His honors include the "Service Above Self" award from Rotary International. He’s the membership chair for “Partnering for Peace.”  His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com and follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/millionmilewalker/
 
 

“The Long Night of White Chickens” was my introduction to the author and I’ve been a fan ever since. His mother is a Catholic Guatemalan, his father Jewish American, and he was born in Boston, so he started off with a very interesting combination of influences. The book is a tense, almost surrealistic detective story which opens windows on the Latin American reality of State Sponsored assassinations, mara youth gangs and organized crime.
The author’s insights come out of his coverage of the wars in Central America in the 1980s as a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine. His book is a non-fiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera by the Guatemalan military. The book was an expansion of an article in the New Yorker, plus seven years of painstaking and often dangerous journalistic investigation.
The Bishop was Guatemala’s leading human rights activist and was bludgeoned to death in his garage, which is only a few hundred feet from the government’s most sophisticated security units and surveillance apparatus. All of this took place two days after a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians. The author tells how the church formed an investigative team comprised of secular young men in their twenties known as “Los Intocables” (the Untouchables) due to the expected lack of interest of police investigators, not to mention the inability of the existing legal system to solve what was known in Guatemala as “The Crime of the Century.”  In what would be his first non-fiction book, the author managed to reach and interview witnesses that no other reporter or authority was able to access and witnessed first-hand some of the crucial developments in the case unfolding before him.
The author’s painstaking research would reveal that in 1980 Gerardi would become Bishop of the Quiche diocese, which was the country’s most populous Indian province, and barely escaped an assassination attempt himself. One of his biggest mistakes, according to the author, was to close the diocese due to the threats of attack.  Before the civil war ended, “…more priests, nuns, and religious workers would be “martyred” by violence …than in any other diocese in the Americas.”
The author’s investigation also reveals the involvement of the U.S. in creating some of the circumstances that led to the bloody civil war which…”was a consequence of a coup re-engineered by the CIA in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history…”  A reality confirmed from a remarkable apology by President Clinton on a visit to Guatemala in 1999 when he sat next to the stony faced President Arzu, and said:  “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units that engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong…and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”
The author takes the reader through the byzantine legal system in Guatemala, which included constant threats against the lives of Judges (several of whom had to leave the country in fear of their lives) and witnesses. Many of the rulings on the case were flawed, at best, as was the case with the Fourth Court of Appeals where important witness records were not even requested by the appellate judges and “Judge Wilewaldo Contreras’s court had issued a precooked ruling.”
Finally, in January of 2006,  the author would receive a “confirmation” by email that the Supreme Court had upheld the convictions and twenty-year sentences for several of the perpetrators, the Limas. Although the author tells of his feelings of astonishment and relief at hearing the news, the attempts to limit and delay the conviction would go on until April of 2007 when a new judge took over as president of the Constitutional Court, and within days—on April 25th, the day before the ninth anniversary of the murder of Bishop Gerardi—the Public Ministry was notified that the guilty verdicts against the Limas and Father Mario had finally been upheld.
The author provides an afterword, a list of appearances of the different characters in the story and a chronology of events, as well as source notes and an index to what is a well written, dramatic piece of Guatemalan history, which says a lot about the chaos and issues forcing so many to flee their homes more than ten years later.  The author has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s to mention a few publications. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mexico City and teaches creative writing and literature at Trinity College.
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#2983 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts

​Moritz Thomsen was an extraordinary writer and influential expatriate who spent thirty years in Ecuador studying the culture and identifying with the people with whom he lived. Although Thomsen only wrote five books, which have been compared to the works of Thoreau and Conrad, he was an avid letter writer. His missives numbered in the multiple thousands, though according to one letter, he was only able to respond to five letters a day on his typewriter, often in the hot, humid jungle of Ecuador. And yet, despite his propensity for separating himself from the outside world—or perhaps because of his isolation—he corresponded with numerous authors, publishers, and professionals. Upon returning from one trip abroad he said he found close to 400 letters to answer. According to author Tom Miller, Thomsen was a “wicked” literary critic, “…the severity of one letter from him could often take days before its impact wore off.”
After rereading Thomsen’s best known work Living Poor recently, Paul Theroux, the “Godfather” of travel literature revealed,
 A British publisher, Eland Press in London, is reissuing Moritz's books—they just asked me if they could use my intro for nothing, and in the spirit of Moritz, I said yes. Actually I think Moritz would have had a big argument with them about money—his letters to publishers were fierce! Someday, someone has to sit down and gather all his letters and publish them in a big volume. His letters may prove to be his true masterpiece.
 
In another exchange, Theroux went on to say,
 
While the subject is riveting, and the details of peasant life vivid and unusual, Moritz himself did not really find a way to bring the people to life in “Living Poor.” His models were Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and god-only-knows who else—big personalities. Moritz himself did not have the ego, or the style, to match them. I think his writing improved with "The Saddest Pleasure" and "The Farm..." (“The Farm on the River of Emeralds”) but in essence his writing has an epistolary feel—as though he is writing a letter to a reader; and is the reason his collected letters are probably his magnum opus. Just a thought. 
 
Theroux met Thomsen in 1976 at a talk on “Aspects of the American Novel” sponsored by our State Department at the US embassy in Quito, and according to a letter Thomsen wrote fellow author Craig Storti,  “It wasn’t  particularly impressive, but he was such a nice guy that everyone forgave him. I tried to talk him into a PC (Peace Corps) novel, but the Peace Corps is not especially news at this point.”
They met again in 1977 when Theroux was writing The Old Patagonian Express, and according to Theroux,
It was Moritz who said to me one afternoon on a Quito street, “I don’t get it, Paul. How do you write a travel book if all you do is go to parties?”

“Write about the parties?” I said. But he was dead right and I was ashamed of myself. I vowed to take the train to Guayaquil the next day.
 
Over the years they would correspond and a friendship emerged, which Theroux revealed in his introduction to The Saddest Pleasure,
 I should have declared my own interest at the outset—he is a friend of mine. I am glad he used a line of mine as a title for this book. Our friendship is, I suppose, characteristic of many he must enjoy. We met in Ecuador twice in the late seventies and have corresponded irregularly since. He goes on boasting of his ailing health, his failing fortunes, and his insignificance. For these reasons and many others, I am proud to know him. There are so few people in the world like him who are also good writers.
 
Acclaimed author Tom Miller, who would dedicate his last book in Thomsen’s memory, met Thomsen while researching The Panama Hat Trail in the early 1980s. In an article in the Washington Post he wrote:
 I saw the chain-smoking Thomsen with some frequency and formed a deep friendship that continued in extensive correspondence. When I saw him last, he was living near the Esmeraldas River, his emphysema worsening, in what was, essentially, a tree house with a typewriter, books, a phonograph and classical records. We sensed it would be our last face-to-face visit, though neither of us said so.
 
 Thomsen’s “wicked” critiques are also reflected in this letter to Miller in 1986, relating to an article Miller co-authored, “The Interstate Gourmet: Texas and the Southwest, a Restaurant Guide”:
 Last night I read the Interstate Gourmet, the perfect oxymoron; so my idea of you is changed. You are not that sweet child I knew with your honed sensibilities…You are a kind of 3rd rate Caligula, chewing, dribbling, degenerate with your debased tastes, your incessant hunger, the food going in one end, an endless stream of shit shooting out the other. I think of Tom, I think of shit—tons of it spread thick enough across the desert to bring it into bloom…I don’t think writers should write about things that don’t engage their basic passions. —And of course, studying your book-book prose, maybe, god help you, you never have. But stop Tom, before it is too late; you will not be chevere [cool] at 300 pounds.


Miller described the critique as “amusing” and went on to state, “His vicious comments are often directed not at the writer but at the person or situation profiled. Anyway, I did not object to a word of his critique.” However, in another letter he admitted, “Thomsen maintained a wide correspondence; the severity of one letter from him would often take days before its impact wore off.”
The shared friendship and respect Miller and Theroux felt for Thomsen led to what they would call “Moritz Memories,” which Miller described as,
 A tribute to a great American expatriate writer, in a century for which the term expat has little genuine meaning. Thomsen lived the word fully. We are convinced that he will be recognized as a significant 20th century figure for his life and his words. He was an uncompromising sceptic, difficult to know well, impossible to forget.  And destined to be fully appreciated only posthumously. The book will be made up of a biography, essays by those who knew him well, his correspondence…some of his line drawings, photos of him and excerpts from his three published books.
 
I came across a ten-page version of this effort from February 1997, what Miller and Theroux referred to as the “Moritz Project,” which was to have been the last phase of the venture, to be completed by the middle of that year. The plan references some of the twenty-five key authors and publishers Thomsen corresponded with.  
John Hay was one of those authors who wrote a short essay plus a prose poem about Thomsen called, “Moritz’s Dream.”  John Brandi, a well-published small press poet, who carried on a “vigorous correspondence” with Thomsen wrote, “M’s writings were those of a master seer—direct and sizzling, full of enough passions, insight and rare detail to rock me off my seat.”
 Philippe Garnier, a French journalist who was in Los Angeles for the publication Liberation, also wrote a short essay about Thomsen and eventually would be instrumental in getting Living Poor published in French. He was also asked by Miller to write an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project,” which turned into an extensive article, “Maquis: Apercu, de un autre paysage American” an in-depth piece on various contemporary maverick American writers, which included an extensive section on Thomsen.
Stan Arnold, the editor of the features section of the San Francisco Chronicle which published stories from Thomsen that would become his first book, corresponded with Thomsen for many years.  Of Thomsen he said, “I’ve only known two Christians in my life. He was one of them.”
Mary Ellen Fieweger, a poet and friend, was also asked to write an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project,” (also known as “Moritz Memories) which she titled,  “FAME ma non troppo.” Fieweger also lived in Ecuador and said this about her essay in a July 1996 letter to Miller,
 
 Since you’re probably sitting up there in Tucson worrying about the screed (no doubt interminable) on Moritz I’m cranking out down here in Quito, I’m sending a draft to put your fears to rest. You will note that it’s within (just) the 5,000 word/20 page limit stipulated. You will also note that I’ve treated everybody with kid gloves. Well, sort of. But I haven’t gone after anybody with brass knuckles. Though a few academics, including on anthropologist, are presented in terms they might not think altogether flattering.
 
Miller felt Fieweger knew more about Thomsen than anyone although she was not easy to get along with, so Miller asked Theroux if he would take over future interactions with her. Theroux said of her, “Mary Ellen convinced me that she is a terrific resource and that Moritz was more B. Traven than I had really grasped,” which is another reason why Thomsen’s correspondence would become such an important window into his life despite having written four books about it. After Thomsen’s death, Fieweger would become the “Literary Executive” to negotiate for his estate.
The Origins of Tom Miller’s Collection of Moritz Thomsen Letters
In February 2018, Miller contacted the editor of Peace Corps Worldwide, a blog for Returned Peace Corps Volunteer authors looking for someone willing to complete the book about Thomsen and made these comments about how and why he came across so many of Thomsen’s letters:
One night more than 35 years ago I met Moritz Thomsen, a writer and former Peace Corps Volunteer. This took place in Quito, capital of Ecuador where Thomsen had served. His account of his Peace Corps years is wonderfully detailed in Living Poor, the first of a handful of terrific nonfiction books that earned the author ranking as among the best American expat authors of the twentieth century. I describe him like this: He was a man of almost insufferable integrity and undeniable charm.
 
Over the years until his death in 1991 Thomsen befriended many writers on the literary gringo trail through the Americas as well as Peace Corps officials, local farmers, and others, building up an impressive array of acquaintances with whom he corresponded. I count myself among them, all the more fortunate in that I came to know him personally. At one point late in the twentieth century I had in mind to write a biography of him, or at least, with Paul Theroux, compile a Festschrift (literary tribute) in his honor. Neither effort reached fruition. Still, I amassed an enormous amount of material about him going back to his military service as well as letters he had written to others.
 As part of the “Moritz Project,” Miller had requested copies of Thomsen’s letters from all of the authors he knew had corresponded with Thomsen, and his best source was John and Ruth Valleau.  (This material is available for review in the University of Arizona Special Collection).

According to Miller,
 They came to my attention through an elderly woman in a retirement home in San Francisco who knew Moritz in college, who got in touch through her daughter who saw my announcement soliciting Moritz memories. She simply recalled a friend of Thomsen from college. She had enough of the name right and the city, that through the University of Oregon alumni office I was able to track down the Valleau’s.
JohnValleau was a college friend of Thomsen and shared a room. “Butch,” as Ruth called Thomsen, spent the Valleau’s wedding night in a cottage with the newlyweds, and according to Ruth,
We spent a happy and boozy evening, the three of us. And of course Moritz kissed the bride. His lips quivered as we kissed. They trembled each time I ever kissed him—then and through the ensuring years…I loved John but it was easy to be in love with Moritz, too—he was gorgeous, with incredible blue eyes and a smile that made me weak in the knees. He was witty, urbane, sensitive, and more than a little mysterious.
 
Thomsen referred to Ruth as “Panther Eyes” in his letters and after both “Butch” and “Panther Eyes” passed away, Ruth’s estate sent Miller several boxes of letters and sketches.
 
Other Literary Encounters
Thomsen told of his encounter with Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan author of Open Veins of Latin American, in a letter to Miller in 1989:
 Did I ever tell you I met Galeano in Quito at “Libri Mundi” [a bookstore Thomsen helped set up] [I]fell to my knees before him (almost) called him “maestro” [teacher] and gave him a copy of the “Farm” [on the River of Emeralds]. He was guarded by a mancha of “pistoleros,” Quito Marxists in black leather jackets who didn’t like to see Eduardo talking to a gringo.
Although Thomsen wrote some blistering critiques of books written by fellow authors he announced his first negative review to Miller in a June 1991 letter,
“Got my first Vile and wicked review in 25 years—from the London Times. It is bitchy—and had I not written the book very similar to the review I might have written. All the English reviews are very good and…generous. Cogdon [his agent] says the River Esmeraldas book did not catch on.”
 
Clay Morgan was a fellow author who corresponded extensively with Thomsen, and told Miller the following in a letter written in April 15, 1996,
 I dedicated “Santiago” to Moritz. In fact, the “little blue man,” who appears on a rock in the middle of the river, is a humorous poke at Moritz. Moritz dedicates “The Saddest Pleasure” to my wife Barb and me.
 
I’m enclosing an essay I did for Writers Northwest, a couple of years back, so you can see if my perspective is one that will fit your book. [Miller also requested an essay about Thomsen for the “Moritz Project”]  I have many letters—I think you may be mentioned in one or two—but haven’t pulled them out to look at them since his death. Mark Lowry, a professor from Western Kentucky University, has asked for letters, too.
 
Moritz Thomsen Versus Editors and Publishers
Thomsen had a rather contentious relationship with agents and publishers, although he managed to get his first three books published. Thomsen sent his stories of life in the Peace Corps on a regular basis to the San Francisco Chronicle, despite being told they weren’t interested. Evidently they reconsidered once they received the initial stories, which were eventually compiled into his best known work, Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, published by Washington University Press in 1969.
Page Stegner, a friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer and author, said of Thomsen:
[He]could rise to inspired heights of eloquence in his condemnation of all agents, editors and critics (whom he regarded as a kind of literary Gestapo) who maliciously failed to appreciate or understand his work. “Of course,” he would say, subsiding in his chair, “the bastards are probably right.”   
 
Stegner would deliver the manuscript of Thomsen’s second book, The Farm on the River of Emeralds, to Don Cogdon, who would become Thomsen’s agent. When Cogdon asked for notes and asked when it would be done Thomsen sent back a 400-page manuscript with a curt note saying it would “end with a period.”  The book would become the “poor orphan”of Houghton-Mifflin publishing company, since the two executives Thomsen had worked with left their positions for other companies. This dumfounded Cogdon, who stated that Thomsen, “had brought these people [in his book] to life in a Dickensian fashion, to be both colorful and memorable.”
Cogdon did convince Vintage, a division of Random House, to produce a paperback edition. In an interview with the publisher of Peace Corps Worldwide, John Coyne, Thomsen revealed his vision for The Saddest Pleasure, “A novel? On the inside cover of the last book about going to Brazil, I told my editor I wanted to say, after the title: travel book as memoir, memoir as novel, novel as polemic.” Several author friends leaned on the editors of Graywolf Press to publish this epic journey. According to Thomsen’s agent, Don Cogdon, he was able to “place British rights” where it received a better review as, “The British have greater interest in travel memoirs then readers in the U.S.” Thomsen’s second to last book, My Two Wars, was not published until five years after his death. He corresponded with Page Stegner about the book’s focus on his hatred of his father (one of the two wars), and Page urged him to focus more on his stories as a bombardier in the Second World War, as it resembled Catch-22 in its poignancy and hilarity.
 
Thomsen’s Legacy
 
In a letter to Tom Miller, Martha Gellhorn, considered one of the great war correspondents as well as being the third wife of Ernest Hemmingway, summed up Moritz’s decision to leave a life of privilege,
Moritz Thomsen rejected wealth and all its values, starting with his very rich father; he chose to live poor, as poverty is the majority human condition. He was true in practice to his beliefs and the result, for us, is truly extraordinary writing. I had never heard of Moritz Thomsen and by chance found “Living Poor.” I was electrified by something (not found) in any writing…I think he must have been a unique human being because the quality of his writing could not be separated from his spirit. His books should survive when many others, far better known, are forgotten.
In a similar vein, Paul Theroux said the following in a letter to Miller in July of 1993, “He was an exile, a refugee, a hostage—lots of incarnations. I often think that what he was and the ways he lived his life was as important as his writing.”
According to his fellow author and confidant, Mary Ellen Fieweger, “I think he was ready to die, and determined to do it the way he had chosen to live most of his adult life. He died poor, with a disease that affects only the poor.”
Thomsen was possessed with the thought of death for many years before he actually died. According to fellow author Mark Lowry II, Moritz grew more “absolute—his cynicism, advice, softer side, and crotchety morality all more pronounced. He wrote one friend, ‘I see now that death doesn’t arrive at a certain moment with a clang and clatter. It is simply a slow leak.’” 
To another friend who was planning a visit Thomsen wrote,
I contemplate a visit from you in August with mixed emotions and wondering if I will still be alive. I’ve been talking like this for ten years and don’t die and have to apologize to my friends for lingering on. Lately, however, I don’t move around and figure seventy-five is OK. I can leave the party because it’s a f…ing drag when it takes thirty minutes to put on your socks…I  think you have never lived  as I live now, starving for human and intellectual contacts in complete isolation….Writing, the source of so much pain, I think I’ll give up. My gift to humanity—and myself...Yesterday I had more to tell you. Now, today, the mind has gone blank.
These, according to Lowry, were among his last words.  
In August of 1991 (shortly before his death), Thomsen again wrote to Page Stegner, “Page, I am half sick and will write you again in a few days. Thanks again kid, I have put you through hell, but how else does one get ahead except walking on the backs of his betters.” In 1995, Stegner and several other friends convinced Steerforth Press in South Royalton, Vermont to publish My Two Wars after they tracked down Thomsen’s only heirs, a niece and nephew, for permission. And in 2018, Thomsen’s niece and Executive Literary Agent, Mary Ellen Fieweger would finally and independently publish his last manuscript, Bad News from a Black Coast.
 
 
According to Mark Lowry II’s, “The Last Days of Moritz Thomsen”, Esther (Ramon’s divorced wife) describes Thomsen’s last words,
 Around 11:00 or 12:00 I woke to a loud thump. Don Martin was trying to get to the bed pan. The IV was in his way. He ripped it out and….”I don’t need this sh-t.” I pleaded, “Don Martin no! Please leave that alone. You need it. Let me help you.”  But he said, “I can still do something. I can go to the bathroom myself.” I told him, “if you can’t, just say so, and I’ll hold the bed pan for you.” He said, “No. I still can do it. I can take care of myself.”
 
He died on August 28, 1991 at 11:00 P.M. dying as he lived most of his adult life, staying true to his values of living amongst the poor and rejecting comforts that his father had envisioned for him.
After reading hundreds of Thomsen’s thousands of letters, I’ve learned many things about the man not revealed as intimately in his books. His letters offered an opportunity to share some of his most inner feelings and fears with people he trusted and respected and considered part of his literary family. He wrote to some of these authors for over twenty years. His letters like his books were transparent but possibly rawer and obviously unedited. They included and abundance of colorful and profane language and a good deal of irony and humor was sprinkled throughout his correspondence. He offered good advice about writing and life which is one of the reasons so many authors continued the dialogue with him, sending countless letters on their long and often endless journey into the jungles of Ecuador.
 
Although I didn’t know Thomsen and never corresponded with him, he’s the author I consider my “literary patron saint”. His transparency and lifelong commitment to live among and try to understand some of the most abandoned people in Ecuador, the different ways he described what he saw and the impact it had on countless writers is an inspiration and something worth emulating.
 

​ There’s no doubt that racism has been alive and well in America since 1617, however, our problems, as black people, are also within. I don’t believe the so-called “Community Leaders” like Jackson and Sharpton spend enough time addressing the problems in our communities that are caused by us.
     When I see paper cups, cans, empty cigarette packs and plastic bottles in the streets of our communities; they were put there by us.
     When a black person is shot or stabbed, nine times out of ten, they were shot or stabbed by one of us.
     When a black child buys crack or some other illegal drug, nine times out of ten, they are buying that crack or illegal drug from one of us.
    When we see gangs terrorizing our neighborhoods, we also see that 99% of those gangs membership are us.
     Throughout our communities, there are single teenaged mothers, who were made single teen-aged mothers by one of us.
     Every day, somewhere in America, at least one black person’s home is broken into and 99% of those break-ins were done by one of us.
     Too many of our children’s mothers are being forced to raise their children by themselves, and the person leaving these mothers with no alternative, but to raise their children by themselves is one of us.
     I have officiated high school basketball games where the seats were filled with beaming parents who had visions of their child playing professional basketball. I wonder how many of those beaming parents realized their child’s chances of being a doctor or lawyer were 50 times greater than their playing in the NBA. Many of us take the time to go to our children’s ball game; however not as many of us take the time to attend our children’s open school week or PTA meetings. So we have children who can score 20 points, run for touchdowns and hit a curveball out of the park; but couldn’t write a sentence if you gave them a noun, a verb and a period to end that sentence with.
     When we begin to take responsibility for the environment in which we live we will also begin to realize that what white people are doing to us is nothing compared to what we are doing to ourselves. Because we are not powerful enough to overrule ourselves, we quit our jobs because our boss didn’t like us, we dropped out of school because our teachers couldn’t teach us, we left home because our parents didn’t love us and we left the mother of our children because she didn’t understand us. We use these excuses in an attempt to appear mature and on top of the situation, but it’s really a cop-out. What we need to do is take full responsibility for our lives and the environment in which we live. Then and only then will we get what we deserve.