ISLANDS
There are islands in all the seas waiting for us to visit if we please.
The girls will dance
For you each night.
Everyone is happy
There is never a fight
They are so pretty
You cannot resist
You ask them to dance
Again, before they
Dismiss.
The sun slowly fades into the night
The lights come on to our delight.
The dancers glide onto the stage
They know every movement
They have practiced all year
We sit marveling at their skill
As we eat and drink our beer.
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Tomorrow is Easter, April 5, 2015. This morning, I got up at 4:30 am and watched the moon hide in the shadow of the Earth, an event that helps us define who we are and what we are. It made me reflect on my life. What came to mind were the Easters I spent as a child. They were some of the happiest times in my life that we old folks who live at the end of the street still enjoy, in our journeys through memory.
In my family, we all gathered at my Aunt Aggie’s house. There were about 20 of us. The years were in the early 1940s. She and Uncle Leo had about an acre of land right on the Los Angeles River somewhere in “the valley.” I have no idea now where that would be, but it was rural. She had a goat that she milked, and my cousins and I would go out to see if we could milk it. We were primarily city kids, and milking a goat was a skill we didn’t possess. My aunt would squirt the milk into our mouths from three feet away. Of course, it would get all over us, and that was part of the fun.
Being right across the street from the river, the cousins (there were four of us who lived close enough to be there) were given the duty of collecting enough crawdads to put in the salad. The L.A. River was all mud banks back then, and it was full of crawdads. We even had a swimming hole in it and went swimming if the weather permitted us to, without our mothers thinking we would get too cold and get sick. My mother and all my aunts would prepare the meal, and of course, the crawdad salad was my favorite part of it.
As I write this, there are tears running down my face. These were wonderful times. Now the river is all cement. No more crawdads. No more swimming hole. No more goat milk. All of those people are dead now, except two of my cousins and me. I don’t think any of us have had a crawdad salad or gone swimming in a swimming hole or milked a goat for a long long time. What a travesty that is.
John's Book of Life 