The White Beret

What catches my eye is the bobbing white beret. We’re sitting at an upstairs window in the Monterey Chowder House sipping Bloody Marys and taking in a glorious March morning on the Bay. The pier is almost empty, the rain is passing inland; the sun bouncing off the water puddles. The restaurant music is something by one of the legendary Rat Pack guys.
Welcome to Southern California.
The bobbing beret, a shortish man with an easel, paint box, folding stool and umbrella is setting up next to the Whale Watching booth, in time for the noon-hour traffic, I suppose. By the time our Malpeques arrive, I notice white beret is ready for his first sitting. He reaches into his bag , whips out and slips on these gilt- framed shades, resets the beret just so. He clips some sketches of his best work on to the umbrella edge. He waits.
The Dungeness crab cakes arrive with a crisp glass of local sauvignon blanc demanding full attention. But I cant help it. I glance down. Our white beret sits patiently; with the sun's warmth comes the people.
Ahhh. An eye- popping Cobb, as only Socals conjure up salads, wafts by and lands to my left. This takes my eye to the dock as white beret seems to reach out, saying ‘’Finish up ,sir!”.
The espressos arrive and with them, an unexpected squall. I see the white beret itself slomo off screen as the artist grasps his umbrella , his stool, and grimaces as his ‘best work’ goes with the wind. He trots away in search of the beret.
Exiting the Chowder House, here’s the artist, his props and all, huddled under the awning. He digs into his bag and pulls out an identical white beret, “ A beret for the artist in you, sir?”
I thank the gods for the perfect food, and the artist for that almost detached, abstracted silent scene from a Hitchcock film.
“I’ll take two, please.” I fondle the berets, walk away, whispering, ”… on the aisle.”

the hidden eyes-

lost sketches

sink below the waves

The Left Hand Chord

It’s mid-afternoon in dreadfully humid Havana. A cooler refuge beckons across Avenida Maceo. I slip into a dark corner booth in the Hotel Libertad lounge to sip on their famous ‘te frigo’, a tallish iced tea, chilled thoroughly, but no ice. I add a soupcon of local honey for character; a thimble of very old rhum for my character.
A gentleman silhouetted against the whited out door catches my eye. He hesitates, then limps into the twilight of the lounge. The panama hat leads the way, followed by a suit, white shirt and tie. Rather formal for the heat. He’s elderly, a bit shaky, but he goes purposefully to the upright piano and snaps on the light.
This Steinway has to have seen most of Cuba’s recorded history; hand-carved, rum-dipped; keys a mellow yellow.
He folds his jacket, drops the panama on top for tips, and sits.
He sniffs the atmosphere for musical inspiration. Does the room need a lift?
Or is he thinking melancholy, maybe a waltz or a popular aria?
He surprises with Erik Satie. Then a segue into a slow and building tango; he loves 

flourishes but I begin to sense the odd incomplete chord. Two songs later, my seven years of wasted lessons tell me that the culprit is his left hand. On my way out. I pause to drop a few pesos into the hat. “Gracias” he nods and waves. 

I easily note his hand is missing the pinky and ring fingers.
Puzzle solved. But not so fast. This is Cuba. At 80 plus, there’s a story here.
I go next door to the tobacconists and fetch a Romeo y Julietta.
His set is over. ‘El Pianista’ accepts the cigar. Fires it up and gestures to sit.
“Accidente?”, I point. Blowing smoke, he eyes me for some hidden agenda. His face says I’m accepted. “No accident”, he went on. “I was young, very popular. My playing led me to friends, ‘ los passionatas’ … those who detested Fulgencio Batista. A bad choice. I was ‘disappeared’.

  One was chopped: I could tell Batista’s beasts little. Then they took the other.

  They were desperate to know about the rebels in the mountains.”
  After the victory, Che and Fidel allowed my freedom minus these two fingers.
  “How did you manage?” I inquired softly.
  “I swept streets to rebuild my muscles. An amigo asked that I play at his                 wedding party. Raul Castro was a guest. I played badly. Enough, I think to
  warrant some state therapy perhaps?” A lifted eyebrow, a sardonic smile.
  He gestured around, “ Now you see what I am today. I still play badly.”

 “What about Cuba?’ I ask.

He lifts his left hand over the keys.” See this? It is Cuba. Tired, missing many parts, hurting,

not working well.” He then shows his right hand, clenched very tight. “ This is also Cuba. 

Closed to the world. Watching it pass by”.
Two more chords and he turns back to the music.
I ease away.

At first, dreams . . .
a loud crow squawking
in havana square

Vive Michaelle Jean!

We’re leaving Paris in a rainstorm. The taxi’s tires hiss and the horns honk as we hit the ‘rond point’. It’s April and we’ve had a gorgeous four days (and nights) on le Rive Gauche. As we speed through the tunnel where Princess Diana met her fate, the taxi driver says the usual “ Vous etes Americain?” and we reply

” Non, nous ne sommes pas Canadiens.” You can tell he isn’t prepared, has to ditch the rant about Bush.
Since he’s black and speaks French, I guess he’s from Sierra Leone or west coast at least: he does not have that Somali east coast build.
“I come from Haiti, mons pays d’origine.”. And I immediately swing into my Canadian non-Parisian sounding french, he with his lilting Haitian patois.
We manage … to discuss the current politics in Quebec and Canada, the weather in the Laurentians, ice-fishing and Celine Dion quite handily – in fact, he segues right into how the Canadian army offered assistance to calm a dangerously volatile Haiti last year. His family writes him that a soldier saved his sister and his mother from an attack last month.
How close we seem to be. Like old friends with things in common.
Like cousins, almost.
The Charles De Gaulle lights startle us, break the thread. I offer him the usual tip. His waving hands say ‘non merci’. We shake. Hesitate. Then shake again. Only then do I catch a look at him. His left eye is very blind. He flashes me a toothy grin as if I mustn’t worry: he got us here in one piece. With one eye.
A jet screams overhead.  Pointing to his face, he suggests “ Maybe me no good for pilot?”
His chuckle puts me at ease. As he gets behind the wheel, he leans across the seat and calls out
“ Vive Michaelle Jean!* Vive le Canada!”

On a wing and a prayer...

an island awaits

their destiny


*Michaelle Jean is the Haitian-born Canadian Governor-General.

Chateau George

It’s June 2004 on France’s Cote d’Azur. I ‘ve just discovered a large abandoned villa that has been vandalized by humans and weather over many years. With my photographers eye, this scene stands up and begs an essay; exquisite marble floors overgrown with vines and strewn with old clothing; expansive shattered windows framing millionaire yachts on the blue Med below; all the back walls of the main house blown away as if hit by a 70mm Howitzer; a bidet hanging by its plumbing swinging in the wind; whole rooms exposed on the second floors remind me of a scene from Ramallah or Beirut: surrounded by palm trees and terraces laced with glass shards and broken roof tiles.

Certainly no one is actually living here.

As I raise my camera, I hear a low whistle. Then another one, and as I look towards the source, I see him, George, sitting in an overstuffed chair precariously perched on a slab of concrete and twisted rebars jutting out of the broken third story, a razor in one hand and a fancy mirror in the other.

George says” Wait. I’ll come down… finish shave.”

He shakes my hand with a smile and proffers a fireplace mantle piece fashioned into a bench under a fig tree.

Turns out he’s been here for three years. No heat, no water, no power, no doors, no windows and a couple of rooms up there with a serviceable roof.

He invites me up. Pretty amazing. There‘s a boat up there. George sailed single-handed from Australia to here. Now he’s building a catamaran to sail back.
I wish him a decent wind at his back.
He smiles and invites me to return anytime to Chateau George.
I will. But I won’t wait too long. He may have gone for a sail.


Hulls on a rough sea
a homemade man
seeking george

Justin’s Cay

Fully engrossed in the impossible task of extracting a live conch from its shell with a blunt, rusted out machete, I am not expecting a human being at all. After 17 days on a deserted cay in the Bahamas, living off the sea and land, the only person I expect anytime soon is Mister Pinder, from Abaco who dropped me off up the beach; he has promised to pick me up ‘in 'bout three weeks’.
I hear a rustling in the sawgrass over near the prickly pear cactus and thinking island rats, I stand up and throw a cocoanut shell at them. But instead, a startled head pokes up followed by two very curious eyes, followed by the rest of a small island boy.
I smile to ease him and I get a big warm one back.
“You’re not doin’ dat right’ he says, pointing at the mangled conch shell.
Curious, I ask him how he got on the cay and he tells me his daddy is fishing ‘roundsabout’. “He puts me here to be sure where I be.”
He moves towards me and says” Wan some help?”
Without waiting, the boy pulls his own machete from his belt, grabs the conch and whacks the bejesus at the pointy end, opening a slash. Then he takes a knife from his pocket and puts the blade into the slash and saws vigorously.
“Ya gotta cut where it’s 'tached, see?” he turns it upside down and doesn’t the lovely conch spiral its way out and plop on the sand, all glistening.
“Wan me clean it up? Got some limes here?
Needs to soak some to mek it sof’.”he rapid fires me.
He has lots of time it seems; daddy won’t be here ’til sundown.
So we sit under the causarina for shade next to my tent.
Just a couple of lonely-for-conversation guys passing the day.
Justin does most of the talking; seems I’m out of practice. Turns out his daddy parks him here a lot, says he’s got to learn to be on his own. He calls it ‘my cay ‘cuz no one else uses it’, and ‘someday I’m goin’ to live here forever’.
At sundown we hear a motor. Justin shakes his finger at the marinating conch, “leave dat alone for one mo’ day, den fry ‘er up!”
He shakes my hand, turns and lopes off down the beach waving with his machete.
I look at the conch. I can almost taste it. But I’ll do what Justin says.


A boat on the sea
gulls follow the scraps

boy into man

Tree of Life

The snow comes fast and with purpose. I spot her through the woods. As I round the trail bend, she is filling a bird feeder with niger seeds, “ For the Americans.” She responds, “Goldfinches.” to my quizzical face. Tiny, yellow-feathered birds flit with anticipation around her.
After, we walk together, heads down against the weather. “When we first came here, we thought we owned these woods, could do whatever. One day there's this very tall, dead tree and we thought ‘let’s cut it down before it hurts somebody’. Then we heard a rat-tat-tat and looked up, saw this woodpecker happily at work.” She stops and points at the dead tree, still there, full of holes, leaning at an ominous angle. 

“I mean how can we 'own' anything? What about the nesting squirrel, the wood-borer, the barred owl?”, she asks, rhetorically.

She walks over and circles the barkless tree with her arms, loving it like a child. “Go ahead... give it a hug”, she challenges. I do it and as my cheek touches the smooth surface, I notice a very large ant emerging from a bore-hole.  “Carpenter ants; at the low end of the chain, not very beautiful until you watch them close up.  I’m blessed. I see so much more of life here”. 

As we walk on she glances back and says ”That tree will fall when it’s good and ready. When it does it’ll keep on being a really useful part of these woods.”

And later, "Controlling nature? Hah! Let it be, folks."

“Thanks for that” I nod, as we part. 

As the snow thickened, her head was haloed by a blur of  fluttering yellow .

a bare tree

old ideas

buried deep

Gaudi Guide

His name is Ferdinand Pedro de la Costa. My guess he's pushing well into his 80s, still robust with the ruddy face of a sailor. He tells me he came from near Barcelona and had worked the coastal boats most of his life. I ask him what he thinks of the famous architect, Antoni Gaudi. His face quickly darkens as if the name is painful. He looks away but doesn't turn away. Sensing a chance to engage him in a Gaudi exchange, I prod him with my view of la Sagrada Familia, the astonishing unfinished cathedral Gaudi began in 1884. He shakes his mane of silver hair slowly as if I am just another 'know-nothing tourist' and replies in a thick english " I was with him when he was killed. 1926. June 7." His eyes water as I follow his finger pointing to the street corner. "It was raining hard. He was agitated, distracted. I was only 10 then. He was old and I was helping him cross the traffic. Neither of us saw the trolley - I was holding the umbrella against the rain. The trolley hit him first and then me. His body softened the blow. It was all over for him. A brilliant anarchist mind, almost childlike. "
He pauses in memory " It should have been me. I was just a sailor apprentice, no schooling. I meant nothing, but him, he was a god!" He turns away repeating over his shoulder, " It should have been me."
As he walks on, his shoulders lower, his sadness palpable.
I bump into him again the next day on the wide sidewalk outside of Gaudi's Batllo House. He is talking excitedly to a couple, his hands flying, pointing to a second story window. As I pass by, I overhear him. " .... and up there was his study where I delivered his plans for that Guell residence ... I was with him when he was killed. 1926. June 7. He was a god!"

struck by the tram on the 7th
he dies on the 12th

rain splashes sorrow

©2006morganearl.