I dreamt of bluebirds last night

It was a vivid dream: a flock of Western bluebirds suddenly appearing outside my cabin windows, between rain showers. I called to my daughter to come look, and told her--which is true in real life--that the last time I glimpsed a flock of these electric blue birds with their russet/rose chests was after the first flood I went through, years and years before her birth. In my dream three of the birds fluttered into the house, and I opened a door to let them out again.
The quality of the dream was sunlight, and joy. Perhaps the return of an old happiness.

Back to the waking world, where it is still raining, and roads are still blocked, and deaths go on, and children grow. I planted some more narcissi along the parking lot, and white hyacinths, and white irises, and came back to read my latest letter from the maximum security prison a few county lines away.

Nyadzi writes "I know you. You will plant this grief."

The name he prefers is not the name his mother gave him, and certainly not the number with which the prison system identifies him. After we had corresponded a while he asked that I use it, rather than his birthname, because it was the name he took as a young man. He tells me it is from some African language, and means something like "death before surrender". He tells me he figures he'll die in prison. Because of this state's three strikes program he is serving a 35 year to life sentence.

Never were there two friends from such different worlds. I first encountered him through a political paper I help put out--it is free to prisoners, and those who want it and can't afford it. He sent in some poems and essays, long, long essays, pondering rebellion and freedom and religion and life. He asked for correspondence. We printed some of the essays, and a poem or two, and I wrote him to ask if he'd perhaps like to write for us regularly; tell the truth of his prison experience; share his harsh knowledge. I sent him books.

He was born in the south, to a poor black family, the youngest of 14 children. His mother sent him to live with his grandmother. Grandma moved with him to southern California, to the east LA ghetto, and there she died. And there, at 14, he found himself on the street. His life went on like many a story of those days--gangs, violence, jail. But he was hungry for books, and he loved learning, and when he could he'd make his way to libraries. We figured out that for a time, as I worked my way though college working in a library in a working class area, and went through all the self important dramas and love affairs of my late teens and early twenties, Nyadzi came into my library. I do recall a slight, proud black teen who never met my eyes, who gobbled history and good literature. These days we ponder our odd crossing paths.

We debate in our letters--he challenges my nonviolence; I listen to his very justifiable rants about a system that seems constructed out of a tale by Kafka. He writes of his family, his now dead mother. He writes of vanished dreams. He asks if I know what the birds are, the little birds, brown ones, that he can just glimpse from his small window. He writes of the reality of prison, and asks about my children, and especially about the dogs, the cats, the landscape. And the gardens. Oddly, of all my friends, it is Nyadzi who most clearly understands what my gardens are to me--solace, centering, stabilizing.

There's a growth on his lung, and the prison doctors say, well, it might be cancer, but then it might not. He says he's keeping strong.

I send him postcards with pictures that might bring a little beauty into the tiny concrete cell.

And he sends me letters. In the last one he writes of an encounter with a particularly harsh guard. To push back, to in any way seem to attack this guard would of course make his life in many ways worse--but in the past, goaded beyond what his pride will endure, he has. This time, he writes, he thought of me. "I didn't want to disappoint you" he said, "I remember how you try to hold to nonviolence. I thought of you, and stayed still." He says it may have saved him a beating--but I tell him I am so naive about the truth of life in a maximum security prison, one of the most notorious in our country--and I understand the will to survive.

Meanwhile, we try to figure out the name of the little birds, sheltering from the rain at the edge of the cell block.