A Pedestrian Journal
After quitting his job on public televison last year, David Grant decided to maintain a month of silence. This journal was wrillen during the last two weeks, when he travelled on foot, carrying a petition calling for military disarmament. His only companion was his goat, little Iowa, who carried provisions.
I want money. I need money. I will have all the money I desire. I am a money magnet. Money is my servant. This is a meditation, folks, don’t mind me, just keep reading. I’m trying to materialize $100 bills in the bush outside my door. I wouldn’t mind some new clothes, either, or some expensive health food instead of all this Wonder Bread and Spam. Please don’t think me crude and selfish. I’ll work on world peace, universal brotherhood, etc., just as soon as I summon up enough money to buy that $50 janitor suit I saw at Sears or that $27 aluminum baseball bat I’m going to use to bust up this dump I live in so I can start all over.
I ended my last letter swimming in heavy surf. I still am. And my images come from my childhood on Narragansett Beach. There was a raft anchored out beyond the breakers and a line, buoyed with cork floats, between it and the shore. On calm days we used to hold on to the line to rest as we swam out. When the surf got huge I got bashed and battered if l tried to hang on. The only thing to do was to swim free trusting my body and the water as I dove down under the turbulence of each breaking wave on my way out to deeper water. I remember a Sufi saying: “There are treasures beyond compare in the ocean. If you seek safety stay ashore.” I also remember that I did not like to use a surfboard. I much preferred to body surf with nothing between me and the direct experience of the wave of bubbling, foaming, rushing water until I landed in the sandy shallow of the beach.
Book Review
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron. Random House, 515 pp. $12.95 Early in S…
Pretend that this is a movie. You are seeing two men create a curl of dust as they drive in a pick-up down a dirt road. The one driving is old, his features molded like leather, worn and stretched by a hard working foot. Many miles he’s seen, of steel, concrete, glass and plastic worked and erected.
*NOTE: Original copies of this issue are no longer available. Unbound, laser-printed copies will be provided for print orders.
Home, for me, is in western Indiana, West Lafayette, even though I lived there for only one year of my childhood. I remember it as a time of brutality and shame, and I think of it as home because it is the only year I can remember when my father lived with us. At the end of that year, my parents divorced, and my younger brother and sister and I have not seen him since.
The ancients said: “The hanged man cannot cut himself down.” But in due time Nature is stronger than all his ropes and bonds. It was always so. Where is the reason to be discouraged?
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