*

The Bay of 'Akka' and Mount Carmel in Israel are physically very similar to the Monterey Bay and peninsula.




*

El Cortito

*



I ran across the short-handled hoe (the hated El Cortito) that I had found next to a lettuce field in Salinas right about the time they were banned for commercial agricultural use in the mid-seventies. I'll bet some farmworker had thrown it as far out of his life as he could.

The picture is from here.


*

*

What smiling eyes!






*

*



This scene from the movie Stand By Me was very similar to one of my own experiences when I was seven years old. We were living as a family in Atlanta, and one day two of my brothers and a friend went for a hike. We happened upon a railroad trestle approximately the same size as the one in the movie--the only difference was that there were two rail lines.

No sooner had we made it to the middle of the span, we heard a train approaching. I remember we all started yelling, and then scrambling to the side opposite the train. I latched on to the structure with all the strength of a seven year old and looked down between the ties to the creek forty or fifty feet below. The shaking, the noise, and the sight of the wide-eyed engineer shaking a fist at us made an indelible impression on me.

*

*



*

O SON OF DUST! The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing, even as the cup-bearer, who proffereth not his cup till he findeth a seeker, and the lover who crieth not out from the depths of his heart until he gazeth upon the beauty of his beloved. Wherefore sow the seeds of wisdom and knowledge in the pure soil of the heart, and keep them hidden, till the hyacinths of divine wisdom spring from the heart and not from mire and clay.

--Baha'u'llah, The Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah

*



*

*

Tug likes to bite off pieces of cardboard and spit them out.



*

*

A speedo from a Heritage Softail. They got it right.




*

*



*

Today I regretted not saying yes to the Marine sitting behind the desk in the Oakland Processing Center who had asked me, a young newlywed man who had just been drafted, if I wanted to be a Marine. As a Baha'i, I was classified Non-Combatant, and as such I would surely have been trained as a corpsman and sent to the maelstrom in Vietnam. Would that I could have served valiantly, and given the fullest measure.

*

Cement Plant Road, Santa Cruz County.


*



*

*



*