Back home upstate. My pale blue wrist mala – Joe will be familiar with it since I wore it all across and around the country on our Odyssey, and it left a pale ring on my wrist where the sun caught me between glove and shirt (burning a big ring of sunburn that became an asteroid shower of blisters – the same recurred on my ankles) – broke: the string snapped, and the beads, all 21 of them, fell – I’ve only been able to find 19 of the 21. Eventually I proceeded to the Zen monastery on the mountain above us, and located an amethyst wrist mala – my birthstone and that of the young man who sold it to me – along with two spares made of jasper, one for the car where I do most of my praying (!), and one to take to college in case of an accident to my purple one, which looks well. Right, a glimpse into the courtyard, with the temple in the late autumn light. Years ago when some of my graduate students were visiting, I took them to see the temple, and two of them were thrown out of the precinct – for making out; necking, as we used to call it. Sacred spaces inspire surprising reactions.

The underground walkway from the Port Authority to the 7th Avenue subway lines is a magnet for unusual, sometimes crazy, people. I’m tempted to walk it above ground, up 41st, but I would miss the day’s loonies. On Sunday a girl – I was too embarrassed to take her photo – was holding up a postage stamp-sized piece of card, arm extended, as if to draw our attention. I went close. On the the tiny square of card it said, Love the Jewish people. Interesting technique – make the message so small you have to make an effort to read it. The elderly lady [right], bowed almost in two with arthritis, is a more familiar figure. She’s simply begging. I gave her some cash and she let me photograph her. Yesterday a man was shouting Hallelujah! in the walkway. I wanted to take a snapshot of him but felt ashamed to do so. Hallelujah, anyway!

More flashbacks… (see below, no. 41) – randomly, as they come to me every day –

Most persistently of all, the honeyed-apricot-smelling prairie, hundreds of miles of glorious scent following heavy rains that brought the sweet clover into bloom. Who knew that a prairie could smell like paradise? Less sweet-smelling… Yellowstone’s celebrated sulphur pools…

Flashbacks – I get them all the time, flashbacks to my extraordinary summer adventure, across America and back, by Harley. Today I came across some photos taken by my traveling companion and frequent savior, Joe my brother-in-law and brother in arms; some of the photos are selfies, all are his – the daily photos in my 50-day travel blog (scroll back to the earliest blog entries to find it) are almost all mine. His, which I’m putting up here today and which I hadn’t looked at for months, took me right back to our journey. They come in no order – all equally present in the simultaneity of memory.

Wonderful sunsets here – a glorious one, seen from our front yard.

One of my favorite items in the surrounding countryside: an abandoned train, so completely rusted over that it looks red. Motionless for who knows how many decades, it could be…anything – it could be the train in which Lenin arrived at the Finland Station… something ineffably romantic about this relic left to rot amid the weeds around Rte 208, in the middle of fields.