Dr. Kevin

I met Kevin at one of my parish’s gay-lesbian potlucks. I was impressed with his refusal to be erased, either by who he was or his relationship or his family. He took his place in the Church, which he loved so much. He was a model of faith and forgiveness.

So it was with shock when I found out he was in an automobile accident. Did he know that morning was his last? I suspect his yes to God was a yes to life and all that it entailed. And the incomprehension of leaving a husband and two young children behind is an act of trust in Jesus. I don’t know. I am bowled over for this holy man and I am grateful.

They whom we love and lose

are no longer where they were before.

They are now whenever we are.

--St. John Chrysostom

Learning from Ruth

Ruth Asawa, a Bay Area Artist and Educator, was born in 1926 in southern California, one of seven children to first generation Japanese farmers. In 1942, she and her family were detained in internment camps, first in Santa Anita and then in Arkansas. She attended Milwaukee State Teachers College, and then she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied art with Josef Albers and met her future husband. They married and moved to the Bay Area where they had a family and where she has been involved in art and education.

A few weeks ago I saw the film Ruth Asawa: Roots of an Artist by Bob Toy, a film of a Bay Area artist and educator, Ruth Asawa. After the screening, there was a Q&A session with individuals of the project, among whom were two of her children. The children were asked if Ruth’s siblings were also artists. None of Ruth’s siblings were artists. Ruth, herself, probably would have been a farmer had it not been for the US internment of Japanese-Americans. It was in the Santa Anita internment camps where Disney artists who volunteered to give art lessons exposed Ruth to art.

The children also mentioned that as a young woman, Ruth had wanted to be a teacher but since she was Japanese-American she could not secure a student-teaching assignment because of the lingering hostility to the Japanese in the US. Her alternative was to study art at Black Mountain College, a honing ground for artists such as Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, etc. There she studied art and met her husband. While her first love was to be a teacher, she became an artist and later returned to education by bringing art to the schools in San Francisco.

I find it instructive that Ruth’s internment camp experience and disallowance of being a teacher were pivotal in her development as an artist.

©  2011 Hector V. Lee

Don't drop banana peels in the street

Happy Birthday Dan!

you hold my...

Happy Birthday Ade!

Happy Birthday Pío

Happy Independence Day

This is my song, oh God of all the nations,

a song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

but other hearts in other lands are beating

with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

This is my song, thou God of all the nations;

a song of peace for their land and for mine.

This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth's kingdoms:

Thy kingdom come on earth thy will be done.

Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,

And hearts united learn to live as one.

Oh hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations;

Myself I give thee; let thy will be done.

--From the United Methodists (Stanzas 1 & 2 by Lloyd Stone, Stanza 3 by Georgia Harkness):

Goodbye Ti Couz

So my nephew wanted to eat French food on his last night in San Francisco and I thought I would take him to what was one of my favorite restaurants in the City. But when I drove by I noticed it was closed. Apparently it was closed at the end of May.  How sad.

It opened around the same time I arrived in San Francisco in the early 1990s, when Valencia Street was a grittier. I remember my first meal there was divine. I came to it again and again because no matter what you ordered, it was delicious, you could not go wrong. The food was the spiritual solace of Brittany. My favorites were the French onion soup or the salad de mer. The buckwheat crepes were unique and savory, not like the crepes you find in other eateries. My favorite combination was sausage, mushroom and cheese or onions. They had a slight fermented pear cider to accompany the meal. And for dessert there were any number of combinations: bananas & nutella, apple compote with berry syrup. In recent years, I thought the quality had gone down; there were no longer the long lines listed on the white boards. Still I will miss this place. It was like an old friend. Good bye Sylvie. Goodbye Ti Couz.