reaching out

to the cyberhermitage that is savage reserve. So as my cyberworld expands I have begun to receive strangers into my hermitage. I'm not talking desperate scammers from the Bank of Nigeria, but actual people. I just received an invitation to stay in the handsome building known as the Harmony Club of Selma which is odd as it does not appear to have accommodation, despite the so-called residential floor.

As the charming but not so informative website explains, the Harmony Club was set up by the Jewish community of Selma, Alabama. In 1930s it became the home of the Elks, which sounds like one of those Barney Rubble type secret societies. So what happened to the Jews of Selma? Does anyone know? Did they head out west with the Joads? Emigrate? There was no Jewish state to speak of? I imagine the building for years abandoned empty like the temple MM and I visited in Plovdiv with its beautiful naive art and its abandoned scrolls and apparatus of worship, and how MM spoke Spanish to the Ladino speaking caretaker. A language that had been carried to Eastern Europe by the Jews leaving Spain, some east, some West with Columbus to the New World, a phrase which now looks odd as its local referent here is a chain of supermarkets. That gives a new spin to the John Donne poem

let us others to New Worlds have gone

doesn't it?

I am rambling and you have better things to do...