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Billie Harris: Good evening everyone. This is KUSP Santa Cruz, Monterey, Watsonville, and I'm Billie Harris, welcome to "From the Bookshelf." And thank you very much for joining me this evening. This is a particularly exciting evening

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for me because I have Ralph Peduto in the studio, and he and I are both going to read from Morton Marcus' book, "When People Could Fly." Ralph is a working actor living in Santa Cruz and he's appeared in several movies. Some of my

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favorites: "Mrs. Doubtfire," and "Metro." So this evening is especially wonderful for me because I'm an inveterate lionizer. And here I am with two of them in the studio with me, Ralph and Mort. Some people have all the luck. Good evening,

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Ralph. Ralph Peduto: Good evening, Billie, how are you? Billie Harris: It's lovely to have you here. And thank you so much for honoring us with your presence here at KUSP.

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Ralph Peduto: Thank you for having me. Billie Harris: It's really exciting. Shall I begin? Ralph Peduto: Please do. Billie Harris: Okay. This is a poem called:

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THE WORDS, written by Morton Marcus. When we sleep, the words inside us slide from their hiding places like thieves and assassins in a Renaissance city. It is after midnight but there are all these figures muffled in

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cloaks or slipping from one pillar to another in black capes, who whisper and bicker or come upon one another unexpectedly in the dark. One stabs another in a shadowy arcade and leaves the body where it falls. At the edge of a

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piazza, four ruffians, growling and cursing, carry off a drunken student in a burlap sack. The facades of townhouses are still and dark, although whimpers and sighs and raspy snores flutter from the partially open windows, their meanings blurred by the

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fountain's burbling in the squares. The quiet everywhere is stippled by these sounds as if the buildings were restless and muttering. A shout, lights flare at windows, torches dot a piazza, seems the body has been discovered. But the sounds are

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confused, the reports garbled: is it war, disease, the birth of an heir in the princess palace? A bell booms in a cathedral tower. The sound rushes in all directions over the tile rooftops. A mile or two down the road leading to the city's west

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gate a peasant in a cart lets his donkey guide him home as he sings of love, death, and the joys of a simple life. Ralph Peduto: THE DRUGSTORE I remember when I was a boy passing the darkened drugstore

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at night, my footsteps following too close behind me and how I would run when I saw the patina of bluish light radiating from the pharmacy in the rear of the shop. I knew the light was left on to discourage thieves but there was always a suspicion

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that Mr. Gold, the owner, small man round and bald who smiled too blandly and never looked us in the eye, was working there alone on something forbidden. Silhouetted against the light, shadows flailed and swooped and I was sure he was cutting a

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pound or pounding plants that squirm and snatched at his hands or draining a yellowish ooze from the rocks he had gathered in the park, as if he had lance an abscess hidden in a seam of stone. I was positive, he would bottle that bubbling mess, and

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store that bottle along with others next to the cartons of pills he kept in the storeroom in the back, cartons which shifted like bins of baby teeth in the dark. Everyone in the neighborhood was certain that something unholy was going on.

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Why else would he remain in the store so late each night? "To do the books" he murmured and smiled when asked one morning by Mrs. Marks, "and to fill the orders for the following day." I see him now in the bluish light among ledgers, and thumb-worn

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index cards and no longer think those books were unholy texts but list of prescriptions and payment stubs, credits and debts he would check and double check. Like all kids, I imagine ledgers and books whose pages fluttered like wings and him holding them

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down with rocks from the park so they wouldn't flap while he read, or fly around the room blundering against boxes and jars. I imagine he could revive the dead, make flowers dance, and shrieking, hold the pulse of time in the palm of his hand.

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"Bills and medicine," he said with a smile and shrugged, avoiding all eyes as he spoke. I guess all of us back then young and old alike needed to believe it was something else, something that had nothing to do with tidy city parks but with metals and

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hillsides, beyond the ocean's wintery waves where forest was shrinking to shadows on landscapes, most of us would never see, and fewer and fewer of us remembered. Billie Harris: SMOKING CIGARS

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When I smoke a cigar, I'm part of the earth again, but a wilder earth than municipal parks and public gardens. The wrapped brown leaves, brittle as autumn, smell like rotting fish and crumbling stone. Even in an apartment high above the city, I

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become an element of the earth once more when the cigar smoke enfolds me like the air inside a tomb. I sit at a table, opposite an empty chair when I smoke and imagine the cigar is an earthen whistle, through which I summon whatever ghost will come. Most

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of the time it's a leathery man, his skin as brown and thin as tobacco leaves. We sit face to face across the table, not speaking, smoking the same cigar from opposite directions. My mouth clasping the unlit end, and his the firey cinder whose

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glow must resemble the burning coal that sprang from the darkness to start the world. He blows into the cigar, as if blowing on the coal, and I suck until I'm filled with a life beyond this one. When I exhale, he sips my living air through

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the pink nipple that scorches his tongue. In church on Sundays, some people eat and drink the body and blood of their god. I consort with those who are less sublime, the ones who built the pyramids and tombs with their hands, and who

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vanished without hope of being revered, or even remembered. Ralph Towner: THE PEOPLE OF THE BOAT Watching the shaggy shoreline separate into rocks and trees we experienced a moment of questioning as well as

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foreboding. Had we been driven here by exile, a loss of remnants, of a ragged army and defeat? Or had we undertaken the journey like a choir whose singing was a splendor that drove the ships and clouds of glory to this other world, this

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world that, one way or another, offered a promise we had to believe in? While we swung axes and sledgehammers, felled birch trees and pines, while we lashed logs into walls, toward rooves, and boiled tallow, these questions drove our days. Why

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were we building? For what purpose, his glory or our own? And what in the end was the promise we expected to be fulfilled? Part Two

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The same questions were asked by those in the ships that followed when they saw the jagged outlines of the cities we had built. Although, admittedly, for us, these questions were rarely put into words. They were more a feeling of foreboding, and the

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forebodings grew along with the ghosts of the animals, and the painted people we had scrubbed from the land in the same way we scrubbed sweat from our bodies, and noxious dreams from our minds, in the same way we had erased the old customs and

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former languages from our memories. Part Three What had been promised? Had we sought freedom here or had we been seduced by images of gold and goods, which make each of

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our cities look more like a maze of marketplaces. Had we sought escape in coming, remembering the armies at our back or, as we told the young, had we chosen, faces forward in the salt wind, to seek a home where our ideas would take root in the landscape

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or were both conceptions in the end, really one in the same? Part Four Those who arrive now expect to see the cities on the horizon. Many have memorized the skylines and the famous building, and

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those who come with the old questions soon forget them in a tumult of forebodings. Almost everyone thinks the cities were promised them, or they think nothing at all. The marketplace explains their days: the putting-on equals the

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taking-off, the spending is nearly as important as the getting, and the words desiring and praying are interchangeable in daily speech. Part Five

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The populace bustles through the streets, jostling those people wild-eyed and mumbling, who wander among them like shipwrecked sailors, lost and penniless in a land whose ways they cannot comprehend. Storms gather behind the buildings,

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cloud banks that rumble like old forebodings. It is weather, only weather, the people say. It will vanish in a deluge of rain, but by this, even the newcomers mean a new kind of rain, one that bites at the buildings and streets like teeth in the jaws

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of avenging ghosts. THE LETTER (Let me get the letter here) I found the letter in a book I bought at an outdoor theater turned flea market every weekend. It was June 1995, in a

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small town on the California coast, the book was Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina," and the letter was tucked between pages 434 and 435 where delirious Levin, the day after he's proposed to Kitty visits her parents' home, the letter pinkish, sealed, not

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mailed, faintly redolent of talcum like a pressed flower, was from a Sarah Harris, dated inside: October 1939. Yes, I opened it and read how fine the trip was from Des Moines back to Cincinnati, suspecting nuances and unworded passages I had no

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way of understanding or more accurately, deciphering, to go along with what I took to be the mute appeal to call Bigelow. 913 McKinley Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa and the final paragraph which read: "There didn't seem time for me to say all the

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things I needed to. Do you feel the same?" The Tolstoy book was a book club's bonus edition, bound in gray leatherette. Had Sarah Harris purposely placed the letter between those pages, depicting Levin and Kitty's jubilant betrothal? I had no way

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of knowing and refused to suppose. However, I resealed the letter, affixed fresh stamps to the envelope and sent it on. Billie Harris: And now: THE THREE LOST TALES OF THE BAAL SHEM TOV

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Who has not heard of the Baal Shem Tov? Each of his tales is a leaf on the tree of his legend, the tree that shines like a shaft of flame in the shadow gardens of our imagination. "Forget about how many angels dance on the point of a pin or

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how many souls can slide through the eye of a needle. Those problems are the syllogisms of tailors," he said. The only question worth asking is whether the dead push us from the earth through the tree so that they can fly once more from the wings

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of the leaves, or whether we're dragged upwards from the stones until, like birds, we sing the praises of God from the highest branches. When asked in Berdychiv, whether he thought we were shoved from below or tugged from above, he answered: "From

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above. It's God's way of glorifying the dead." Another time in Kamianets, he answered: "From below. It's the dead's way of glorifying us." However, in Horodenka, he replied to a feeble old man leaning on his grandson: "Both. It's God's way

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of glorifying the dead and their way of glorifying us." But when he was asked the same question in Sadagora by a [unidentified] whose wife had recently died, he said: "Neither. What makes you think our lives are dependent on the whims of God or the dead and

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have nothing to do with us?" "How can this be?" cried Reb Tzvi Hirsch Sofer, the Baal Shem's lifelong scribe, as the crowd in the Sadagora marketplace stood astonished. "Two years ago you answered from above, last year from below, two

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months ago both, and now none of the three." The Baal Shem Tov turned to his scribe, nodded towards the [unidentified] sad eyes and disheveled clothes and said, shaking his head, "Tzvi, Tzvi." Later that day when they were walking alone on the road

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to Polnoy(?), the frustrated scribe trotted around his master and continued to upbraid him: "How could you say that God determines our lives in one place, that the dead do in another, that both do in a third, and that we do in a

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fourth?" The master shrugged. "Tzvi, you never look to see whom I'm talking to. For each of the four, there was a correct answer that wasn't correct for the others. Besides, I'm sure you think that at least one of the answers was right so why

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quibble?" Clapping his hands, a disciple of the Baal Shem leaped up from the prayer table beaming. "I just discovered men and women's most important secret: they love God, whether they know it or

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not." The Baal Shem looked up from a letter he just received and nodded, "Good. Now you have to learn God's most important secret with equal conviction." "What's that?" asked the disciple. "Why?" said the Baal Shem, turning back to the

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letter. "Whether or not God knows it, he loves us," this is what the Baal Shem Tov, the master of the holy names, said to his disciples as they rested in a forest on the road to [unidentified].

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I have told you how enraptured I was when I was alone in the mountains. I learned the language of stones and trees, of donkeys and sparrows, and I've told you how hard it was to come down into the towns and villages and live among people. But I

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have also told you that we must live among people with their sorrows and pettiness, their transgressions and self-righteousness, no matter how much we yearn to remain with the wind of God's voice on the mountaintops. To live with

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people and to help them is our duty, but we also have a duty to go into the mountains, so we never lose touch with God's voice. Many of you have said that these two roads are a contradiction, but are they? There is the raindrop we see

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that taps the surface of the pond and makes the water shudder in all directions, that is our life among people and shows how each of our actions affects others. However, there is the raindrop we don't see that slips through the surface and

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disappears without a ripple, as if the surface had opened a tiny fish mouth, closed around the raindrop like a pearl and swallowed it without leaving a trace. This is our life alone. Who is to say which raindrop is doing God's work and which is

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not? Both are part of the community of raindrops that are collectively called a pond, which at night luminously reflects the stars, many of which we recognize, and many we do not. And some we do not even notice as they slide down the

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sky and disappear. Ralph Towner: MY FATHER'S HOBBY My father's hobby, now don't laugh, was collecting sneezes, no stamps or coins for him, "The stuff of life," he said, "of

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life." My mother and brothers shook their heads, his friends smirked, but he hurt no one, was an honest electrician and everyone eventually shrugged it off as a harmless quirk. As his closest friend, Manny Borak told my mom, "it could be worse." Dad

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would mount the sneezes on glass slides he carried in his pockets everywhere he went. Some sneezes resemble flower petals, other seafoam amoebas, insect wings, still others fan-shaped, fingerless fetal hands, splatters of raindrops, or empty

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cocoons. Next, he stained the specimens magenta, turquoise, egg-yolk yellow and placed them in the glass cases that stood in all the rooms. Late at night when the family slept, he arranged handfuls of the slides on the light table in his study

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and switching off the lamp, he would peer down at them and smile. One night, a small boy with bad dreams, I crept terrified through the darkened house to the study. He was bent over his collection, his face surrounded by darkness, glowing

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in the table's light as his lips murmured something again and again. I slid my small hand into his and listened. He was rocking back and forth, bowing to the slides. "God bless you," he was saying, "God bless you."

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THE HEAD, for Kim [unidentified] My uncle Ernie found a head in his bowling case. It was nearly a perfect fit. "A mob-job, probably drugs," said the cop as he flipped over the pages of his pad and tucked it into his shirt

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pocket. Every time he bowled after that my uncle couldn't avoid the notion that he was poking his fingers into the victim's nostrils and mouth. It put him off his game and more often than not, the ball would roll into the gutter. "That's

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where they all wind up," his friend Sully said with the grin, "in the gutter," and he went, "rat-tat-tat-tat," with an imaginary machine gun. My uncle didn't think that was funny. That and the other jokes about the Headless Horseman, or how

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good it was that he was finally getting ahead in the world. "For Christ's sakes, for Christ's sakes," he'd say and, "let a guy have some peace. They don't even know who he is, for Christ's sakes." I couldn't understand if the guy he referred to was the

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victim or himself. "Victim? What do they mean by that? He was someone. He could have had a wife, maybe kids," my uncle said that Sunday at the family dinner. "Take it easy," my father said, nodding to the other end of the table, where my

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grandmother sat. "Mama, remember?" but the old lady was patting my sister's hair and smiling and hadn't heard. Uncle Ernie looked at her, then leaned close to my father, "I mean, who was the guy? And how did his head get in my case?" he said in

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a scratchy whisper. My father shrugged. He was the oldest of three brothers and the others were always asking him questions, which he inevitably answered with a shrug. "Could have been anyone," he said. "You still keep the case in your

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locker at work?" Uncle Ernie nodded. "Could have been anyone," my father said again, "you can't think about it no more. Forget it." But uncle Ernie couldn't forget it. After school, I'd meet him when he got off work at the post office and

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he'd drive me home. "They don't understand," he said, leaning toward me from the steering wheel, "Everyone else has a locker. Why mine? See what I mean? There's more to this than your dad thinks." The kids at school knew about the head from

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their parents and crowded around asking if I'd seen it and what uncle Ernie had said about it. That was the year Mr. Goodman told the class about the head-hunters in the Amazon, how they shrank the heads and sewed the lips together and stitched

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the eyelids shut. Shortly afterwards, I began dreaming about the head. A hand was holding it by the hair in front of my face, the sewn lips was struggling against the threads wanting to say something, and the eyelids flooded and flew off

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like two moths, leaving the eyeballs bloodshot and swollen, staring into my eyes, as if the head were beseeching me to explain why it was unable to speak. In two or three months, the jokes and questions stopped and my uncle's bowling game

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improved. It was about that time he met aunt Sue, to whom, my father said with a smirk, he lost his head. After they married and had kids, uncle Ernie would answer any question, even questions about the head with a shrug. Eventually the

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head came to me and all the unanswered questions everyone had asked about it, even when the cop arrived at the house several months later, and told uncle Ernie and my father, who the head belonged to. They shrugged, but I was too young to

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shrug. Besides, I had this weird idea that if I shrugged, my head would fall off. "The Head." The next one I'd like to read is, The Lights- The Lights- "The Light Was Out." There it is:

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THE LIGHT WAS OUT (It's a pretty poem) I kissed her in the hallway. The light was out. She didn't love me and I didn't love her. We fumbled with each other in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, and our breath was more

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like hissing than lovers' murmurings. I thought [unidentified], wasn't half surprised when she broke away and stood shuddering in the shadows, turned from me, "No," she said, "they'll hear us." She said that the other time, and

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the time before that when the light was on, I imagined them all in bathrobes, coming to the stairhead looking down on us and calling, "Ellie, is that you?" But now the light was out and there was no excuse. "Come on," I said, and reached for her

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because I thought I should, although I knew it was no use. "No!" It was as final as goodbye and was. I never saw her after that, but heard from time to time that she had married and divorced and married once again, that she had a daughter by her

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first husband and a son by the second. She would be 56 or 57 now. I remember her saying that her parents were old and wouldn't understand, that her mother was 40 when she had her, and her father was over 50. I thought they were grandparents

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when I first met. She was 15 or 16 that winter, and I a year or so older, but I can't help thinking that she's older than her parents now since they've remained the same age in my head as they were then. Is she too old to understand when her own

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children giggle and fumble in the dark at the bottom of the stairs? Does she remember when she hears them whispering, the night we faced each other in a similar darkness, unable to express anything but confusion and self-protective anger and

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went our separate ways without so much as a goodbye? She didn't love me and I didn't love her, and the light was out at the bottom of the stairs. She came into my arms only to push me away. A woman about to leave her girlhood and a man who was still

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a boy, both too young to know we were her parents then as we are her children now as we stood face to face on the darkened threshold. Billie Harris: Thank you very much, Ralph Peduto. That was

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really wonderful and thank you Morton Marcus for writing such brilliant poetry. I'm not surprised that your book, "When People Could Fly," has been nominated for four literary awards. And thank you, Ralph, very much. I did say that. And

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next week, Angie Chrisman is going to be our guest on "From the Bookshelf" and will read to us from, "Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker," edited by Roger and Joe, who by the way is E.B. White's son-in-law just after

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Valentine's Day, but I think it's okay to extend Valentine's Day, don't you? Angie will read a story called, "How To Give The Wrong Impression," by Katherine Heiny. And one called, "Laws of Forbidden Cases," from, "Lamentations of the Father," by

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Ian Frazier. And now I have a message for you about the quarterly call-in. At twelve noon on Thursday, February the 12th, you can add your comments about KUSP during our quarterly call-in. The panel will consist of the president of our board of

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directors, Mark Bernhard, station manager, Peter Troxel, program and volunteer coordinator, Ray Price, and chief engineer, Don Russell. Whether you love or loathe what we're doing here at KUSP, have your say in the quarterly

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call-in. The phone numbers are 476-2800, or 1-800-655-KUSP. Make your views known at twelve noon on Thursday, February the 12th. And now stay tuned for Mike Lambert and "Syncopated Metronome."