UPDATE & FLASHBACK, June, 2011

I left Kutira's Kamp on March 15, 2010 & returned home to New Jersey. I was emaciated & undernourished & weighed in at about 113 lbs. But I was ecstatic about my adventure & what I had felt, seen, experienced & fallen in love with in Maui. One month later, my high crashed & then I struggled along hoping to return to paradise. My plan was to work on a Bamboo Farm in Hana the next winter, however, fate intervened and on October 22nd, my 60th birthday, sometime after 1 a.m. as I slumbered from my birthday meal of food & wine, the windows of my 2nd floor office blew out, shattering from the heat of an electrical fire that started in the ceiling below & quickly flew up the balloon-frame of my old wooden Victorian house, engulfing the entire area in black smoke. I was unconscious & unaware of what was happening. But, by a twist of fate, a young off-duty firefighter was in his 3rd floor apartment down the street & heard the glass breaking. Looking out, he saw the flames & ran down the street, calling the alert to the fire station. He kicked my locked gate in, ran up on the porch & into the house. He determined there was no one downstairs & heard a sound upstairs. Crawling under the smoke, he pulled me out, wrapping me in a red quilt. I woke up on a guerney at East Orange General sometime after 3 a.m. I had that red quilt (& still do), but little else remained.