My husband
was dying. In the hospital - for five weeks. His temperature was 105
degrees. He was receiving Intravenous Antibiotics. Day and night. Nothing
was working. Doctors' medicines were failing. Arthur and Excalibur,
Abraham and Isaac, earlier pagan sacrifices stood shadows in my mind
as, dismal, I stared into a dying fire one late winter afternoon. People
die. I knew that. Only I couldn't spare Sandy. Not just then - his face
so noble, so kingly, so caring. I had to stop Fate. Somehow.
"Could I make him something? If I made it with my own hands? But what?
In six hours? All I had was six hours. I couldn't cook. I couldn't sew.
I didn't know how to paint. What could I make?"
"Write a book?"
"In six hours?"
"Scraps. What about scraps? Scraps of Poems, Sayings, Heres and Theres
which had stopped me in my tracks when I first read them. Pasted behind
cupboard doors, over the kitchen sink, under bathroom mirrors. Together
with everything most beautiful from the Louvre, the Nelson Atkins, the
Metropolitan, the Freer. All those post cards I had loved the best from
each gigantic blockbuster show."
Suddenly I was racing. I was tearing around my house. For six hours I
cut and pasted ending with the first of my many Mockups.
Presented the next morning. But Sandy was too sick. Really he was too
sick even for "Thank You." Except that night. 104 degrees. And the next
night 103 degrees. And the final night coming home from the hospital,
knowing in my heart, even though I never said it aloud, "My Scrapbook
was saving My Husband."
Later it took me a whole year to receive permissions. So many mistakes
for this Novice rushing along. That bill from the Museum Nacional de Arte
Antiga for the Hieronymus Bosch "The Temptation of St. Anthony" paid in
a money order for Escudos? Just before Christmas? And I never double checked
Escudos? $2,000 instead of $400? Still, in spite of such landslide mistakes,
finally I was finished with my ANTHOLOGY.
A new kind. The clothesline holding it together: "Please God save Sandy."
The clothespins all those silver light Scraps of Writing and Illustrations
gathered through so many years.
In this
ANTHOLOGY, a girl from the Bahamas meets a boy from Canada. They marry
and have children. Quotations from all over the world tell this Personal
story in a Universal way. Major Museum Masterpieces (mostly from the
field of Oriental Art), all mixed up with Family Photos of Mr. and Mrs.
Anyone illustrate this saga. Most anthologies in the USA represent Western
Thought. In this one, East (China, Japan, Ancient Persia) meets West.
This Anthology is a Different kind of Love Story.
Euripides
Thomas Paine
Anwari
Asian Verse
Basho
Bible,King
James, Ecclesiastes, Corinthians, Solomon
Elizabeth
Bislan
Derek bok
Jorge Luis
Borges
The Rune
of St. Columba
William
Henry Davies
John Donne
John Dreyfus
Higher Educaton
T. S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Benjamin
Franklin
Louise M.
Haskins
Hideyoshi
Henry Kissinger
Henry Wadworth
Longfellow
Benjamin
Franklin
Somerset
W. Maugham
Frederick
Morgan
Portia Nelson
Sir Isaac
Newton
Harold Nicolson
Sir Amyas
Paulet
Plutarch
Jacques
Prevert
John D Rockefeller
Junior
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti
Jalalu'd-Din
Rumi
Sir Walter
Scott
Socrates
Aleksander
I Solzhenitsyn
Fujiwara
Teika
Oscer Wilde
Tao Yuan-Ming
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