Postdated: Seattle.

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"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
—John Steinbeck


It's the homeless and the handicapped that have showed us the most kindness, which makes me think that once you having nothing but your life to lose you realize the value of simple benevolence. I saw an angel in a wheelchair, overweight and smoking a cigarette. She sang us three choruses of "Spirit In My Soul" and cursed the depression that kept her from singing more. Her song still sounds clearly all around me.


Folklife:
The flutes trilled and the oboes bellowed across the sea of men smoking their medicine in long whittled pipes. Six women in colorful dresses unclasped their fiddle cases, untucked their instruments and bows from soft velvet wrappings, tuned and harmonized with the established musicians, increasing the volume against the shaky canyon walls. A drummer boy walked between groups of men passing their pipes around a circle. Everyone there was warped with poverty; faced wrinkled and hands intuitively groping about for spare crumbs or change. Not a word was spoken while the music played. Between songs, however, jokes were told and laughter erupted throughout, moving from group to group like some holiday creature. There were bicycles scattered throughout the camp, most belonging to the sons of craftsmen, hammered together with feeble wheels that wobbled as they rode down the hills that led up to the horizon. Most of the day was draped in shadow, but during the few long hours when sunlight broke into the canyon valley men huddled under the sparse trees that drooped down around them. It was during these hours that men pulled their bottles from the stream, their porter cooling in the current. And with all this going on around me, I could only wonder at the incredible invention of the bicycle.


—Benjamin.

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