Shorter Posts

The silver crescent of May’s first moon rises over the valley to the south of the
hospital where a silent ambulance waits below a sign in red letters: EMERGENCY

In an x-ray room at the end of a long hallway a technician in a blue smock assures
a white-haired woman that the fracture in her left foot will heal but not soon

Awaiting his turn with a therapist a man whose bride of sixteen months ago has left
him is enduring a panic attack and stares blankly at a wall in a crowded corridor

The father and mother of a boy who has been crying about a rasping pain in his lungs
are slowly being swallowed by their cell phones and slowly they disappear from sight

Two female EMT’s strap a roofer who has fallen off a ladder and fractured his pelvis to
a gurney and wheel him past security guards and sheriff’s deputies into the ambulance

The white-haired man of the white-haired woman waits on the far side of a waiting
room with a book and pencil and pen observing nurses pushing women in wheelchairs

Nurses give the roofer pills for pain and tell him that this hospital has neither doctors nor
equipment to treat his wounds but he will be taken care of in a trauma center in the valley

Crying softly, the boy lies down to sleep and a nurse covers him with a sheet as the white-
haired woman receives a metal four-legged walker to replace the foot she has broken

The ambulance with the EMT’s and the broken roofer pulls away from the curb and descends into freeway traffic toward the May moon crescent still rising in the twilight far to the south of the hospital.

Those who were paying attention in 1935 knew that it was a dark year. The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression raged throughout the world. Josef Stalin killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Russians and deported millions more. In Italy the Blackshirts crushed any opposition to Mussolini. In violation of the Treaty of Versailles Hitler began rearming Germany. His Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. In Spain, generals in the army began plotting to overthrow the Republic.

Those who were paying attention also intuited that 1935 was a tremor, a shadow of a bleaker darkness yet to come. In 1936, Franco and the Spanish generals staged a coup d’état; the resulting civil war would not end until 1939. Hitler’s armies invaded Poland in that same year and began constructing the death camps to which in 1942 he began deporting Jews, gays, Blacks, the disabled and other perceived threats to his regime.

In Picasso’s print of 1935, all the figures, except one, are paying attention. A half-human/half-beast is hungry. Two women gaze at a dove. A man tries to escape up a ladder. A girl-child confronts the monster with her innocence. A beautiful matador lies asleep on a panicked horse, unaware of the menace around her.

Ninety years after 1935, another darkness and other monsters are everywhere. Even here in the United States of Amnesia. I have a dream: The girl awakens the woman and shares the light and flowers. They make a bridle, mount the horse together and challenge the beast. It drops its sword. The women break the blade into bits.

One of the pleasures of drawing outdoors is listening. You hear the normal racket of buses, car horns and motorcycles in the streets, but if you are fortunate to be in a park with trees, sounds are softer. During the autumn months of 2024 when I was living in Spain, in Valencia, you could find me almost any evening in the Jardín del Turia with my pencils and brushes. It’s a park, almost 8 miles long, in an old riverbed. After a terrible flood in 1957, the Valencianos diverted the river around their city and now you will discover joggers, families and picnics, soccer fields, a concert hall, fountains, children’s’ playgrounds, orange trees, the futuristic City of Sciences, yoga and Taiji practitioners, bicyclists and ponds. And an artist seated on a park bench at work.

As I was drawing the bridge, the wind rose. Dark clouds appeared. I heard doves murmuring. They were often out-shouted by the screech of wild parrots who, years ago, had arrived from Africa and had made their homes in the palm trees. From farther away came the sound of drums. Passing directly behind me was the clop-clop sound of horseshoes from four mounted policemen on patrol. Then, right next to me, a shout, a single word, “NO!”

It was a man and woman walking together, but apart. They were arguing in a language we all know: Pain, Hurt and other variants of a language called Love. They paused at the base of the ramp that leads up to the bridge, stared at each other in silence, then continued walking. They stopped between the saints and stared again at each other. Then she reached out and gently caressed his cheek. He took her face in both his hands and they held each other. I drew them as they moved away in each other’s arms toward the darkening clouds. Healing? I hoped.