The rainbow flag is everywhere. I thought, “What can I say about that? I’m not going to write about that, I guess,” but even here on WordPress the rainbow stripes are up there.

I accept the rainbow stripes. Down the street, some neighbors fly a rainbow flag. Past the house walk our Muslim neighbors. People walk past, walking dogs, walking each other. We ride bikes around the neighborhood, down to the Thursday night Pasar Malam (“night market,” as Malaysians say). People generally find all this acceptable.

Maybe that person passing by is gay. Maybe that person is a conservative Muslim, a conservative Jew, a conservative Christian, a conservative Buddhist. Maybe that person was 16 when the Beatles played at the Seattle Center. Maybe that person lives in that house with those weird gigantic plants in the front yard.

Hard as it can be, as loath as one is to have his motives questioned, one can smile and say “Hello” if your paths cross as you walk down the street. Neighborliness can be contagious. It’s a simple expression of acceptance, a way to express that one is content to live amidst the complexity of human experience as we increasingly know it.

As someone who everyday expects to be banished from society because of my social awkwardness and clumsiness, I say, if I’m a certain way, it’s just because, and why should anyone necessarily be the boss of anyone just because he is louder, or more simple-minded, or stronger, because he has the gun?

Why should a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or a Democrat, or a Republican, or a vegetarian, or a carnivore, or a Sounder or a Canuck or a Trailblazer hate somebody else? Every person is a variation on the same theme. What we know about another person is never enough to render judgment, but it should be enough that one can have compassion and acceptance that every person struggles with circumstances and not always as gracefully as one would hope.

We are lucky to be alive, lucky to live in a universe of infinite varieties of beauty and consciousness.

“By their fruits you shall know them,” He said. That bodes well for those who embrace the peaceful flag of the rainbow!

Eighteen years ago this week I started my first major poetry project: Leviathan (about the Mercer Slough). Since then I’ve done two others (Clam Dreamtime City, about Seward Park; and Pentecost, about Discovery Park). A new one is 75% of the way through the first half (they’re two-year projects).
So, here are excerpts from haikus written in the third week of June.
Happy Summer!

Above the green grass
rises a glade of green trees
beneath a dark sky.

Arachnids move their
limbs too fast to see them well
loosened by the heat.

Dogs bark people walk
eagles attract attention
to poplar treetops.

One reckons here not
just with seasons but with one’s
personal context.

A 358
spills passengers out into
a westlake raincloud.

Canadian geese
totaling 76
graze a lakeside lawn

east up the shoreline
away from crows ducks and one
wading blue heron.

Bus shelter dimness
gently softens old faces
inside light more harsh.

The foot on the gas
suffers toes poked by sharp grains
buried in the socks

grasses gone to seed
a hillside’s bad company
hard for ferns to breathe.

Byproducts of this
rounded watery planet
all these winged insects.

One sees the heatwave
(green leaves already fallen)
and the damage done.

Mounds of blackberries
reach for each other across
pedestrian trails.

Can released their album “Delay” when Malcolm Mooney was still their lead singer, before the Damo Suzuki era.
One song goes on about Frog and Toad, two characters, once mysterious and meaningless to me, but I know them well now.
In two books, each a collection of short stories for the youngest readers, I have come to know these individuals: Frog And Toad All Year, and Frog And Toad Are Friends.
Frog And Toad Are Friends contains five stories.
“Spring” dwells upon a subject familiar to residents of the Northwest: SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Toad is in a state of utter paralysis– house all shuttered, the “November” page still on his calendar. Frog looks for Toad inside his tiny two-story cottage. “Blah.” “I am not here.” “Go away.” Frog literally drags Toad outdoors into the Sun. “It’s Spring! We can begin a whole new year together,” he encourages Toad.
See? So many people think of Spring as the first season of a year. Toad tells Frog to come back “about half past May.”
“But I will be lonely until then,” Frog says, and that explains why he tears off every page of the calendar until he gets to May. He wakes Toad, who sees the May page on his calendar and climbs out of bed.
The story ends with Frog and Toad gesticulating together along a road of green grass sprouting through snow.
“The Story” illustrates the combination of selflessness and masochism often present in the case of a writer, an artist– a storyteller, in this story.
Toad visits Frog, who is in bed, feeling ill. “Tell me a story while I am resting,” Frog requests.
“Let me think of a story to tell you,” says Toad. He could have told Frog any story, but, as any true creative type will appreciate, Toad likes nothing better than the challenge to recreate the wheel. He wants to tell a new story, so he walks around the porch, but found no inspiration. He stood on his head– no story. He poured glasses of water over his head– no story. He banged his head against the wall. No story.
Frog is feeling better. Never mind the story, he says. “I feel terrible,” Toad says, and gets into the bed himself. “Would you like me to tell you a story?” Frog asks. “Yes.” Toad falls asleep as Frog tells the story of what Toad had just done.
Frog wanted a story, and now he has one.
“A Lost Button” begins with a familiar experience– after a long walk, Toad discovers that, somewhere along the way, he lost a button.
Despite Toad’s hurting feet, they retrace their steps to look for the button. Maybe they will find it right away; maybe not at all. Frog finds a button, but it is not Toad’s. A sparrow brings Toad a button he found, but it is not Toad’s. A raccoon brings him a button, but it is not Toad’s. In the meadow, the woods, the river, the mud, they search, to no avail. Toad screams at the world, runs home, and slams the door. On the floor, there is his button.
Toad sewed all the buttons he was given onto his jacket and gave it to Frog, who dances for joy.
When a button is lost, no other button will do. Out of confusion, clarity and creativity.
“A Swim” highlights a difference between Frog and Toad: Toad wears a bathing suit. Frog does not. Toad tells Frog that after he puts on his bathing suit, he must not look at him until he gets in the water, because he looks funny in his bathing suit.
When the two friends are ready to leave the water, a turtle comes along. Frog explains to the turtle why he should please go away. Some lizards nearby are curious. A snake overhears and says he wants to see Toad looking funny in his bathing suit. So do two dragonflies and a field mouse.
Frog tells Toad everyone wants to see how funny he looks in his bathing suit. Toad resolves to wait them out. Finally he begins to catch a cold, and climbs out of the water. Everyone, even Frog, laughs. Toad says “Of course I look funny,” picks up his clothes, and, head high, eyes closed, walks home.
After all, he had told them he looks funny in his bathing suit. He has the satisfaction of having been right about himself, his bathing suit, and his audience.
“The Letter” ends the book on a hopeful note. Toad sits on his porch at his “sad time of day.” He waits for the mail, but he never gets any.
Frog hurries home and writes Toad a letter. He instructs a snail to deliver it. He returns to Toad’s house, but Toad has given up.
Frog spills the beans. He tells Toad he has written him a letter, and even tells him what the letter says.
Four days later, the snail arrives with the letter.
Toad could have complained that he had had to virtually ask for a letter from Frog, but he has the insight to recognize that, what he had wanted, he got– a letter. He was grateful for that.

As the Seattle Symphony performs at Benaroya Hall, they are overwhelmed by the King Of Instruments: the pipe organ!
Though some say the king of instruments is the symphony. Hard to argue with that, not because it is right, but because that is such a weird thought. Anyone who uses that argument must operate by rules of reasoning hopelessly opaque to anyone else.
I once had an overnight Wednesday-Sunday job. Sundays at 6am, in those days, a radio station had a program called “The Organ Loft.” I looked outside as I sat on the steps and listened to pipe organ music on my transistor radio. Maybe the pipe organ isn’t meant to be listened to on a transistor radio, I thought, because it sounded silly. Too much treble.
Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price) played the pipe organ.
There was a day in Fremont that predates even those long-ago Sundays. A neighbor across the street, window open, was listening to piano music. A guitars-and-drums man, I was struck with admiration. That person must be a real sophisticate, I thought. I would like to be able to do that.
St. James Cathedral has two pipe organs. I was there once on a weekday. After Mass, the organist came out and started to play. Lucky me, I had time to listen, and it was a thrill. I became one of the people who stays after Sunday Mass, listens to the organist play out his whole piece, and applauds.
I began taking note of the composers of the pieces played at Mass– my first contact with the ethereal Olivier Messiaen.
St. Mark’s Cathedral has an excellent pipe organ high up in back. You can’t get up there, same as the Benaroya pipe organ. The organist has to ascend that mountain alone and send the music down to the uplifted masses.
One night a courageous organist played Messiaen’s “Meditations On The Mystery Of The Holy Trinity,” one of the lesser-known works from a year that saw more than its share of historic music: 1969.
I went to high school just down the road from St. Mark’s, so I thought I’d take my wife down to show her around. Farther than I thought, we were on foot, and a downpour erupted as we were too far away from the church to get back without getting soaked. That’s what I get for thinking I could just go back to my high school and it would be fun. No big deal.
It was horrible. I sat in that church freezing and soaked, miserable, and listened to that crazy piece, thinking it would have to be one of Aimee’s least-favorite nights of all time. But, a classic night for me.
Someday, I hope I get another chance to hear that performed live, because it’s a startling piece of music, and one of the great cultural treasures of the Catholic church. Imagine trying to portray the reality of the Trinity in 70 minutes of pipe organ music. As it unfolds, one truly has the feeling of being on the threshold of the Ineffable. There are great outbursts of power chords and passages through deep tunnels of unexplored darkness.
Procure some Messiaen, or Buxtehude, or Bach, and go for a walk in the rain, at night, or a Summer twilight, in a forest, a field, and listen to pipe organ music through your headphones.
One of the Seattle Symphony’s yearly subscription series is a pipe organ recital series, always among the least-attended concerts of a season. Someday, an organist will play with a drummer– a jazz drummer, say– and that’ll be a great success. Give the organ something visceral and immediate to play off.
During public tours of Benaroya Hall, a demo of the pipe organ is included. People recognize that the pipe organ deserves more prominent and thoughtful presentation.
The Organ Rock Singalong Series will be a huge success. The symphony, with organ, plays “Whiter Shade Of Pale,” “Smoke On The Water,” You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “A Day In The Life.”
Why isn’t this being done?
Why? Why? Why?

The Moon is full, so it’s not a good time to ask this, but are you always self-contained, and in complete control of circumstances? A Zen Master is. I think.
Maybe I could just at least have a zen rock garden.
When we got a house, I thought I could have one, but the places I had in mind didn’t work out, so the idea was shelved.
Until I was put in charge of balloons at my son’s third birthday party.
Seventy white balloons to form a grid, and ten black balloons to form the special big rocks. Cost less than $10 for the balloons.
I could use little nails to anchor the balloons in the grass, but it was tough to get the nails in those little knots. The balloons flopped around and were different sizes. Not regular!
“Hey….” I noticed. “It’s not windy.” Take the nails out and just put the balloons on the ground.
The black balloons I taped together, in one case attaching them to a stick to form something meant to resemble a scholar’s rock.
It was a lot smaller than I hoped it would be. I could have used ten times as many balloons, but who’s going to blow them up? For just the 70 I took two Advil for the earaches.
Then I got a ladder, climbed up on the roof, and started photographing it: from the roof, the ground, standing on a chair, a table, behind the balloons, in front of them, beside them, in the late afternoon, in the evening, after dark.
Then the wind blew. In the morning, they’d gotten all over the yard, even into a neighboring yard. They ran alone, as couples, in packs. They popped. They got stuck in a lilac bush, against a fence, the side of the house.
Out of dozens of photos, I chose two dozen and thought of options: print which ones at which sizes?
With cheap copies, I designed a poster, and had good copies made of those, but some didn’t print correctly and had to be deleted from the project or kept in their imperfect forms.
I had roughly equal numbers of landscape photos and portrait photos. Instead of one poster of all the photos, I thought I would arrange them, by those styles in linear fashion, so that the project would consist of two separate pieces.
To the local frame shop to get mats made on which to paste the photos. For that, I also had to get good archival paste and a brush, and practice on something else before pasting the photos onto the mats.
After experimenting exhaustively with the order of the photos as they were placed on the mats, I was satisfied I had them in the best order.
Then I had to mark the margins and try to paste the photos perfectly, which I failed to do, as the lady at the frame shop pointed out. I consulted with her as to how to frame the piece, and how to get perfect margins between the photos and between the photos and the frame.
Three weeks later, the job was done and I picked it up.
Then it took two days to figure out the best place to hang it at home.
What fun it was to have those balloons and carry them out into the backyard as people watched, wondering what exactly I was doing, making it up as I went along, encountering unforeseen problem, figuring out solutions, finally arriving at a piece of work I hadn’t anticipated at all– George’s Third Birthday Zen Balloon Garden!
Well, the next one will be way better.