Author: Jonathan Bell

INTO AFRICA River runs fast and tumultuous.  Before my eyes it breaks up in a white water, dashed against, over, around great slabs of rock.  At a safe distance you feel its threat.   You know the grandeur.   This is the savage Nile. Far lower Nile.  The Nile without flocks of egret-like feluccas.  No tourists come to see this in their thousands… Continue reading Bodies Under The Coffee Trees →

NOT PALM BEACH “I knew you was a Yankee because you’re so fair.”  This in the Upper Gulf accent of the Florida Panhandle.  A talk reminiscent to me of my father’s family, how they spoke to me as a child, a self delighting lilt, a lazy river of speech.  Although one I’d learned holding eddies, dangers, downstream.… Continue reading Scream of the Mynah Bird →

ONLY THE DEAD KNOW NEW YORK I don’t have any meaningful jot to jot down about death. It’s been pretty well covered.  One thing I’ve learned is that you can know how strong people were when they’re even stronger in death. Watching my mother die was my first death experience. Yes, I’d been to open… Continue reading Only The Dead Know New York →

Midnight doesn’t cool the graveyard shift.  It’s another fucking hot night at Kansas City Structural Steel,  here in Argentine on the Kaw river bottom.  These last days of August miserable heat and humidity haunt the men, me too almost a man among them.  Summer of 1968 I’m 19. This cavernous half ruined factory swallows the… Continue reading KANSAS CITY STRUCTURAL STEEL →

HERE      Les Izards is where I live, the name of the land and of a house.  In this countryside every place has its own name, an identity often ancient.  To help my very few visitors especially those from afar pronounce Les Izards I tell them to say ‘Lazy Czar.’  It’s close enough.    … Continue reading HERE →

Part Two of Ciao Mate      When The Moon        Hits Your Eye        Like A Big Pizza Pie  August night 1963.  Florence Italy.  Hot.    Young boy in a tub. Hardly naked, not so brave, he has his pants on.  Boy quaking.  His name is Jonathan Bell.   “YOU… Continue reading When The Moon →

Ciao Mate 1. Rule Britania  I’ve been in this room for a long long time.  Oh in truth perhaps not yet an hour.  Time is useless except in passing.  I’m only 14.  If only.  In truth today at this moment I’ve been here (or ‘there’ as you wish) for almost 60 years.    Myself now and myself then, we two lie… Continue reading CIAO MATE →

BAD BEHAVIOR Midnight in a young man’s sensual garden of behavioral Analysis. A young man so serious, so seriously self involved. I am at work. Entombed every week night from 9 to 1 in the morning in the far reaches of the behavioral science building, University of Kansas, a prairie Brutalist affair without personality, lacking… Continue reading BAD BEHAVIOR →

How quaint missionaries seem today.  Yet I recall them as integral to life in my father’s parsonage.  That place of my childhood of worn out furniture and tall wooden bookcases that is a castle keep for hundreds of books no longer read, for art ignored, and great music now left unheard.  Sad for me? No, a proud distinction. My… Continue reading Missionary Barrel →

Summer of my 16thyear I landed my first man job.  I was hired to be the dishwasher for the summer at the Fisherman’s Inn restaurant in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado.  Except for a couple of short summer camps I’d never been away from home, from my doting mother and father.  Suddenly I was to be transported 500 miles… Continue reading UP UTE PASS →