Cloud and Paper Inter-Are

This is it, 
why I love 
this man. 
We, every 
one of us, 
and the 
world we 
navigate 
inter-are:

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either...

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the tree cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too...

You cannot point out one thing that is not here -- time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper... As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Hats Off to Mel (for Melanie Penny)

We became very close when Melanie was still in Art Production on the 4th Floor of the Warner Bros. Records "Ski Lodge”. I was a gopher in Merchandising on my best behavior except for every Friday afternoon when Hale, my boss, had me rolling joints in the Conference Room. He’d pass them out with his business card, but I digress. 

I couldn’t help but be smitten by an almost hourly flash of blond past my desk, an art board in its wake. Mel could turn any hall into a runway as she’d glide her way down to solicit yet another Curly-Q of approval and sashay back. She certainly had my approval, but we hadn’t been properly introduced until one day she abruptly stopped in her tracks to compliment me. I wasn’t used to that, so I just punted and squirmed, but by the time I regained my balance, there went that blond flash again! I don’t think I’d ever been caught in the sights of an authentic come hither look before either, but Mel was nothing if not authentic. 

She lived with lovely Linda Allen in Silverlake just down the street from me; no other dynamic duo could compare. We briefly dated then, in only the blink of an eye to be honest. It was my bad, I know and I'm here to say so. She taught me two things that, to this day, always make me smile, place my virtual hat against my heart and bow deeply to her with respect: Nick & Nora Charles and the word "Haberdasher". 

That was her dream, one of them, to be a haberdasher, in its original use: a hat maker. I love saying that word. It's like all that joy, hope, promise and self-belief she retained through thick and thin was embodied in one pure ambition: to make the perfect hat for just the right person, never mind that no one we knew, particularly then, would even consider wearing a hat! But, she was convinced she could find that person and he would appreciate it, darn it, and that hat would mean the world to him. Well, by all accounts, though I haven’t had the pleasure, I believe she did find that person and how he must cherish his hat, a hand made ten gallon hat, and even that not large enough or deep enough to contain all the love she put into its making and all the love that, as I write, must indeed be pouring out. 

Melanie, my own hat, these last few days, has been off to you again, you who were always determined to be bigger than this world allows a woman to be and will be, easily, as big and bigger still in the next world. I'll know for certain when I get there should Gabriel be wearing a natty, felt bowler hat, for instance, tipped at just the appropriate angle, not to suggest a bowing to this long, sad "goodbye" we've all been giving, but a salute, a celebration, a continuation of a line that has not and will not be broken as if to say, with your same sense of humor, welcome and joie de vivre, "Hello, good friend, just this way! You can't miss her. She'll be right over there with Asta, Nick Charles and Nora mixing a martini. You're just in time."

 for Melanie Penny 

11/21/53 - 9/03/09