Letters to the Editor
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volume 7 number 8, August 2005

You Can Go Home Again
7/16/05

Sitting in Moclips, Washington and composing a partial list of my blessings.

1. It is sunny and cloudless today so Carolyn Peck will be sticking around.

2. I know and am known by some of the residents of the splendid village of Ester.

3. I am loved by Pete so much that he accepts my need to wander away from home for awhile.

4. I have obtained a position consonant with my desire to shift from taking jobs to pursuing a vocation.

5. My three-month “sabbatical from life” still has a few weeks to go.

Such a list indicates that I am just now missing what I have left behind. I wonder, for example, if Harry Simpson was able to realize his goal of performing The Star Spangled Banner á la Hendrix at the annual 4th of July celebration.

This past May I wandered around central Florida. June found me in Thomas Wolfe’s birthplace of Asheville, NC. In July I strolled the streets of our nation’s capital. (Don’t miss the monuments to FDR and Einstein if you find yourself in DC.) I have since fallen in love with Olympia, Washington and made the decision to advance my retirement plans by having Hippie Bruce tear down the old Moclips Fire Station in August. (I acquired said property last year.) On August 1st I begin working as an admissions nurse for The Center for Hospice and Palliative Care in Cheektowaga, NY. The home office is a short drive from the house I grew up in. The process that led me to this choice was hugely catalyzed by the late Denise Dadd.

Whenever and anywhere I go, the accumulated memories of my familiars in Interior Alaska will continue to warm my heart with waves of affection and nostalgia. I continue to be inspired by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. From his poem Please Call Me By My True Names:

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply, I arrive in every second....
in order to laugh and to cry
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive....

Mark Schubauer

August 11, 2005
Dear Editor (you really are one kick-in-the-backside gal),

In light of what George Bush and the Republican Party are doing to America and the slippery slope into the depths of war, facism, racism, genocide, murder, baby killing, rape, intolerance, ignorance and plain-old-stupid-dumb-as-a-freaking-stump hypocritical behavior they so gleefully grease with profits I respectfully submit the following poem in protest to the entire ugly mess.

Bush has only one big ball,
Cheny has two but they are small,
Rove has a whole grove
and Rice has no balls at all.

Thanks for the ventilation,
Jeff Rogers

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