This is the blog for the Bentari Project.
Saturday, July 01, 2017
“A bird made a nest in the flowers and laid 4 eggs, at my client’s house. I felt honored to get to see it. As I worked this evening, I reflected on the dedication and work put in to build the nest and lay the eggs... And the effort that will be needed to raise the young. “I get so caught up in my daily routine that I often forget how fragile life r...
Read full postSunday, June 25, 2017
DAWN IN THE HEART OF AFRICA [1] a poem by Patrice Lumumba For a thousand years, you, African, suffered like beast, Your ashes strewn to the wind that roams the desert. Your tyrants built the lustrous, magic temples To preserve your soul, reserve your suffering. Barbaric right of fist and the white right to a whip, You had the right to die, you also...
Read full postMonday, May 29, 2017
MEMORIAL DAY AT THE LITTLE BIGHORN At the edge of the Great Plains, beneath a Western Big Sky just off I-90 halfway between Billings and Gillette through a tollbooth up above the Crow casino rest stop without picnic tables, gift shop run by boy scouts public address system announces the next lecture in fifteen minutes solemn menfolk holding the han...
Read full postSaturday, May 27, 2017
I was almost eleven in the summer of 1960. Brother Art was 13. We rode the Domeliner east from Portland to The Dalles. The tracks ran beside the newly completed Interstate I-80. From the dome on top of the train car, we saw the Columbia rolling toward the sea. The new freeway’s river of cars was a modern torrent at 70 mph. But the natural beauty st...
Read full postSaturday, May 27, 2017
On a hot Friday night in August of 1960, we got a special treat when Uncle Wayne took us to a drive-in movie in The Dalles. The movie was “Pork Chop Hill,” [1] a thriller about the Korean War. Gregory Peck played Lt. Joe Clemons, whose war experiences were the basis for the film. It is about the “hell” of war—a fire-fight that puts lives on a fragi...
Read full postSaturday, April 08, 2017
When I recently began reading one of Mom’s old books, The Trail Led North by Martha Ferguson McKeown [1] , I was moved by the inscription that the author added. This hardbound copy of the 1948 edition came with these words from the author who had been a mentor to my mother for many years. In flowing penmanship, she wrote: “Jo dear, This book comes ...
Read full postMonday, February 13, 2017
Mother held you first, Daughter, on that morning when dawn surpassed the birth of former days. On that morning I was there, all fired up and manly in the midst of it, I witnessed you in Mother’s arms when your eyes beheld life for the very first time. You were not blind or blurry eyed, Daughter! You looked long upon our faces. You saw things. We ca...
Read full postFriday, January 27, 2017
F. Clair Brown was born in a modest house in NE Portland on this day in 1923. Today he’d be 94, but he sailed with the Last Patrol on December 22, 1994. His wife, Josephine, preceded him in death by merely two months. It was fitting that my parents were together for the Holidays, since they had not missed Christmas together since the Korean War. On...
Read full postMonday, January 23, 2017
On his first day of ineffectual leadership, the rude leader of the free world harped and twiddled that the audience for his inauguration eclipsed all prior inaugural events. The orange president marched his press secretary out for the very first time where he ranted and whined about poor coverage that made the crowd seem smaller than it was. It was...
Read full postSaturday, January 21, 2017
The March on the morning after— the morning after the orange one took the sacred oath with his mouth puckered— the morning after the abomination—the women arose! The women gathered! The women descended on the capitol! The women gathered in hundreds of town squares! The women spoke! The women marched and chanted to the drumbeat! Trump goes down! Wel...
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