September 20, 2002 - Charlotte's funeral took place on the following Monday, preached by her oldest son John, in the First Baptist Church of Floresville's new sanctuary. John Atkins, long a Baptist minister, joined the U.S. Army in 1989 as a chaplain, and has been there ever since, moving from base to base as is usual in the military, including a three-year stint in Baumholder, Germany, at the same base his mother served at as an Army nurse about 40 years earlier.

Tropical Storm Fay singled out Palacios, Texas for landfall, and San Antonio as a destination, and brought a morning of hard rain to Floresville for the funeral. After the service, which focused on Charlotte's love of music, we adjourned in a downpour to the gravesite, amid comments from all that, given Charlotte's love of precipitation, she would have been pleased with all the water. Later, after the funereal dinner, I headed out into the residual wind (the rain having eased) for a midnight walk in the Pecan Park. Wind from the Gulf arrives in Wilson Country as a second thought, either as a failed tropical storm that never quite made hurricane, flailing its periphery with its death agonies, or as a mightily successful storm whose high tide reaches 150 miles or more inland.

This particular night was a night of disappointment for the storm but fulfillment for the rest of us, with enough rain to add substantially to the already above-average annual participation without flooding the town yet again. Emboldened by the earlier deluge the creatures of the soil had become fruitful, the wetness multiplying them into abundance, particularly in the little patch of thicket just next door to the park. Insect chorus from there offered a contrapuntal buzz to the amphibian refrain from beneath the bridge that had been so near to inundation earlier in the day. Frogs, spawned in the moisture in their dozens and hundreds, called and responded to one another, higher ribbits mingling with lower croaks in a symphony of fecundity that surely cheered Charlotte along her way.

After the memorial I proceeded to Rhode Island, for a visit with Rebecca & David Chandler & son Ethan, in their home inside Lincon State Park; then to Brattleboro, and Sarah & John in the Wilder Building , and on to Temple, New Hampshire, and the Moses Family, and a lecture at the Old School. Meanwhile, Hurricane Isidore gathered strength, awaiting its moment …

September 6, 2002 Driving down from Inner Harmony, returning to the outside world, a small bird speared itself on the van's antenna. It rode with us all the way to our destination, its head tucked carefully under one wing as if snoozing in the wind, its seemingly headless body heralding, in some palindromatic parody of Samothrace's Winged Victory, our triumphant return to the metropolitan trollop that is Las Vegas.

Vegas to Orange County to Texas, then Tulsa, for a morning with horses, a soccer evening, and a look at Princess Mononoke, the disturbingly inspired full-length animated version of a Japanese legend, a tale of human and animal, forest and town, poison and antidote, betrayal and repentance that would, I think, have made our antenna bird proud.

Back to Houston for a look at an exquisite exhibition of Mughal jewelry - including dozens of hundred-carat emeralds, rubies and sapphires - on loan from the personal collection of Sheikh Nassar al-Sabah al-Ahmed of Kuwait - whom, as rnanubandhana would have it, Vimalananda knew well.

Finally, as the fortnight waned, a visit to a waning existence: my Aunt Charlotte, who for two decades was next-door neighbor to my parents, eighteen of those years as a widow. Most mornings she'd stop in for coffee; many evenings they'd dine together; each Sunday and most Wednesdays, as staunch members of the First Baptist Church (my father a deacon, my mother a Sunday School teacher, my aunt a choir member and piano accompanist), they'd worship together. After my father's death Laura and Charlotte were widows together, and when after open heart surgery Charlotte was unable to drive for several weeks, Laura took on the responsibility (at age 85) of driving the two of them to breakfast or lunch each day.

It seemed then that a new set of traditions was developing, until Charlotte's heart took a turn for the worse. After the doctors gravely notified her that there was nothing more they could do, she moved resignedly to a nearby extended care facility, and was just getting comfortable there when death took her, at age 72, on September 5: the birthday of her second son, as also my parents' wedding anniversary. Hail and farewell!

Link to News of the Past