Photo Essay: The Forgotten Library

As the falling sun torches the mountains 

at my patio door, I feel a sour gloominess

creeping over me. Have I done any good

in the world today? Not really. I feel

warehoused, neglected, and superfluous.

So I decide to go up and visit

The Forgotten Library.

It sits on the third floor of my apartment building;

two rows of cheap plywood shelves,

drowsing in a respectful neglect.

People my age do not ever throw out books

or magazines.

So they wind up here on the shelves, 

rarely, if ever, examined or handled.

The perfume of disintegrating glue and

paper turning brown with age

is a reminder of mortality shrugged off

with a sigh and a chuckle.

Old historical novels predominate.

Some of these books are pretty old. This one dates

from 1955, presented as a Sunday School award.

An original copy of Dashiell Hammett's 'The Thin Man.'

From 1934.  I bet it's worth something on eBay or etsy,

but I left it in peaceful disusage.

From England -- a long time ago . . . 

Can you read the price?  One shilling.

Hey! How'd this kind of book get in here?

Stumblingblock

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness . . . 
1 Corinthians 1:23

Objectionable and foolish

seems the Christ to many folk;

unreal and superfluous,

plus the butt of careless joke.

But those who doubt and denigrate

the Savior and Creator,

are to their very heart and soul

a foolish bitter traitor.

Open up your inner eyes,

and you will be amazed

how the love of Jesus Christ

your life has gently raised.

Photo Essay: Sunday Dinner for Eight.

I woke up from my nap at 2 this afternoon, fully refreshed and dreading the long Sabbath afternoon and evening. So I decided what the hey, I'll cook up something from the pantry, post an invitation on the ward Facebook page, and see how many customers I get here at Valley Villas Senior Housing. Turns out I fed eight people, at 5pm (MST), and had just a tad of soup left over along with about a third of my fruit cobbler. I threw away the soup and put some foil over the cobbler to stick in the fridge.

I cleaned out the pantry and threw it all in my biggest stew pot. For the purposes of Facebook I called it Vegetable Beef Soup. Here is a break down of all the ingredients.
1 can of government bully beef; 1 can of corn; 1 can of peas; 1 can of black beans; 1 can of sauerkraut; a squirt of ketchup and yellow mustard; a long squeeze of fish sauce; a dash of cheap rice cooking wine, the kind that works as paint thinner, too; a tablespoon of dill pickle relish; a third of a jar of Branston Pickle; the tail end of a small jar of capers, with the brine; 4 beef bouillon cubes; 4 bay leaves; a pinch of thyme and rosemary; and some wilted stalks of parsley that by rights should have been thrown out, but instead I put 'em in the blender with tap water and then poured the green goop into the soup. 

Ingredients for the cobbler included

four cans of pears, some raisins and some

elderly rock hard dates. I plastered

oatmeal mixed with brown sugar,

 butter and lard over the top and

baked it in a 350 oven for an hour.

Boy oh boy, how my arthritic hands love

 those pull lids!

Lordy, how I hate doing the dishes

after getting everything on the stove

and in the oven!

And I bet I take out more trash than

anyone else in the entire building.

Everything's loaded on the cart, including crackers --

so it's Go Time!

"Come and get it or I'll throw it out!"

Conversation around the groaning board

centered on Fast & Testimony Meeting, in

which a man with a strong French accent

apparently went on and on and on, until

the Bishop went red in the face with embarrassment.

There was also some lively debate about a news story

of a man who found a McDonald's hamburger from 

1999 still in its original wrapper in an old

coat pocket -- and it appeared ready to eat.

I've thought of asking this woman out on a date

several times -- but she likes to put crackers

in her hoodie pockets.

Photo Essay: Clouds

People are too busy; I prefer interacting with clouds.

They invite me to imagine

and they never interrupt.
Why must we build so many
roofs?

shattered like brittle cotton

on a blue roof.

someone is 

finger painting

up there.

the pleasant veil

is never an

interruption.

It's hard

to erase

a cloud.

Once upon a time

clouds

walked on the Earth.

clouds have

nothing

to reveal.

a bird and a jet

in the sky

at the same time.

too tender

to gather

and snow.

A Most Precious Land

And may the Lord consecrate also unto thee this land, which is a most precious land . . .
2 Nephi 3:2

On this consecrated ground, preserved by Deity,

I struggle to possess my soul in perfect harmony.

I'm pulled by innuendo and the falsehoods of great men;

I'm pushed into a corner like a child in a playpen.

I know this land is precious, for the Lord has made it so --

I yearn to keep it treasured and protected from skid row.

Please give me strength, O Lord of Hosts, to battle ever on

until I've conquered all my doubts and see in thee the dawn!

The Feather Merchants

I come from a long line of feather merchants.
My name is David Camoes.
We have always dealt in feathers. One way or another.
One of my ancestors invented the quill pen while imprisoned in a grotto for lese majeste against Charlemagne. That same ancestor lost the use of his left eye during the Albigensian Crusade. Ironically, he came to find out that the fletching on the arrow that took his eye out came from his own stock of goose feathers sold to an armorer years before.

In the Armenian culture a 'feather merchant' was someone untrustworthy and flighty. In Bohemia during the Reformation feather merchants were often soaked in brine and left out to pucker during the harsh winter. Feather merchants were forbidden to enter Peiping in Imperial China, on penalty of death by mongoose.      But the first Prince of Rus, Svalbarg the Beardless, kept at least one feather merchant by his side at all times as a trusted counselor, and fed them fish roe and musk ox tongue.

My great great grandfather, Charles Camoes, came to America in 1884, on board the S.S. Josiah Nitt, accompanying a large shipment of Guinea fowl feathers destined for the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington DC. While getting his boots blacked outside an oyster bar on the shores of the Potomac, he spotted Ysibel Minx-Vaux -- the daughter of the French ambassador. Like many a young man before and after him, Charles lost his heart at first sight and found it again several months later when he married Ysibel on the island of Goree -- where he was pursuing the plumage concession for the Senegal coucal. The coucal's feathers were mixed with certain types of seaweed to make artificial guano, which was much in demand as a fertilizer and in manufacturing munitions prior to World War One.
Sadly, shortly after obtaining the plumage concession Charles came down with Blackwater Fever. He lingered for nearly two years before succumbing, leaving his grieving wife Ysibel a widow with twin boys. She was inveigled into selling the valuable coucal concession for next to nothing to a scheming Parisian upstart in the feather trade, Georges Clemenceau, and used her meager funds to return to America -- which she rightly concluded would be a Land of Opportunity for her little twins -- Alphonse and Michael.
Settling in New York City, Ysibel quickly displayed a mastery of feathership that astounded her male competitors, who for the most part were content to sit in their offices and natter away about the price of eider down for pillows. Ysibel convinced the famous entertainer Eva Tanguay to load her broad-brimmed hats with stuffed pheasants, coots, and lyre birds, with their rainbow feathers, for a boisterous theatrical effect -- which soon caught on around the world. No woman who considered herself a part of the bourgeoisie dared to leave her home without at least a dozen passenger pigeon or rusty tinamou feathers protruding from the crown of her floppy chapeau. And Ysibel was the one providing all that fashionable plumage from her little shop on Eighth Avenue.   
Perhaps it is as well to interrupt my narrative here to explain in some detail the mechanics of the feather trade. As noted above, it has not always been a respected vocation. In the ancient world, while birds themselves were considered to be lucky, their feathers were not. Pretty to look at, and pleasurable to feel, feathers were nevertheless held to be lethal harbingers of doom in classical Greece and Rome. Some historians have even gone so far as to revise the assassination of Julius Caesar, claiming that his murderers tickled him to death with peacock plumes instead of turning him into a sieve with daggers.
But an enlightened minority throughout the ages have recognized the utility, as well as the beauty, of bird feathers. Lucretia Borgia created the first feather boa -- not for evening wear initially, but as an efficient means of silently garroting her enemies. 
Collecting and marketing feathers requires a steady hand and a cool head. Eider ducks do not just hand over their valuable pin feathers for the asking. Hunters must track them to their lairs along the Arctic coasts of Norway, braving icebergs and narwhals along the way. Ostriches are loathe to give up their huge white plumes, and have sent many an unwary featherman to his grave with a well-placed punt.
It should be noted that the feather trade has never dealt in owl feathers. Druids are the only ones to ever touch an owl feather. If you want to start a fight, just ask a feather merchant how many owl feathers he's got for sale.
Once the feathers of any bird are collected they are cured in sheds by being hung upside down and salted with powdered talcum. This kills off the feather mites and prevents fire damp. Then the feathers are transported to a central godown, where they are continually turned over to prevent mildew. In the old days a feather merchant would sign a chit for a sack of feathers and then go door to door,  selling his lightweight wares to writers who needed a quill or housewives contemplating a quilt. The more ambitious feather merchants would take several tons of feathers on consignment, and then sail off to faraway lands to barter with the natives, trading feathers for glass beads and little tin hatchets. These, in turn, were traded to other natives further inland for rare spices, ivory, and unsaturated ambergris. Thus certain feather merchant families grew great and prosperous. These included the House of Calamus, the Clan of Pinion, and, of course, my own Camoes Family Corporation. 

Today real feathers, like real fur, provoke much controversy. PETA has stepped up their campaign against the use of real feathers for any purpose, claiming that plucking even one feather from an innocent bird is just as cruel and painful as pulling out a human fingernail. But others pooh pooh such undocumented anthropomorphic claims, and continue to demand real pheasant tail feathers for their fly fishing lures and iridescent humming bird primary wing feathers for lightweight earrings. 
Our corporation tries to stay out of the fight altogether by offering both artificial feathers and real, range-free, feathers. One thing the PETA folks don't seem to realize, however, is that artificial feathers are made out of plastic, which of course does not decompose like an organic feather. This means that eventually landfills, and possibly the ocean as well, will be choked with colorful but ultimately noxious feathers for centuries to come. 
I hope you've enjoyed this modest chronicle of the life and times of a feather merchant. And please remember:
"IF IT'S A FEATHER IN YOUR CAP, IT'S A CAMOES FEATHER!"

Let us follow peace

Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another.
Romans 14:19

Let us follow peace for keeps

and pray that o'er the earth it sweeps.

For men and devils do conspire

to set the anguished world on fire.

Armies march, the heavens rain

nothing but great shock and pain.

Our leaders, do they look to God

or by their fears are overawed?

O Lord of Hosts, help us to cease

our warlike ways and work for peace!