Month: July 2025

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Gaza Dream

I’m at the Mendocino Farmers Market with my basket as I am every Friday. I’m about to buy some tamales when I look to the west and see a big military helicopter hovering in the air over what I thought was the Mendocino Hotel.

“What’s going on down there?” I ask my friend Christine, the market manager.

She hesitates to reply and then says quietly, “Gaza.”

I set my basket down and walk toward the helicopter, and as I get closer I can see where Mendocino abruptly ends and Gaza begins.

I stand a few feet from the edge of Gaza and watch in horror as people run toward a pile of sacks of grain and bullets rain down from the helicopter killing many of the people.

Now two children, a boy and a girl, walk by close to the line between Mendocino and Gaza, and I reach out to them and they take my hands and I pull them across the line into Mendocino and we walk back to the farmers market.

The boy is so weak from hunger, he collapses. So I pick him up and the girl clutches my pants leg and we continue on our way to the market.

I buy two tamales from the Mexican woman I always buy tamales from.When I try to pay her, she shakes her head.

I carry the boy into the park adjacent to the market with the girl still clinging to my pants leg and we sit on the ground. I unwrap the tamales and give one to the girl while I feed the boy the other. The girl eats her tamale quickly and goes back to the Mexican woman who gives her another tamale.

The boy eats slowly. When he has swallowed a few mouthfuls he falls asleep. The girl eats her second tamale and curls up on the ground beside me and falls asleep, too.

Christine brings me my basket and says, “Now what are you going to do?”

And I wake up.

fin

Gaza prayer song by Todd on YouTube and Apple.

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Living In Fog

Twenty years ago while hunting for a house to rent in Mendocino, I had lunch with a local who gave me some valuable information about life here, including where here is. Mendocino is the name of a town, true, but when a local says he or she lives in Mendocino, he or she means they live somewhere between Westport in the north and Elk in the south, and somewhere on the coast to ten miles inland.

This local also forewarned me about the dense summer fog that can blanket the coast for weeks and even months at a stretch permitting no sun to shine upon the land. She said many people here succumb to fog-induced depression that can only be cured by going inland a few miles where the sun is shining brightly.

How right she was. We are currently in week two of Life In Fog, and though I’m accustomed to these stretches of gray timelessness, the body mind spirit consortium is really put to the test by this lack of sun. By that I mean, one doesn’t have to succumb to the gloom, but if one is already feeling a bit blue about something, the blues may easily grab one.

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Speaking of the blues, for most of my life I felt mighty blue about the unwillingness of humans to forsake violence and greed to work for the greater good of humanity and to work for the good of our mother earth who is hurting so badly from humanity’s misuse of her.

Now I’m no longer blue about that because I came to realize with the ascendancy of Trump and how his adherents and many others behaved during the Pandemic, and watching how things are unfolding now, that humans are behaving as humans have behaved since we evolved into modern humans a few hundred thousand years ago.

As with all other species of life on earth, our priorities are: having sufficient food and water, not being too hot or too cold, procreating, and protecting our offspring until they are able to survive on their own. If we have the time and the means to do things to give ourselves pleasure we’ll do that, too. And most importantly, we don’t care about other species except to try to eat them or use them to fulfill our priorities.

Yes, a tiny minority of humans deviate from this self-serving behavior, and some pre-industrial societies developed collective behavior practices designed to not overuse resources so future generations would have enough to eat, but by and large humans do what all species do: we take care of ourselves in the short term. And we think anyone who suggests we do otherwise is crazy.

For instance, air travel has been proven through many meticulous studies to be the cause of at least 25% of all greenhouse gases and the attendant global warming, and that number is probably closer to 50%. Yet millions of people who claim to care about the environment and the future of the earth continue to fly in jets multiple times a year. This seeming hypocrisy used to give me the blues. Now I understand these people are simply being human and giving themselves pleasure in the short term. They don’t really care about anything else. That’s how humans are.

And that, I feel, is why we the people elected Trump. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is: a self-serving human being just like the rest of us.

Or maybe I just feel this way because I haven’t seen the sun in a week.

fin

Troo Romanz piano/drum duet on YouTube and Spotify.

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Good Things

Headlands Fleurs

There is a boggy place on the headlands just to the south of Main Street in Mendocino where the flowers this year are more lush and spectacular than I’ve ever seen them, and the bumblebees are in ecstasy visiting the myriad blooms.

Farmers Market

Every Friday from noon to 2:30 until October is the Mendocino Farmers Market. Such fun. I go every week and buy sunflower-seed sprouts and tamales, and this week I got a jar of ambrosial apricot jam, a jar of Laytonville honey, a jar of cannabis healing salve that really works, and a spectacular bunch of radishes.

The Bear Came

This morning I went out to cut a zucchini from my one zucchini plant growing in my orchard tub and found a bear had knocked over one our garden refuse cans to root around in the kitchen compost.

We call any bear who knocks over cans in our neighborhood the bear, though we’ve never actually seen the bear in the thirteen years we’ve lived in this house. He or she visits us during the night. We know the bear is different bears, but for some reason we like calling them the bear.

And though cleaning up the bear mess is a gucky chore, I’m always happy when the bear visits us so long as he or she doesn’t try to get through or over our deer fence. I like the idea of him or her out there sniffing around.

Sugar Snap Peas and Carrots

In my orchard tubs protected by the aforementioned deer fence, we have had the most successful crops of sugar-snap peas and carrots we’ve ever had. The lettuce crop has been good, the scallions marvelous, the sunflowers still stalks and no flowers, arugula plentiful, radishes ample, parsley galore, and the snap peas and carrots magnifico.

Lemons

Our lemon trees are also having a fabulous time this summer. I’m staying on top of feeding them and watering them, and we’ve had bumblebees and hummingbirds doing a great job pollinating them in the absence of honeybees. How lucky we are to have such a profusion of those tasty yellow orbs.

Reviews of The Farm at the East Cove Hotel

I’ve had several emails and letters and even some phone calls from people telling me how much they enjoyed my latest book The Farm at the East Cove Hotel, but until recently no one had posted a review of the book on Amazon, and finally someone has posted a nice encouraging five-star review there to go along with two good ones at Goodreads. Hurray!

fin

Todd’s happy song Wake Up Thinking About You from his album Dream of You

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Robin Hood

In the myth I liked to enact as a kid, Robin Hood was a witty swashbuckler who didn’t have to help poor people and could have enjoyed the patronage of the evil king and his even more evil henchman the Sheriff of Nottingham, but Robin felt it was shamefully wrong that so few people should own almost everything while everybody else was starving to death.

The final straw for my Robin Hood came when the king and his amoral cohorts raised taxes even higher on people already literally dying under debt. Robin Hood said, “Enough already,” and started waylaying rich people traveling through Sherwood Forest and taking their money and jewels to buy food to give to the poor. But Robin didn’t just take their money. He brought them to a feast in the forest where he was taking care of a bunch of hungry people, and he introduced the rich people to the poor people so the rich people would learn that poor people were exactly the same as rich people except for one thing: they weren’t the children of rich people.

When I would enact my Robin Hood dramas with my friends, I usually played the part of Robin Hood, and my friends would play the parts of Friar Tuck, Little John, and Will Scarlett, and they would all best me at combat. Even so, they liked having me lead them in our skirmishes with the Sheriff of Nottingham because I knew how the story went and they weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next.

We even had little leather pouches full of rocks (money) we took from the rich, usually invisible but we knew they were there, and gave to the poor, also usually invisible but easily imagined from seeing the Errol Flynn movie version of Robin Hood several times.

These enactments always made us happy. And I think that was because we knew instinctively that sharing was the way to go. Indeed, I think it was in our bones, our genes, in the evolution of our species to share in order to survive. Nobody should be rich at the expense of other people, especially when there’s plenty of food and money for everybody.

Little did we know we were socialists and the king and his lords were capitalists, but that’s the story we were playing out, creating a world of sharing and equity.

Now the actual ruler of America and his greedy henchmen have raised taxes on the already desperately poor, taken away medical care for tens of millions of people, and are creating a society resembling the England of Robin Hood’s time.

This time, however, the rulers have made sure guys with bows and arrows won’t stand a chance against vast numbers of soldiers armed with powerful weapons. There is no fun way to bring about a just and equitable society because, quite frankly, we waited too long to do anything about these greedy guys taking over all the branches of our government.

So what do we do? Elect people who want to take from the rich and give to the poor, assuming the rich ever let us have a fair election again.

fin

Everybody Has To Breathe from Todd’s CD Hip Salon