KENNETH

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

For a few years I taught creative writing as a volunteer with my friend Vince Cefalu at the Braille Institute in Hollywood, California. One of our students was an elderly African-American named Kenneth. He was in a wheelchair, partly blind and with a speech impediment. Toward the end he was also a little demented. Kenneth had been cruelly abused and neglected as a child, and he once told me just a little of those nightmare years. His life had been a painful one and he said he looked forward to dying, it would be a relief. But, sitting next to me in class one day, he told me a simple yet profound truth I never forgot and it is now part of me.
“So many bad things happened to me,” he said. “Things that should never have happened to a little boy. But this time is my time, my only time, to be alive. This is Kenneth’s time.”
And then he gave his funny Kenneth giggle. So, with a holiday and a new year upon us, it would be good to remember gentle souls like Kenneth and try to love one another. Or at least try to understand that this time is truly our only time to be alive.
Peace, love and blessings to all the people in my life. I am grateful for you one and all.

David

THE HILL

Every morning, before breakfast, I walk the hill. It slopes down past my farmhouse, then rises in a gentle serpentine to the far ridge. From there it wriggles across the fields to the village of Mastrontas, then past the Pero Pinheiro marble-cutting yards - great steel blades and water-sluices chewing through immense blocks of stone - and finally to Sintra, whose fantasy castle is silhouetted in the distance.

The Atlantic Ocean glitters on the horizon, my local village, Mafra Gare, sits, half mist-erased in the bottom of the valley, and Danish-made wind turbines are pinned on the surrounding hills.

My head is usually filled with the chaos of a night’s thoughts as I climb the hill and the walk lets me sort them out: What’s Portuguese for my DSL’s not working? How do I rewrite that character so she’s more rounded? Where the heck is that mouse Rockat brought in last night and whacked around the kitchen? And so it goes.

It seems a fresh thought rises with each step and the succeeding steps serve to resolve them. I have walked the hill worried about money, despondent at the mediocrity of my work and then just as equally exhilarated by its brilliance. Often my thoughts are of friends, about me( far too often), the world’s problems are regularly examined and resolved, while God and I are in constant discussion about his existence.

I walk home a different man, and scattered on the hill, invisible and decaying, are all the previous night's worries. Before me waits a brand-new day.

And a hungry cat.

AUTUMN

The swallows are gone and the year is changing. They have flown south to winter in Africa and in their place are bold robins. The landscape has changed too. The harvest is in, the grapes picked, the last pig transformed into bacon and pork-chops, and the figs are all eaten - mostly, it seems, by me. The days are clear, but brisk, and the nights cold.

This part of Portugal is the land of big skies and immense clouds above an ancient, detailed countryside. Here, in my farmhouse high over the valley below, it is easy to see the inexorable shifting of time. The days of poppies and cornflowers seem so far away now, and the earth has settled into hibernation. Soon the rain-storms will sweep in from the Atlantic and Portugal will belong to winter. But the swallows will return, they always do, fields will be green again, and I will be waiting for them.