December 18, 2002Lynda's children Max & Molly, acting in concert with neighbor Alex, were kind enough to return me to the mid-60s by the simple expedient of sitting down with me at the dinner table to play the world-domination board game of Risk (which, on this occasion, Alex won). Risk & I began our relationship nearly forty years ago at the Governor's Program for Gifted Children, at McNeese State College (now University) in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was at GPGC that I made the acquaintance of plant hormones indole-3-acetic acid and gibberelic acid; that I learned Dr. Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer ("a simple drudge"); that I acted the part of the Chorus in "Oedipus Rex," and sawed away on a double bass as the Elephant in Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals"; that I read such works as "The Vision of Sir Launfals" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; that I wrote my first haiku; that I began to appreciate astute literary criticism of the like of Mary McCarthy, who once said this about Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and the.'"

GPGC was a formative experience for all of us lucky enough to spend six weeks of our Junes & Julys there for four or five summers of enrichment, surrounded by the waterways, cheniers, and mounds of freshly mined sulfur that ring Lake Charles, a fascinating world of learning and exploration rather exotic to the remainder of the Bayou State. It touched all of us deep within, even twice-Pulitzer-Prize winner Tony Kushner, our most famous alumnus, whose mother Sylvia conducted our orchestra. Expanding our horizons it multiplied our prospects; providing for us a community of like-minded souls, it taught us how to such communities can propagate.

I tried briefly to explain some of this to Max, Molly & Alex, but they were having too much fun attacking me, and one another, with dice and plastic armies; so I threw myself back into the fray as well. Soon after it was Dec 12, the 19th anniversary of Vimalananda's untimely demise. Was it not for GPGC, where the sweetly eccentric Dr. Girard introduced me to the words "philologist" and "Sanskrit," I might never have mustered the inquisitiveness to make my way to Sanskrit's homeland. Saluting mentally the perfection of the Law of Karma, I proceeded to Sonoma, and an afternoon of wine tasting in a wild rain storm; then Seattle, and the inauguration of the Seattle Ayurvedic Center, sponsored by my old friends Krishna Kumar and Ram Kumar from the Ayurvedic Trust of Coimbatore, India. Near the end of this particular fortnight I conferred with Dave Grenell over his plans to corner the U.S. market in ready-to-drink chai. I met Dave first in Benaras, when he was studying Hindi on the Wisconsin program - another sort of enrichment curriculum than GPGC, no doubt, but like GPGC transforming all whom it touches.

December 4, 2002Texas was a fine place to watch Frida, the excellent film based on the tumultuous relationship between the painter Frida Kahlo and the muralist Diego Rivera (played superbly by Salma Hayek & Alfred Molina). Times were frequently hard for Frida, physically and emotionally, but she brought an intense love of living to her art. She was Mexicana through & through (I recently learned that "Mexico" comes from "Mexica," which is said to mean "the navel of the moon), and while watching the film I recalled to mind that President of Mexico (Porfirio Díaz, perhaps) who once declared (with a sigh, no doubt), "Poor Mexico - so far from God, so close to the United States."

Over Thanksgiving my sister became inspired to clean out the three freezers that sit in my mother's garage, filled with produce from the garden that my father tended so lovingly for nigh onto two decades. Pecans from the early 90s are still quite good, and most of the figs made it as well, but on inspection it was discovered that many other items had come to the end of their natural lives. They had to be discarded, but I was loath to merely toss them in the trash - so I conceived the idea of tossing them back into the garden. They had emerged thence, so it would be a return home; the remaining flora there would lap up the nutrients, and the local fauna could also feast. Thanksgiving afternoon thus found my sister & I & our cousin Bill's son Braden heaving five wheelbarrows full of frozen peas, beans, pomegranate juice, persimmons, peanuts, okra, jujubes, blackberry juice, ancient tortillas, and all manner of other fare into the underbrush, depositing some directly to the roots of the larger trees, and lobbing some over the neighbor's fence to her donkeys, Coal Miner & Goober. I found it immensely satisfying to offer, on the day that we Americans are supposed to be giving sincere thanks for the bounty that is ours, something back to the land from which we have stolen so much. Near as I could tell, the garden gave thanks to us in return.

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