Bookshelf – Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2)

This is a short observation about reading vs. listening:

When I first read “Between the World and Me” three years ago (a bit late to the game), its unblinking directness astounded me and my truculent ignorance ashamed me. I wrote:

“There are sounds in life so distinct and universal they cannot be mistaken for anything else – the tumble and hiss of heavy surf onto sand, the guttural reverb of distant thunder, the ominous hustle of night winds through tall trees.

“To these voices of the world I would add that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who speaks through the pages of this epistolary essay about blackness and whiteness in America with such honesty and authenticity that from now on I will measure the veracity of all other literary voices against his.”

Just the other day, I listened to Coates’s narration of the book and found it to be even more profound. His voice, eloquent, educated, but still inflected by the streets of West Baltimore, amplifies the wisdom, truth and necessity of his written words. Heard aloud, their poetry flourishes even further, as does their urgency.

If you have not read Between the World and Me, I urge you to do so. If you have read it, I suggest you also listen to it.

(Original review)

Bookshelf – The Trees

Finally, a way to never be disappointed by yet another so-so book: Only read what Percival Everett writes.

A few weeks ago, I gushed over “James,” Everett’s current reimagining of “The Tales of Huckleberry Finn,” this time told from the perspective of Jim, the slave. Seeing my comments in an online book group, someone suggested that “The Trees” was equally terrific.

And it is.

“The Trees” also uses history as a fulcrum, in this case the 1955 murder in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was tortured, shot and lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. Till was one of more than 4,000 Black victims of lynching and other documented acts of racial terrorism that occurred in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. (Read more: https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/).

Set in the present day in Money, Mississippi (where Till was killed), “The Trees” begins as a crime story: A white resident, Junior Junior, turns up dead and emasculated in his home. Near his bloody corpse lies the body of a Black man. Both cadavers are hauled to the morgue, but that of the Black man disappears, only to reappear again in similar circumstances.

When the dead won’t stay dead, it’s a mystery enough for the state police to send a pair of Black detectives to Money, where they find a townful of cartoonish Southern crackers, a 105-year-old great-grandmother who has amassed thousands of files about lynchings, and a passing-for-white diner waitress who is hiding more than her skin color.

Little by little, “The Trees” reveals itself to be less of a crime story and more of an artful, incisive indictment of America’s shameful past and of the shameless persistence of racist values disguised as regional culture.

Everett pulls off this impeachment with a mix of violence, sarcasm, caricature, and humor (the latter especially evident in the book’s wonderful dialogues). To say more is to reveal too much, so I’ll end with this: “The Trees” is inventive, entertaining, and enlightening, a virtuoso work that anyone who loves good books should read.

Bookshelf – On the Plain of Snakes, Paul Theroux

This is a book of wisdoms, large and small, about the charms and challenges of Mexico, about the rewards of travel and spontaneity, and about the fierce headwinds of aging, which, unless leaned into, will blow you over.

Book cover -- On the Plain of Snakes

Paul Theroux, icon of the open road, aficionado of the untrod trail, decides in his mid-70s that instead of going gently into whatever the good night might bring he will follow Kerouac, Lawrence, and Lowry into Mexico, where age garners reverence instead of disregard. “Más sabe el diablo por Viejo, que por diablo,” states a Mexican saying that captures Theroux’s attention. “The devil is wise because he is old, not because he’s the devil.”

“In the casual opinion of most Americans,” says Theroux, “I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade.

“Naturally,” he continues, “I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgment.”

Alone at the wheel of his car, Theroux begins at the border, where in some places a tall steel wall rises and in others nothing more impedes passage than barbed lines of wire or a thin strand of river. He ignores all advice about safety (“everyone will give you ten reasons for not going”) and crisscrosses the political boundary that promises hope to some, but also delivers suffering and death to many others: Calexico to Mexicali, Nogales to Nogales, Naco to Naco, El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, even Laredo to Nuevo Laredo, where bullets fly as narcos kill each other and whatever innocents impede their trade.

Theroux observes, interviews, and engages – with refugees, migrants, journalists, and Trumpista Border Patrol goons. What results is perhaps the most accessible and three-dimensional report I’ve read about this 1,900-mile strip of borderland, where headlines often take precedence over humanity.

As he heads south, through more narco-lands, into the heart of Mexico City, onto Oaxaca (the city) and Oaxaca the Zapotec coast, and finally into the Zapatista compounds of Chiapas, Theroux wields the same observant eye, curious mind, and welcoming heart to immerse himself in experiences unavailable to less adventurous travelers. Theroux is both an old gringo – and a bold one.

As an American man of Theroux’s vintage, and as a cross-border “gabacho” with deep personal and professional involvement in Mexico, I loved this book in part because many of Theroux’s conclusions about the mosiacal mess that is our southern neighbor match my own.

Chief among these is his idea of  “mundo Mexico” – Mexico as its own world. “Mexico is not a country,” he writes. “Mexico is a world, too much of a “mundo” to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine.”

True that. When friends ask me upon my return from Oaxaca, where I am doing non-profit work, How was Mexico?, it is question that demands another interrogative: Which Mexico? Because, as Theroux demonstrates at depth, the Mexico of the Sonoran Desert is not the Mexico of the Colonia Roma, and the Mexico of the impoverished and besieged Mixteca is not the Mexico of the empowered and enriched Monterrey. Separated by distance, dollars, and dialect, these disparate Mexicos share little more than a national identity (in some places very little of that) and one other thing: the inveterate institutional and social dysfunction rooted in corruption, tradition, and self-preservation that both Theroux and I believe defines how Mexicans live.

“Mexico,” writes Theroux, “is a country of obstacles, a culture of inconvenience.” These obstacles range from “mass murder to serious hardships to mundane inconveniences.” Forty-three university students disappearing, nearly non-existent medical services for the poor, sporadic roadblocks by striking teachers, nurses, or garbage workers.

A land of obstacles. I’d not heard the country summarized with such precise succinctness. It is exactly that – which is why family and loyalty trump everything in Mexico because when no institution can be counted upon, blood and “confianza” matter most.

There are moments when the book lags (an academic pondering on Mexican writers, for example), but they are sparse. They can be endured or skimmed, but they are mere obstacles, inconveniences, that do not detract from Theroux’s telling, which is as rich and as complex as his subject matter.

On the Plain of Snakes is essential reading for anyone desirous of understanding modern Mexico.

***

Addendum: The title – On the Plain of Snakes – comes from the name of a rural village Theroux passes through, San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. Coixtlahuaca means “plain of snakes” in the Nahuatl language.

Theroux points out that “the most important pre-Hispanic deity in Mexico” was Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and that the Mexican flag, which features an eagle and a snake, suggests that snakes are evil and eagles are virtuous. But, he says, quoting a Mexican writer friend, “The truth is more complicated than that. The eagles soar in the sky alone, but we Mexicans share the land with the snakes.”  

Good News about Getzamaní

Thanks to the generosity of many of you last summer, 10-year-old Getzamaní Hernández Rodríguez, of Oaxaca, Mexico, who was born blind and autistic is now receiving the education and therapy she needs.

Getzamaní, who lives with her parents and three siblings in a humble home of tin and wood, is benefiting from three sessions a week with a teacher who focuses on basic skills such as opening containers and using buttons and zippers, as well as giving Braille lessons to Getza’s mother, Edith.

Once a week, a pair of physical therapists work with Getza on movement and understanding the position of her body so that some day she will be able to walk with a cane. A speech therapist will also soon be added to Getza’s team.

Until this point, because of the lack of public services for persons with disabilities in Oaxaca, Getzamaní received only sporadic education. In order to even obtain that, her mother had to take her – and the other children – across the city every day to a public school. The cost of transportation was bankrupting the family. Now, with Getzamaní at home, her older brother, Neftalí, and younger sister, Ruth, can walk to neighborhood schools. The financial relief for the family is immense.

Thank you again for your contribution to Getzamaní’s life. For anyone who did not get a chance to donate, I will be asking again next spring.

Abrazos a todos – hugs to all.

Tim

Bookshelf – Circle Way, Mary Ann Hogan

A writer dies, her book is not done, her husband writes the final chapter

There is no more tenuous concept than time. Hours, days and years are inventions of man, an application of accounting and order to a life whose beginning is mysterious but whose conclusion is both clear and capricious.

Time, as a mechanism, constructs a façade of stability behind which extends a void that defies definition. What we call “today” is a random assortment of instances, each so infinitesimally transitory that we can neither immerse ourselves in them nor extract from them any indelible depth of experience. Tomorrow is perpetually beyond reach, unattainable, because it exists only in our heads. As soon as the rising sun cracks the horizon, tomorrow disappears under the onslaught of today. Our brains are wired for now; every instant of consciousness occurs today.

What remains is the past, a grand mausoleum of dismembered memories. This unkempt charnel house of fading images, distant conversations, and joys and pains exaggerated or tempered by time tempts examination, especially by writers and others who seek to make sense in their lives. But the past is not a single, definable entity of what was. The past consists of only what we remember, and even that is unique in quantity and clarity for each of us.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said the Greek. But what of the unexamined past? Should it be disinterred?

***

When Mary Ann Hogan and I met we were journalists, she a reporter for a big newspaper, and I the editor of a smaller one. I was arrogant, aggressive, and inflated with self-worth; she was everything that was the opposite: sweet, lovely, and brimming with talent.

I fell for her at once, charmed by her Irish eyes, galactic smile, and dulcet ways. But she was taken, by a lucky fellow I’d just hired, Eric Newton. So, I settled for friendship, and we three formed a youthful bond that endured as we aged.

Mary Ann died in 2019, claimed by rampaging cells. Dying is an untidy process that always leaves something – or much – undone. When the lymphoma took Mary Ann, she hadn’t yet finished the book that was to be the culmination of her life’s work, a memoir about losing and finding herself, about leaving and returning home, and about her father, the former literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The book lacked a final chapter, which Mary Ann had planned to write after returning home from the East Coast to Mill Valley, California.

Before she died, Mary Ann asked Eric to keep her book alive, to make it whole and write the last chapter. In their decades as a couple, she the writer and he the editor, they regularly wove words together. Each nourished the other. So it was a natural thing to do.

***

In the book, Eric describes one of their final conversations:

The last time we went over the manuscript, after we finished, she just looked at me. It was not the please-grab-a-towel look but the deep-blue-sky look.

And she said . . . nothing.

Not a word. No need.

She was dying. We both knew what she was asking. I hugged her pages to my chest.

“You know I’ll do it.”

***

And he did.

The result is Circle Way, a lyrical, deeply personal, honest, and often whimsical collage of Mary Ann’s artful story-telling and her father’s poetic ruminations and ephemeral drawings. It is a three-dimensional memoir that presents the life of a writer shaped as much by what she overcame and what she accomplished as by what her father, despite his professional success, failed to do, which was to write his own book.

“In so many ways,” Mary Ann writes, “I am my father’s daughter. Self-made journalists, we. Introverts, lovers of books and wine. Sufferers of ‘flying thoughts.’ We once held prized newspaper jobs, writing for the masses. But we felt like impostors with nothing to say. At times I still do.”

Flying thoughts, swirls of emotions, the curve of life, the inward spiral, the outward gleam of the nautilus shell. This is the path Mary Ann followed, avoiding the straight lines, accepting the looseness of history and ignoring the conventions of time. She didn’t want to just tell a story; she wanted to tell a whole story, using what was available, what could be grasped, what could be disinterred, and what could be intuited from what she had seen and lived.

We all live with doubt about the rightfulness of the choices we make. Knowing what to do is often more vexing than the doing. Author Katie Kitamura, in her enigmatic novel, A Separation, writes a piercing line that is apt here: “People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment.” What Mary Ann allows us to see in Circle Way is a daughter’s recognition of her father’s discontent and how, using that perception as a beacon, she found a way to elude his legacy.

Acknowledging the prejudice of my friendship, as well as my reading of several versions of the manuscript, I can say Circle Way is a remarkable book. Or to say it in a manner that Mary Ann would approve, I saw the sausage being made and still found it delicious.

One final word: What Mary Ann did, and what Eric helped her do, was not just write a memoir, but create something uniquely personal. Anyone who attempts creative expression knows how difficult that is to do.

Mary Ann, the journalist, did not want to get scooped on the news of her death, so she wrote her own obituary, one about Mary Ann the writer. Here’s an excerpt:

“Mary Ann saw death not as an ending, but rather as the beginning of the final, infinite chamber in the nautilus shell of a creative life. . . .”

***

How to buy Circle Way:

Amazon

Bookshop

Bag Check

The scene is a familiar one. A line of people outside an airport. A father holding a child in his arms. Another man opening his backpack for a security guard. The guard rummaging through the bag. It could be occurring in any U.S. airport. But it’s not.

The scene is Kabul, the line of people is leaving the airport – not trying to enter – and the security guard is barefoot.

Barefoot.

This photograph tells me all I need to know about the tragic, but inevitable, events taking place in Afghanistan, and that is this: All the modern weaponry in the world, all the massive military budgets, all sanctimonious politicians of all stripes, and all the beefed-up American soldiers clad as ultimate warriors are no match for a barefoot men with a rifle (or a RPG or an IED) who believes he will be liberated by the righteousness of his actions — whether they be motivated by religion, i.e., Taliban, or political, i.e., Viet Cong.

This is the lesson that seems to be lost in the maelstrom of media accusations, political recrimination, finger-pointing punditry, and in the justified chorus of lament for those likely to suffer the most under a resurgent Taliban rule – Afghans who sided with the U.S., either for self-enrichment or genuine desire to modernize their country, and Afghani women, who are headed back to the seventh century.

The United States – we – never belonged in Afghanistan. We went to punish the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda. We did that, and a decade later we killed Osama bin Laden in his bedroom. That should have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t. It never is.

American arrogance is only matched by its ignorance and stupidity (see: Covid-19 vaccine). A core component of the American identity is the belief that everyone in the world wants to be like us, that they would all live according our values if only they could, that they believe as most Americans (but not all) do that each of us is entitled to our liberty and our pursuits.

Sounds good – but it’s not true.

There are large swaths of the planet, populated by hundreds of millions of people, who think this basic American credo is bunk. These folks are in favor of inequality, especially in regard to women and children. They do not believe in the precepts of civil society – family and tribe are first. They do not even believe in the imperfect laws of men; they adhere to the perfect rules of their chosen gods.

Their fundamentalism has nothing to do with liberty. It is directed toward preservation of self and propagation of the guiding belief. It crosses all religious boundaries. The fundamentalist form or every human faith has persecuted those it declares to be apostates or non-believers. More blood has been spilled over religion (combined with ethnicity) in the history of the world than all the wars for treasure combined.

Now Afghanistan is over for us – as it was always going to be. The internal clamor will continue, of course, because the beasts of media and politics must be fed. Wars never end well. Someone wins, someone loses, and the losers always suffer. Acknowledging this doesn’t lessen the suffering, I realize, but truth is better than subterfuge or self-delusion. I like seeing wars end, no matter how it’s done.

In this case, we were no match for a barefoot man with a rifle.

— Photograph by Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images

My Oaxaca — The Bird That Fell From the Sky

José and his family had the day off from their work at the city dump, where they picked plastic bottles and sheets of carboard out of the ripe muck to sell to recyclers. They were pepenadores. The day was waning, and it was almost time to walk the mile to the highway to catch a city-bound bus.

That’s when José asked me: Would you like to see my eagle? One thing I learned in journalism is that certain questions demand a “yes.” That was one of them.

José went inside his cinder-block house and returned carrying a dead bird mounted on a polished piece of wood. He said it was an eagle. Me, I thought it looked more like a hawk, and to this day I can’t be sure either way. Whatever the raptor was, it was stunning. He set the bird on the trunk of his car and told me how he came to have it.

The bird had fallen from the sky one afternoon, victim of a collision with a power line. It landed on the ground near José’s house, broken and dying. Jose gave the bird the gift of death; in return, the bird gave José his most treasured possession.

#43

Mission, protestor, Ayotzinapa

43 students. 43 young people kidnapped in the night. 43 sons and daughters murdered by the hands of corruption. 43 bodies discarded and burned like household trash. 43 chances for a better future lost. 43 more reasons to mourn for Mexico.

The 43 slain university students of Ayotzinapa died because on Sept. 26 they commandeered several public buses and blocked a highway, a common form or political protest in Mexico, and by doing so interfered with the wife of the mayor of Iguala, one of the most violent and corrupt cities in the Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent and corrupt states. She was en route to give a speech, found the road blocked and called her husband to demand he do something about it. The mayor,  José Luis Abarca, ordered the local police to attack them. The cops handed them to a criminal gang associated with the narcos who control the region. And the students disappeared.

All this happened with the same impunity on the part of the mayor, the police and the narcos that infects all of Mexico and has quite literally allowed killers of all political and illegal persuasion to get away with murder for years.

Since the beginning of what has come to be called the Mexican Drug War, launched in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón again the web of cartels who generate between up to $50 billion in illegal drug sales annually and control 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United State, the official death toll of the violence between the cartels, between the government and the cartels and between both of them and the innocent citizens of Mexico – like the 43 students of Ayotzinapa – has reached 60,000. That’s the official number. Unofficially, human rights observers put the estimate at 120,000.

For some perspective, consider that 58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War, a conflict that compelled my generation to fill the streets of the U.S. capital in protest and led to vast changes in American society.

Of course, Vietnam was an American war and a draft existed that pulled those who could not dodge the conflict directly into it, but still one might imagine that a war of similar lethality occurring in a country visited annually by more than 6 million Americans would spark a modicum of outrage here at home.

Not so.

Thus far, the official U.S. response has been little more than a shrug. The Obama administration has described the fate of the 43 students and the insipid response of the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto as “worrisome.”

That may change. The street protests that began in Iguala after the fate of the students was learned have spread throughout the county and turned violent in Mexico City. Peña Nieto, who ignored the kidnapping for 33 days before speaking publicly about and then left the country for a trade conference in China, has returned to hear a growing number of cries for his resignation (fueled in part by the revelation that he and his wife, a soap-opera star, had a secret $7 million house in a wealth enclave above Mexico City).

American news media are increasingly covering the issue and Mexican-American communities in the United are organizing and marching in the hope of galvanizing more public attention. One of those marches happened Saturday in San Francisco, with 500 people walking from 24th and Mission, once of the heart of the city’s Latino community, to Powell and Market streets. More protests are planned, once in conjunction with general strike set to occur in Mexico on Nov. 20, the anniversary of the Mexican revolution, and another in 43 U.S. cities in December.

What can you do? Many things. From a little to a lot.

Write or tweet your congressional representatives. Tell them you’re outraged, that you’ve had enough, that you want the U.S. government to demand that is second-largest trade partner (U.S.-Mexico trade totaled $600 billion in 2013) clean house.

If you smoke dope or do coke (and why do you?), then stop. Nearly all the coke and much of the weed comes through Mexico. Your high supports the cartels, which in turn corrupt the government further, which engenders a state of impunity, which allows crimes of all sorts, from tax evasion to mass murder, to go unpunished.

March. Walk in the streets with the Mexicans who have come to our country, legally and illegally, in order to escape the very corruption that lead to the deaths of the 43 students. With more than 33 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States (and that’s not counting second-, third-, fourth-, etc. generations of Mexican Americans) this is as much our war at it is Mexico’s.

Photo Story: My Iceland Day

Iceland

“You have to come,” she said. “It’s weird. You’ll like it.”

I had been in Reykjavik for more than a week photographing homeless people, alcoholics, Elvis freaks and massive gym rats known as power-lifters. Mary Ellen Mark was leading a workshop and after assurances from her that Iceland offered enough oddities to suit my visual tastes I’d made the trip.

Mary Ellen was right, as usual. Beyond the ubiquitous blondes, behind the unrelenting civility, and underneath the itchy woolen sweaters, there was plenty of weird. I found all I could of it and made some decent photos in the time I had. I was doing what I often do while traveling: looking for interesting people and ignoring the tourist attractions.

That’s all well and good when I am in New York or Paris or Oaxaca, places I have the good fortune to visit regularly, but Iceland might have been an once-in-a-lifetime trip and the people I’d met and photographed could have lived anywhere in the world. After all, an alcoholic who lives in shipping container resembles similarly broken people in the U.S. – even if her name is Sigrun. I had been photographing Icelanders, not Iceland.

The country is a geologic amusement park chock full of glaciers, fjords and fumaroles, none of which I had seen. Nor had I walked on lava, slid on ice or dunked myself in the warm waters of the Blue Lagoon.

And that is how, in an 11th-hour effort to fill that gap two days before my return flight to San Francisco, I found myself on a gray, blustery Sunday riding in a small station-wagon being driven by Ellen Inga, one of the workshop’s photography interns. She was taking me on a fast-forward tour of the volcanic landscape east of Reykjavik.

With Ellen’s young son buckled into the rear seat, a serpentine road carried us out from the city through an uplands studded with dark, magenta-tinted cinder cones. A spongy mat of green lichen covered the lower reaches of the rock. The colors, vibrant in then sun, were muted by a heavy mist. For photography, especially the drive-by variety I was doing, the day didn’t look promising.

We stopped several times so I could click off some frames. Even though I doubted the capacity of my computerized camera to capture the natural complexity before me, I marveled at the rawness and freshness of the landscape. The rocks, in geologic years, were newborns. The water, sitting deep in glacial lakes or running rapidly through basalt-rimmed rivers, was untainted by man. The air, moist and moving, quenched a deep pulmonary thirst.

At Þingvellir National Park, where the great tectonic plates of the mid-Atlantic ridge collide, I walked in the mist and followed a boardwalk through the rift valley to a promontory. I recorded the volcanic hills in the distance and the lake below. The gray swallowed the color, but I wanted the photo anyhow, as a memory and as something that might compel me to come back and devote more time to this landscape.

I can’t say I will return to Iceland. I would like to, though. There are good people there I would like to see again. There are amazing places – such as Þingvellir – I want to revisit and many more I’ve yet to see. But as my years accumulate, my promises become fewer. There is less time ahead to keep them.

This day, then, this Sunday drive through the hills, around the lake, past the waterfalls and home again, may be my Iceland day.

On the Job: The Garden in the Canal

Mosaic artist Rachel Rodi, right, helps volunteer Joanne Gordon at the the new Canal Community Garden

Far out on the edge of the Canal, past the blocks crammed corner-to-corner with parked cars, beyond the rows of sagging apartment houses packed with immigrants, on the other side of the new Mi Pueblo grocery, where Mexicans and Guatemalans and Salvordorans shop for sheets of chicharron, fat plugs of quesillo and other foods that make home seem less distant, far the from busy intersection where broad-backed men line up for day labor, not near any of those things, but on the long, low flat of fill that stretches to the Bay and one day will hold some brand of box store if the city fathers have their way but for today, at least, sits empty, they’re building a garden.

Canal Community Garden map

The Canal Community Garden, located on a quarter-acre of city land at Bellam Boulevard and Windward Way, is an array of 5-foot-by-10-foot, redwood-rimmed beds that, come next year, will abound with organic, herbs, fruits, vegetables and flowers, each plot the labor of someone whose desire to extract bounty from the land overcame the unlikelihood that they’d ever be able to do it in a place as infertile as the Canal.

Work on the garden began in September. Seeds go in the soil in February. When the first harvest comes, the urban farmers and gardeners of the Canal should thank The Trust for Public Land and the Canal Alliance for making it happen.

I was there on Saturday, talking with a Philip Vitale of the Trust for Public Land, the project manager. He filled me in: a budget of more than $600,000; 92 garden plots of various sizes; a greenhouse for sprouting; a storage shed with lockers; a central space for classes and education; and, centering it all, a circular mosaic celebrating the overlap of art, food and community.

The mosaic came together while I watched. Oakland artist Rachel Rodi, the designer, and a half-dozen other women worked shoulder-to-should around a rectangular table, cutting sheets of blue, purple and green tile into shards of many shapes, laying beads of glue on the pieces and inserting them into the unfinished mosaic. It was a jigsaw puzzle with a twist: There were no pieces until someone made them.

The Canal Community Garden is the successor to one that was lost to the expansion of the Pickleweed Community Center in 2005. Since then, said Vitale, The Trust for Public Land has worked on a replacement. Partnering with the Canal Alliance, the neighborhood’s primary social service and advocacy organization, was key to the success of the project and ensures ongoing management of the garden, he said.

Daniel Werner, an AmeriCorps VISTA staffer on loan to Canal Alliance, is the garden coordinator. (To learn more about the garden or to apply for a plot, contact Werner at danielw@canalalliance.org, 415-306-0428.

I showed up at the garden on Saturday to scratch an itch, one that’s festered in the years I’ve been out newspaper journalism — a desire to feel the connection to community I felt when I first fell into photojournalism and, then, reporting.

As many did, I wandered into journalism by accident, but once there found enchantment and intrigue in the stories of ordinary people. I began as a photographer and loved capturing the faces of people with the camera. When I started writing, I became addicted to the interview, the act of questioning and asking why and how and who. I was nosy and I guess was needy and the conversation satisfied both.

Eventually, I let many of those things slip away. I managed people instead of photographing them. I wrote memos instead of stories. I looked far ahead and missed what was in front of me. I’d succeeded in the business of journalism, but I’d stopped honoring the passion that brought me to it in the first place.

Now, I’m, if not wiser, certainly older. I don’t confuse ambition with passion any longer. I recognize the difference between what I must do and what I love to do. I admire more the great storytellers, visual and written, and the work they do to bring those stories to us. And, perhaps with some regret – because we all have just a little, don’t we? – I wish I had made more of an effort to become one of them.

I didn’t, though, so I do this – stop by an empty city lot on a cold fall afternoon to meet a group of good-minded people who are building a garden, an enterprise that enriches the neighborhood, elevates the  common welfare and rewards them with the individual satisfaction. I take some pictures, I ask a few questions, I find a small story and I share it. It is journalism with the smallest “J” possible. Not hard-hitting. Not world-changing. Not much of anything really other than a thin slice of truth, a small dollop of daily life, and a healthy reminder to myself that this is who I once was – and who I can be again.

photocrati gallery

On the Job: Canceled

Golden Gate Sunset, from Belvedere

Nice view, huh? Would you pay more than $40 million for it?

This is sunset just the other night from the terrace of an unfinished 15,000-square-foot home in Belvedere — with “unfinished” being the key term here.

I was there to capture the view — which extends from Mt. Tam to the Bay Bridge and encompasses what you see here, the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands and Sausalito — from this house for a magazine story about a fundraising event that was going to be held there in a couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, the house won’t be ready in time, the event was postponed and you’re now reading the only page that will probably ever contain this picture. (Come back, though. I got so many good ones that night that there will be more to come.)

By the way, this property — at 425 Belvedere Ave. — has a disputed past and is one of two gargantuan home projects that, until recently, had sat partially finished for two decades. Here’s the story.

When this house is complete, the reported asking price will be $45 million.

(This picture could hang on your wall. Buy it here.)