I went because I was told I should. The journey wasn't remarkable. I saw rocks and shrubs, tall trees, some birds I couldn't identify, the sky— a nameless blue—a background for the view as I kept craning my neck ever upward to see where I was going. My mind wandered in the interrupted silence of wind and bough, my feet crunching rhythmically on the diaspora of leaves. I tried to pay attention, but there was nothing on which to hang my thoughts. Inside, I climbed my mind, but I kept slipping and found myself in free fall. My muscles moved automatically, and the elevation ticked steadily upward. Many times I almost turned around. What was I doing up here? Where was I going? Why? My voice hid in my throat, afraid to talk to itself. I recorded nothing of the climb. I carried no device. I was a shadow, empty of substance, a hole in space. I climbed because I was told I would find something at the top, but I soon forgot why I came. The journey ate up everything around it.

With each step, I erased more and more of my story, until the beginning and the end were gone, and all I was was a middle, and then only a moment—this moment. I had to watch my breath to remind myself that I existed. Nothing seemed real, including me—but then I couldn't explain what real was. Thinking somehow made everything less real, so I kept moving, thoughts dissipating like clouds in a summer sky. I was almost at the top, but I didn't know it, didn't care. The air thinned out, and my lungs had to work even harder to prove my existence. My heart thundered in my chest, and I turned to look for the rain. I wondered where the lightning was. A few steps from the top, I stumbled. I was so close to something—too close. My heart shrank, and I collapsed to my knees. I hissed a long-forgotten prayer, but it turned to dust the minute it left my lips. Ancient words wouldn't help me here. They were wrong, all wrong.

I crawled the last few feet, then forced myself to stand. Around me, the trees and shrubs stood with me. The rocks supported me, and I stood transfixed. The sky expanded out in all directions, a vast ocean above me— I had to stop myself from jumping into it, but I knew if I did, I would only evaporate. Every cell in my body became a mirror in which I could see what I'd come for. I looked inside and saw myself reflected in every direction, and I looked outside and reflected everything back outward. My skin tingled, becoming a simple outline, and the real me bled out. I wasn't anything anymore. I felt my body crystallize as I left it. I let go and floated untethered into the void... Or I would have if anything had actually happened. Instead, I looked around for a few minutes. I saw nothing remarkable, just a lot of rocks, trees, and shrubs, but I left refreshed, with a new appreciation for nothing in particular. —Keira Dodd

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i Mountaintop Experience – Keira Dodd

2 The Path up the Mountain: Dave Clements’ story – Wendlyn Alter

4 My Mountaintop Moment – Dave Clements

7 We Are Bound to Others – Paul Marshall

11 Frustration – Greg Sloane

11 Mountaintop Moment – Robert Hoener

13 Leaving Mountaintops – Katherine Campbell-Gaston

14 Finding My Educational Home – Katrina Walker

16 Hesitation – Gaylene Sloane

17 The View – Barbara G. Howell

18 Epiphany – Chuck Homer

19 Into the Woods – Anne Obradovich

20 Shadows – Gaylene Sloane

21 Brokeback Mountain Revisited – Katherine Campbell-Gaston

22 It’s All in the Mind – Tom Slattery

25 The Brother Returns – Warren Campbell-Gaston

27 A Time for Friends – Chuck Homer

28 Life Changes with Internment in Indonesia, Conclusion – John Zylstra

Chalice is an Independent Arts Publication of Members and Friends of West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, published by the Editorial Board.

Material in this publication may be used only by permission of the author. Submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, artwork and photography accepted from members and

friends of the church. Send all submissions, inquiries, comments, subscription or sponsorship requests to Chalice@wsuuc.org or by mail or in-person delivery to Chalice, West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, 20401 Hilliard Blvd, Rocky River, OH 44116. 440–333–2255. Submission guidelines are available via e-mail at the above address or on the West Shore website. Persons who submit work for publication will be required to sign a release form available via e-mail or in the Story Year mailbox at the church office. If submitted photographs depict living persons, a model release should also be provided.

Subscriptions for Chalice during Story Year, October 2013 through May 2014, are $35. Individual copies are available by donation. A free, on-line expanded version of the publication will be available at the church website, www.wsuuc.org. Sponsorships are $25 per issue with acknowledgement included in each issue.

The Editors of Chalice,

Barbara G. Howell Wendlyn Alter Carter Marshall Barbara Walker Andrew Watkins Paul Marshall

Submission Pub. Theme Deadline Date

February: Taking a Risk Feb. 9 Feb. 23

March: Your Hardest Lesson Mar. 9 Mar. 23

April: A Time You Grew Apr. 13 Apr. 27

May: Your Greatest Teacher May 11 May 25

Carter Marshall – Cover

Barbara G. Howell – 6, 10, 17, 23

Andy Tubbesing – 12

Wendlyn Alter – 20, Layout

Chuck Homer – 27

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Wendlyn Alter

Dave was made to be a UU, though for much of his life he would have denied it. His Catholic father and Jewish mother actively raised their children within both religious traditions, and for Dave, it seemed perfectly normal—“just how things were.” Growing up without television, he was ten years old before he realized that not everybody celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. But by adolescence, religion just “floated away” from his thoughts and for many years he was affiliated with no tradition. He still observed the Jewish holidays with his family and attended Catholic Church occasionally with his grandmother, but their spiritual content didn’t move him. Only love had the power to bring Dave—reluctantly—through West Shore’s door... but that happened much later.

Dave’s childhood taught him to be self-sufficient. At a time when this was very rare, his mother did a lot of traveling in her professional career, so she was often absent. Dave and his twin sister arrived eight years after the last of the first three boys, and by that time, Dave says, his mother “had lost interest in mothering.” At the time, Dave felt resentful—other kids’ mothers were at home—but looking back, he sees how positively and profoundly his family shaped him. Both of his parents were active in working to make the world a better place, and served as strong role models.

The couple became acquainted while Dave’s father Ruben was a patient at Letterman’s Hospital in San Francisco after losing a leg fighting in the Second World War. Bea, in the Women’s Army Corps , worked as a dietitian at the hospital. Not long after their meeting, she was posted to Japan just two weeks after the U.S. deployed the world’s first atom bomb ever used as a weapon of war on Hiroshima. She stayed two years. (Three different cancer diagnoses throughout her life might have been related to radiation exposure in Japan.) Ruben proposed marriage by mail, and after Bea returned they set about making a family. Even then, she didn’t slow down, enrolling in a master’s program in nutrition while pregnant and with a two-year-

old in tow. In graduate school she specialized in the newly emerging field of frozen food technology. She went on to become one of the founders of Meals on Wheels and devoted the rest of her career to promoting and expanding the program. Despite her tiny size—4’11 and 95 lbs—Dave says when she walked into a room, everyone noticed. She demonstrated what one small person with drive and commitment can accomplish.

Meanwhile, Dave’s father was spearheading his own program of good works. With a missing leg, he discovered he was considered unemployable, so he started his own company making artificial limbs. Winning a lifetime contract with the Veteran’s Administration gave the company success and stability, but Ruben didn’t stop there. He cared for a broad community of disabled veterans in other ways as well, helping them rebuild their lives, networking, making useful contacts and helping them find new careers.

Growing up in Chicago, Dave and his twin sister Debbie made a pact to leave winter behind as soon as they could, and followed through by moving near an aunt in Van Nuys, CA. Dave attended USC while his sister was at UCLA. After college, Dave embarked on a 15 year career with AAA, becoming Vice President of HR. While working full time, he also went back to school full time, completing both a Master of Arts and an MBA degree in three years. Then he struck out in a new direction as a fundraiser when he accepted a job offer from a consulting firm in New York. He worked for or served on the boards of the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra and other nonprofits in Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago.

Dave and Deb are awarded their MAs

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Dave’s gift for bringing order out of chaos, making things happen, connecting and working with people—as well as his adventurous spirit—is illustrated by his move to Cincinnati to begin a new position there. He flew in, bringing three suitcases containing all his worldly possessions, with no car and no place lined up to live. When he walked through the door of his new office the next morning, his first order of business was to hire his entire staff, starting from scratch. Co-workers pitched in to help him make a home for himself, and just six months after his arrival, fifty new friends attended his birthday party.

Eventually Dave landed in Cleveland during a period when he was again open to a significant life change. He had taken a leave of absence from work to care for his ailing mother in Chicago, and she had recently passed away. During an out-of-town conference, a new acquaintance—Jerry Devis —offered to give Dave a tour of Cleveland’s sights and features. Before the tour was over, Dave says, he found himself thinking, “I could spend the rest of my life with this man!”

It was Jerry who convinced Dave to visit West Shore during a subsequent visit. Dave was thoroughly skeptical of Unitarianism—“They don’t believe anything!”—but Jerry was persuasive. The two arrived just as the service started. Dave planned on making a quick getaway afterward to avoid having to talk to anyone, but the getaway didn’t happen, and the rest is history. Dave is not only firmly ensconced as a member of West Shore but has discovered a deep calling to the UU ministry. Jerry has played a profound and highly supportive role in Dave’s finding his destiny.

Although the history of Dave’s professional career proves his exceptional skill at organizational development and fundraising, he points out that those activities were not a calling. Dave continues to operate and enjoy his consulting business, Vision 21, but says he is especially attracted to the pastoral care aspect of the ministry because of his lifelong interest in people and his desire to help and encourage them. While working in HR, he found the greatest enjoyment in

helping people develop their skills and overcome their challenges. Truly liking people and savoring challenges, he reflects, are excellent qualifications for pastoring a congregation—because there will always be new challenges!

Much of Dave’s drive to get things accomplish-ed derives from his mother’s influence. She would tell her children, “Stop the whining and muddle through!” and “Enough of this (fingers making a talking gesture) and more of this (fingers walk-ing).” At the first sign of a “pity party,” she got out the china and linens. This quality of not moping, not dwelling, but just getting on with the task at hand has helped him through the profound losses in his life—first his father’s death when Dave was 17, then his twin sister with whom he was very close, and finally his mother in 2007. “Life goes on,” Dave says. “We try to have a positive attitude.”

Dave’s prayer practice centers on the belief that he should do everything he can do in a given situation and only then ask for help. The forms in which that help manifests might include a renewed inner clarity, a fresh idea or the timely appearance of someone who can help. Dave’s Jewish grandmother—“ahead of her time”—taught Dave the importance of being whole and in tune with himself. His daily spiritual practice includes early morning meditation, visualization and journaling (and now blogging), and he relaxes with activities he finds grounding such as abstract painting, gardening and music. He also greatly enjoys reading history—“especially what we weren’t taught in school!”

In this issue of Chalice, Dave tells how he found his calling to the ministry.

Ruben and Bea Clements Dave in Cincinnatt i

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There are windows in time—

certain seasons in life when everything suddenly becomes crystal clear. Something what you’ve been searching and hoping for is right in front of you. Clarity comes like the

ocean layer lifting off as the sun heats up the sky. In those moments you see your life, and everything from a new perspective and it changes you. These are the mountaintop moments in life. Maybe it’s been awhile for you but do you remember your last one? You left that place of insight a different person. What you saw changed something inside of you. Perhaps it was a retreat, a trip, or something someone randomly said to you. It may have been seemingly ordinary on the surface but something inside shifted. The circumstances of life didn’t change all that much but you did. A new hope or direction began to take shape from within.

One such mountaintop moment happened to me this past September. I had spent a very hard fought summer trying to answer the deep question of, “Is there more, something—anything—that I need to be involved with that will give me more of a deep understanding of meaning and purpose and answer the quest from within my soul that there is something that I need to be doing with my life, career, etc.?” I arose very early the morning of September 20 and dressed and drove to my office. It was a little past 4 a.m. and I was wide awake with a wonderment and a desire to find answers to my questions and to my search for meaning and purpose for something more. A few months prior to this morning in a rare moment of time in my hectic day I had googled the topic of UU ministry and somehow saved the search on my laptop computer. This morning as I went to my computer to search for answers and possible directions as to handle challenges in my life I was directed to my saved search menu and there was the search—How to Become a UU Minister. I clicked on the search results and for the next four to five hours I listened and learned all that I could about what was required to become a UU minster and what qualities and characteristics make up a good candidate for the ministry.

As I listened to the videos and read the articles, I felt the call to the ministry. By 10 a.m. that morning, I knew that I had to heed this call and prepare myself to go back to school to become a UU minister.

Dave Clements

Dave delivered this message as part of the Spiritual Autobiography services at West Shore on Dec. 1, 2013.

Dave Clements and Jerry Devis

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I left my office and went down the street to catch a quick bite of breakfast and while there made a list of all of the things that I need to do to get ready to attend seminary in the fall of 2014. I have that list and each week I am happy to report that I am checking things off of my list. I still have much to do but I am moving towards my goal in September of 2014. What a mountain top moment this has been for me. Can you imagine?

No matter how grand and glorious mountaintop experiences may be, they never last. They aren’t designed to. We aren’t meant to live on the ‘mountain.’ We all know that life mostly plays out in the valley. It’s in the everyday routine that life largely unfolds. So why go to the mountain peak if we only have to begrudgingly descend back to the valley? The mountaintop is meant to inform the way we live in the valley. Moments of clarity are meant to sink our hearts deeper into the reality of our being. Next time you find yourself breathing in the high mountain air of fresh insight, enjoy it. But realize the purpose of it transcends the joy and ecstasy. You are preparing to live differently when the euphoria ends.

My life has not been the same since I heeded the call to prepare to go into the ministry. I am now back in the valley playing out that which I need to do to prepare myself, my family, my partner and my work life in order to start attending UU ministry school in September of 2014. I know that I will have many more mountain top experiences and hopefully they will help me to move through the next valley that lies before me.

Amanda Awan captures this feeling in her poem, “Life is a Mountain”:

Life's a mountain that is true, climb one step, enjoy the view. at any moment we can slip and fall, luckily, we have friends to help us through it all. climbing up, sing a song, hear the birds, chirping along. happy moments will always last, bad moments, forget them fast. embarrassing times coming through, but not everyone will laugh at you. There you will find your own true friends, to fill one story till the end. It’s going to be hard climbing to the top, so many adventures you need to stop. But it doesn't matter how long you take, cause what matters is the chance you make.

May you take time this day to reflect and remember the mountain top moments in your lives and

how they have changed you. If it has been awhile since you experienced a “mountaintop moment,” may you have that blessing in your life. May you also take strength in the events that are playing out in the valley of your lives.

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—Vikram Oberoi

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Paul Marshall

In the early 90's I was part of the Atlanta Chapter of NCBI, the National Coalition Building Institute. NCBI works to end discrimination and promote diversity by teaching people to listen to the stories of others, and to teach people how to effectively share their stories. I loved the concept from the very first three-day train-the-trainer event I attended.

The first day of the train-the-trainer was the 8-hour workshop from start to finish, the next two days involved examining each step of the workshop and learning how to present it effectively to a group as well as ways to use the techniques of listening and storytelling in daily life.

That training was the gateway to membership in the NCBI-Atlanta chapter. At monthly meetings we continued to practice parts of the workshop, and worked on our own issues and prejudices using the techniques we taught. We also planned for presentations of the workshop at various venues, including corporate seminars, public workshops and events for local colleges and schools.

Over the next few months I was part of various workshops, first helping with logistics and set-up, then assisting with facilitating breakout groups, then leading some breakout groups, and finally leading the entire workshop.

In the early fall we did a three-day train-the-trainer at Agnes Scott, a private women's college in Decatur Georgia, a small city nestled in with Atlanta. We were presenting to students and faculty to train the core of a campus affiliate of NCBI for Agnes Scott. We were also training some students from Georgia Tech.

I was one of the break-out group leaders, and presented a section of the workshop to the whole

group. As a leader, a focus on the morning on the first day was watching people so we could build break-out groups that would—we hoped—create a mix so everyone was involved and connected. We would be working with the same group for the entire three-day workshop, getting the right balance was important.

One of the first people I noticed was a student named Sarah. She was short and very petite. Her head was shaved to stubble, but she had a wispy beard and mustache. She was wearing layered clothing that seemed too much for the day, and glasses with tinted lenses that hid her eyes. Her appearance, however, was not the reason I first noticed her.

The reactions of others when Sarah walked in grabbed my attention. Nobody openly stared, but it seemed most eyes tracked her and people drew back a bit as she passed them. I covertly studied her. She seemed intensely fragile and at the same time seething with anger, like a glass bubble filled with nitroglycerin. She sat on a chair separate from everyone else, and nobody sat near her until the room was almost filled—and those who sat closest to her were students from Georgia Tech, not students who went to school with her at Agnes Scott.

I watched her as she watched the workshop. She had fierce attention for every word, every gesture, every nuance. After a bit I realized she was also intensely aware of every person in the room, as if she expected any or all of them to attack her without warning or mercy.

During the first break the leadership team had a brief meeting to talk about who would be in the breakout groups. I was the first to speak, and I was

Continued on page 8

—Rabindranath Tagore

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Bound to Others, continued from page 7 insistent: "Sarah is in my group." The head of the campus affiliate, an Agnes Scott professor named Linda, started to object that Sarah was a special case and had to be handled with care. The workshop leaders listened to her carefully, and then expressed their confidence that I could handle the situation and put her in my group.

In our first breakout Sarah sat huddled into herself, an invisible wall of anxiety separating her from the others in the circle of chairs. She looked at me only out of the corner of her eye, but at the same time she watched me intently. I suddenly realized she was waiting for me to leap across the circle and hit her, or to scream and accuse her of something, or to be inconsistent in my message, or, most dangerous, to cut her to the center of her being with a careless word or judging glance.

Today I know a lot about people who are transgender and gender queer and gender-non-comforming. I know about the deep pain that comes from being outside the gender binary that is imposed in American society. But two decades ago, I didn't have a damn clue. My confidence evaporated. I was terrified I would mess up and hurt her.

I told my little group we were a safe space within a safe space, that it was okay to talk, and it was okay to stay quiet. The workshop went on, and each time our group met we shared and we began to bond a little. NCBI fosters a lot of touching— hugs at greeting and parting, sitting close during meetings, holding hands, having comfort in safe and non-sexual physical connection with other members of the group. Those of us staffing the workshop had modeled this during the day, and some of the participants were

picking it up, too. Sarah talked some, in the breakout group, but there was always a distinct distance between her and the other members.

The next morning the leadership team arrived early and we debriefed about the workshop and began to plan for the next two days of training. A few of the students had already said they were not returning, and I was wondering if Sarah might be in that group.

I was happy when she was one of the first people to arrive, and stunned when she came and stood next to me, not touching, but very close. She followed me like that while we organized and got things set up. She didn't talk much, but I was aware she was again watching me as I greeted and hugged people. When we sat to start she was in the chair next to mine, and pulled it a little closer to me instead of inching a bit further away like she had the day before.

She opened up more in the group, sharing some on her own, offering a few opinions, telling a few of her experiences. And through the morning she was always by my side, a quiet shadow.

We had a two hour lunch break that day because the Agnes Scott faculty who were part of the workshop had to attend a staff meeting. The workshop was being held in a big old multi-use building that included offices, meeting and classroom space, and a large common area with

NCBI-Atlanta marches at Gay Pride: Paul, on the left, with other Chapter Members

9

some tables and some islands of comfortable chairs.

I settled into an oversize leather arm chair in one area and talked with a slowly changing group of people. At times I had somebody sitting on one or both arms of my chair, and sometimes somebody perched on one of my knees or just plopped on my lap. Sarah didn't join the group, she stayed off to the side, watching. When Janet, a very vocal lesbian student, sat on my lap for a while Sarah seemed especially attentive. When Janet's girlfriend arrived, gave me a hug and then dragged Janet away to get a Coke, Sarah darted forward and landed on the arm of my chair. She sat, tense as a cat ready to leap away. I kept talking with the others in the group who were obviously trying to not stare in disbelief.

After a few minutes, and again without any warning, Sarah slid off the arm of the chair and

onto my knee. She sat stiffly for a few minutes, and then slowly began to inch back, until she was leaning against me. A few minutes later she suddenly turned, so she was cuddled like a small child in my lap. We sat like that for nearly an hour, as people joined the conversation or drifted away.

At some point I realized that other people from Agnes Scott were coming by and peeking at what was going on and then moving away without comment. Later I found out that the afternoon session was delayed another twenty minutes because Linda, the campus team adviser who had objected to Sarah being in my breakout group, didn't want to disturb the moment.

Sarah stayed close to me for the rest of the weekend, and opened up more in our breakout group. After that I talked to her on the phone every week or so through the holidays and winter and on into the spring. Our conversations weren't always long or deep, we chatted about our daily lives and current events, about frustrations and

about future plans. We talked about getting together for lunch or to do something, but were never able to arrange it.

I saw her again at an NCBI workshop in the spring. When she came in I asked her to help me lead my breakout group. She worked hard to contribute, and again we had a closeness that was safe and comfortable for her.

The last time I saw her was a chance meeting on the street. I was attending an NCBI retreat at Emory University. A group of us were walking across the campus to lunch when I heard somebody screaming my name. I turned around and Sarah was running headlong toward me. She grabbed me and we just stood there on the sidewalk, hugging. After a bit an older woman walked up to us, clearly upset. Sarah had been riding in her car. When she saw me walking by she started yelling "pull over, pull over" and then

jumped out before it stopped rolling. We stood there for nearly twenty minutes before she finally said she had to go to an appointment. We talked a little, but mostly she wanted to be hugged.

We talked a few more times on the phone, but she was near the end of the school year and had finals and a new job with a demanding schedule and our conversations were brief.

A few weeks later I got a call. Sarah went home after work one warm evening in early May and fed her dog and put him outside with plenty of water and then she went back in and ended her life.

She didn't leave a note. She didn't talk about it with anybody. Her grades were good, her job was going well. She didn't seem to be depressed - in fact, several people commented that for a month or six weeks she had seemed less anxious, more content and even happy. Looking back, though, she had been slowly saying good-bye to people. A last

Continued on page 10

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Bound to Others, continued from page 9 meeting, sometimes a small gift or memento, and then a careful withdrawal amid claims of being busy. A counselor I talked with said Sarah had made the decision weeks or months earlier. The day she acted may have been a personal anniversary or day she picked for other reasons, but it wasn't a decision made in the heat of the moment.

Sarah was my friend, but she was just a few years older than my daughter and could have been my child. For a while I wondered if I could have made a difference, could have somehow saved her. The counselor I talked with—a professional therapist who was also part of the NCBI chapter -

helped me see that I had connected and had made a difference. She reminded me that Sarah treated me wholly different than any other male in her life and different than all but a few women.

Sarah lived with deep pain. She kept the details guarded, but there were so many clues of betrayal and abuse and a long fight to survive. Twenty years later her pain and death leave me angry and sad. At the same time I cherish the memory of her fierce trust and the joy of the connection—however fleeting—that we shared. Twenty years later, that memory still shines.

Sarah and I were friends in past lives, and we will be friends again in the future.

Barbara G. Howell

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Crisp rays glistening A flicker, a hint It may be different, today A wisp of hair, the shadow curve, you are one step ahead of me Infinite insignificant moments tick by Brackish tar swells and envelopes Anesthetized, stupefied, enfeebled, and bemused The object of my joy and rage Nothing comes forth, bits of truth cemented in fear Waiting for another day —Greg Sloane

Robert J. Hoerner

My father was a high school teacher and had to take a refresher course every five years. He always went to the University of Colorado where a relative fixed him and his family (including me) up with a log cabin in the South Boulder Creek Canyon.

I fished during the day, and, one day, decided to follow South Boulder Creek down to where it exited in the flat land. The trek proved longer than I expected, so, when a tributary entered the Creek, I followed it up to the top of the canyon.

I was only 10 and got very tired before reaching the top. But what a glorious view. I could see Kansas! I had binoculars with me and trained them on the campus where I could make out the 18-inch wide

irrigation ditches accompanying the campus walkways. Being tired, I took a nap, but when I woke up, I couldn’t recall how to get back down, so I picked a

route. Going down was easier than climbing up, but I soon ran out of water. I came to a tiny, vacant

building labeled “Sugarloaf Post Office.” It was unlocked, but it had no water. I stayed the night but was terribly thirsty, so I continued down where I found a road. I hitchhiked

and was finally picked up by a friendly mountaineer (mountain people are all friendly in my experience) who took me back to our cabin where I was administered a sound thrashing for staying out overnight without my parents’ knowledge.

The experience and wonderful views made the thrashing worthwhile, particularly since my parents had been genuinely worried about me.

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Andy Tubbesing

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I have climbed eleven hours up a mountain trail to feel the God Spirit hovering over forever reaching vistas. I have wept at my first glimpse of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. I have bravely made decisions that have altered the course of my life. I have scooped up both joy and sorrow in my hands and poured them over my head in baptism. So many mountaintop experiences. Now, age wraps its mellowing arms around me, beckons me to lie down in green pastures and along still waters. Here, no mountaintops to climb, rather moments to notice listen recall… I hear a bird sing her heart out in the red oak above me. The weeping willow sweeps its branches across the dark mirrored pond. I kiss the downy head of my newborn grandchild. I sing and dance to the glorious Missa Gaia Earth Mass. I have known a man’s eyes and heart so filled with love for me I cannot breathe. I have seen three rosebuds on a branch survive the first snowfall and bloom outside my window. I have wept in a tent in Maine reading chapter ten of WILD. I have invited my senses to transport me to the poignant ache of memories sacred exquisite. I have written a poem after thirty years.

—Katherine Campbell-Gaston

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Katrina Walker

I was 11 years old, and on a vacation to Colonial Williamsburg, also the site of the campus of The College of William and Mary. I was immediately attracted to attending school in a place where I would be surrounded by history. While I did not end up going to, or even applying to William and Mary, this experience sparked my long journey of thinking and looking forward to college. This was my first mountaintop moment, opening my eyes to the possibilities of college. I could not wait to be in a place where, with any luck, I would be able to study things I loved, and be surrounded by people who were excited about learning. I truly lucked out with my choice of Sarah Lawrence, but not without some strife and hard work.

The first time I looked up Sarah Lawrence, I emailed my mom with the link to their website, with the words “I want to go here!” in all caps. A couple of people had suggested it to me as a place I might look at for college, and the combination of individualized education, small campus, proximity to New York City and conservatory level (without being a conservatory!) theatre program grabbed my attention. This was the second mountaintop moment.

After doing my personal interview with the admissions officer from Sarah Lawrence and in the midst of an academically and emotionally challenging first

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semester of my senior year of high school, I went to Sarah Lawrence for the first time. The long drive to New York was nerve-wracking, this school was my first choice, and I definitely had some doubts, what if I hated it? What if I was wrong and it was not the school for me? On the morning of my visit and overnight, we drove over to the campus from our relatives home nearby, and as we turned onto the street that cuts through the main part of campus, past the curving Sarah Lawrence College sign, the song “Home” by Phillip Phillips came on the car radio. I thought for a moment that maybe it was a sign, but sort of dismissed the idea. Walking through the green gate and up the drive to the main administration building, the old Lawrence Mansion, Westlands, I had a moment of clarity. The crisp November air filled my lungs, and I turned around, grinning at my parents. Something about this campus just felt right, somehow it was exactly what I had pictured when I thought about my college experience. This was another mountaintop moment. They say that when you find your wedding dress, the person you are meant to be with, or your perfect college, that you just know. Something just feels right. I had had similar moments at other schools I had toured, but this was different. This was a knowing that could not compare to the others, it was inexplicably right.

The tour of campus had me falling in love with this quirky, artsy little haven of passionate people who were in charge of their own education. Other schools claimed to have students who have diverse interests, who do intense projects, and I am sure they do; but at Sarah Lawrence, that’s not surprising,

it’s expected and celebrated. When I was pulling out of the school, on my way home to Lakewood, that same song came on the radio again, and I knew that it was a sign that I had found the right place.

Less than three months later I applied for the second round of binding early decision. With three weeks until I would hear, I settled in for what would seem like a long wait. In that time I heard from two other schools, one of which was my second choice, that I really liked and would probably have been very happy at. This took some of the pressure off, if nothing else, I had this school to be excited for. Finally the day arrived, and I heard....nothing. Not an email, phone call, letter, nothing. I was devastated, frustrated and angry. I just wanted to know, the waiting was horrible. That evening, tired and with an emerging headache I went to go take a nap. At least in sleep I would be able to put this nagging anxiety from my head. I was half asleep when my phone started to buzz on my nightstand. I picked it up,

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Educational Home, continued from page 15 and saw a New York number. Not really thinking it through, I answered and a voice on the other end said, “Hi, is this Katrina Walker?”

I gulped and replied “Yes, this is she.” “Great!” said the voice, “This is Mr. Exline from Sarah Lawrence College, and I am calling to

congratulate you on your acceptance to the class of 2017!” My whole world stopped, and I was in shock, and I blurted out “Is this a practical joke? Cause this

would be a really mean joke!” He laughed and assured me that this was for real and that my letter was in the mail. It finally made it through my thick haze of shock and I started saying “Oh my god! Oh my god! Thank you! Thank you so much!”.

I went back to Sarah Lawrence about two months later for accepted students day and had a blast, cementing my feelings that I was headed in the right direction. Then in late August I left for my first semester. Moving in, and saying goodbye to my parents was probably one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but I would not trade my new home for any other. I keep saying to my mom, “When I get home,” and I have to clarify which of my homes I mean, my Ohio home, and my Sarah Lawrence home. Each day at school is filled with inspiring, affirming moments of clarity as to why I am there. Each day I have mini mountaintop moments, learning and exploring my world and myself.

Fiction by Gaylene Sloane

I always said I would do it, but for some reason—for no good reason, really—I never did; and maybe now I never will.

We were born five minutes apart, she the older. Unlike many twins, we never became close—it was an intense competition almost from the beginning. Our dad was a 'Type A' personality and achievement was all important to him. He saw nothing wrong in pitting us against one another and being first was everything.

Try as I might, I almost always came in second best—in school, in sports, in popularity. Years of this took its toll, but the final straw was when my twin stole the love of my life. We separated 'for good' at that point. Oh, I would hear about her from time-to-time through the family grapevine, but we never visited or even spoke.

As I grew older I began to realize how ridiculous this estrangement was and that I should make some effort to contact my sibling. When our father died, the feeling became even stronger. But, from what I could tell, we had nothing in common. She had become a well-known attorney, having taken on several high-profile cases. I, on the other hand, had become a social worker and

rarely had two nickels to rub together. Curiously, neither of us ever married.

I am retired now and not sure I want to risk reopening old wounds—certainly not this late in life. Yet perhaps it is time to come to terms with this old garbage (perhaps take a course in waste management, I think grimly to myself) Could there be some resolution, even if the encounter does not go well?

My close friend, Edith, encourages me to try and make the connection, but she had not lived through the years of ill will and 'put downs' that I had; had not collected the emotional baggage that goes with it.

Having done something in the line of counseling, it occurs to me that I might seek counseling myself. Yet I hesitate. Just how important is this reconciliation? And, for that matter, is it possible? I have trouble answering either of these questions. Yet I ask another—what is important to me? Trying to make a positive difference in people's lives; so yes, I've gained very little financially, but I have sometimes made a difference and under very difficult circumstances. Can my twin take this away from me? I have my answer and may very well call her—tomorrow.

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Am I at the top? No sky. No stars. No clouds. Clear vision of what? I cannot see what I do not recognize. Possibility. Have I been climbing? Paths with stones. Rivers with rapids. Feet with blisters. Just parts of everyday life. Not an illumination or inspiration. Just parts of me I wish I didn’t have. What is THAT? A bird. A plane. A super adventure. These look like parts of someone else. I can’t do that. I will fail. I will die. I will be ridiculous. Could I just try this once? Maybe a trip, a chance, a new experience. I can see differently now. I would rather die in this endeavor Than live a life of quiet desperation. — Barbara G. Howell

Barbara G. Howell

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Chuck Homer

Epiphany: —a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into

the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

—a moment in which you suddenly see or understand something in a new or very clear way.

How often epiphanies occur to others I know

not but for me they are rare and like the description above, they come on with a bang, shed light on something that I’ve pondered for years and I’m left with a feeling of exhilaration, and amazed if not astonished. I’ve been to the mountaintop, said Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 3rd, 1968, and so have I, albeit, a different mountain, an actual snow covered mountain. But this is the way I experience an epiphany.

My last time on a mountain, I’d hiked from my campsite at Jenny Lake (6783ft.) to lake Solitude (9035 ft.) I’d been at Jenny Lake for three days to allow me to get accustomed to the change in altitude from my home in Chardon, Ohio—altitude 1260 feet and 14 pounds per cubic foot to my target with a 25 percent reduction in air pressure.

Cascade Canyon is one of the most beautiful parts of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. You get

amazing views of the only alpine mountain range in North America, awesome meadows filled with drifts of wildflowers of just about any color you can imagine, the crystal clear water of Cascade Creek that runs along the bottom of the canyon, and a lot of wildlife.

From Jackson Hole, I took the quickest way to Lake Solitude which was to take the shuttle boat across Jenny Lake to the west shore boat dock (while there I took a short detour to check out Hidden Falls). There’s a switch back that takes you up a hundred feet or more to the floor of the canyon and to Inspiration Point looking East over Jenny Lake. From there you follow the trail over a well-trod stony gravel path interrupted periodically by ankle-buster stone falls from Mt. St. John on the north face of the canyon and Teewinot to the south, up Cascade Canyon 4.9 miles until you reach the junction where the trail splits into the Teton Crest trail that takes you south along the west face of the Grand Teton, while the North Fork, Paintbrush trail, takes you up to lake Solitude and beyond. The north fork is where the hike gets quite steep and the air thins out at nine thousand feet. Lake Solitude is 2.7 miles from this point. Most of the change in altitude occurs in these last 2.7 miles—or on the average about two inches per foot of elevation. Doesn’t sound like much, but, at that elevation, the task required of my 40 year old body forced me to stop and catch my breath about every 300 to 500 feet. So it took quite a while to finish the hike. Of course getting back down was a cinch except at that rate of descent it was easy to trip over my own feet and arrive at the bottom all too soon.

So you ask, what was the mountaintop moment? Well, the view from the lake was quite beautiful, but the most memorable part of the trip was not at the top but instead the journey itself, the excitement of all the discoveries; the many colorful flowers, the mountain peaks that dwarfed everything around me, the fact that I was so drained by the thinness of the air, reassured by the clarity of the water, the fact that snow was on the south side of the mountain in August, the discovery of the little Pica, a tiny furry animal with short, rounded ears (much like the common guinea pig), that I encountered along the trail scurrying in, on and around the rocks and boulders. I’d have loved to continue to explore by returning to camp along Paintbrush Trail but it was mid-afternoon and it would be dark by the

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My mountaintop Isn't anywhere near a mountain. It's quite flat actually A woods surrounding two little lakes, they call them, They're really just ponds. It's in the woods, though where I had an experience of immanence Of oneness with those ponds, the woods, the dust, the sun. I can pinpoint that feeling exactly: While gazing at a fallen willow huge, old. It's been down 5 years Yet it's still alive, still setting leaves growing yet dead. And it was while looking at this tree half dead, half alive That I felt One —Anne Obradovich

time I arrived back at camp and hiking in this territory after dark, what with the chance of becoming the dinner of a black bear or being trampled by a moose, or tripping over a root or rock breaking a leg or my neck, was not my idea of a fun time. But, I knew I’d pick up some time as the trail back was downhill all the way.

So here I am back at camp and the end of my journey. I’m not so impressed with mountaintops except as they provide us the challenge to do something other than sit on a camp bench or lounge all day in a hammock and getting there IS great exercise, but in the words of Homer, “the journey is the thing.” Want to commune with nature? Here’s the place. On the entire fifteen-mile round trip, I ran into only one couple, and they were heading back to where I came from. The sun

was shining and the sky was bright blue. Fortunately, I didn’t run into a moose or bear—not even a snake, but the Picas were charming and the birds, dragonflies and butterflies were plentiful. I remember thinking at the time that it would be great, next time I’m here, to leave enough time to take Paintbrush Trail back—that was 35 years ago. Funny how life gets in the way.

And the EPIPHANY? Like an epiphany, the experience left me in awe, this time in awe of the richness and diversity of nature. My contribution to life pales by comparison. Unlike the epiphany, my encounter with this mountain top left me with an artist’s pallet of visions still vivid at this writing 35 years later. Yes, Mr. Homer, the journey IS the thing!

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Wendlyn Alter

Gaylene Sloane

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

—Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

I cannot claim to have passed through the shadow of death again and again, but I have certainly passed through the shadows. I read the Bible as a child (I was between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I believe) in an effort to understand the fanaticism of certain of my fundamentalist relatives. Among my family was a father who believed homosexuals deserved to die of AIDS, an uncle who was a member of the John Birch Society, an aunt who was the most self-righteous individual I have ever met and two fundamentalist ministers (one, a grandfather, died before I was born, but he operated a soup kitchen during the depression, refusing to feed anyone who would not convert to his religion).

Over the years I noticed that fanatics of every stripe exhibit similar behavior; the compulsion to control others, sadomasochistic tendencies and incredible rigidity. I once read a psychological profile of the Nazi mentality. The author could have been writing about certain of my relations.

I believe that fanaticism is a mental disorder and should appear as such in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Perhaps then an effort would be made to research and treat it—certainly the world would be a better place if it were deemed treatable. Fanaticism seems to me to be some sort of compulsive disorder, perhaps with an element of fear involved. This is only a guess, however, as I have no psychological credentials. I don't know if coming to these conclusions constitutes a mountaintop moment, but it certainly was an important step in my journey to understand what, to me at least, was very difficult to understand.

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Only in passion, in the body’s need for intimacy is love so intense, so brave, too brave. Watch the heartbreaking pain. See how it spreads like hot searing lava, seeping into every crack and crevice, of mind and spirit, heart and body, mountains, pristine lakes and rivers, a wife’s fateful glance. Truth is no longer a word. Only in hidden moments, risking everything, does truth know its name; in embodiment, in the wildness of passion with all its power, pleasure, surrender, in the fullness of love, tender, difficult, forbidden. Such a price to pay. Hands on tire irons ready and waiting to beat their hatred their morals their fear into a man’s skull. Only love takes such risks. No happy ending here.

—Katherine Campbell-Gaston

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Tom Slattery

Our brains originated in the

stars. The atoms in them are the stuff that stars are made of. We are inseparable fractions of a great, majestic, and mysterious universe.

Simultaneously our minds are the stories that we make about ourselves. Our story-conjuring minds incessantly invent and reinvent what we are and what that may mean in the fictions that we formulate and call fact.

If there may be anything more to magical moments of revelation than self-invented fictions that delight or frighten us, it may be in crossovers from

the stuff of stars to what we have evolved to in molecules of nerves that make up our minds.

That is to say, while being constructed of the stuff of stars, the molecules of our minds and memories evolved over ages. And the often awfulness and occasional delightfulness of eons of evolutionary progress have left us limited to knowing what

the molecules of our minds can be programmed to know.

To enhance this we have devised extensions of our primitive sense organs to reach out to the edge of space, to understand the coldness close to absolute zero, to study the ultra-hot temperature at the beginning of the universe, and to measure the size of the smallest sub-nuclear particles. We also know that this hard won scientific knowledge is seductive and there is much more that we do not know: dark matter, dark energy, the inside of a black hole, what is out beyond the edge of space, and what existed before the Big Bang.

We all have had multiple mountaintop moments of glints or shimmers of revelation that seem to leap from the stuff of stars that we are to the stories that we have made ourselves out to be. We know of them ourselves, and great minds in

arts and sciences have told of experiencing them.

Small or large, insignificant or spectacular, they arrive as spiritual encounters, mysterious coincidences, new ideas that never existed before, and experiences beyond our grasp but convincingly real.

But wait. Have the depths of unconsciousness in our

magnificent minds simply created experiences, patterns, and fictions to satisfy our longings that there may be more to it all? Or do we really sometimes touch on something mysterious beyond our grasp?

By sharing, we may accumulate libraries of highly individual mountaintop moments to examine, compare, and maybe decipher. By sharing these highly individualized moments or experiences we know that an individual may have undergone not only that encountering but perhaps many of them, ranging from trivial to profound.

And in sharing we realize that we can share because there is nothing unusual in them. Language has even created words for some well-known types of them. Déjà vu is one such word. It is so common that we even joke about baseball player Yogi Berra's contortion of

the concept: "It's déjà vu all over again."

Let me offer my own take on déjà vu. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in late 1972 and early 1973, and, every time that I walked past a certain pretty little store, it gave me that déjà vu feeling. And it gave me that feeling every time that I walked past it for those several months.

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Then I moved away. Three years later when I again happened to live in Berkeley but on the other side of town, I made a point of walking over to that pretty little store to see if it would still give me that same déjà vu feeling. Alas, it no longer did. It was just another building. And I even walked back there another few times. And each time it was the same: no more déjà vu.

And on my final walk to that place, a thought out of nowhere suddenly occurred to me. The déjà vu feeling was not because I had experienced having been there before but because I had been exactly where in some sublime design of time and the

cosmos I had been meant to be three years earlier.

Am I saying that this is what déjà vu really means? No. I have no idea what déjà vu really means. But I offer this anecdote to show that while the feeling is real its meaning is open to interpretation.

Another touch that many seem to feel from the mysterious beyond is coincidence. Coincidence in itself is just coincidence. But sometimes coincidences occur in patterns or coincidences seem to be related to other coincidences. The mathematics of probability may be called in, but probability is about probability and coincidence is not necessarily

quantified by it. Coincidence puzzles,

astonishes, and bewilders all of us but can bedevil us for a lifetime when associated with tragedy and death. And this leads me to share another slice of autobiography.

It starts in 1957. Unemployed in Cincinnati and with the Selective Service hanging over my head preventing me from getting a job because no one wanted a guy who could be drafted any day, I had given up on normal job-finding and had begun trying unorthodox methods.

I walked into a small hospital lab without the faintest

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Barbara G. Howell

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Mind, continued from page 23 idea of what was done in hospital labs and asked the first person I ran into if they had any jobs. By coincidence that someone happened to be the pathologist who ran the lab, and by an even greater coincidence he had just, minutes before, fired his histology technician. In fact he was still fuming over the confrontation.

There was a brief on-the-spot interview where, while I hastily looked around at the lab's scientific equipment and white-coated personnel to get some grasp of where I was, I told him that I had a high school course each in physics and chemistry.

"You look pretty bright," he told me. "I think you can do this."

Several years into the future the State of Ohio passed laws that required hospital histology technicians to be tested and licensed, but that was not the case that day. Since the previous histology technician had been fired on the spot, the histology lab equipment and the medical specimens were ready to go.

The pathologist showed me what to do and how to do it, and I started work in a matter of minutes. And over the next week or so I picked up the finer points of histology and became, for the next year of my life, a histology technician. I was way out of my league, but I needed the job to survive, and so I winged it. During that time I picked up some of the in those days simple general hospital lab techniques and filled in doing lab technician work for some time more.

But that was a closer call. The State of Ohio had, several years earlier, passed laws

requiring all general lab technicians to have at least two years of college-level lab technology courses to be certified, and that window was quickly closing. I had no way to finance two years of college.

There was still research, though. Working with patients in hospitals required credentials, but research technicians only had to know how to do the work. So I got a temporary job as a research technician in a lung-function project funded by a government grant. And that ended in late 1959.

In January 1960 I was overcome with a feeling that I should go to Chicago to find a job. It may have partly been Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems. It may have been a perception that I could more easily find a job in big city Chicago than in Cincinnati. But I also remember being overcome with a really strange feeling.

I had some money saved. I packed a couple suitcases, told my dad and stepmother that I was going to look for a job in Chicago, went to the grand old Cincinnati Union Terminal and bought a ticket, and headed for Chicago on the all-night milk train. It may have been a steam locomotive train, but at any rate passenger trains were still widely used.

The train pulled into the (now gone) Illinois Central terminal, and I walked a block or two and got a room at the (now converted to condos) YMCA Hotel on South Wabash. And knowing my money was limited, I immediately began looking for a job.

After a week or two of looking I got two job offers. One was as a salesman for a new-

type and cheaper magazine-addressing machine. The other was for a much lower paid lab-tech trainee position at the Billings Hospital lab. Illinois certification laws were different. I decided on the latter.

But by coincidence -- one of those suspicious coincidences -- it had started snowing a record snowfall that night. By morning there were deep drifts and it was still snowing. Naive and not from Chicago, I elected to take the Cottage Grove bus. As I recall it was a near-whiteout condition on top of already deep drifts of snow. Cars were abandoned at weird angles in the middle of Cottage Grove Avenue, and even some of the other buses were immobilized at weird angles.

Almost miraculously the bus made it to 56th Street, and I got off and trudged through deep unshoveled drifts to the university personnel office that was handling jobs for Billings Hospital and other satellite organizations. And when I got there my hat and coat were covered with inches of snow.

The waiting room was crowded. People were drying gloves and I believe even shoes on aluminum-painted cast-iron radiators. It was chaos. And later I found out that it was not only weather-caused chaos.

I waited all morning. A businesslike older woman finally gave me some personnel forms and tests to fill out. I skipped any kind of lunch because that meant going out into the snowstorm, and it also meant possibly losing out on the lab tech trainee job.

There was nothing to do but wait. And I waited until after five p.m. Finally I was ushered

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You cannot be at home until you leave and return. The eagle goes a long way off from its nest in search of food and returns in search of comfort. She settles among the twisted sticks and woven weeds like a queen content only because she has been away. The younger son, too, leaves the nest of his father’s house and ventures bumbling in places that do not exist except as they are needed for discovery. What the younger son discovers away is himself, in the charged alleys where everything his father rejects is waiting for his ‘yes.’ It is only when he is full, which is a form of emptiness, that he can go home and teach his father lessons from his refusals. His older brother stays. He works the fields day after day learning nothing but what he already knows again and again. He can never return because time after time he has hesitated at the gate and turned back. He has gotten no farther than the familiar field. When he hears the band he is angry. There can be no party for him.

—Warren Campbell-Gaston

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Mind, continued from page 24 into an office for an interview and was shown to a wooden chair next to a utilitarian desk by a man in a rumpled suit. We sat down. He shot a perfunctory look at my forms and tests. And then he said, "I'm sorry, but that lab job has just been filled."

And I erupted in an uncharacteristic show of anger. I banged my hand in the desk and told him in a considerably raised voice, "You can't treat people like this. I waited out there all day." It clearly flustered him.

"Okay," he said. "Let me see if I can find you something. And he went to the back of the office to an olive-drab filing cabinet, pulled out a drawer, and rummaged through it. He ambled back, sat down, and looked over several pink forms that he held. I believe that he was smoking a pipe.

"Here's one you might like," he said. "It's almost minimum wage but it's helping with nuclear physics experiments at the Enrico Fermi Institute. Okay?"

I nodded and he called. I had an interview with my prospective boss the next day.

The pipe-smoking man in the inexpensive rumpled suit and I shot the breeze for a few more minutes. He explained that the personnel office was in chaos because the former personnel director had abruptly quit that morning and gone to Northwestern University. He told me that he was a professor of psychology that they had hauled over to put some order into the chaos.

It was a strange occurrence and in view of other events, a manner of strange coincidence. The personnel director's sudden

resignation was as abrupt and unexpected as the histology technician's firing and sudden departure. Moreover, a cold-hearted personnel professional would not have troubled to look for another job for me like the kindly psychology professor did.

The next morning I met my boss, a physics PhD candidate named Manfred Pyka who was attempting to prove the newly discovered Panofsky Ratio, a ratio of decay of two kinds of sub-nuclear particles called mesons discovered by nuclear physicist Wolfgang Panofsky. Pyka would, more than a year later, prove the Panofsky Ratio in a unique way, thereby making an important contribution to science.

My workspace looked out a window at the west end of Stagg Field where the football stadium stands that hid super-secret wartime atomic bomb research had once stood. It was there on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi created the first nuclear chain reaction that led directly to making the atomic bomb. That beginning of the Atomic Age had only been seventeen years earlier.

I worked for and with Pyka for a year, and then in January 1961, I got drafted. I saw him once more when I visited Chicago after Army basic training. And then I was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington. We regularly wrote to each other. He got his PhD, published his dissertation, and was hired to work at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.

For a year's Army service time, I accumulated a two-week leave and entertained vague notions of going to Princeton to visit him. But when it came

down to actually planning, I had neither the money nor the time. When I finally went on leave in January 1962 it was to sunny California for both the sun to flee rainy and snowy Washington and to visit other old friends in San Jose, California.

In a San Jose newspaper, I saw a short blurb with a small blurry photograph of Wolfgang Panofsky breaking ground on the Stanford campus for the new Stanford Linear Accelerator. When finished it would become the world's most powerful atom smasher.

It was my birthday. And for a birthday present to myself I borrowed a car and drove to the Stanford campus for the sole purpose of seeing where the celebrated Wolfgang Panofsky of the Panofsky Ratio had used a shovel to turn over some ceremonial earth for his unique new linear accelerator. I had worked on the Panofsky Ratio for Manfred Pyka for a year and this, I thought, would top off that intoxicating, exhilarating year that had now gone on to past years and experiences past.

I drove around the Stanford campus not realizing how big it was and that the groundbreaking ceremony had taken place in the hills above the campus. I could not find the spot, and students that I asked did not know anything about it.

While I was on the Stanford University campus that birthday day looking for the spot that Wolfgang Panofsky had shoveled earth, on the other side of the North American continent at the Princeton Institute for Advance Studies, Manfred Pyka opened a container that did not have a label. It contained lithium

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hydride. Something ignited it. Pyka was a chain smoker, and it was probably a cigarette.

The fiery explosion effectively blew off Pyka's face, but he survived -- at least for a while. I, of course, knew nothing about it and took a bus back to Army duty at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Over the next couple months I continued to write occasional letters to Pyka but never got one back. I thought that he had become busy on an experiment, and I knew how that went. In the spring the Army deployed our field hospital unit to maneuvers in the desert Yakima Firing Center. And a letter came one day from Pyka's wife, Ingrid.

I opened it, and there was a partial explanation of what had happened. And there was a small water drop that could have been from a tear.

There was a pay phone about a mile away in the desert.

I borrowed coins from everyone and walked to it. I called the hospital. I got a terrible unintelligible moan-like sound. And then immediately his wife picked up the phone. She said that she would have to talk for him. And with her acting as his voice we exchanged trivialities. I dared not upset his fragile condition by asking how it had happened. And that was the last that I heard from him.

Within hours after that phone call the field hospital got orders to ship to Southeast Asia to be part of the growing military action there. Pyka lived on in hospitals for almost a year after the explosion. A cornea transplant finally took, and he could see again out of one eye. He wrote a letter to me in his old familiar handwriting. But he died shortly after that. Hours after he died the field hospital got orders to immediately return to Fort Lewis.

A last coincidence in this collection of coincidences is that a year-and-a-half after I got out of the Army I got a job at Wolfgang Panofsky's then nearly completed Stanford Linear Accelerator. At first my work area was a few doors down the hall from Panofsky's. I would see him every day. My boss there was Martin Perl. Years later Perl would win a Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Tau particle.

It may be in atoms of a brain. Or it may all be in my mind. But it seems that there was something strange in this, a mountaintop moment that may have gone awry. I'm distanced from it for more than a half-century now, but still wonder what it all may have meant.

And there is actually a little more to this story. But it might tax credibility. And it may best be a story for another day.

A time for family A time for old friends A time for healing A time for amends. A time for appreciation Of those we hold dear. A time for thanksgiving And sharing and cheer. A time to say thanks friend You’ve been there for me. A time when we realize How all times should be. — Chuck Homer

Chuck Homer

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John Zylstra

West Shore member John Zylstra spent several years in a Japanese internment camp in Padang, Indonesia, as a child. This passage about that experience, continued from last month’s issue of Chalice, is excerpted from his book, The Australian Lagoon.

Japanese know-how and Oriental efficiency

taught those who were willing to learn, many things that were important to their survival. That wasn’t always the intention of the conquerors. The camp was built around a river, with the water flow diverted in sections to provide sound hygiene.

The first section provided drinking water, next was a bathing area, and finally came the toilet section. The strong current afforded a constant flushing of clear mountain water. The problem of surviving many threats to 2,000 women and children everyday accounted for very little abuse of the river, but there were incidents.

There were six large barracks buildings with large letters from the alphabet painted on them. They were built in a symmetrical pattern and spaced far apart. A few other roofed areas served as cooking places, wood-chopping locations and the camp commandant’s quarters. There was an infirmary of sorts, called the hospital, where hard-nosed Dutch doctors successfully performed a few operations. They were done in the area called the

lab, around which a bucket brigade brought river water in to splash down the dust during a long dry spell. The Japanese at first believed it was a smuggling attempt.

Smuggling and black market activities, despite the usual punishment, gained momentum. The dual problem involved outsmarting the Japanese and getting the Indos to cooperate—often at great risk. There was still some sympathy in the Indo for the Dutch, and, of course, there was money to be made. A teacup of raw peanuts quickly soared in price to ten dollars, whole bananas sold for three dollars each. Fresh fruit and vegetables could be had for women willing to prostitute themselves to the Japanese. The women usually gave those things to hospital patients.

Soon after a routine was established, rats arrived. War was immediately declared on them as a potential food supply. They were caught in bamboo cages made by the children, and then they were drowned, skinned, boiled, and prepared. Those in the hospital retained the first rights to rat

In 1945, the Dutch captives of the Bangkiang Camp (Indonesia) raised their country's flag as the camp was liberated by the Allies.

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meat. Edible rats, though, unless caught in great numbers, made very little food.

The rats were clever. They sensed their lives were at stake and drowning one required thought, experience and innovation. Filling the cage with water impelled the rat to swim to the top for breathing space. When the air ran out, the rat usually tried to overturn the cage. Even when completely submerged, a rat frequently swam to the door and tried to gnaw off the lock.

The rats fought bravely, but they lost. Scientists, who used them in laboratory experiments, confirmed their intelligence and resourcefulness. In tropical climates, rats were terrible disease carriers and fought a cruel, vicious environment. Snakes were the rats’ major predators. In the camp, the normal human aversion to rats slowly disappeared as they were recognized as a source of protein.

The Japanese once shot a tiger and gave it to the 2,000 prisoners to celebrate Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. Unfortunately, they shot it through the gall bladder, which rendered the meat inedible.

Regular Japanese food deliveries to the camp consisted of coconut oil sealed in army drums and barrels. The containers were returned when emptied. They also gave the prisoners an inferior grade of rice—one teacup a day, sago and, sometimes, ubi, a root resembling yams or sweet potatoes.

Once, when a committee of women went to Hadike, the camp commander, and complained about the food supply, he asked, “Why do you wish for more food? Even Imperial officers don’t eat much more than you.” He spread his hands. “Understand, too, there is no more food. If you wish, go into the jungle and get it.”

That initiated a new work program, in which older children and some women got permission to leave the camp at dawn to work outside.

Children got up early and worked the lading, the high jungle elevations outside camp, under the watchful eye of Japanese guards. They chopped down small trees and dragged them back to camp to be cut into firewood. Other groups gathered edible wild weeds, breadfruit, berries and heavy, root-like beets resembling potatoes. After a few unsuccessful attempts, they were grown inside the camp. There was also a bright green plant like a fern that gave a bitter but edible vegetable. Sago palms, which were light and easy to carry, served many useful purposes when stripped of their bark. The food search excursions were often educational and revealing.

The questions everyone asked themselves was “When will liberation come?”

After many months, though, that hope faded. An American airplane was said to have been sighted occasionally, but the fuselage and wing insignia were impossible to see at such altitudes. Routine Japanese flights usually were single Zeros trailing target discs for shooting practice.

As time passed, people occupied themselves with details. They didn’t have time to think beyond the present. Their weakened bodies didn’t allow too much mental or spiritual reserve. Those who relinquished that reserve fell victim to their lack of self-control quickly. The weak perished, and the strong survived.

People kept diaries, logs and day-to-day records. They made detailed studies of spiders, ants, crickets, worms, scorpions, roaches, centipedes, flies and mosquitoes. Others worked on projects once begun but never finished, reviving old hobbies.

Some entertained others or amused themselves. They practiced word skill games, performed satires of Japanese authority, or created things. They did anything they could to survive.

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings