Immigration

Immigration
by Matthew Zathe Daniels

They make a special hell for businessmen as conniving as Jim Barton.  Jim was a restless entrepreneur who had more money than he knew what to do with.  His three adult children never talked to him and his ex-wife hated him more than any human being alive.  It didn’t stop her, however, from living off his money and fancying herself to be “his girl.”  Jim had set up and closed hundreds of illicit business deals throughout a dozen Latin American countries over the course of a career, but was starting to lose his edge.
Toward the end of his last deal, in San Ramon, he wasn’t even sure how he had made it out alive.  Only a few details of that three month stretch of his life were clear to him.   He had been in San Ramon, had been back in New York, and was now in Montevideo, but not sure of much else.  He was getting out of the game, disappearing into a South American landscape where stability was the order of the day.  As he sat in the Uruguayan immigration office with his “modified” papers, he hoped the fog would soon lift, giving him back those missing months of his life.
He remembered only that the stress of the work had been wearing on him.  He never really understood Read more »

Enjoying my trees…

I am enjoying my trees from another vantage point.  I am in my neighbors backyard (don’t worry, I have their permission), and it just occurred to me for the first time that they trees aren’t mine.  Not just, “not mine” in the sense that I rent the house and so they really belong to Nene Ferrari, but “not mine” in a bigger sense.   They are not mine ALONE.  I guess what belongs to me is the unique angle from which I see the trees.  They are awe inspiring from where I see them.  My back yard is about four meters lower than my neighbors.  The leaning brick retaining wall bears evidence of someone’s great engineering feat some 60 years ago. 

They tower over the world from where I see them.  Standing in a solitary group in a remote corner of my back yard, far from the house, they shoot my eyes upward, sending my gaze heavenward where it belongs in the first place.

But from my neighbor’s yard, it is there immanence that grabs me.  What looks like poles of energetic green from my window looks like a party of individual Cottonwood leaves from Ademar’s house.  I can almost reach out and touch them from where I sit.  I wanted to strap a zipline to them four years ago just so I could convince my then four year old daughter that daddy really could fly. 

Now Annie’s almost here, maybe hours away, and all I can think about is building a little nest in them to show my newborn that even big powerful things can be safe. 

I see the broken shaft of what used to be the tall one, before the 2005 wind storm that snapped it like a twig underfoot.  That day, one hand on my northward bound plane ticket and the other on my suitcase handle, I denied any claim whatsoever to ownership.  Another neighbor came wondering when I was going to get the two tons of cottonwood trunk out of her pool.  I gave Nene’s telephone number and told her that “the owner of the house” would have to deal with such matters.  The tree was seen from an entirely different perspective that day. 

I guess the tree belongs to all of us.  Heck, the world can see it on google earth if they wanted to.  There you learn that even big and powerful things can be small and insignificant if you just get enough perspective.

What else fits in this hole of consideration I am lending to my tree just now? 

Heck, I guess just about everything.  I don’t know.  You’ll have to look for yourself.

old friends…

Got a letter from an old friend today.  He lives SO far away.  Dang, I miss that guy.   Oh, the pain!!!   Of all the things that I will always hate about the universe is the pain that is inevitable when the heart is open. 

I just hate pain.  Perhaps more than anything else.  I hate pain.

(I hate it that some people will be like, “he shouldn’t have blogged that,” but I still hate pain worse).