Cutter Scout Reservation 2011; Call for Staff Applications, in Haiku.

Redwoods by the Sea
Change lives including your own
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http://www.pacsky.org/Camping/Cutter.aspx

Women of the Favela Part 2; Maria

Maria and her Granddaughter Lauren

The first day I saw the Recanto I wasn’t scared at all. The old electric train wound its way through green hills. Shantytowns lined the tracks. Shacks clumped together in the low valleys. Despite the crowded train, the incessant heat, the unfamiliar Portuguese babble all around me, I burned with excited. My first assignment in the city, just what I’d been praying for. The Recanto dos Humildes clings to the edge of Perus, a town fifty miles or so north of São Paulo. It would be wrong to call Perus a suburb, though it may have started that way. Rather, Perus is a microcosm of the city, a mini São Paulo, facing all of the major challenges of the metropolis, only on a smaller scale.

At the train station I met my new companion. (Our missionaries always work in pairs.) He came from California and had been in Perus for six weeks. He helped carry my bags and led me into the town. I followed close behind him as we tunneled through the crowed alleyways. People pushed passed us. Chickens squawked in cages and vendors shouted over each other. Above our heads, clotheslines crisscrossed from window to window. Murky, pungent water trickled over the uneven asphalt.

“We’re going to Maria’s house for lunch,” my companion told me, looking back over his shoulder. “She’s a good cook but after, we’ll have to help her husband Claudio wash his legs. Try not to stare.”

“Stare at what?” I asked but he didn’t answer. We stopped in front of a large gate. It was solid metal, ten feet tall, with spikes on top, not at all inviting. My companion clapped loudly and called,

“Maria! It’s the missionaries.”

The gate swung inward and Maria answered, her smile shining, her granddaughter in her arms. Maria was as warm and inviting as the gate was ominous.

Maria and Claudio have been members of our congregation since they trekked down from Piauí, a state in Northern Brazil. When she met me she cried. I was surprised and sorry, not knowing what I’d done. But my companion laughed, and then Maria laughed.

“Don’t worry about it Elder, (all the missionaries are called Elder) I always cry.”

“It’s true,” my companion agreed, “Everyone calls her Irmã Chorona, (Sister Cryer).”

“Yes, Irmã Chorona,” she smiled, “I always cry, but never because I’m sad.”

She told me she didn’t cry the day they left the North with all their possessions on their backs, but she cried the day they arrived in their new home. She said she didn’t cry when her husband couldn’t find work, but she cried when he bought a wheelbarrow, filled it with wildflowers to sell, and returned home with his first day’s earnings. She said she didn’t cry when her husband’s legs started to swell and crack, and he could no longer push his wheelbarrow, but she cried the day he gave up drinking and started going to church. She didn’t cry at funerals, or at hospitals, but she cried every time a new missionary came to visit.

Slowly, over black beans and rice, interrupted many times by tears, Maria told me the history of their own little metropolis.

Perus is one of many favela-towns surrounding São Paulo and provides a textbook example of the country’s social stratification. The World Bank rates Latin America as, “the most (economically) unequal region in the world, and Brazil is the most unequal country in the region.”

In most areas the slums flood over the wealthy neighborhoods. The shacks fill every open space, built up against skyscrapers, in parks, or freeway medians. But Perus provides such an interesting example because the areas of rich, poor, poorer and poorest are clearly defined and divided. The highway, the river, and the train tracks, run together for twenty miles or so, out of São Paulo. At Perus they part, dividing the town into four distinct sections. Panning the town from East to West you pass through the entire spectrum, from rich multi-storied brick houses on the hill, to tiny slanted plywood shacks on the muddy riverbank.

The rich, legitimate part of town covers the hillside east of the highway. A poorer neighborhood fills the area between the highway and the railroad tracks. From the tracks to the river the town tumbles into the old favela, a jumbled conglomerate of houses, shops, narrow alleyways and twisted roads. Beyond the river sits the Recanto.

According to Maria, the legitimate Perus was built in the 1970’s. Businessmen came, looking to get out of the city, and the highway was built to give them a speedy commute. Poor workers came as domestic servants or shopkeepers, and the government built them the railroad.

“No one built on this side of the tracks until the nineties. We were some of the first. When we got here it was a dump.”

“Literally,” my companion smiled and Maria nodded.

In fact all the land west of the tracks and east of the river was government owned and designated as a landfill. The land beyond the river belonged to an absent, and essentially faceless owner who, everyone assumed, lived in the city.

In the early nineties, slum populations in São Paulo exploded, overflowing into areas like Perus. The people carved a neighborhood right out of the landfill, building their homes with anything they could find.

“You’d be surprised what those richies throw away,” Maria says gesturing to the corrugated steel roof. “We dug this out of a mound down by the river. I insisted on real clay brick for the walls, but the Oliveiras down the alley, they built that house out of blue water barrels. Every month they cover up one or two with concrete. Whenever they can afford the cement. ”

Originally lines and pipes crossed over the tracks bringing pirated water and electricity. The Favela itself was graded from poor to poorer, with the poorest families living closest to the river.

“The river became an open sewer,” Maria said shaking her head, “drugs, violence, disease and death, they were everywhere.”

Government officials in every major city in the South faced the same dilemma. They could barely estimate how many people lived in the favelas, let alone provide for them. By 1995, Perus’ actual population was at least ten times the official head count. Half the town stole electricity and water. Children flooded the schools, and there was absolutely nowhere to send the people.

“What about the government housing?” I asked. On train rides through the city I’d seen the massive concrete apartment complexes, lined one after another like wasps nests. Called COHAB’s (co-habitation units), they must have been a massive undertaking.

“The COHAB’s,” Maria snorted. “They’re so much worse than the favelas.”

Despite the scale of the COHAB project, it fell desperately short of its goal.

“I’ve been to see them,” she went on. “My cousin lived in a COHAB for three years. Horrible, Elder, just horrible.”

She told us how large families from the North are crammed into one-room apartments. How the housing complexes breed organized crime, and are often the most dangerous parts of the city.

“People only move to the COHAB’s if they have to, if they get in trouble with the government or something. They move in, get in debt to the drug lords and the cops, and can’t leave.” She told us that many of the people in the Perus had fled the COHAB’s, often leaving behind all their possessions and bolting in the middle of the night.

“It’s true,” my companion added. “There were COHAB’s in my last area and we weren’t allowed anywhere near them after dark.”

When the COHAB’s began to fail the government tried to entice people to move back to the countryside. Brazil built a new capitol city, Brasilia, built in 1960, as an early effort to draw people into the country and away from the urban coast. In the 1990’s the government granted enormous subsidies to Northern ranchers in hopes of bolstering the agricultural economy. Today Brazil has one of the largest beef industries in the world with over190 million cattle. But cattle tycoons and foreign investors dominate the industry. The grants helped Americans get 39-cent hamburgers but gave few opportunities to farm workers. With no schools, no hospitals, no infrastructure of any kind, for families like Maria’s there was no going back North.

In the mid 1990’s, the government tried land reform; giving the favelas to their inhabitants. In Perus, they paved a few roads, built power lines, basic sewage systems, and even a primary school. The neighborhood was laid out poorly, and hastily built, but it was a neighborhood.

These land reforms, meant to ease the favela problem, only exacerbated it, causing a new major internal migration.

“At first the flow of newcomers was steady,” Maria told us, “but word reached the North that the government was giving away land. For a sharecropper or a plantation worker that’s like saying they discovered a gateway straight to heaven. The people flooded down.

“ But the government could hardly be surprised,” Maria, laughed. “The promise of free land always brings waves of people.”

These people came in the same way Europeans flooded through Ellis Island, or American pioneers pushed through the west. Many Northerners actually came to São Paulo in wagons, trailing livestock.

Maria and Claudio were both born from a long line of sharecroppers and plantation workers. São Paulo was going to be their ticket out, their “better life for their children.” For fifteen years they dug a living out of the old garbage dump. They raised their son Paulo and built a life, all on the money Claudio brought in from selling flowers. Every day for fifteen years he wheeled his barrow down to the train station, and every night he brought back beans and rice to his wife.

They succeeded. Paulo went to school, got a job in the city, married, had a daughter, and built a small brick home in the Recanto, just west of the river. But not every emigrant would succeed and as the years went by it became more and more difficult for newcomers.

Roses from the Ashes, Women of the Favella; Part 1- Introduction

This is the beginning of an article I wrote last year. It's rather long so I am going to post it in installments. Let me know what you think.

Roses from the Ashes; Women of the Favella

We heard the sirens long before we saw the lights. We looked down the five-lane highway that twisted away from the town and disappeared into the green hills. I had no idea what the sirens meant. As a nineteen-year-old boy, raised in the mountains of Northern Utah, I could not imagine what the shrill wailing foretold. But the people of Perus knew. They knew what was coming, they knew it was pointless to resist, and they knew they had no time. The Policia Militar, the Brazilian Military Police, were coming to burn the favela.

We were not in the favela that day. A fellow missionary and I were working across the railroad tracks, on the hill above the Brazilian slum, in the legitimate part of Perus. Still, from our vantage point we saw everything. We saw the SUV’s tear around the last green hill and into view. They were big and white, with Policia Militar, glaring on their sides, in large black letters. Men with machine guns (machine guns!) hung out of their windows.

Most of the people scattered like roaches, fleeing toward the river or back into the town. Others did not run. They huddled in small groups, just waiting.

The police reached the edge of town, and swarmed across the open field, toward the slum. It didn’t take long. The groups of slanting shacks, huddled together like their frightened owners, fell easily into dead heaps and the police torched them. In explosions of blue sparks, the police cut the wires that piped stolen energy across the river. Like reapers at harvest, they cleared the ground.

The Policia did not chase the people who ran. They brandished machine guns but no one fired a shot. No reason to, the people did not resist. Why should they? They had, after all, so little to lose and the next favela would be exactly like this one.

A hot wind whipped across the burning field, lifting ashes across the river, and up into the rich neighborhood. We tasted the soot in the air. Flakes, like black snow, dusted the houses and smudged our white dress shirts. I was just a boy. An American teenager dropped as a missionary into one of the poorest places on earth. In the year and a half I’d spent in Brazil I’d learned the language, learned to talk and live with the people and, certainly, I’d grown to love them. Yet on that day, as I sat helpless on the curb, watching their houses burn, I was oblivious. I could not understand what had happened, much less why. I knew people who lived in the favela. I’d eaten with them, laughed with them, worshipped with them. Was I not one of them? Was this not my neighborhood burning?

As we sat on the curb in the drifting soot, my missionary companion and I, we were too afraid, too awestruck, to go down and cross the river. The sun set orange and red against the black smoke. Intense and focused, the sunset was a violent, beautiful sequel to the day’s burning destruction. We waited until the last SUV disappeared down the road. Then, in the coming darkness, we ran to the church house.

Lights shone in every window. Organ music, a slow gentle hymn, floated out into the darkness.

Maria was there. Her son and daughter-in-law were helping her husband Claudio up the steps. His heavy, swollen legs oozed an opaque mucus, a late stage of elephantiasis. Josette comforted her grandmother who slumped in a pew. Where was Luã, Josette’s little brother? Ah, he was playing in the hall with the twin girls, Aliane and Eliane. Where was their father? Not here. Ann rushed forward to help Claudio up the steps; none of the orphans were with her. Good. That meant the orphanage was safe. The fire hadn’t crossed the river.

Where was Rose Angela? Of course, she would come last. She would be the last to leave the favela, the last to retreat. Rose Angela would be counting all the children, helping all the elderly; she would be caring for the entire town. Soon her daughter Jakaline appeared out of the night cradling her little brother. Only eleven years old, Jakaline, carried her brother like a mother would. She walked as a woman would walk. She set Arnaldo down gently, calmly, her eyes glistened wet and heavy. “Mom told me to come here,” she said glancing backward into the night. “She’s still down in the Recanto.”

O Recanto dos Humildes, that’s what the locals called the favela. It means the “Refuge of the Humble,” not the only favela in the town, but the only one built on land with an owner whose political connections could have it cleared.

Only ten families in our congregation lost their homes in the fire, but everyone came down to the church house. As I expected, Rose Angela arrived last, her white smile shining out of her round face, smudged with dirt and ash.

I trembled with sadness, or anger, or perhaps fear, some intense emotion I was too young to be familiar with. Everyone else seemed calm, lounging about on the floor or in the pews, as if on their own porches. They talked, told stories, even laughed.

Until that night I thought I’d grown accustomed to life in the favela. I’d seen hardship, sickness, poverty, even death. I thought I understood life there. I thought I could share in anything they’d have to face. But I was from another world. Two places couldn’t be more different than Perus and Layton, Utah.

Rose Angela gathered the women together before the pulpit to sing, and as I looked from woman to woman, from face to face, I felt more like a foreigner than the day I stepped off the train.

Photo: View from above Perus. Edited by DBC www.connerstudio.blogspot.com

This morning

Ice shell on my car
Crystal in the morning light
Scrape, Scrape, time for school

Havasupai Review

And the Waters Receded;

Havasupai Indian Reservation a Year After the Flood

As I enter the canyon I feel like Dorothy leaving her cottage, crashed down in Oz. I leave the bland sepia-toned Arizona landscape and suddenly everything is in color.

The canyon walls are ribbons of dark red, pastel orange, and an almost royal purple. Deep green mosses cling to ledges where frozen springs hang like crystal. My trip will lead me ten miles into the gorgeous canyon to stunning vistas, tepid emerald pools beneath towering waterfalls, and down cliff faces beside roaring cascades.

During my three days on the Havasupai Reservation one thought followed me. “I almost didn’t come here.” If I’d listened to the people back home I wouldn’t have. I would have missed, not only the beauty of the canyon, but a chance to participate in the area’s rejuvenation and preservation. After my three days I was determined to spread the word about Havasupai, what it has to offer, and what can be done to save this treasure.

Until my trip to Havasupai in December of 2009, I hadn’t thought much of the desert. I grew up in the mountains of Wyoming. I worked as a trail guide in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. I’d spent several summers building trails and marking areas for re-vegetation. For me the mountains held all the magic the wilderness had to offer. The mountains were my home and, for me, there was no place like home.

I first heard of Havasupai in 2008. A friend, and fellow trail guide, had visited Havasupai that spring and, after his review, a few of us made reservations for October. In August, two months before our trip, disaster struck. A flash flood devastated the area. The village in the heart of the canyon had to be evacuated. There are no roads leading through the narrow canyon, so helicopters had to get the people out. Local news stations covered the catastrophe. Along with the concern for the people, the commentators lamented the loss of the canyon’s natural features.

“Navajo Falls is completely destroyed,” one reporter lamented. “Surely we’ve lost a natural treasure.”

“This will be devastating for the village’s tourism business.” “Will the landscape ever recover? Outdoor enthusiasts are doubtful.”

Outdoor enthusiasts were indeed doubtful. “I’ll never go back now, they say the landscapes totally changed,” “Yeah it’s trashed.” Even the friend who suggested Havasupai in the first place told me to “Forget it, stick to the mountains, at least for a while, it’ll take them years to rebuild.”

Our trip was canceled and Havasupai was closed for several months. It was summer before they began letting people back in. I headed back to Yellowstone. The reviews of Havasupai, post flood, were mixed at best. Most people found it shabby, especially compared to its former beauty.

I probably would have left it at that, mourned the loss of Havasupai along with everyone else, but for some reason I didn’t. Perhaps I was trying to defy the reports. Perhaps I love a lost cause and wanted to help. More likely, like a driver slowing down to see a mangled car wreck, I just wanted to see the devastation for myself. Whatever the reason, over Christmas vacation 2009, six of us left the mountains and drove off toward Arizona.

By the time we reached Flagstaff, I wanted to turn back. The brown desert stretched out endlessly around us. Light snow covered the barren landscape. It was far worse than Dorothy’s 1930’s Kansas. The 60-mile drive from Flagstaff to the cusp of the canyon was not encouraging either. The barren landscape seemed as endless as the gray sky. At last, we stepped out of the car onto snowy gravel. The smell of mules hung in the cold air. The mule drivers were friendly and directed us to the trailhead. From above, the canyon looked depressing, the same yellow-gray grass dusted with wet snow.

After fifteen minutes of steep switchbacks we reached what I’d thought was the canyon floor. From above, the canyon looks rounded and plain, but at the bottom the streambed cuts deeper. Like most of its beauty, Havasupai itself is hidden. We followed the dry streambed as it tunneled into the canyon floor.

Walls rose up around us; smooth, almost fluid, cliff faces and dramatic overhangs. The desert orange was contrasted against stripes of black, red, and purple. Young trees were growing out of the dusty gravel.

My mother was with us. She summited Survey Peak in the Teton Range and bush-whacked her way through Targhee National Forest. She always points out hidden beauties. In the canyon, she stopped often to show us how the floodwater carves terraces that trap dirt and eventually became small natural gardens, and how the trees’ twisted roots anchor them against the constant floods.

The eight-mile hike was easy. We were all strong hikers but we didn’t need to be. Except for the first switchbacks, the slope was gentle and the walls provided shade. Twice we heard the crunch and bustle of an oncoming mule train. The second time, as we stepped aside to let them pass, my sister waved to the drivers calling out, “The canyon is beautiful.” The driver nodded and replied, “This is only the beginning.”

Hurried along by this prospect, we reached the village just before dark. A small pack of loose dogs met us at the mouth of the canyon. The dogs were not mangy or sick looking but they didn’t seem to belong to anyone. They accompanied us through the town.

In the village we began to see the effects of the flood. I’ll admit this is where my spirits began to sink. More than a year afterward, you could still see the remnants of the devastation. Old tree stumps lay partially uprooted along the path, fences were still leaning crookedly, and some houses showed obvious signs of patching. The town had a small store, a post office, a church. I’ll admit that after the pristine beauty of the canyon, the village seemed out of place.

The next day we left the village and entered another broader canyon. I was unsure what to expect. The first part of the canyon had obviously survived the devastation but what about Havasupai’s famous waterfalls? Would we be disappointed?

We visited three waterfalls on our first day in the canyon. The first we came to is on the site where Navajo Falls stood before the flood. I’d seen pictures of the old falls and I was anxious to see what was left. I admit, at first, my heart sank to see it. The flood tore a great gash down the valley. The riverbank, once covered with groves of tall trees, collapsed. Mounds of dirt had been pushed aside to rebuild trails. An unfinished erosion barrier lined the riverbank. There were rolls of chain link fence. I squinted skeptically at my mother and sighed, “Looks like it’s still under construction.”

I’m not sure when my attitude began to change. I think it was that thought, “under construction,” that did it. As we walked, accompanied by a stray dog from the town, we called him Toto, I mulled the thought over in my mind. I began to realize the area was under construction. Before our eyes the landscape was being rebuilt. No wilderness is static, the flood did not destroy the natural beauty of the canyon. The flood is part of nature.

With this new attitude I began to explore the waterfall canyon. The scar that before, seemed ugly, became the quick slash of nature’s putty knife. As I looked closer at the rubble I could see colorful spirals, the ancient marks of tree roots. The mounds of dirt were filled with overlapping and twisting layers of sediment and tiny fossils from the riverbed. It was a geologist’s Wonderland.

Everywhere life was springing from the devastation. Already mosses were growing over displaced boulders and young grass clung to the new cliff face. New pools and estuaries glowed bright green against the dirt’s pastel orange. Navajo Falls was gone but in its place recent cascades tumbled over the freshly broken ledges, bringing life to earth that lay dormant for centuries. The whole scene was a symbol of hope and rebirth. The land was still tender and scarred, but Lazarus was already leaving the tomb.

I was impressed by New Navajo Falls but it was only the beginning. A mile or so further down the canyon, Havasu Falls took my breath away. The water spilled over a 100-foot drop into a jade pool. It was a cool day in December but the water was too inviting to pass up. We had to go swimming. To my surprise the water was warm, about seventy degrees, comparable to the Fire Hole River in Yellowstone. We swam and splashed, beneath the fall’s curtain. We ate lunch by the side of the pool. Except for Toto we were alone in our hidden paradise.

New Navajo Falls impressed me, and Havasu Falls left me breathless, but after another mile, Mooney Falls topped them both. Towering over two hundred feet, the crash of the torrent filled the canyon. From the crest we could see how repeated floods over the millennia have left their mark. Loose sediments solidified over time to form hanging stone curtains, stalactites, columns, and shallow caves. Young life surrounded the roaring cataract, spray fed mosses, hanging vines, as well as small storm twisted trees.

A trail, of sorts, led down the cliff face to the bottom of the falls. We worked our way down slowly. We had to crawl through tunnels and cling to chains. Spray covered us and the crash drowned out our laughter. Sound, and life, and color, were everywhere. I leaned back against the slippery rock face and breathed in the wet air. Without a doubt I’d fallen for the desert.

Havasupai is not the forest of Yellowstone, or the crags of the Tetons, or even the Havasupai it was two years ago, but Havasupai has its own beauty. It is beautiful because it is the desert, because it is constantly changing. It is beautiful because of the flood, not in spite of it.

I could have listened to my friends and missed Havasupai. I could even have visited Havasupai and still missed its magic. In order to see the beauty of Havasupai there are three things one must do.

First, adjust your expectations. Not lower them, by any means, but accept that Havasupai is what it is. Hiking in Havasupai is unlike hiking in the National Parks. Before Havasupai, I’d spent so much time in the heavily controlled and conserved Parks I had forgotten a few things about the wilderness. Now, I am not disparaging National Parks. I agree with Ken Burns they are “America’s best idea.” Still, like museums, they are heavily curated, held in suspense, almost artificially. Havasupai canyon is a raw living wilderness. People live there. People whose hands and mule trains have carved the canyon along with the floods. Some backpackers are disappointed to find a village at the end of an eight mile trek, but the people of Havasupai are a natural part of the landscape, as much as the wild goats, or waterfalls. Their dogs have become as native to the area as the wild foxes and grouse. The village, and the dogs, and the flood torn landscape are part of the natural beauty.

Second, do something to contribute. Practice no trace camping. The facilities make this easy. There is no need for bear bagging or cat hole digging. The campsites are clearly marked. Cleanup efforts have not cleared all the debris washed down canyon so bring a trash bag. Pick up your own garbage, and any other garbage you find. Any trash left in the campsites or village has to be carried out by mule so pack it out your self. The Tribe offers a $5 refund on fees if you take a sack of garbage out with you to the hilltop. You should pay all fees, don’t try to slip around them. Making a reservation can be tedious. The Tribe limits use and charges entrance and camping fees, but I promise that the reward is worth waiting your turn and paying your dues.

Third, walk slowly and look for the hidden beauty. Stop often in the canyon to examine closely the plants and rock formations. Think about how the plants must cling to the rocks during the monsoon season and then go for months without a single drink of water. Stop to dangle your feet in the warm stream. Feel the twisted patterns in the bark of an ancient tree. In the village, talk with the people. Visit the store. The village is not a break in the landscape it is part of the landscape. Oh, and send a postcard. It’s the only mail route in the U.S. to use a mule train, and each letter gets a special postmark. You should leave no trace on the land but your presence can help the Reservation, not to rebuild, but to build anew.

Three days went by quickly. Toto followed us back up the canyon. The vivid colors faded and, after the last push up the switchbacks, we were standing in the gravel parking lot. A mule train was just getting ready to head down the canyon. The driver asked how we liked our trip. When we told him how much we enjoyed hiking in the canyon, swimming in the falls, and visiting the village, he smiled and said, “Good, then tell a friend.”

Well friend here I am. Go to Havasupai. Don’t miss this chance to enjoy it, to see its raw authentic form, and contribute to the preservation of this Natural Treasure.

Her Twilight Years; Tales of a Granny Vampire - Part 1

A Gift from Grandma

Margery Stellworth sat alone, in a sagging yellow armchair, in her dark living room. It was Sunday and she was expecting her grandson. She had been waiting all morning but he hadn’t come. She sipped absentmindedly at her mug of blood. The Mug was a gift, which read “world greatest grandma,” on the side. The blood was cow blood from the butcher shop, sour and unfulfilling. But the nights had been too cold to go out hunting lately, the chill air made her hip ache. She’d thought of setting a trap for the postman. But she rarely got letters and besides she knew the postman, Mable Jenkins boy. She couldn’t bite him. At this thought she laughed dryly to herself. She really was a pathetic Vampire.

Those hoodlum vampires who’d turned her must have thought it was terribly funny. An old Lady vampire, hilarious. She was just one of their frat-boy jokes, a prank to impress their girlfriends. Well, they got what was coming to them. She’d heard through one of her few demonic acquaintances, that they’d been caught by the vampire hunters. Staked through the heart, all of them, well it served them right. The young vampires these days are all too showy. It was the whole Twilight, teenage vampire craze on T.V. It made the whole thing look romantic. Perhaps it was romantic, for them, but for her it meant an eternity of hip pains, rheumatoid arthritis and cow blood mixed with Metamucil. It meant she had to meet her grandson in the dark living room with the curtains drawn. He’d often ask her to take a walk in the park and she’d have to make some excuse about back pain and convince him that she preferred to stay indoors.

In the months directly after her infection she’d considered turning someone else, a companion. Darla from down the street, her grandkids never came by. She’d thought they could move in together, try out new recipes, make this cow blood tolerable, but no she couldn’t do that to Darla. She’d considered Jenkins, from the bingo hall, he wasn’t so bad looking and he’d flirted with her a couple of times. But in the end she’d given up on him too. She just couldn’t condemn another person to eternal membership in the AARP. In the two years of vampirism she’d only killed seven people and she hadn’t turned anyone.

There was a knock at the door.

“It’s open Billy,” she called and heard her grandson push through the screen door. With her heightened sense of smell she could tell he’d brought flowers, daisies, her favorite.

“I’m in the parlor dear,” she said.

He went to the kitchen for a vase then brought the flowers in and set them on the coffee table.

“They’re lovely,” she smiled.

“We’ll they’d look better in the light,” he said, “are you sure we can’t open the curtains.”

“No, the doctor says it’ll just aggravate my skin condition you understand.”

Billy nodded and sat down. He looked sadder than normal. Though in general he’d always been a melancholy boy, bright but unfocused. He was a senior at the community college and he didn’t have a girlfriend. His mother suspected it was because he was, you know, that way. In life the thought of a gay grandson would have horrified her, but now that she was technically the spawn of Satan, it seemed hypocritical. Pity though, he was such a handsome boy.

Yes, she thought as he sat on the sofa telling her the latest news from the family, he was very handsome. He must be going to the gym or playing tennis or something. His shoulders were broader than before and his arms thicker. Yes, she could see the veins, well defined, on his forearms.

“I just feel like I’m getting old,” he said and she looked up. She’d been distracted by the veins and hadn’t heard what he’d said.

“What was that deary?”

“I just mean, I’m twenty eight and I’m barely graduating college, and who’s going to hire a Political Science Major? I’ll have three more years of graduate school at least. If I can even get in, I’ll be thirty one before I graduate and I can’t keep living at home…”

Billy stopped. His grandma wasn’t listening to him. She was staring blankly at his right arm. For a moment he was alarmed. Maybe she’d had a stroke.

“Grandma?” he asked

“Yes dear,” she shook her head and looked up at him.

“I was saying,” he went on slowly, that I think I’m getting too old to be going to school and living at home,”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I suppose you are.”

They sat quietly for a moment. It was such a pity. He was right, soon he would be old and he’d have wasted his youth, not only that but when he did graduate, if he did go away to school who would visit her on Sunday afternoons, but I guess they can’t stay children forev… she stopped mid-thought, why had she not thought of this before.

“Billy,” she said slowly, “don’t be afraid of growing old.”

“I know, I just…”

“Here hand me my dentures dear,” she said pointing to a pink plastic case on the table. He handed it to her. She turned away as she slid them in, so he wouldn’t notice her new, “enhanced,” set.

Her fangs in place she softly said, “Come here and let me give you a hug, for the flowers.”

He smiled and stood up, stepping toward her and bending down.

With a jerk she pulled him off his feet and into the chair. He jerked back but she held him.

“Don’t struggle dear, it’s just a gift from grandma,” and she sunk her teeth into his young warm throat.

Notes from English 6410; Teaching World Literature (in haiku)

Notes from English 6410; Teaching World Literature

(in haiku)

Here’s a few Haiku

Just a midterm assignment

Yes I’m cynical

A quick blue scribble

A simple Haiku assigned

Is this real home-work

Are you crocheting

Teachers make the worst students

Is that your cell phone

Leaves, stream, trees and stuff

A Haiku about nature

Is that what you want

Abortion and death

A woman suppressed by man

A Modern Haiku

Realism in vogue

Real people prefer Potter

What now NPR

With modern Haiku

We've a nation of poets

Every text message