When the first cold days came . . .

In those years the first snows would generally fall toward the end of September, at least in New England. It used to get colder than it does now, and it was in the season of those snows that we said good-bye to the Russian wolfhound, and to the cats, who were undoubtedly all called "Kitty-Cat," and to neighbor lady who would take care of them while we were gone. The house we commended to the great white birch that rose, firm and watchful, at the end of the driveway.

These adieux heralded series of metamorphoses. The birch tree would become a palm, tall and slender; the white mantle of snow that draped the frozen earth, gentle waves drinking the sands. My brother Michael and I would exchange our companions in parkas and waterproof boots for others, black and barefoot. The cold, shiny white Formica desks disappeared, and in their place was a lone, wide, old-fashioned dark wood table. Our Bostonian-sounding English gradually faded into the background, hidden behind gentle, rhythmic accent in keeping with that of our West Indian companions. The yellow school bus that picked us up daily was replaced by a gray donkey that we got up on in turn--Michael, Sammy the son of Polly the cook, and I. It always seemed redundant to me that the donkey was named Donkey, like the cats we had left in the care of the neighbor.

Three years had already gone by since our father began working on the book on the West Indies, three years during which we rented a house on the beach in Jamaica with Polly, her son Sammy and her brother Sunshine. Polly took charge of the whole house--of us, the kitchen and the marketing. One day I heard my father complain about her petty theft, and ask my mother to talk to her. But Ma never did it. Sunshine took care of the garden, Donkey and the two roosters. He was a young man, black, as was the entire native population, muscular, and as we were to discover, possessive. There was no doubt that Sunshine was industrious, and was recompensed, in addition to his salary, by the product of the second henhouse, to which he was in the habit of referring to as his own.

The routine of morning toilette in which Polly insisted in combing our hair was the only storm cloud over the horizon of our island life. First it was Michael's turn--a useless task, because his blond hair always looked as if it had been startled into disarray. Then she braided my skimpy blond hair and tied them with a ribbon that matched my blouse, choosing the right color from an endless collection of ribbons she kept in the buffet drawer. And last of all came her own son Sammy. I never understood why she went to the trouble, since his close-cropped hair looked like a black scouring pad.

The daily routine seemed to us less routine than pure entertainment. Especially compared to our life during the rest of the year. After that process was over, we would get on Donkey’s back in strict order and ride to the school, which was in an old English quarter a couple of kilometers from the house. The forty of us kids sat on both sides of the wooden table, grouped by ages in just one room, with just one teacher. We all went barefoot at the insistence of our mother, who did not want us to stick out. Naturally we stuck out anyway.

We would go home on Donkey, too, but with different turns. Polly always had a salad and exotic fruits prepared, because she had her own theory about meat. She said meat should only be eaten (in any form) with special meals, for example on Sundays, birthdays, weddings or national holidays.

One of the many games we thought up was to see who could swim the farthest out from the beach. Polly would watch from the terrace of the second floor to see whether any sharks were coming—although Ma had already told us that if we ran into a shark we were supposed to punch it in the nose, and it would go away peacefully. But Polly insisted that if she saw any sharks she would warn us by signaling from the terrace, and I always felt safer seeing her there.

We didn’t have to wait long to celebrate one of those dinners Polly considered worthy of serving meat with (in this case, chicken). All Jamaica was turned out it in festive attire. It was more than a national holiday. Princess Margaret was making an official visit to the islands. Our teacher limited himself to the teaching of the history of Great Britain, and particularly to the Jamaica’s responsibility toward the Crown. It seemed to us a bit exaggerated, all the fuss, but we were the only whites, the chosen ones to present the wreaths of flowers to the Princess. This sort of festivity ends up spreading to everyone, willy-nilly, and in the end it even made us think we were witnessing a great historical moment, but we were more impressed by the filming of From Russia with Love, which was being shot on the beaches of St. Ann’s Bay, and included in Princess Margaret’s official itinerary.

The entire island was attired for the grand gala occasion. White figures adorned with black heads floated down all the island streets. British flags lapped around the crowds. Endless calypsos were composed about the Princess and her visit. Government House sported a special guard in full regalia, in imitation of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Everything went according to plan, with the exception of the theft of the teapot from Government House, which inspired even more calypsos. Polly, true to her manias, served us a delicious chicken on the final night of festivities: chicken cooked with tropical fruits, which we were to remember the rest of our lives.

When we got back home the next day, festive colors had faded into the gray penumbra of an American film noir. An old model black Buick with a siren on top completed the picture. Sunshine did not come out looking for Donkey, because the assistant police chief was taking his deposition in the kitchen. On the black and white tile floor a corpse lay sprawled, covered with a blanket. Mother, whining, was sitting next to the chief inspector, both warning us to no avail not to come into the kitchen. We could hear Sunshine telling the police that he killed his sister Polly because she had stolen a chicken from his henhouse. Despite the voices and sobbing, you could hear the silence.

Sammy ran to the arms of our mother, and Michael and I went running out to the beach where we sat cross-legged for a long time looking out over the ocean.

Sharon Smith-Hernandez

Fiction and the personal. An aspect of the meaning of fiction is that it makes the private sayable to an anonymous audience. This may be not just an incidental aspect of that mode of discourse, but its very meaning.

I find algebra refreshing. Should one speak of mathematical versus, say, "natural" languages? Is mathematics a language even? It seems to have derived from language. So-called "rhetorical algebra" was used by Ahmes, an Egyptian scribe, in the 17th century BCE (Rhind papyrus). It slowly leaves humanity behind, its symbolism relating only to itself. Pre-world? Language, vieille coquette (ou cocotte), always seducing, convincing, cajoling.

The extension of the concept of cognitive dissonance to the moral realm produces interesting results. The dictum that truth is the first casualty of war is another way of expressing the process of suppressing lucidity in order to carry out the pressing agenda of the ego, unencumbered by conscience.

The new book by David Cay Johnston: Perfectly Legal. Brian Lamb's interview of the man on Booknotes, C-Span. Lamb is amazing in his breadth of interests. And what a scandal it is, the tax shelter business and all the devious ways corporate executives have of playing the tax laws in their favor! The rest of us are to busy working to lift our heads from the traces and see what is befalling us: the growing tribe of gonifs. Exposés of this nature (including no doubt Woodward's latest) are the mitzvot of the modern world.

The Personal, the Impersonal, God. The pilings of my future thought. Not pillars, pilings, because they seek stability below the moving waters and unstable silt.

Today this song came back to me, from someplace in my childhood, and it is connected to my father, as if the chair were for him.

In the cool, cool, cool of the evening, tell 'em I'll be there,
In the cool, cool, cool of the evening, better save a chair.
When the party's a-getting a glow on, and singin' fills the air,
In the shank of the night when the doing's all right,
You can tell 'em I'll be there.

Hello everyone on the Smith-Godchaux journal. This is my first blogging expierence and I must admit it is almost like jogging. After having acheived filling in all the spaces correctly I am exhaused. I promise to get back to the journal soon with a story or something but I just wanted to know that I can blog from Spain. Sharon E. Smith

A make-shift translation of a story I wrote in Spanish for my next book which is called "El día después" "The Day After" which could easily have been written the day after 11-M but it wasn't; it was written more than a year ago.

The echo that thunders through the calcinated ruins is all that is left
of the world. The wind disperses the empty words from rock to rock.

-That is not the way it was.

-Of course it was. I was there, I heard it all.

These words with no meaning rise above the mountain and bounce back. No one hears them. I doesn't matter. They would seem to be words from a
conversation but the echo disfigures them. They become incomprehensible.

-She told me everything and it was not that way. She should know what
happened.

-She is the affected one even if she wasn't there. I was there.

The words roll along one after another like tumbleweeds, empty balls of
dead weeds making their way along the roads with no cars, the fields with no
cows, along the avenues with no trees. They accumulate and are thrashed
against one another. One story migles with the other within the ruins.
They climb over the walls and fall down the other side. The balls of words grow bigger and bigger as they pile up one on top of the other.

-I don't understand why you refuse to listen, don't you want to hear the
truth?

-I don't refuse to hear what you say. But you only say what you heard and
this is not the truth. I repeat, I was there.

And the no and the yes unite. One word fuses with the other within the now
huge ball which rises, rolls, crashes but does not stop. A big globe full
of empty words, with no meaning, with no obstacle to stop it and no ears to
hear its contents as it rolls along.

-To hear is as true as to see.

-No it isn't. I can hear lies but I can't see them.

The lies and the truth are confused in the world of lost words. A finished
world. The lies are trapped in the cracks of the ruins but the truth pushes
them out. They flow one after the other along the rivers with no fish out
to the sea with no seaweed, where the yes and the no, hearing and seeing and the ball of words are inexorably drowned.

Sharon Smith-Hernandez

The joy of making "to do" notes. Here we are at the source of the beginning of the differentiation between the the leaders and the followers, or the masters and the slaves.

Cruel and crude from the same indo-European source, kreue-. The same insensitivity.

How Hebrew echoes the disorder of a discrete passage.
Hebrew uses the letters as numbers. Thus the letters א, ב, ג, ד, ה, ו, ז, ח, ט, י (read from right to left) represent the numbers 1 through 10. The number 11 is represented as a yod (10) followed by an aleph, thus: יא. Fourteen is predictably יד , but fifteen is טו . Why 9 plus 6 rather than 10 plus 5? Because the combination of letters יה would be the first two letters of the sacred tetragrammaton, the four-letter representation of the name of God that is to be represented (the letters יהוה ). Thus the representation of the number fifteen bears the trace of an invisible passage.

Today is the day before Pesach, or Passover, which starts at sunset tomorrow. We will go to First Night Seder, at the Temple Beth El in Dalton, GA. The Hebrew Calendar still holds some mysteries for me. But one thing is clear, and that is the moon, which is full on the 15th of the month of Nisan, and which is the first day of Pesach (פסך). Nisan is the modern name of the "first month" referred to as aviv or abib (אביב) in Ex. 12,2 and Deut. 16,1. Aviv just means "spring" in modern Hebrew, and appears in the name Tel-Aviv (Hill of Spring). Astronomically, Pesach falls on the first full moon after the spring equinox.

After the great Susan's Surprise Birthday Party more and more names from my early years are coming back to me. Proper names. Nouns, are they not the solid, the skeletal part of that animal of words that we are? And particularly proper nouns, because their meanings are open, waiting for our personal biographies to fill in the meanings. The county surveyor's side of "Obtuse Road South" was not evident to me as a child growing up there, in Brookfield. As all roads are connected, that that one eventually leads back to 229 Whaley Street, Long Island, the scene of an even more remote childhood, is self-evident yet astonishing. Those memories are situated at different geological depths.

Gordon Hatch, Eric Staib, boyhood friends who lived in the direction of Candlewood Lake perhaps, not far from Danbury. We attended the same school, Brookfield Consolidated, where Mrs. Murphy taught mathematics. I had learned my times table up to 6, due in part no doubt to her technique of hitting you on your quivering extended hand with her wooden ruler if you got the wrong answer, when the school board was forced to get rid of her because of parent complaints. I have no systematic mastery of the rest of times tables beyond 6 to this day.

Greetings all!
Michael--thanks for the invitation to the blogging. It seems that it might serve as a worthy supplement to seeing all of the faces together in NYC last month. I loved seeing the Eckles and Smith siblings all together, which is an unfortunately rare occurrence! Being far-flung out here on the west coast, I relish the opportunity to mingle with family members when I get a chance. I wish there had been more mingling time. I look forward to the rumored posting of photos by Annalee on the web!

Yes, BIG CHEERS to Susie and Paul! How nice to have been able to celebrate both the birthday and the marriage. So glad that all three of us could be there. Tomorrow, Molly turns 12. I think I remember being twelve--it was a tenuous time. Molly seems to be pretty happy with it though.

regards,
Victoria Gilbert in Portland

Congratulations, Susan and Paul Garrigue on your marriage on March 18th at the Mount Kisco Town Hall! I wish you both great happiness. And what a wonderful 70th birthday, Susan, brought about by the efforts of your dutiful daughter Annalee.

Hey, Michael and all. I had a terrible time getting set up to blog (new verb in my vocabulary) because I tried to use a name from Tolkein as my password. Bad choice. All the names, even the very esoteric ones, seem to be taken. Anyway, I have never blogged, and here I am. (I resorted to a name from Beowulf.)

My big news: I have a job, will begin in August at Jamestown College in North Dakota. I will teach British lit to 1765 and Shakespeare (and lots and lots of writing classes--but possibilities for other lit classes). The school is small, Presbyterian but very non-sectarian, and they like me and I like them. The town is also small, but maybe I will be able to buy a house eventually because housing is quite inexpensive there. This summer will therefore be busy: I work at Baylor until July 6; then I will be moving onto a new adventure and phase of my life. I actually will be closer to Washington and my sons there, and much closer to Hannah in Wisconsin.

Cheers to all.
Becky

L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu. Hypocrasy is a hommage vice pays to virtue. I cannot teach this maxim of La Rochefoucauld without thinking of Ma, who would say (or did she just say she used to say?) "Don't you have enough respect to lie to me?" I like La Rochefoucauld's rescuing of hypocrasy's element of goodness. There are so many degrees of nuance in the continuum from emulation to simulation to dissimulation.

Today I have been thinking about Lhomond. The Abbé Lhomond was not that important a person, really. He was a Latinist of the late 18th and early 19th century, who wrote a summary of Roman history called "De viris illustribus . . .", of which I have a copy. The introduction says "il sut se faire aimer de ses élèves" if I remember correctly. He also wrote a summary of "sacred history." He was of those clerics who chose not to sign the oath of allegiance to the new (revolutionary) régime. He was therefore to be guillotined, but was saved--it is said--by a former student of some influence who exclaimed "On ne touche pas à Lhomond!" There is something sacred beyond regimes in a revered teacher--even if he is a humble grammarian and Latinist.

Lots of ideas this morning, but the best have probably gotten away from me already. One of my thoughts was to use blogs for individual students in my French conversation class next semester. They would have to write a full square (like the one I am writing in now) in French each day. Ils pourraient écrire la moitié sur ce dont on avait parlé la fois précedente, et l'autre moitié sur ce dont on va parler, par exemple. A propos, אפשר לכתב עברי פה