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By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.
I rode the Hurricane and Logger's Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn't have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear.
On the drive back to return him to his parents and little brother, Ethan and I stopped in Aptos at the Rummonds Building. Jim Rummonds bought the building when I was working for him in the mid 1980s. He wasn't in his office when Ethan and I stopped by but his wife Sue and assistant Chansonette were there, and we lied to each other and said we had not changed. Actually, Sue hadn't changed and she didn't lie about anything.
DESCENDANT
Elissaveta Bagryana
No portraits of my grandfathers are kept fixed in a family picture-book. I know nothing of the testaments they left, The lives they led, their souls, their looks.
But I sense the wandering, self-willed beat of the ancient blood of all my kin. Its raging rouses me from sleep, it draws me to our first-found sin.
Perhaps some grandmother — dark-eyed, with silken pantaloons and turban — escaped at darkest night to ride with an alien, fair-featured Khan.
Perhaps across the Danubian Plain hooves came drumming on the chase. Yet they were saved from being slain for the wind smoothed our their every trace.
Perhaps because of this I'm gripped by lands unseized by human eyes, by horses that fly at the crack of the whip, the wind-splashed, free-affirming cry.
Perhaps along my way I'll falter and lies and sin may show my worth. But I am, indeed, your faithful daughter, by bond of blood, my mother earth.
Tranlated from Bulgarian by Kevin Ireland