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