My Delivery -- adventures in an old notebook
Copyright, Terry Turner, 2009
Several years ago an unusual fellow, a recluse of sorts, who lives back off the Canon Road came to call with a small painting to sell, as he occasionally had done before. The Canon road is an eastward extension of Kit Carson and runs from Taos and on up to Angel Fire and is also the Taos route to Eagle Nest. An amazing assortment of clever, creative folk live up in the Canon; but then an amazing number of clever creative people live all over Taos and New Mexico in general.
This fellow, Phineas, came by our gallery, the old Field’s Gallery on Kit Carson, to drop off one his rarely produced paintings --- a primitive as they say, a piece of one by sixteen inch pine on which he had carved a red bird about to eat a small red apple --- very primitive and very powerful, almost archetypal. The artist, writer, philosopher, recluse, Phineas T. Strongtoe, was stopping by also to give me a small stack of notebooks, the scholastic sort which comes with blank lined papers bound in a cardboard cover, “Someone will call for these in a day or two, just hand it to her will you?” I said I would hand them over when asked for. That was in the fall of 1999. I tucked notebooks away in my desk and time continued, as usual, to go by.
Suzi and I personally collected most of his work but one day I had the bird piece on display and sold it on a whim. Who knows why? I always wished that I had not sold it. At least I sold it to a nice lady; a resident of Taos, who seemed to appreciate the work and whose name, regretfully, at the moment I do not recall.
Lots more time went by and I did not think of Phineas or the notebooks.
Then in the summer of 2001 there were some forest fires in the Taos area, worrisome fires; even worse fires came in 2002, and in 2003 came what was generally called the Great Encebado Fire. It was a huge tree eating fire and it burning a little over a couple of miles from our gallery door. We were advised to be ready to evacuate at once --- you’ve no idea how that order feels when you are looking at a million dollars worth of art with no labor or transport available to move it. Most people who could leave the zone had already done so. The smoke settled over the town and Suzi and I were trying to breathe by using fans to blow air laden with smoke particles through wet sheets that we hoped would be a sort of air filter. It was dicey to say the least. During the last smoke filled week, with a thousand fire fighters that were still unable to beat the Encebado fire back, Suzi and I were overcome with a sort of wistfulness for the clean air and snows of Colorado. The exhausted fighters eventually, courageously prevailed but not without an incredible effort.
Which brings us back to Strongtoe’s notebooks; years had gone by and no one had called for the notebooks and Strongtoe had not returned to sell us any of his primitive artwork. Further, I had been unable to make any contact with the person Strongtoe had mentioned; one Sunday we drove down to Santa Fe only to get reports that person had gone, we were told, to the island of Bimini as part of a search team looking for a long lost treasure.
I passed the Strongtoe notebooks from my desk to my important papers file and they moved with us, in due course, to Colorado and here and there, thereafter. No word of Strongtoe, no word of any sort ever came.
At last I determined to do what I think is reasonable. I am publishing a passage, a few pages, from one notebook to “signal” Phineas and the other person that I still have these and that I can be contacted.
Have I read the notebooks? After more than a decade, what do you think? I have read every fascinating word.
Here then, is what I think of as the delivery from the journals of ever elusive Phineas Strongtoe. Here then are the words of Strongtoe in a passage titled, The Mechanical Grandmother and Other Tales
In dreaming deep, I found myself traveling in company with an awesome Angel who cradled the eyeless corpse of ethics as we searched for the Forbidden Key which, hopefully, might restore it to life.
Sometimes walking, sometimes flying, we went down an endless trail of lifeless schools and churches, churches and schools long dead, yet peopled to overflowing. Filled with crowds who sought the Word of God but instead were taught a litany hate hymns by the songs of hollow eyed teaches, hollow word preachers, deaf rabbis, and shadowy priests and professors whose reason flowed from agendas with no reference to science or reason. A gaggle of leaders and teachers who masturbated public guilt cubes and were trapped in huge glass bottles; bottles corked and red wax sealed with history that had long since forgotten how to smile having been many times rewritten to suit the passing treason. Passing those ghostly rows of churches and schools, busily recording what they lied, amazed, I watched, I witnessed, and I saw that they grew and expanded even though they had long since died.
On we went. Plunging through the darkness until at last we came upon a sea, oily black, whereon floated murky barques of misty pharaohs waiting, waiting for a czar. With smoky breath dripping perdition, my foul Angel said those pharaohs waited in vain because the czar remained beneath a great pyramid, fearful of the god gating prophet murderers who had captured Love and raped her to sire a new and terrible religion.
Throughout that infected sea and all around its shores stood cat-eyed high priests who shouted orders at a master mummy, a pharaoh monster that plunged through the reeds and struggled over the whispering sands in pursuit of the wife of Atlantis, she who built the great pyramids of the world in a single day with eleven little songs.
At length we passed out of that dreadful oily place and thence across the towering mountains of Detroit. There we dined with diamond and chrome sprayed death skulls. While we sparing ate, the huge skulls raced madly round the larded table and pleaded with us to kiss their lumbering creations and cozy coffins. Near at hand, sparkling by the light of a smoky sun, the Master Skull hosted whole squads of little flower girls in white and gave them pretty gifts of tiny cancer pills while he directed them away on paths towards frigidity and fear; all while the Master Skull hummed, “Adroit, Adroit, Adroit.” Leaving, at last, that gruesome hall, climbing over piles of cash and loot, we went out of their plastic and steel forest and, tiredly, continued on our way.
Trudging through thick sunlight we went on and on ‘til we came along the rims of Chicago’s mighty stone canyons, where, hardly glancing down into that shadowy world, we could see lumbering dinosaurs that ate the earth at a fearful rate. Queer they seemed, their gigantic jaws sucking up the planet while their feet were hardly troubled by the herds of innocent dreams which they trampled underfoot.
Passing strange it was to watch the crowded skies overhead and thereabout, skies filled with militarized eagles, and propaganda robots, all made by an electronic giant. These incredible machines combined to hurl wars, weather, czars, and kingdoms round the planet like so much confetti.
A long night later we came to another, darker place where a demonic Scorpion held the way, a watering hole of white houses, statues, and a people whose suckling habits had made of them ghoulish vampires; they preferred not blood and life so much as liberty and death. Its golden tail arched into the sky and seemed to obscure the very stars; that Goliath-like stinger could strike almost any place on the planet with out cause or warning. Despair dripped from its venomous stinger and the monster thing laughed with rogue gods which had been released from deep pits dug by the great old universities. Those gods had long since eaten nations entire, those gods kept score on loveless white sheets and even though each tally exceeded all other tallies, no tally sufficed except that they screamed in unison, “More! More! More!”
Overall, uberalles, the scorpion waved giant shark teeth filled pincers. In the left it held crushed and bloody Hope; in the right pincer squirmed the headless body of dying Truth. When the Scorpion opened its cancerous mouth, we saw its bloody lips infected with the putrid forms of crushed morals and rotted ethics, and worse, worse, worse, it chilled my soul to see the bleached bones of faulted orgasms lying there in countless millions. In the midst of that horrible scene sat pseudo religion singing Dark Age harmony along with omnipotent government. Between their happy harmonics, sung by the light of cadres of burning poets, it made me vomit to see how those two whored on the chained body of Education. I forced myself to look upon her and I saw the spittle oozing from her cracked lips, the bloody milk that dripped from her shredded breasts and fell like tears raining upon her wasted wormy womb. Maggots, thoughtless millions, fed upon her wounds and then took their leave bearing the ignorance with which they came. My ghastly Angel pulled me away from that scene and we continued.
Beyond, beyond we went, the ghastly Angel ever beckoning, rotting garments falling from its wretched body, always urging me on as we searched for the forbidden key. At last we came upon a swamp wherein the trees, dead and bleached bone white, reached hundreds of feet into the leaden lifeless sky. The still waters of that land rotted and the watery surface reflected nothing, nothing at all. Each and every bone white tree was topped by a timeless cross. Each cross bore the stapled body of a mutilated truth. To each little truth was sewn a silken banner, royal purple with a shimmering edge of golden thread. The banners emblazoned in identical legal grimaces, a sort of Latin, that decreed, “Don’t read, Don’t touch; don’t stand, don’t stop, don’t think.”
Deeper and deeper we plunged into that swamp ‘til the murky waters gave way to a foggy lies that chilled our limbs and obscured our way. Finally, we came upon an island constructed of the deaths of past and future heroes. Round and round its crumbling edge marched what passed for parents, parents without number, marching round and round. Half, at least were blind and the others would not see. They sang and chatted gaily as they marched. Periodically, en masse, they rushed into the swamp and seized rusting and defective mechanical grandmothers that the parents used, club like, to beat their own hapless offspring in lifeless submission which, thereby, assured a successful transmission of future mindlessness and servitude.
In the center of that mad island was a giant sarcophagus crafted of perished traditions, stone legislated customs, and gold. The sarcophagus bore a burnished plate inscribed, “Here lays the body of the Word of God.” Where the date should been there spun a comic clock which I little understood, but it was plain that the death of the Word had occurred and was occurring at every minute of every hour that had ever been. Beside that tomb stood the rotting body of a Prophet who could not die and looked ghostly, ghostly like old Wilhem Reich, “Here,” said he, “here lies the Word, here lies the Truth, they don’t want you to touch it, don’t touch it, don’t ever touch it.” In his hand lay a great key.
My ghastly Angel took the great key from the Prophet’s rotting hand, the key to access the monolithic sarcophagus, and as we moved away, the Prophet winced with pain as a peculiar creature pinched little chunks of flesh from his rotting body and stuffed the rotted meat into its fourowuncee mouth, “I got mine, I got mine,” it sang with glee, “I got mine, I got mine.”
While the creature worked to consume the substance of the Prophet, my fearsome Angel and I mounted to the lid of the sarcophagus and there, rising on steps constructed of the compressed and living bodies of Saints who screamed in torment as their minds and souls were being processed into a sort of sugary jell by a college of academicians and politicians. From that squirming mass, glass encased, came a mournful wail and it seemed to me a chant, “Let them touch it, let them read, let them think, let them touch it.” Painfully we advanced over those horrid twenty two steps, the Angel and I, until we arrived at the top and struggled to open the entry way which was blocked entirely by tortured bears whipped by half gurus and empty journalists. My Angel cast them down and they fell arguing among heaps of cash registers and curiously attractive rocks and other toys while the bears raced to escape the island. Using the Prophet’s great key, we unlocked the entry.
Where those poor bears had danced, there at once appeared seven beautiful globes of shimmering light and by their light, at last, we saw within the entry, a simple iron key, the forbidden key. We used it to open a hidden passage, and thus entered the sarcophagus. Looking in, it seemed a cellar, and deep it was, and dark. Carefully we wended the narrow steps moving ever towards a distant light. An hour or more, we wandered down, though some might count that hour a lifetime, and at last we passed from darkness into a sunny room.
In the center that room sat a giant of man with a soft curly beard and a merry laugh that bounded back like a sort of happy thunder from the very walls of the room. Most notable of all, deep behind each startling blue eye flashed sudden rays of light that seemed to touch and measure us. Each glance a complete assessment it seemed to us. We laughed to see cuddled all about the place jolly babies, lots and lots of laughing babies who sat on his lap and played in his beard. That giant, rather like an over sized Santa Claus, played on with the babies and we felt powerful energies emanating from them, like damped atomic fires. I was thunderstruck to see, coming to life, as though never dead, the corpse of Ethics, which the Angel had carried this long, long time and distance.
And the giant, without ceasing, spoke to the babies, continuously, saying to each and every one, to each individually and to all collectively, “Read, touch, reflect, reason, evaluate, think. Be free in your mind.”
At last the giant took note of us and reaching out he pluck a large stone from the wall of that chamber and, using his finger for a stylus, he wrote a message on the stone and then tossed it to us. The Angel caught the stone and we retired to the stairway and went wending our way to the top. When at last we had climbed the well and locked again the secret entry to the sarcophagus, the Angel drew me to the light of the seven globes and motioned for me to read the words graven in the stone.
Simple it was but it chilled me deep, for it read, “Teach not babies to forget that which they knew by nature long before they knew you or education.” And though I only read it, in my mind I heard those words like a distant angry thunder and I wondered, how long can men and women thrive and prosper in willful resistance to God?
There was date at the bottom of the message, it read, Jan 12, 1976, 1900 hours (7 P.M.) with the initials PTS just above the date.
There were some editorial marks and some word corrections which had been put here and there by Strongtoe, but they were illegible in the main. I have not, in this text, made any reference to them.
So this is, so to speak, my attempted delivery. Perhaps the reader is the recipient upon whom I yet wait.
Even as I prepare to post this, I can almost hear someone ask, more or less, “What does it mean?” To which I must now reply, in advance, “I don’t know. Does it mean something? Perhaps it means nothing. A dreamer’s dream of a dream. Please don’t ask me. If it has no meaning for you, I can give it no meaning for you.”
Copyright, Terry Turner, 2009
Several years ago an unusual fellow, a recluse of sorts, who lives back off the Canon Road came to call with a small painting to sell, as he occasionally had done before. The Canon road is an eastward extension of Kit Carson and runs from Taos and on up to Angel Fire and is also the Taos route to Eagle Nest. An amazing assortment of clever, creative folk live up in the Canon; but then an amazing number of clever creative people live all over Taos and New Mexico in general.
This fellow, Phineas, came by our gallery, the old Field’s Gallery on Kit Carson, to drop off one his rarely produced paintings --- a primitive as they say, a piece of one by sixteen inch pine on which he had carved a red bird about to eat a small red apple --- very primitive and very powerful, almost archetypal. The artist, writer, philosopher, recluse, Phineas T. Strongtoe, was stopping by also to give me a small stack of notebooks, the scholastic sort which comes with blank lined papers bound in a cardboard cover, “Someone will call for these in a day or two, just hand it to her will you?” I said I would hand them over when asked for. That was in the fall of 1999. I tucked notebooks away in my desk and time continued, as usual, to go by.
Suzi and I personally collected most of his work but one day I had the bird piece on display and sold it on a whim. Who knows why? I always wished that I had not sold it. At least I sold it to a nice lady; a resident of Taos, who seemed to appreciate the work and whose name, regretfully, at the moment I do not recall.
Lots more time went by and I did not think of Phineas or the notebooks.
Then in the summer of 2001 there were some forest fires in the Taos area, worrisome fires; even worse fires came in 2002, and in 2003 came what was generally called the Great Encebado Fire. It was a huge tree eating fire and it burning a little over a couple of miles from our gallery door. We were advised to be ready to evacuate at once --- you’ve no idea how that order feels when you are looking at a million dollars worth of art with no labor or transport available to move it. Most people who could leave the zone had already done so. The smoke settled over the town and Suzi and I were trying to breathe by using fans to blow air laden with smoke particles through wet sheets that we hoped would be a sort of air filter. It was dicey to say the least. During the last smoke filled week, with a thousand fire fighters that were still unable to beat the Encebado fire back, Suzi and I were overcome with a sort of wistfulness for the clean air and snows of Colorado. The exhausted fighters eventually, courageously prevailed but not without an incredible effort.
Which brings us back to Strongtoe’s notebooks; years had gone by and no one had called for the notebooks and Strongtoe had not returned to sell us any of his primitive artwork. Further, I had been unable to make any contact with the person Strongtoe had mentioned; one Sunday we drove down to Santa Fe only to get reports that person had gone, we were told, to the island of Bimini as part of a search team looking for a long lost treasure.
I passed the Strongtoe notebooks from my desk to my important papers file and they moved with us, in due course, to Colorado and here and there, thereafter. No word of Strongtoe, no word of any sort ever came.
At last I determined to do what I think is reasonable. I am publishing a passage, a few pages, from one notebook to “signal” Phineas and the other person that I still have these and that I can be contacted.
Have I read the notebooks? After more than a decade, what do you think? I have read every fascinating word.
Here then, is what I think of as the delivery from the journals of ever elusive Phineas Strongtoe. Here then are the words of Strongtoe in a passage titled, The Mechanical Grandmother and Other Tales
In dreaming deep, I found myself traveling in company with an awesome Angel who cradled the eyeless corpse of ethics as we searched for the Forbidden Key which, hopefully, might restore it to life.
Sometimes walking, sometimes flying, we went down an endless trail of lifeless schools and churches, churches and schools long dead, yet peopled to overflowing. Filled with crowds who sought the Word of God but instead were taught a litany hate hymns by the songs of hollow eyed teaches, hollow word preachers, deaf rabbis, and shadowy priests and professors whose reason flowed from agendas with no reference to science or reason. A gaggle of leaders and teachers who masturbated public guilt cubes and were trapped in huge glass bottles; bottles corked and red wax sealed with history that had long since forgotten how to smile having been many times rewritten to suit the passing treason. Passing those ghostly rows of churches and schools, busily recording what they lied, amazed, I watched, I witnessed, and I saw that they grew and expanded even though they had long since died.
On we went. Plunging through the darkness until at last we came upon a sea, oily black, whereon floated murky barques of misty pharaohs waiting, waiting for a czar. With smoky breath dripping perdition, my foul Angel said those pharaohs waited in vain because the czar remained beneath a great pyramid, fearful of the god gating prophet murderers who had captured Love and raped her to sire a new and terrible religion.
Throughout that infected sea and all around its shores stood cat-eyed high priests who shouted orders at a master mummy, a pharaoh monster that plunged through the reeds and struggled over the whispering sands in pursuit of the wife of Atlantis, she who built the great pyramids of the world in a single day with eleven little songs.
At length we passed out of that dreadful oily place and thence across the towering mountains of Detroit. There we dined with diamond and chrome sprayed death skulls. While we sparing ate, the huge skulls raced madly round the larded table and pleaded with us to kiss their lumbering creations and cozy coffins. Near at hand, sparkling by the light of a smoky sun, the Master Skull hosted whole squads of little flower girls in white and gave them pretty gifts of tiny cancer pills while he directed them away on paths towards frigidity and fear; all while the Master Skull hummed, “Adroit, Adroit, Adroit.” Leaving, at last, that gruesome hall, climbing over piles of cash and loot, we went out of their plastic and steel forest and, tiredly, continued on our way.
Trudging through thick sunlight we went on and on ‘til we came along the rims of Chicago’s mighty stone canyons, where, hardly glancing down into that shadowy world, we could see lumbering dinosaurs that ate the earth at a fearful rate. Queer they seemed, their gigantic jaws sucking up the planet while their feet were hardly troubled by the herds of innocent dreams which they trampled underfoot.
Passing strange it was to watch the crowded skies overhead and thereabout, skies filled with militarized eagles, and propaganda robots, all made by an electronic giant. These incredible machines combined to hurl wars, weather, czars, and kingdoms round the planet like so much confetti.
A long night later we came to another, darker place where a demonic Scorpion held the way, a watering hole of white houses, statues, and a people whose suckling habits had made of them ghoulish vampires; they preferred not blood and life so much as liberty and death. Its golden tail arched into the sky and seemed to obscure the very stars; that Goliath-like stinger could strike almost any place on the planet with out cause or warning. Despair dripped from its venomous stinger and the monster thing laughed with rogue gods which had been released from deep pits dug by the great old universities. Those gods had long since eaten nations entire, those gods kept score on loveless white sheets and even though each tally exceeded all other tallies, no tally sufficed except that they screamed in unison, “More! More! More!”
Overall, uberalles, the scorpion waved giant shark teeth filled pincers. In the left it held crushed and bloody Hope; in the right pincer squirmed the headless body of dying Truth. When the Scorpion opened its cancerous mouth, we saw its bloody lips infected with the putrid forms of crushed morals and rotted ethics, and worse, worse, worse, it chilled my soul to see the bleached bones of faulted orgasms lying there in countless millions. In the midst of that horrible scene sat pseudo religion singing Dark Age harmony along with omnipotent government. Between their happy harmonics, sung by the light of cadres of burning poets, it made me vomit to see how those two whored on the chained body of Education. I forced myself to look upon her and I saw the spittle oozing from her cracked lips, the bloody milk that dripped from her shredded breasts and fell like tears raining upon her wasted wormy womb. Maggots, thoughtless millions, fed upon her wounds and then took their leave bearing the ignorance with which they came. My ghastly Angel pulled me away from that scene and we continued.
Beyond, beyond we went, the ghastly Angel ever beckoning, rotting garments falling from its wretched body, always urging me on as we searched for the forbidden key. At last we came upon a swamp wherein the trees, dead and bleached bone white, reached hundreds of feet into the leaden lifeless sky. The still waters of that land rotted and the watery surface reflected nothing, nothing at all. Each and every bone white tree was topped by a timeless cross. Each cross bore the stapled body of a mutilated truth. To each little truth was sewn a silken banner, royal purple with a shimmering edge of golden thread. The banners emblazoned in identical legal grimaces, a sort of Latin, that decreed, “Don’t read, Don’t touch; don’t stand, don’t stop, don’t think.”
Deeper and deeper we plunged into that swamp ‘til the murky waters gave way to a foggy lies that chilled our limbs and obscured our way. Finally, we came upon an island constructed of the deaths of past and future heroes. Round and round its crumbling edge marched what passed for parents, parents without number, marching round and round. Half, at least were blind and the others would not see. They sang and chatted gaily as they marched. Periodically, en masse, they rushed into the swamp and seized rusting and defective mechanical grandmothers that the parents used, club like, to beat their own hapless offspring in lifeless submission which, thereby, assured a successful transmission of future mindlessness and servitude.
In the center of that mad island was a giant sarcophagus crafted of perished traditions, stone legislated customs, and gold. The sarcophagus bore a burnished plate inscribed, “Here lays the body of the Word of God.” Where the date should been there spun a comic clock which I little understood, but it was plain that the death of the Word had occurred and was occurring at every minute of every hour that had ever been. Beside that tomb stood the rotting body of a Prophet who could not die and looked ghostly, ghostly like old Wilhem Reich, “Here,” said he, “here lies the Word, here lies the Truth, they don’t want you to touch it, don’t touch it, don’t ever touch it.” In his hand lay a great key.
My ghastly Angel took the great key from the Prophet’s rotting hand, the key to access the monolithic sarcophagus, and as we moved away, the Prophet winced with pain as a peculiar creature pinched little chunks of flesh from his rotting body and stuffed the rotted meat into its fourowuncee mouth, “I got mine, I got mine,” it sang with glee, “I got mine, I got mine.”
While the creature worked to consume the substance of the Prophet, my fearsome Angel and I mounted to the lid of the sarcophagus and there, rising on steps constructed of the compressed and living bodies of Saints who screamed in torment as their minds and souls were being processed into a sort of sugary jell by a college of academicians and politicians. From that squirming mass, glass encased, came a mournful wail and it seemed to me a chant, “Let them touch it, let them read, let them think, let them touch it.” Painfully we advanced over those horrid twenty two steps, the Angel and I, until we arrived at the top and struggled to open the entry way which was blocked entirely by tortured bears whipped by half gurus and empty journalists. My Angel cast them down and they fell arguing among heaps of cash registers and curiously attractive rocks and other toys while the bears raced to escape the island. Using the Prophet’s great key, we unlocked the entry.
Where those poor bears had danced, there at once appeared seven beautiful globes of shimmering light and by their light, at last, we saw within the entry, a simple iron key, the forbidden key. We used it to open a hidden passage, and thus entered the sarcophagus. Looking in, it seemed a cellar, and deep it was, and dark. Carefully we wended the narrow steps moving ever towards a distant light. An hour or more, we wandered down, though some might count that hour a lifetime, and at last we passed from darkness into a sunny room.
In the center that room sat a giant of man with a soft curly beard and a merry laugh that bounded back like a sort of happy thunder from the very walls of the room. Most notable of all, deep behind each startling blue eye flashed sudden rays of light that seemed to touch and measure us. Each glance a complete assessment it seemed to us. We laughed to see cuddled all about the place jolly babies, lots and lots of laughing babies who sat on his lap and played in his beard. That giant, rather like an over sized Santa Claus, played on with the babies and we felt powerful energies emanating from them, like damped atomic fires. I was thunderstruck to see, coming to life, as though never dead, the corpse of Ethics, which the Angel had carried this long, long time and distance.
And the giant, without ceasing, spoke to the babies, continuously, saying to each and every one, to each individually and to all collectively, “Read, touch, reflect, reason, evaluate, think. Be free in your mind.”
At last the giant took note of us and reaching out he pluck a large stone from the wall of that chamber and, using his finger for a stylus, he wrote a message on the stone and then tossed it to us. The Angel caught the stone and we retired to the stairway and went wending our way to the top. When at last we had climbed the well and locked again the secret entry to the sarcophagus, the Angel drew me to the light of the seven globes and motioned for me to read the words graven in the stone.
Simple it was but it chilled me deep, for it read, “Teach not babies to forget that which they knew by nature long before they knew you or education.” And though I only read it, in my mind I heard those words like a distant angry thunder and I wondered, how long can men and women thrive and prosper in willful resistance to God?
There was date at the bottom of the message, it read, Jan 12, 1976, 1900 hours (7 P.M.) with the initials PTS just above the date.
There were some editorial marks and some word corrections which had been put here and there by Strongtoe, but they were illegible in the main. I have not, in this text, made any reference to them.
So this is, so to speak, my attempted delivery. Perhaps the reader is the recipient upon whom I yet wait.
Even as I prepare to post this, I can almost hear someone ask, more or less, “What does it mean?” To which I must now reply, in advance, “I don’t know. Does it mean something? Perhaps it means nothing. A dreamer’s dream of a dream. Please don’t ask me. If it has no meaning for you, I can give it no meaning for you.”
Photo Credit: The photo is of Clair, our clairvoyant hippo, a true glass flower aficionado. Clair was a gift from my sister to Suzi. The hippo is at home in our collection of blown glass roses.
Photo by Suzi with an old Minolta Dimage X.
