Feeling solid, stable, beneath my feet,
some say the earth spins and soars in the void.
Here, near the Great Lakes, I have made my home
near Erie and St. Claire, then Michigan.
Dirt and rock and salted water, with a
thin layer of air. Iron at the core.
This is where home is.
Home is here on Earth.
Cities dot the surface of the land
while arbitrary lines and squiggles define
nations and states, forcing allegiance on
heterogeneous populations.
It’s a lost cause these days.
Earth is now home.
From the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Papery Traces 14APR22
Several members of the group said they liked this piece. Many of them are newer members who don’t recall my early flash fiction and who don’t care for the Knomo Choicius stories. :>(
They challenged me to write the novel. I offer this to anyone who wants to keep going with it. Acknowledge this link, please.
But maybe I will keep going a little bit. Here’s the beginning of the next chapter…
Please click below to hear the audio Recording of the actual sermon. Note content is an elaboration of some of the points made below.
Today is November 11, 2018.
It is the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first World War.
Some wars, as the Hindu’s great scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us, are justified. Sun Tzu of China also wrote a book held in longstanding honor that explains how to determine when war is justified. Sun Tsu’s classic, The Art of War, is still used today for its advice on how to gain a speedy end to any war that is justified.
We in the West have our own traditions justifying war. The Trojan War between the Achaeans (predecessors of the culture occupying what we now call Greece) was fought due to a pact between rich landowners to defend whichever of them took the most beautiful woman of the times as a wife, from anyone who tried to take her away. The Hebrew Bible documents many wars fought at the direction of God’s commands to cleanse the Promised Land of its supposedly sinful occupants.
At that time, people were led to believe that they were doing good by helping their God to annihilate offending peoples. I personally have a hard time deciding if this seems morally superior or inferior to the idea of preventing Helen from leaving her short, fat, ugly Achaean (Greek) husband and going off with the handsome Prince of Troy. I am also struggling to come to a conclusion about whether ethnic cleansing is superior or inferior as a supposedly legitimate cause of war, compared to one fought over the refusal of a king to return his cousin’s domain after the allotted time had elapsed since the dice gambling match forced him to go into a 13 year exile.
Are all of these reasons morally inferior or superior to the ones that Americans have used in recent times? (Securing our supply of oil? Liberating Afghan women from those who were forcing them to give up their right to education and liberty to walk about in town? Destroying what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)
Apparently, back in the Bronze age, in what we now call the Middle East, wars fought to perform ethnic cleansing were considered good deeds. The episodes of what today would be called ethnic cleansing, or genocide, were thought to endear the people to their god. Because of this, Israelite editors of the Bible made up the story of their ancestors’ destruction of the great city of Jericho. Historians and archeologists seem quite certain that the city of Jericho was already a pile of ruins at the time of the Israelites occupation of Canaan. But it was important to tell the story of the destruction of every resident of Jericho- man, woman (except the certified virgins of child bearing age), child, even the livestock. Important to remind God of the obedience of the people, and important to remind the Israelites of their fierce warrior natures.
Now, before you, dear reader, accuse me of being NEGATIVE, wallowing in the horrific deeds and attitudes of the past, I want to say that THE FACT that we now find these deeds HORRIFIC gives me some hope for future progress. As the great Rabbi Hillel said, what is hateful to you, do not do to others.
Sure, it’s great to give charity, and to smile as you go about your daily business. But destruction is so much swifter than construction, that you could be loving and kind 364 days a year, and on that one day of destruction, ruin more than you built. Perhaps that is likely if we try to suppress our negative aspects, rather than bringing them into the light of day to figure out how we can move beyond them.
So first, let’s avoid destruction of the beautiful, the useful, and the spiritually uplifting.
How much progress have we made in the last 3 or 4 thousand years?
The kings of Assyria and Babylon used to have their scribes count the enemy hands in the piles that the warriors made, so they could brag to their god of how many enemies his army had eradicated. Most of the armies of the day only killed men and children, sparing all women of child bearing age, and taking the livestock. Women were spared as the men of the day had an incorrect belief that THEY carried the complete genetic seeds of their offspring, and the females were merely incubators.
Getting back to more modern times, World War I resulted in 10 million civilian deaths and 6 million military personnel deaths. Another 20 million were injured. In the heat of the battle, many soldiers had been brainwashed as to the necessity of continuing to kill until the moment of cease-fire at 11 am on 11/11/1918. The last soldier was killed at 10:58 am. This was almost six hours after the announcement of the cease-fire. The combatant had become so filled with hatred that they did not want to waste a chance for a little more glory on the battlefield, a few more enemies killed.
But, as a result of this bloody, horrible war, many people did start to undertake organization building for the purposes of reducing the pain, suffering, and losses of war. Some people also worked to reduce the likelihood of war.
As we look back in history on this hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, we can’t celebrate the end of war. We can’t even celebrate the end of the desire for war. But we do have some progress to report. We have the knowledge of the Buddhist prayer that all beings be happy, and more importantly that all beings have the causes of happiness. Again, I’d like to suggest that we not pray for the currently unrealistic end to war, which would leave many people in untenable conditions. Rather, I pray for an end to the causes of war.
What are the causes of war? I am not a historian, so probably no historian would take my opinion into account. However, I think that injustice is the biggest. I will claim that I’m not the first to think along the lines of social structures contributing to war. Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli wrote (in 2007) an article called “Political Bias and War,” in the American Economic Review, 97 (4): 1353-1373. I haven’t read it because I don’t want to pay for the article at this point. From another article by these authors, which I found in its entirety, they apparently make the case that PEOPLE LIKE to CHOOSE those with belligerent tendencies as leaders to negotiate for them. They also provide information that led me to understand that in hierarchical societies (all human societies), the LEADERS actually tend to benefit from war more than the citizens. Let’s think about the rich Americans who benefit from selling arms. They are not the ones being shot at on the battlefields! Be that as it may, these two historians see war most frequently resulting from bargaining failures. To me, bargaining failures is a “HOW wars start” factor, while injustice is a “WHY wars start” factor.
If peace and justice prevailed everywhere on the face of the earth, and people LOVED peace and justice, I think that there would be a lower driving force for wars.
But injustice is the hardest thing to eradicate. Or perhaps I should say that the manifestations of injustice are very difficult to eradicate. When we start to try to disentangle a single strand of injustice, we find ourselves pulling on one end of what seems like an infinite spider web.
Two years ago I studied the Flint Water Crisis, in order to prepare a presentation for an engineering conference. The “ROOT CAUSE” of the children’s lead poisoning was eventually found by the American Civil Liberties Union to be a failure of democracy. Of course with any big failure, there are multiple points of view. From another vantage point, the Flint problem was economic in nature. The city had been a thriving center of manufacturing, but the losses of the automotive industry had left it as the home of one of the most poverty stricken populations in the country. But defining the situation in those terms is philosophically defeatist. It implies that poor people don’t have a right to safe drinking water. Or it leaves poor people waiting for charity.
Calling the situation a failure of democracy leads to more immediately actionable plans. The control of the government of Flint has now been returned to its elected mayor from the State appointed emergency manager, who took control after the bankruptcy of the city. Several years on, there are still a lot of lead pipes in Flint, and some people are still relying on bottled water to drink, although it’s been safe to wash even babies in the water for some time now.
There are still ongoing lawsuits over the actions taken by the officials appointed by the State, who abused their authority and ignored safety warnings from the employees of the water department. Some of these former authorities are facing criminal charges. (Feel free to contact me for a copy of my slide show or paper on the subject.)
Should all humans have safe drinking water? Is that a matter of justice? Lead in drinking water has been shown to cause irreversible brain damage in infants and young children. The brain damage leads to a higher incidence of behavioral problems, and even murder rates. (My previously mentioned paper has references to a scholarly article on this issue.) Of course “normal” people don’t want violent, brain damaged people in their neighborhoods.
What about toilets? Should all humans have toilets?
And education? Should all humans have access to basic education? Should they learn how to read, do arithmetic, and practice basic hygiene?
Are these issues of justice?
If we are able to envision a world of both peace and justice, we bring it closer to reality. Jesus’ teachings encouraged his followers to enter the Kingdom of Heaven within. Yet, as we leave the Halloween season, and approach the Thanksgiving Season, overshadowed as it now is in the American Retail environment, by a frenzy of Christmas capitalism, let’s rejoice that Christians have not totally given up the idea of the Old Testament prophet, that one day there would be Peace on Earth.
If all of us spread the word that our chances of Peace on Earth coming sooner will be improved once we start praying for an end to the CAUSES of war, we will be doing a small part to making it happen.
Even though we just got more snow, the birds announce that the season is changing. These views were from my back window. There were at least 20 robins hopping around for hours. There were some sparrows who later joined them, and then a crow started strutting around!
And a hawk circled
over the snow spotted ground
then flew off, northward.
And the rain having
melted the snow,
the robins party, party big.
I’ve been making it back to my Thursday morning writing group fairly regularly for a month or so now. It’s great to be back. So much talent, I sometimes wonder what I am doing there….But here were my creations for the morning.
It is spring. There are
birds chirping from branches bare
or needle spiked.
Spring announces self
with light not temperature.
Light velocity
In four dimensions
Defines the universe that
humans can perceive.
Even Einstein did
Not know this on inventing
relativity.
Comments: I am reading J. W. N. Sullivan‘s book from 1949 called The Limitations of Science. He was considered one of the greatest lay science writers of the 20th Century. I first encountered his writing in The Life of the Spider. What a lovely book! Also worth reading is Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. But back to The Limitations of Science. Mr. Sullivan, just a few years after the publication by Einstein of his theories of Special and General Relativity, explains it in a way that I feel like I understand certain concepts that I never have before. Apparently it was not until others started working with Einstein’s equations that the concept of the velocity of light as perhaps the fundamental measurement in the universe was arrived at and perceived as meaningful in reality, not just useful in a mathematical description of reality.
Jay hated the question why.
Jay hated the word why.
He told me that he had concluded that there is never an answer to the question why.
Whether this was a result of his training as a psychologist or his personal spiritual search, I never could quite fathom.
Jay is no longer speaking with me.
I don’t believe I did anything specific to end the relationship. Over the years, I have often been wrong, and am usually the first to admit that to myself.
But after not seeing him for a while, and then a friendly unexpected encounter at Meijer, I have never gotten a reply to any attempts to reach him.
So obviously, I ask myself why? He was a good friend and support to me when we had first met. Sure, I can think of things I did that he did not appreciate. But the relationship did not end then. Anyway, at that time my question would have been how did I wrong you, or what did I do, not why are you not returning my calls.
Now, of course, I better understand the Buddhist teaching of dependent arising. However, in my mind, that teaching does not mean that the question or word why is completely useless or meaningless. It simply points to the fact that there is never a simple answer to the question. There are always and always more steps beneath the platform of conscious perception.
A popular manufacturing process troubleshooting method proposes a mere five whys. If perchance we do dig deep enough, we will eventually get to the point where there is no answer. Whether that question is why does God exist, or why the Big Bang happened, we humans will never be able to produce an answer that will be accepted by all humans.
A fellow industry consultant apparently believed that the answer to all whys was “Because of Adam and Eve.” That tells you how old this discussion was. Because now we would say simply “Because…Adam and Eve.”
To get back to the main point, we can’t now and won’t ever be able to answer the fundamental why from within the only fundamental what that we can know. We now know, but only in part, as through a glass, darkly. The promise of the Gospels, that one day we may know in full, is a false one. The Unknowable will always “out-be” the Knowable.
So suck it up.
But keep asking why about the little things. That can only have the effect of instilling an attitude of wonder. Wonder is a help. Wonder gets us through. Whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic wonder, wonder opens our mind to the possibility that things, or at least our appreciation of them, could change.
Joy to the world, proclaimed Jeremiah the Bullfrog. Or so sang Three Dog Night back in 1971, on Jeremiah’s behalf. It is funny that they picked Jeremiah to proclaim joy. Jeremiah of course is associated with the Jeremiad. The strong warning of imminent doom. But maybe that is the joke in the art form.
Anyway, those were the days when music was music. It had catchy tunes. At least usually. Those were also the days when Phillip Glass experimented with sounds that were on the margin of what I considered music, but the experts now consider him one of the most influential composers of the 20th Century.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought that music was the only avenue humans had to overcoming the sorrows and troubles of the world. Only through music could joy be experienced. The great composers could presumably experience joy and help to midwife it for others. Schopenhauer thought, and wrote about how, all art could play this uplifting role in human life. But he reserved the highest levels of joy to the potential accomplishments of the musically inclined.
Osho, on the other hand, or maybe we are now in need of moving to the feet, having already used up both hands, between Three Dog Night and Phillip Glass and then Schopenhauer, taught that joy did not ever, and does not now in the present, require music, or any other aid, to manifest in our hearts. All we need or needed, according to Osho, was not even love. Nope, all we needed, da du de dah, is to drop our constant ruminations about what has already passed, and worries about what might be. Just stop listening to the fear mongering of the ego. That’s it. Osho, despite this simple advice, is/was in no way optimistic about the ease anyone will / has encounter(ed) on their path to achieve a joyful victory. But, he teaches, when we truly find ourselves understanding that we are in a hopeless position, and that our ego’s false preachings will never bring us the peace we seek, then, and only then, in the inner silence, there will be joy. Maybe even, I wonder, on looking back on our earlier experiences, we will see that there was then also joy. The greatest joy. Joy to the world. All the boys and girls. Even joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea. I’m so full of joy that I regret that joy was not explicitly allotted to the simpler forms of eukaryotic and archaic life. Why wouldn’t they have joy too? They never had egos to drop.
Never confuse the human condition for human nature. The first is real, the second mostly used as an excuse for personal failings, of self and others.
The human condition is a consequence of the evolution of consciousness. The pain associated with it results from conflicts between the necessity of providing for the body and the higher ethics we’ve developed to make life bearable. Modernity has brought with it ever greater conflicts due to our membership in complex, nested and overlapping sub-groups. These include family, neighbors, residents of our town, village, city, etc., fellow citizens and other residents of our nation, other nations around the world, professional societies, clubs, and more.
So-called “human nature” is a distorted epi-phenomenon arising from the sequence of difficulties that the powerful have created and manipulated for their own gain.
Humanity has not yet figured out exactly what real human nature is, but surely there is a strong component of co-operation and helpfulness.
Without that, we would not have thrived as much as we have.
Merwegon the Great
All beginners once
Some day we come to an end
Recycling matter
Soon, come February, the Zip-locks of seed packets will be taken out of the freezer. Their temperature will be allowed to equilibrate with that of the living room prior to opening for the annual census. Tomatoes. Tomatoes first. I used to start one or two seedlings of each of 25 varieties. The last two years, I have increased the roma types, because of their convenient size for my juice packs. That has decreased the variety of heirloom beefsteaks. The salad tomatoes are holding steady. But I still like to try at least one completely new to me heirloom every year. I’d been growing Paul Robeson for years, a delicious blue salad tomato that my racist right leaning pal likes, before finding out that Paul Robeson was a famous African American socialist.
I have not shared this knowledge with my pal yet. Who am I to take away his enjoyment of a healthy pleasure? Besides, there’s some poetic justice in the situation….
So anyway, first, I take stock of the tomatoes, and figure out how many new packs to order. The peppers. Let’s not forget the peppers. I’m more open minded on the peppers. The individual variety packets don’t last as long, so there’s more opportunity for experimentation. Next, the lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, cukes, melons, etc. Then, the flowers. Gotta have zinnias and cosmos, and something new. The garden provides the chance to see a cycle of life in less than a year. From infant to crone, despite the infant mortality that comes with weeding, and the early maturity deaths due to bacterial wilt, etc., March to September is all it takes.
They say gardening is good for health. It provides opportunities for exercise, and the potential for nutritious food. Some also say it’s cheaper than hiring a shrink, but serves the same purpose. I say gardening is all of the above, and the most spiritual activity there is, linking us from beginning to end, from dust to dust.
I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?
I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.
Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be a disadvantage….
A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on the planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.
My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin. at least in his book.
So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.
The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my exe’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?
Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.
Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.
Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….
What do YOU think???
Today’s prompts were “greatest first lines of novels.”
We started with The Go Between by L. P. Hartley published in 1953.
The first sentence is:
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
My friend Sean said he would like to be able to hear me read this to think about it. So if you would rather listen than read, please click on the audio file here. Or scroll down to find the text.
As soon as we mention the past, we invoke the existence of time. Of course physicists and cosmologists know that time is not linear, and the past does not disappear. When we look at a starry sky, we are seeing light that left the surface of its star at different times, depending on which star we are looking at. Unless we’re using a telescope, probably many different stars, so we are simultaneously receiving light that is young and old. But from our conventional experience of time, it does seem as if the future becomes the present, and then the past. In other words, metaphorically, time flows.
Heraclitus warned us that, despite a river having a permanent name, you can’t step into it twice. Furthermore, he noted that the person doing the stepping changes along with the river. For now, I will focus on the river. The point being that the name, perhaps, carries not so important a set of data with it as the temperature of the water, the pH of the water, the minerals carried along, dissolved and traveling far, or locked into pebbles or sand, and merely vibrating, rolling a short way, or participating in a mixture of those activities. The fish, the algae, the protozoans, the insect larvae, all contribute to the entity we call a river. The shoreline spreads to a varying degree, sometimes shrinking to almost a true line, other times widening to a broad swath. Is the young kid casting a lure into the trout pool a part of the river now? What about three hours ago, when she was eating breakfast at her mother’s kitchen table?
The land and the river merge into a unity. Without land in sight, there is no river. Perhaps a lake, and certainly an ocean, reaches far enough to conceal its boundaries from the one who floats on it or within its volume. But a river? A river carves the land, and the land contains the river. The land the river crosses defines the river itself. So how to separate the river from the country it flows through? The otter doesn’t care. Nor does the dragonfly. Alive for a few seasons, these entities might not notice changes. Either the environment supports its life, or does not.
Yet, longer lived entities, holding greater networks of memory, may note that these water molecules, with this concentration of dissociated hydrogen ions, and that concentration of dissolved calcium atoms, the exact position of the edge of the water, the depth profile of the silt along the 43rd parallel, vary from the characteristics recorded during youth. The air above the water-land-country mixes with the under-layers, providing the oxygen that the inhabitants, both visible and microscopic, require.
As the composition of the atmosphere changes, the transfer of energy to the water-land-country varies. A thick layer of ice covered what we today call Alaska and Chukchi. Now people refer to this same range of latitudes and longitudes, modified as required by the ongoing drift of the tectonic plates, as Beringia. The people who scientists believe, and aboriginal Americans say, skirted its edges in boats to people the western coasts of the Americas, or walked along the edges of its widening corridor to the interiors of these continents, likely used a different name. Whatever its handle, Beringia is a different country, and the history waves plying the ether carry onward the observations, thoughts, stories and acts of a different time, no less vital than the one we currently call now.
The prompt in our writing group was “Breadcrumbs.” As usual, I fell into the rut of SOC (stream of consciousness) writing.
Pinky’s beads are really cool and I hope that nobody uses them for breadcrumbs. Although as metaphorical breadcrumbs, I suppose they are suitable, so I am going to go against the hope I recently expressed.
Just what is a breadcrumb? I am not talking about a single breadcrumb, of course, or even the scattering of breadcrumbs left next to the plate of a messy eater like myself. Or even the thinner scattering of breadcrumbs that might be found at the place recently used to open a bag of sliced bread, or to slice a loaf of home baked bread. No, I am talking about breadcrumbs in a line, or a nominally one dimensional curvy pseudo-line, intentionally left as a clue to where to find something. Or by metaphorical stretch, how to find something. Or by further metaphorical stretch, how to figure something out.
The point being that someone else has already figured out how to accomplish the target, shall we say, of the breadcrumbs.
Of course calling Pinky’s beads breadcrumbs implies that Pinky herself intentionally left clues. But again, by metaphorical extension, maybe we can still legitimately call the beads breadcrumbs, even if she only unintentionally created breadcrumbs along with the beads.
For how does the one who sees the trail of breadcrumbs know unequivocally whether they were intentional, and thus truly breadcrumbs, or unintentional, and thus simple data? Unless we have separate data as to the intentionality, these metaphorical cases are harder to classify as either true breadcrumbs, or the result of our natural human tendency to find patterns where none exist.
With actual breadcrumbs, it is easier to see that it was intentional, especially, as in the case of the original breadcrumb story from which most of us probably get our idea of a trail of breadcrumbs leading us on. That story being, of course, Hansel and Gretel. But if we think a little harder, we are reminded that the breadcrumbs were a failure, until metaphorical breadcrumbs in the form of small stones were substituted.
Personally, I am struggling to recall the details of the story. Did Hansel’s metaphorical breadcrumbs lead Gretel to risk? These children were really smart, I just realize, to carry out the breadcrumb experiment in the first place, and keep modifying their procedure as needed.
So, back to Pinky’s beads. To me, they are breadcrumbs because we see Pinky’s creative mind at work. They help us figure out a little bit of how Pinky’s mind works. They let us see that she saw a way to make complexly patterned colorful cylindrical beads out of a flat piece of colored paper, through the use of a double symmetry procedure around mutually perpendicular axes. Very cool. And this observation from someone who really struggled to pass her crystallography class in her junior year.
I don’t know if she told Jim Z how she made the beads prior to his explaining it to me, or whether Jim figured it out by himself. My first assessment was wrong. Doing it the way I originally thought after a cursory glance would probably not look as good. Doing it the way she did it, rolling the paper around a chop stick, removing the chop stick from the center of the now cylindrical piece of paper, flattening the cylinder to create a very skinny and thick strip, which she then rolls into a disk with a small hole conveniently left for a matching colored string to create a necklace, looks very good. Before attaching the string, the bead is coated with a shiny transparent gloss coat. Very cool. If I did it, due to my clumsiness, it would not look so nice.
Breadcrumbs to see Pinky’s creativity. Metaphorical breadcrumbs. Is it too much of a stretch?
If you like the idea of these beads, even if the only one I had left to take a picture of when I finally posted this today, having given the other four I bought to friends, leave a comment and I will send you info on how to reach Pinky. Maybe she has some left.