TheBanyanTree: Cecil's Play List

[Optus Sal]

Sent from my iPhone

> On 11 Dec 2021, at 3:17 pm, tobie--- via TheBanyanTree <thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com> wrote:
> 
> Oh Dale,
> 
>    Absolutely beautiful. I am not one for nostalgia. There is no era in my life that I would wish to visit inspired by a wistful yearning. But hearing about Cecil, long gone Cecil, whose death I assumed but never heard about, and Dee, our Dee, an indomitable spirit. Often I think about Youngblood, how I flew down to Houston with an enormous artwork covered with souvenir spoons — I had to sit outside on a back stoop while she and Alice smoked and smoked and smoked and smoked.
> 
>    You know the last email that Youngblood wrote to me was maybe the most mysteriously poetic. She said the cancer had spread to her brain and she wasn’t thinking straight, but there was this disjointed that comes to me every once in a while and I love it. Love it.   There were a few words that came before it which I don't’ recall. But the best part was this:   "……pearling roll joints."   Sometimes I feel like that—like whatever it is I’m saying makes sense to me but not to anyone else in the world or maybe in the world to come. But it still satisfies.
> 
>    It’s Shabbat, the candles lit, and as such I can push everything profane and mundane away, just shove it off the plane of disturbances and take a rest from it all. It’s a discipline to be sure, learning to push it all away, but well worth the agony of the training. You don’t have to be Jewish to gather up the comfort and relief of the Sabbath. And it needn’t be religious at all. I don’t consider myself religious, but I have a purist streak a mile wide and value ritual. Okay, then there’s the five thousand years of history and the extremely limited gene pool ……….. so ………. I am respecting my ancestors who came to the United States escaping the pogroms in Lithuania/Russia/Poland (they never knew which country they were living in. The borders were all in dispute and the Jews were only allowed to live in "the Pale of Settlement". I looked at a map once and it suddenly made sense: the Pale was a strip of territory along the disputed borders. It was like this:  Yeah, you can come invade us but you’ll have to go through our Jews first.
> 
>    How did I get off on that?
> 
>    Cecil Talley. Cecil. And Dee and Youngblood and …… I don’t think I remember Barra the Bard. Can you enlighten m