Neither of us had ever been, so given the opportunity to go the Budapest, we jumped at it.  Autumn, the perfect time…a new country, a capitol of renown in our sites and off we went.  It did not disappoint. Stunning, a mini Paris of sorts architecturally, impressive restorations in full swing, sparkly clean, kindness in the culture, each walk was more beautiful than the last, fabulous restaurants, inviting cafes, landscaped parks, efficient and negotiable public transit…it was easy to feel welcomed.  Those were our first and, in many ways, lasting impressions.  Like most places though, there was also an undercurrent and even if we could not articulate it, we could feel it.  I think the first place I became aware of the flip side was at the edge of the graceful Danube whilst standing by the shoes art installation which commemorates the last act of Jews who had been forced into the river by Nazis. Had the unwillingly barefooted owners of those shoes been quaking in their last moments? Had they caught the eye of a Nazi hoping for some trace of humanity before being unceremoniously shot or merely forced into the river? To what god had they cried? How many generations of possibilities and hearts shattered in the terror?  Standing on the flats of the Pest banks as we did, you could look up toward the hills of the Buda side that supported magnificent churches and statues reaching aspirationally, toward the sky. None of that beauty had mattered. Evil won that day. Those days. Those years. Indeed those decades, well beyond WWII. 

We were told that we had to visit the House of Terrors Museum…from the outside, a charming city villa in the center of town. The interior told a very different story…chilling, gruesome.  The building had been one of the places the Nazis had perpetrated unspeakable crimes during their occupation of Hungary and at the end of WWII, the Soviets carried on the Nazis’ brutal traditions. This edifice had been a center through which hundreds of thousands of Hungarians had been exiled to gulags in Siberia. (The last Hungarian prisoner had been returned to Hungary in 2000.) Teenagers had been executed there, people unspeakably tortured. The three storied building did level best to present the facts and in so doing bore witness to humanity at its most monstrous. It was a virtual, visual journey into an unimaginable hell and it shook us at the core. It also served as a vivid cautionary tale.

We had a happy reunion with a friend from Budapest, a former and very brilliant theatre colleague. I’ll call him Andras. Our time with him was short, so after dispensing with the necessary surface life catch up, we dove in.  Andras and Orban had been university mates decades ago…Orban, Andras said, was brilliant then but that power had got ahold of his inner life and off the rails he’d gone. Further he said that Orban has been “Undoing democracy, democratically.” That was chilling. Over the course of the Prime Minister’s reign, gay themed books have been banned, there is an ongoing government campaign of historical revisionism designed to look favorably on Russia, branches of government have been undermined and thus slowly killed off, there has been a systematic installation of conservative judges, ongoing climate change denial, media o’er taken, experimental arts defunded. Orban, a glacial nightmare. US beware.

Andras had alerted us to a student demonstration that was to take place that early evening. We felt duty bound somehow to go. It was to start at one of the main bridges with plans to march to Parliament Square.  As we waited in the square we could hear the chanting crowd approach. Riot police were out in number, geared and waiting. We spotted cameras on tripods on the Parliament steps aimed at the empty square waiting to capture images of whoever turned up apparently.  They seemed more a warning than truly ominous. 

As the chanting drew nigh, we could see the first wave…it was fun. Party like, festive and thank heavens, peaceful. We noted as the demonstrators started to grow in number in the square, that they were a multi-generational population, made up presumably of students and admin. The look in their eyes ranged from hopeful to despairing. Maybe it was seeing the intentionality in their eyes, the purpose in their steps but I suddenly found myself in tears in the midst of it all…a visceral reminder that it can happen, it, the unthinkable, has happened here. Like traveling into a possible future, one to which we are headed, if we do not continue to do what we can. When we told Andras of the similarities in the US to tectonic plates shifts he had described, he was stunned. Said they here as democrats and rational conservatives alike, whilst certainly aware of Trump and his direct correlation to Orban, had not realized things had gone so far in the US. That they look to America as the hope… and surely it would prevail.  We told him we remained hopeful but were not sure, not sure at all.  

So as not to close out focused entirely on devolution of democracy as we have known it, let me say that toward the end of the gut wrenching displays at the House of Terrors, was an account of the Hungarian Uprising of October 1955. A day when there was a nationwide revolt against the Soviets.  How had that been possible? They’d had no internet, there were eyes everywhere, terror reigned and yet…all the better virtues came together to laugh in the face of evil that day. Where had the fuel for hope come from? The citizens of that revolt had no means, dire consequences were the promise, evil seemed omnipresent and yet hope and freedom and courage, solidarity, promise, love, intelligence, life, human rights…all of that burst through. That hard won victory did not really come until 1990 but it had been a tipping point in consciousness and one that however eventually, had won the day. I hope it wins ours as well.

My high school classmates and I are fast approaching a reunion. I’m looking forward to it, to reconnecting, swapping life stories, sharing pictures from then and now.  Predictably, many of us knew each other through chunks of our formative years. We spoke of aspirational dreams through our blooming hormones and formed many of our values with, on and through each other. We shared our innocence before the world moved us into its harsher realities. A crew on the reunion committee asked that we each pull together some remembrances in order to share them. I’ve read the submissions thus far and oh my, the floods of memories they have stirred.  Here is some of what came up in those waters for me. 

My dad’s career as an engineer with Union Carbide moved my family to Tokyo from Greenwich Ct., in 1960. Carbide had just initiated a joint venture with Nippon Unicar, so off we went.  My folks, Ray and Marshie, were thrilled to return…they’d been there under General MacArthur during the occupation days, with part of that rebuilding effort. Dad, had partnered with the brilliant Seymour Janow, travelling the length and breadth of Japan, assessing and where possible turning munitions factories back into fertilizer plants for a starving nation. Mother, partnering with dear pal Mrs. Connor and under the directive of Mrs. MacArthur, launched their school, Western Customs and Manners, open to all wives of Japanese military officers.  

We lived for the first many years in a rambling, quasi Western, great old house rented by Carbide. There were expansive gardens, well tended to by the property’s long-term gardener. He was of an age that meant he had survived WWII in Tokyo which meant in turn that the emotional wounds inflicted by that war must still have been in the healing process. Mom was West Virginia born and some healthy percentage of her joy came from keeping her hands in the dirt, digging, planting, watching things grow. This meant that, however reluctantly, the gardener had to deal with this American, this force who was my Mother, in “his” garden. He was cordial but remained distant and about his work.

My sister Mara and I rode bikes throughout the neighborhood from as young an age as I can recall with total freedom. Oh sure, the kids our age on the streets would point, laugh and call us “gaijin” (literally translates as barbarian) but the taunts were more in astonishment to our novelty than malice and we peddled on, carefree. We were regulars at the candy shop, wanted to be just like the beautiful butcher’s wife Yaeko-san when we grew up and had little girl crushes on the handsome tofu shop owner. This was our world and we were happy in it.  Long term US Cultural Attaché, Walter Nichols soon became a key figure in our lives. He was instrumental in bringing to Japan a host of American artists, many of whom, happily for us, ended up staying in our home, some for extended periods of time.  Henry Mancini, Tennessee Williams, Harold Clurman to list but a starry few. Mara and I took these extraordinary experiences for granted.  Now we know how incredibly privileged we were and are unspeakably grateful for it all. Vivid memories from ASIJ (American School in Japan and later from Sacred Heart) linger…Mrs. Sato in first grade, Miss Kochi in 2nd, Mrs. Story in 6th, Dr. Cleveland who ran the swimming team.  To this day I put both hands on the edge of the pool at the end of a frog lap lest I, again, incur his wrath.  Saturdays were spent at the American Club. Ever smiling Ken-san at the front desk would check us in. Ballet or bowling class…pizza and root beer followed by the matinee movie. I’m still traumatized from the day at age 6 I realized, after swimming and whilst changing into my sundress, that I’d forgotten to bring underpants to wear for my upcoming bowling class.  A wet bathing suit bottom had to suffice.  Oh, the horror!

We spent idyllic summers in a then faraway and tiny, rustic village, Gotemba near the base of Mt. Fuji.  It was then a three plus hour drive curling up winding two lane hilly passes. Dishearteningly, when I took a drive outside Tokyo in recent years, we passed the Gotemba turn off on a spit and polish four lane highway in a mere forty-five minutes. To add insult to injury, there was a Starbucks prominently advertised at the exit. We motored on. Back in the day the village was just that…tiny and dotted with thatched roofed wooden houses on dirt paths that variously doubled as the rice, butcher and vegetable shops.  Our house itself, well more cabin really…ok…shack…had been the countryside get away for the retired missionary who had apparently taught Hirohito, English. She could live there through the war, safe from bombs. There’s a story.  Everything creaked, we’d burn the wood to heat water and we loved it. Days were spent formatively out of doors playing endlessly in the woods and exploring favorite abandoned and over grown Shinto shrines.  We imagined, even hoped, that they were haunted. 

As we had no grandparents on deck in faraway Japan, my folks saw to it that we, and they, were not without elders. What a gorgeous cast of characters they assembled.  George Furness. Harvard man, always dapper who had been a key lawyer during the war crimes trials and later went on to be one of the first foreigners, perhaps the first, to pass the Japanese law bar. He married a gorgeous woman there and their daughter, a contemporary of mine, has been a life long pal. Then there was Bryn Mawr educated Chiye who had, before the war, married Marchioness Hachisuka. Because she was bicultural, bilingual and a royal, she was deemed the ideal private, and secret, go between for Hirohito and MacArthur. She would ferry back and forth across the way from US Occupation Headquarters building on one side of the moat to the Imperial Palace on the other side with proposal details of how Japan was to move forward…infrastructure, government, trade, etc.  Red lacquer nails, a chignon and smart suit for one. No makeup and a shibui kimono for the other. It was Chiye who dissuaded MacArthur from deposing the Emperor, explaining that the General could take away all other titles, hers included, but to depose the Emperor would be to ravage the soul of the Japanese.  

There was Queenie Day and her husband James Mason. Entrepreneurial businessman James, was (if the tale told me was correct) the son of a 19^th century British missionary and Japanese wife. When he’d been sent to university in faraway England, he clapped eyes on Queenie, she on him and that was that.  One year after he had returned to Japan in 1908, Queenie to the horrified dismay of her parents, set sail to Yokohama and there on the dock married her true love.  They had lived through the great Kanto Plains earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1923, through the depression of the 1930’s and through both World Wars. Life was good when I knew them. They had survived so much and lived to see a blossoming Japan. 

There was artist Frances Blakemore and her attorney husband Tom. Frances, a generation younger than James, also had been raised in pre-war Japan the child of missionaries.  When the rumblings of war had begun, her family had moved to the America where, although a citizen, Frances was a fish out of water. At 18, the US government conscripted her to help break the code. On more than one occasion she had struggled, she said, with handing over a cracked code, knowing that to do so was to sentence many in the country of her heart, to death. She justified the reveal however, thinking that surely these actions would hasten the end of war. As soon as the war was over she moved back to Tokyo and set up a hugely successful art gallery in the famed Okura Hotel and serially launched the successful careers of young, burgeoning Japanese artists. She and Tom kept a small farmhouse property not far outside Tokyo that we visited once. In it they housed their considerable collection of items of invention, indigenous to pre 21st century Japan. Farm implements and the like.  Flourishing in the front yard were rows of miniature fruit trees cultivated by contemporary Japanese scientists for low water consumption and high yield. When in the Blakemore’s dotage they moved to Seattle, the farm was given to the Japanese government. Penance? Whose to say. 

We also had adoptive aunties and uncles. Notably Asia hands Bill and Jan Anderson. Bill had survived four years in a cage as a Japanese prisoner of war and was now at the helm of NCR in Tokyo. We traded dogs and sleep overs with their daughters, with whom we now enjoy a third generation of friendship between our own children. There were the Kogans, who had escaped pogroms in Russia, then Shanghai and were now prominent business people in the safety of Japan. The Tarnas, entrepreneurial pearl merchants. Lanky, Don Gregg an affable if lowly (or so we thought) State Department employee, who turned out to have been the CIA Station Chief through much of the Vietnam and Cold Wars. There were legendary journalists, John Roderick (AP) and John Rich (NBC). Roderick had in the mid 1940’s, lived in the caves with leaders of the Chinese Communist rebel movement. Those had included Mao and Zhou Enlai, among others. Rich had traveled with Hirohito and covered Shanghai’s fall to the communists.

Collectively, those listed and beyond made up an extraordinary extended family. Multi national, pioneering parents of every conceivable faith and talent who proactively built cross cultural bridges. Moms who figured out how to raise their kids in what for them must have been a very, very far away land. We there, became each other’s extended family and so it remains. Lifelong friends from then are one of the many life treasures I cherish. Occurs to me that we each were ushered into a global reality long before such a term became popular. Lucky, lucky us.

As an adult I’ve made my way as a journeyman actress on tv and stage. All that began during my growing up years in Tokyo when Toho, a large entertainment concern based in Tokyo, kindly took me under their wing. To my knowledge I was the first gaijin to train at their Geino Academy, perhaps the only? Gosh, maybe they found the experience so distasteful they never permitted it again!  I worked a few times in productions at Toho’s Imperial Theatre in both English and Japanese (which had been easy to learn at so young an age.) Like many of us, I “taught” English on one of the NHK language programs now and then. I eventually did some pop recordings too which I suppose are what gave me the appetite for concerts and recordings I get to do now. 

I want to circle back to the gardener and Mom. Five years into our residency and shortly before the gardener was to retire, Mom came out to the garden one day to discover him midst digging a deep hole. Rather than risk breaching their tenuous trust, she did not ask his intentions, but took instead to trimming azaleas. One hole advanced to a total of five at which point he called her over to peer into the pits at what looked to be stone boulders. Boulders she would learn that he had buried for protection when the bombs had started to fall. Enlisting some neighborhood help, he was able to pull them up from their protective graves and stack them so as to be reassembled back into an ishitoro, or stone lantern. It was beautiful and once again a vessel of light, only now in more ways than one. When we very eventually moved from that home our landlord bequeathed the ishitoro to Mother. Could the gardener have imagined over those terrifying hours when he buried the ishitoro, that there would come such a day? Ofcourse I will never know but I would like to think that the gardener would have approved this extraordinary act of kindness on the well worn bridge of cross cultural ties.  

The porch at our house affords a view across plains that stretch far out into the horizon as they move expansively away from the mountains behind us. We’ve been enjoying the view from this porch for years now, especially so over summer months as they have always sported a reliable weather pattern. That pattern goes something like this…

Bright blue, crisp mornings beckon you to the great outdoors and mount to a toasty crescendo of sunlight. A teatime clap of thunder rings out signalling hikers to get off the mountain tops, golfers to come in and parents to get their children out of the pools. This is followed by a lovely shower that, for variety’s sake occasionally includes a brief pea sized hail storm. The end of showers is more often than not signalled by a rainbow and you’re back to blue just in time for all the hues of sunset to dance across the sky. On a dozen nights or so over the course of summer, there are electrical storms off in the distance maybe five at a time, dotting the horizon. We can take them in from the comfort of our porch and marvel at their far away power. In the certainty of these rituals afforded by Mother Nature, the community at large plans garden parties, barbeques, lawn concerts, outdoor weddings under starry night skies…and oh how the dogs and me too, howl on magical full moon nights. Until now.

We’ve been being warned for years that it could come, could meaning would but atleast in my mind it seemed hypothetical as long as we were, I don’t know…recycling? Being more conscious about using big anything and switching, however slowly, as a society to electric cars and renewable energy sources. I think I first noticed things start to shift when I got to sail again in the waters of British Columbia after an earlier foray some five years prior. Glaciers that had previously come right the way down to the water’s edge were now noticeably retreating. At first, I thought I was mistaken…but this pattern of retreat repeated itself in too many inlets to be denied. Six years ago now I think it was the western skies where I live opened up and for four minutes dropped hail stones the size of softballs.  Animals at the zoo were killed, over 30k cars were destroyed, countless roofs, including my own were decimated. Miraculously, no one was killed.  Two years later it happened again. You get the idea.

This summer, we returned after a time away ready to enjoy the season ahead and the traditional dance with nature. At first the differences of what we were experiencing were fun. Towering cumulous clouds more associated with tropical climates, mushroomed out of low, giant slate misty grey slabs and dominated the traditional blue dome for days at a time. Rain pelted for hours at a stretch for nearly a week. People started making jokes about being in Seattle. Never before seen plants started coming up out of the ground. Perhaps they’d been lying dormant all this while just waiting for life giving waters? I turned the heat on in July. What used to be distant thunder storms are now quite often happening right above us in great claps and enormous striking bolts that run fearsomely into the ground or in a mile’s long and nearby jagged streak across the sky parallel to the ground. As these unusual patterns have begun to be the norm that sense of fun has been replaced with something unsettling.  Things are not normal. Normal is gone.

As I write, reports continue to flow in of the devastation in Lahaina.  Southern California awaits its first ever tropical hurricane.

My son was five when the Twin Towers came down. That horrible morning when all our worlds changed, he asked me in effect what physical structure could we rely on if we could not rely on something as solid as a tall building? I told him we could always rely on nature.  That he could go, as we often did during his childhood, out on a hike find a favourite tree or boulder and just soak up its calm and majesty. That that was reliable.  What do we tell our children now? That we blew it? That we did not heed the decades of warnings?

There are some trails I like to hike in the mountains. This year with some shock I noticed that the roots of several pine trees on the trails have been exposed not by the usual inches but rather by several feet.  Also, surprisingly I came one day to a massive boulder smack in the middle of a trail, a boulder that had not been there a few days earlier.  My first thought was that the obstruction had made the path impassable.  On closer look, I realized you could just get around it without falling off the mountain, and so I did. In other words Mother Nature for all our folly is still saying to us…roots can be exposed but you can still stand.  Boulders come in life but there is, usually, a way around them, no matter how narrow the path.  So… a grace note but the bellwether is ringing loud and clear.

A trawler docked next to ours one early morning…same length at 90 feet but that is where the similarities ended. Plenty of elbow grease went into ours, that would be our own elbow grease, theirs on the other hand, had an extensive crew who, when they were not hosting a fiesta, saw to rigorous routines of serious buffing and polishing and that was only what we could see from the outside. We were ofcourse longing to see what was going on on the inside.  We’d been told by the Dock Master that the elegant vessel was owned by a well to do German divorcee and was conducting a world tour tracing each continent whilst doing research on sharks. Ok now we were even more curious to get on board…but how? As luck would have it, I was coming down our gang plank one afternoon just as Madame boat owner was coming down hers.  She was in clear discomfort as she hobbled with the aid of two crew members. We greeted each other and she explained that she had broken her toe and was going to trek into town to see a local doctor…which in this particular country could be something of an adventure. My beau, who owned our boat, was a doctor and willingly offered assistance seeing handily to her aching toe.  She was profusely grateful and issued us an invitation to dinner that night on her vessel. We accepted in a heartbeat with unabashed and overly enthusiastic teenage glee. 

At the appointed hour we asked permission to come aboard.  Her ship did not disappoint. The hot and cold running crew was a far cry from the scruffy two of us, an occasional three, manning ours. Enroute to the dining room we were escorted through their research command center which sported every known gadget to seek and study the lions of the seas. Her expedition guests were an awesome gathering of scholars, scientists and artists alike. Conversation sparkled. Chef attended the first course, describing the delectables we were about to ingest. The finest of wines complemented each course. After the main course had been cleared, the crew lined up smartly to introduce themselves; stateroom maids, engineers, right the way up to the Captain. Our hostess nodded approvingly and segued neatly over desert into the upcoming weeks’ running order of the day.  They would set sail predawn to a given destination known for sharks. All guests would be invited for a dive, followed by a buffet luncheon and a second optional dive in the afternoon. Cocktails would be served at 7 PM followed by a lecture in rotation, given by each of the guests. The lecture would be followed by a dinner and no doubt robust conversations of the day’s findings and the lecturer’s revelations. It was heady…and yet the inklings of something that had begun to surface over the course of dinner started to shift the sands.  Something was amiss. 

Prompted by questions from my beau we had learned that our hostess’ father had been an art collector. That’s interesting, judging by her age, his young adulthood would have been right in the shank of World War II. We learned too that she had married into the Von Habsburg family, well known for many things, among them art collecting.  Shift. 

When questioned we learned that our hostess’ interest in the art world had been inspired by her father who had gathered his collection in Germany during the war and had initially been focused on landscapes she said with a gentle smile. Shift again. Even more suspicious, just after the war he had sold his apparently vast collection and with those monies had begun collecting works that were more to his liking. Vibrant artworks of the up-and-coming. Brock, Picasso. You know, the new kids. In the awful dawning of more than likely what had afforded this caviar and champagne atmosphere, we lost the thread of conversation.  This was poisoned food bought with ill begot gains. Every liquid on the table had become blood. Every tangible made of crushed body parts. I wanted to vomit. 

Of course what her father had done with the gains of selling his first “collection” after the war had been legal. There could be no recourse at this point except a moral, karmic one. But the initial collection? What Arian German male of means during the war was not collecting art that had not been stolen from the Jews? Eyes locked in tacit recognition. We excused ourselves and disembarked from the once enviable boat as quickly as we could. 

Just as their itinerary had promised, they were gone before we awoke. In the morning their slip stood empty, gone. Gone just as so much, was gone in World War II. It seemed appropriate, very, that the mission was to study sharks. Study her past. Study herself. Will that meal ever be digested? Eight years ago now…not yet. I do not think it will be. Ever.

During the post WWII occupation days in Japan, General MacArthur called on the skills of many brilliant young men and women to help build what successfully became modern Japan. Some would argue, too successfully.  My parents were part of that effort…Dad as a chemical/mechanical and civil engineer travelled the length and breadth of Japan for purposes of turning munitions factories back into fertilizer plants. Mother, along with another American woman, opened a school in Tokyo called Western Customs and Manners, and taught many curious Japanese women how to walk in high heels, use a knife and fork, understand something of how an American woman operates. From the stories I heard over the decades from my parents and foreign friends of theirs who were also in Japan at that time, it was clear that great pains were taken by them, through learning the language, reading the literature, looking at art work, etc., to gain an understanding of the Japanese. It was from the well spring of that knowledge-based respect that cross cultural bridges were built and as a result, all boats rose in the tide. The ethos of that post war effort stands in stark contrast, for instance, to how Americans dealt with Iraq after the war there. One got it right, the other did not. 

Of late, I’ve been reminded of that moment in time I’d learned of over my childhood, coming to know a remarkable fellow named Dewey.  If I have it right, he was from the Pacific NW and had worked from there up into Alaska for years as fisherman turn businessman, braving the elements until one day he set sail for points south in order to find a spot that offered alternatives to the cold and the gray. Thus, he came to a tiny, subsistence level living, fishing village on the Pacific coast of Mexico who’s bay and nearby mountain range afforded shelter from storms. The pueblo’s long flat beaches spoke to him of a possibility of controlled tourism and few restaurants spoke to an untapped, welcoming spirit.  By the time I met Dewey, he had been living in the village for some 30 years and the miracle of what that little village has become is in no small part due to his efforts. To hear him tell it, soon after finding the village he set up a modest bar on the beach, learned the language and began to observe, catch the vibe, began conversing with the local elders, he learned and obeyed their customs and respected their priorities. He also handpicked some pals to come down. If Dewey didn’t like you, you weren’t invited. If you saw a piece of beach property and started talking about building a mega mansion…somehow it just was never possible to build one. He learned about Mexican property ownership laws. If what he needed didn’t exist, he with the help of a new coterie of smart Mexican associates, would create necessary regulations in order to protect everyone involved. He found ace accountants, architects, builders and gradually, carefully introduced them to the village. All the while though he was doing something even more important. Here’s an example of what that something was all about and why I am so in awe of this person.  

Dewey and his partner at the time, Bobby, made friends with a local family.  One of their young daughters had, before Dewey came along, met with a terrible accident and was paralyzed.  In the fullness of time Dewey learned of this most unfortunate circumstance and stepped in. He brought a wheelchair in from out of town. He had a ramp built into her house and various other adjustments made so as to make this young woman’s life manageable. He saw a need, opened the floodgates of his heart and made someone else’s life better. He did not muscle his way into town…he nurtured its evolution through kindness, serial kindnesses. He did not mow down what was here…he learned it, respected it, sublimated his own way of doing things to create a symbiotic system that works.  

I have a girlfriend in her late 40’s who grew up here, in this village.  Speaking of her childhood she explained that potable water was accessed by walking the one mile up the hill.  People died of dysentery on a regular basis. School only went to 6^th grade, most inhabitants were illiterate, there was no electricity and people labored hard to live off the land. She now speaks fluent English as does her husband and their children, runs a business, drives a car, her son will soon graduate and begin his career as a dentist, her teenage daughter is one test away from becoming a black belt. All that change in one lifetime….and she too points to Dewey as being responsible for having ushered in most of the change. 

Today, there are multiple family run restaurants, a dedicated recycling effort, stray dogs are seen to, all village students who want them have laptops, there is a school bus, organic gardens thrive. Astonishingly there are houses built all up and down the beaches but not so as you would know it. None of them are taller than the palm trees, all of them draw their design and materials from the area. Lives of many of the locals and foreign residents are deeply intertwined to the point of being chosen family. People smile here. So do the dogs. There is no crime. 

To go down the main street with Dewey is an experience. As the unofficial Mayor, he is friend to everyone. I think there is no one here he does not know. A wave, a conversation about a relative who is feeling better, a joke…laughter, always laughter…that is part of his considerable currency. He’s got a two way bullshit meter…he doesn’t BS folks and folks don’t BS him.  That’s useful kind of meter to have anywhere. I’d like one. 

This is the town that kindness built.  It can be done. It works. It’s working.