On the wall next to the desk where I write is a map of the world. Right in the middle of it is Gaza.

In ancient times, Gaza was called “the Athens of the Mediterranean.” It was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road linking Europe and Africa and the New World to the Eurasian land mass. The known world came together in Gaza. It was a magnificent city on the sun-drenched eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

That’s my solution, my morphogenic idea -- a magnificent city of buildings built to last a thousand years on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, surrounded by fragrant groves of figs and olives, lemons and palms and fields of sesame and barley swaying in a gentle breeze off the sea – a place for all the peoples of the known world to gather to trade and think and build.

It was possible.

I see cargo ships as big as small mountains floating on by in the canal linking continents through the heart of the city.

Shops and outdoor cafes line the canal where lovers and poets and the presidents of sovereign nations and dock workers, bricklayers and street-corner theologians discuss the production of the goods people need and theories of transcendence.

I can see it looking inside-out from my mind – in the middle of the world, a city of neighborhoods of families going to work and raising families just like my neighborhood here, now, in 2024, on the eastern fringes of Denver where the mountains flow like melting glaciers down and out onto the High Plains of America.

Neighborhoods just like mine… just like America.

My neighborhood is clustered around a cul-de-sac in a suburb next to a large park. Everybody has a back yard with a garden and a two-car garage. I planted an apricot tree three years ago and it’s growing like healthy youth next to the big maple. Kids up and down the street walk to the same elementary school a couple blocks away.

In one house they speak Arabic. In another they speak Spanish. Next door a family from Eritrea speak a language I don't know how to spell. A young couple from Texas just moved in across the street. He works for a tech company. She’s going to law school. They speak Texan and my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor, speaks French when she doesn’t want me to know what she’s thinking.

To avoid being dismissed as a foolish dreamer like the Spaniard Quixote -- one’s morphogenic ideas must be possible.

It’s as simple as tools.

The transcontinental railroad and hydroelectric dams made Denver possible. A transoceanic canal and nuclear desalination makes my Gaza possible.

Tools open worlds of possibilities. It’s how they’re used that counts.

Sitting out on my backyard patio with a Coors looking out across our big neighborhood park where children swing and squeal and people my age walk little dogs (one even walks a turtle) I think about all the things that are possible.

Lots of things are possible.

Possibly an airplane mechanic wakes up hung over the morning after his wife tells him she wants a divorce. He goes to work, but his mind is elsewhere and he uses the wrong torque on an important bolt.

It was possible.

The early spring sun was warm. Beads of moisture wound their way down the chilled metal can of Coors beer. It was Easter Sunday. There was no place I had to go and no time to be there. I closed my eyes to feel the sun’s warmth on my lids.

An unnatural sound came down from the sky.

We live not too far from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The low roar of big bombers are a common sight and sound overhead… just pilots perfecting their craft, nothing more, nothing less… possibly a distracted mechanic’s bolt comes loose...

...and a bomb falls on the park, exploding into a fireball the size of the fireballs I'd seen on Al Jazeera, in a single blast engulfing entire Gazan neighborhoods of concrete structures where people hide… Not a sound. An utter silence emerges from the monochromatic screen painted the pallid whiteness of a dying patient…  a chunk of steel shrapnel passes through me between my shoulder and my chest. It happens so quickly that I don’t feel a thing… but others do… suddenly I can hear it, far off in the silence of the pallid whiteness, a little child’s trembling voice becomes the sound of the universe… “save me… it’s your dream… make it change…” I’m paralyzed! I want to move, but don’t. I could. It was possible. But I don’t. I just stand there with my mouth gaped open in dumb awe… Then blackness. The blackness of the guilt of mortal sin. The guilt we learned about from the Dominicans. The guilt of skipping Mass on Easter to go to the pool hall and smoke cigarettes in downtown back alleys. The guilt of knowing that everything in your dream is your fault and that you just stood there, motionless, dumb, while everything disappeared…

... I bolted upright in my chair on the patio of our suburban home, still gripping the cold can of Coors beer.

I felt dirty.

It was Easter, white lilies, but I felt unwashed, like the taste in your mouth when you wake from a drunk into the guilt of knowing it’s your own damn fault.

There was, in the air, the faintest smell of grilled steak.

A squirrel nimbly scampered along the top of our wooden backyard fence. You wouldn’t think that anything could do such a thing, but obviously it was possible with a squirrel’s brain and body.

Leibniz defined suffering as "diminished motion."

Do.

Start with a shower… shaved… naked… the sting of forced hot streams of water, castile soap soft and fragrant on my skin.

Dressed in something fresh, I say to my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor: “Let’s go out for Thai and green tea."

I told her about my dream on the patio and the lingering guilt.

“We can only do what we can do,” she said.

“As long as we do what we know how to do as long as we do no harm, right?”

“Something like that.”

“I know how to run a chain saw in the woods without cutting my leg off and how to drive a big rig in Chicago without hitting anything.”

“You know how to write.”

“You really think so?”

“… it’s possible.”