This is by far the longest email I have ever sent, so you might sit down and make yourself a cup of tea. The story has been vetted by three astute and longtime Frog Hospital readers -- Virginia Smith in Toronto, Harvey Blume in Cambridge, Mass. and Alan Archibald in North Carolina. I was thinking of posting some sharp political commentary about the fires in Australia and the coming war in Iran, which we hope will not come. But I put that political rant on my FB page, if you are interested.
What is the Quotidian about, you might ask. I don't know what it is about, I just write these things. That's all I know how to do. Write and Rake the Leaves. My limited skills. Anyway, here it is. I hope you like it. It is very long and if you make it to the end, you will become enshrined as a Frog Hospital Hero.
The
Quotidian by Fred Owens
Monday morning. I got up. I put
on the coffee. I went out to the driveway and picked up the newspaper. I
noticed the air was a bit foggy and cool. I went back in the house and cleared
the cat litter box, then I turned on the TV for the morning news. I kept the
volume down low because we have a new housemate and the sound of the TV might
disturb him.
I emptied the dishwasher. I try
not to clatter the plates when I do this first thing in the morning. By now the
coffee was ready. I took the rubber band off the
furled newspaper and stuck the rubber band in a plastic bag in the tool drawer.
I glanced at the front page of
the newspaper. I decided to skip that part and go to the sports section to read
about the US Open. The golf story was interesting. I checked last night's
scores for the Dodgers and the Angels, then I skipped over to Dear Abby and the
funnies.
By now the coffee was ready. I
poured a cup. I like it black.
I looked at Facebook on my
iPad. Mitch Friedman was posting photos of his roots journey. He -- and I
assume his wife -- has been to Athens where they stayed in a hotel with a view
of the Acropolis. He posted a selfie with the ruins in the background and my
first reaction was -- how heavy the stones!
My years of gardening in New
England have altered my perception. In New England I wrestled with large and
small granite stones and rebuilt the old stone walls. Stone upon stone, and so often I thought of the ancient ruins --- the
castles, temples and pyramids -- huge
stone-works built by massive manual labor.
If I spent a day or a week
moving stones then I appreciated how much work it was for ancient men, toiling
up the hill with marble slabs to build the Acropolis so that we, the heirs,
might pose for selfies in 2017.
There was Mitch Friedman, at
the Acropolis, among the Greeks.
Mitch Friedman is scarce of
hair on the top of his head, so he shaves it proudly bald and smiles lightly. I
know Mitch from his old days in Earth First! The year was 1988. The month was
January, when we resisted the loggers at Fishtown Woods. Mitch and his Earth
First! cohorts -- I always resented their interference in what had been a
moderate and local protest. But why didn't I say something at the time?
And why say anything now, 29
years later? Mitch and his group coordinated the protest and mass arrest at
Fishtown in 1988. Later he lived in Bellingham and made a good living as a
promoter of wilderness preservation.
Now I see him on Facebook,
howling with wolves or catching a Seahawks game in Seattle.
Or in Athens, on the balcony of
his hotel room with a view of the Acropolis.
The thing is, when I saw his
photo standing proudly in front of the ancient stones, I was happy for him. I
was glad that he made this life journey, even though I might not ever get there
myself.
I am so commonly envious of
other people. Why did Mitch Friedman become
a successful and well-known environmental activist? He saved the wilderness
in eastern Washington. He spearheaded the introduction of wolves to that area.
He went to court and won. He organized hundreds of donors. He led petition
drives. He left the notoriety of Earth First! And put those radical days behind
him. “I’m being reasonable now. I accept moderation and gradual change.” He
re-shaped his image in that way.
I envied his success. If people
ask, but nobody asks, what have you done to save nature? When I hear that I
start to voice a rasping scream, an inarticulate wordless moan, a string of
obscenities. Even now as I write this, my breathing gets heavy.
I did as much as Mitch Friedman
ever did. I know it, but I can’t prove it…. I guess I am over that now, almost over that
anyway, because when I saw the photo of Mitch in front of the Acropolis I
smiled and I was happy for him. He deserves that pleasure.
I remembered my Greek teacher
in high school. His name was Father Ryan, a young man, barely thirty, not tall,
of a slight torso, neither clumsy nor athletic.
He was our Greek teacher for two years. He only had wisps of grey hair
on his head, and except for those wisps, he was totally bald. It was cancer of
some kind and chemotherapy for treatment, but they never told us what it was
and we never asked. Sometimes Father Ryan would lay his head down on the
lectern in the middle of his lecture – just lay his head down for a few moments
and gather his strength and then carry on. This was 1963 and 1964. We didn’t
ask questions about his health, but we learned the Greek and we read Homer out
loud, words as ancient as the stones on the Acropolis.
I still have the Greek books. I
guess I didn’t need to make the trip to Athens. I carry it in my soul.
------------------------------------------
I’m sitting in the living room
waiting for lunch. I told Laurie I would eat at one p.m. so I have 15 minutes
to go. The big window is open and so is the front door, the breeze is easy. It
is not as hot as they predicted --- meaning here in Santa Barbara. For some
cruel reason I am monitoring the temperature in Phoenix. You can do that on the
Internet. Just type in “Phoenix temperature” in the Google search box. It says
113 degrees at noon. And you worry about power failures when it gets that hot,
and some old woman living in a small cottage and the power goes out and the AC
shuts down and she suffers through the heat of the day – 113 degrees at noon
means even hotter by 3 p.m.
I am sitting on the couch and
the laptop is on the coffee table. Laurie is in the far back of the yard
picking plums, little hard purple plums. I pruned the suckers off that tree two
years ago, but I haven’t gone back there lately. I volunteer for garden
projects when I can think of easy jobs that will make her happy. Like hedging
the Indian hawthorn by the driveway – that hardly took 20 minutes.
For lunch I will fix myself an
open-face liverwurst sandwich, hold the mayo – just bread and sausage. I have
been enjoying liverwurst on bread since I was a small child. My mother
sometimes took me to the butcher shop on Central Street in Evanston, back in
Illinois. You had to drive down Prairie
Avenues to get there from our house in Wilmette. Drive down Prairie Avenue
right past Uncle Ted’s stucco bungalow. Only we never stopped to visit Uncle
Ted. I just knew he lived there with Aunt Bee and their three children who were
much, much older than me -- so much older than me that I classified them as
adults and not fun.
We drove down Prairie Avenue to
the butcher shop on Central Street. The butcher would give me a small slice of
liverwurst as a treat. Usinger's Braunschweiger -- that was the brand name. I
always like it. I still do.
I will fix the open-faced sandwich
for lunch today and that will finish the 8-ounce package that I bought last
week. With that sandwich I might eat a small fresh tomato on the side.
This is where Laurie and I
differ. She would carefully slice the tomato and put it in the sandwich. I don’t
do that. It gets too messy. You get a fresh juicy slice of tomato in your
sandwich and you hoist it up to your mouth – and then the juice squirts on your
shirt. It’s not worth the risk. Better to have the tomato on the side and cut
wedges and spear them with a fork -- and be sure to lean over the plate when
you hoist it to your mouth. This is a way to keep spots off your shirt,
something I learned recently, the part about leaning over the plate, rather than
leaning back in the chair.
Eat the sandwich and the tomato
wedges, but then think about eating one or two small, juicy almost-overripe
peaches. White-fleshed peaches from Hugh Kelly’s back yard garden.
Hugh has gone to England for a
month to visit his family and I water his plants for the one month he is away.
And I may was well pick all the peaches when I come to water – either me or the
squirrels.
Hugh pays me $50 for the
vacation watering service. I do gardening work for about a dozen customers near
our house. It sounds peachy doing garden work for friends and making a little
cash to boot, but I don’t like doing the work very much. I’ve done too much
gardening and farm work and yard work over the years. I’m not too old for the
work. That isn’t it, but I’m getting bored with it. Losing interest. I love my
customers – they are the best people ever, but I would quit tomorrow if I could
find another source of income. I imagine myself taking all the hand garden
tools out of the trunk of my car – shovels, rakes, pruners, loppers, hand saws,
trowels, tarps – all that stuff. I imagine taking it all away and putting it
into some storage locker somewhere. And I don’t pull weeds anymore. Maybe never
again or maybe not for a long time, like a year or so. I imagine myself taking long walks across
fields and forest, hand in hand with Laurie, looking at birds, only there is no
work, just the walking.
And
then maybe I will tell people what I am thinking.
Cataracts. They want to fix the
one in my right eye. Didn’t say anything about the left eye. I do have two eyes.
Pre-op consultation should clear that up. Dr Katsev wields the knife. A strange
man is going to poke a knife in my eye and they call it routine surgery. Katsev
takes a casual air. I said you must be good at it. He said I do about 20 a
week. The clinic website says he has worked there for more than 25 years and he
is chairman of ophthalmology. Technically, intellectually, this is all above
board. Everybody does it.
Why don’t I do it, but next
year, not this year? I can’t drive at
night, so what!
Laurie says why not do it now,
this month. Get it over with.
I filled out the pre-op form. Did
I ever get hepatitis? (among a hundred other questions) Yes, hepatitis A in
1973, from drinking bad water in Nuevo Leon in northern Mexico. I remember the
well, in the back yard of a peasant home, the well and the home a hundred yards
off the highway that went from Laredo to Monterey. We pulled off the road and
asked the residents if we might spend the night. They said fine and we drew
buckets of water from the well.
Something about that well
wasn’t right. Too shallow, to close to the house. The air was fetid. Tortilla Tom
said it was okay, but he said everything was okay. Eva said we are as good as
the people who live here and if they drink this water so can we. Tucson
wondered where he could bum a smoke. Fat Tom went off in search of beer.
We drew the water, started a
fire, put on a pot of beans and just sat around or stood around. It was getting
dark. Mexico wasn’t as pretty as we expected.
Later Fat Tom came riding back
to our camp in the back of a pickup truck – two federales coming to check us
out. Pulling the truck up too close to the fire, getting out slowly.
We didn’t move. They said Hi,
where are you going? -- They spoke a
little English. We’re going to Oaxaca. We’re cooking beans for dinner. You want
some? The cops looked around and nobody moved. They started to smile. They
walked back to the truck, threw off the burlap sack covering a rack of cold
Modelo beer, enough for everybody.
Fat Tom had a big smile now. I
love Mexico, he said. Hey, Maria, how do you say that in Spanish? Mexico me encanta! she cried out, and
she began to sing. The night passed sleeping under the stars.
But the water from the well was
not good. Too natural, to use a term. I got the hepatitis A from that well
water. Ended up in a hospital in Mexico City one month later. I liked that
hospital. They fed me well and let me rest. A clean bed, a TV, a pretty nurse.
But I had resources. The same
privileged resources I have had all my life, right up to today, getting
cataract surgery at Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara. My regular doctor is a
good-looking young man -- Dr. Bryce Holderness got his degree from the
University of Southern California medical school.
I filled out the rest of the
pre-op form. No other surgeries, or broken bones, no strokes, angina, endocrine
disorders, blood pressure -- actually
blood pressure is not so good and I take a pill for that every morning. The
pill must be good, because it only costs $9 a month. My health insurance does
not cover prescriptions. So for $9 a month it keeps the blood pressure within
range.
Cholesterol? Nature blessed me.
Basically I have a license to eat mayonnaise.
Anxiety? Yes, I take half a
pill PRN. I can get nervous. I can get nervous at times when I used to get
angry. Only I am too old to get angry, so I get nervous instead and take the
pill.
This goes back to the garden
work and the field work. It can be very boring and hot and sweaty and it takes
no mental skill for field work. But when
I was younger and I was working out in a field, you start to get angry and
you’re out in the middle of the field --
there is nobody to get angry at. They aren’t there – the people you’re mad at,
except for Pedro working 20-feet from you nearby, only you’re not mad at him.
You get mad at the field itself?
Mad at the soil and stones? Kick the stones, the stones don’t care……. No, the
stones do care, but they say to be calm.
Now
I am older, the field is too far away. I work in the garden. It doesn’t make me
angry or nervous, just bored.
After breakfast I went out to
the driveway to wash my car. My car is parked these past few days in Julia’s
spot under the pepper tree. There is a hierarchy of parking places here. Laurie
gets the cement paved driveway. The two renters get the off-street space, but
graveled, not paved – Julia is under the pepper tree and Ryan is under the
jacaranda.
I park on the street uphill
from the mailbox. Mariah parks on the street downhill from the pepper tree.
Gavin, who is here temporarily, parks wherever he can.
It all works out. But I am in
Julia’s spot today because she is gone to house sit for her brother who lives
across town. So I pulled into Julia’s
spot because it is flat and off the street and I can damp-wash my vehicle.
I drive a black 2004 Nissan
Sentra -- bought it five years ago for
$5,800 – never a problem, but it has one of those lousy Japanese paint jobs,
all mottled and disparaged. I hired an artist to paint acrylic flowers over the
discolored parts, so my car is like a moving mural. I can send you a photo.
People tell me all the time how much they like it. Well, I run a gardening
business, painting flowers on my car is a way to advertise. Not my name or
phone number – just the flowers.
Being that the flowers are only
painted on with acrylic and beginning to flake off, I can’t run my vehicle
through the car wash under those big scrubbers, so it just kept getting
dirtier, until I realized I could damp wash it in the driveway. Three gallons
of water, three clean rags, 30 minutes. Just wipe it down and wipe it off and
wring out the dirtiest rag. Then get a second bucket full of water and use the second
rag for finer work, and then the third for the final touchup.
Easy, peasy, Japanesy – that’s
what the librarian said in the Shawshank Redepemption. I hate it when a
phrase like that gets stuck in my head. I did not choose to remember that
phrase. I would like to get rid of it, but it is probably lodged in there
forever.
Like the names of my grade
school teachers. I can recite them Kindergarten through 8th grade.
But in that case I am glad to remember those names and I even wrote them down
for the archives.
But the memory is scarred with
trauma – horrible burning events that get buried deeper and deeper but can
never be --- there is no verb – can never be erased, eliminated, deleted
expunged – there is no verb because it is not possible.
You can force the memory down
deeper in your subconscious. Bury it. That’s why they ancient Egyptians built
the great pyramids --- huge piles of hewn stone symmetrically arranged. The
purpose of these pyramids is to bury something
-- we cannot say what. Some terrible, scarring memory is buried under
the pyramids and will never come to light.
Nothing is ever forgotten. It
is all stuck in your brain somewhere, in the lower drawer, under the cobwebs,
in the basement.
People say I have a good
memory. I recall details of events that happened long ago. I dwell on the past.
I love the past – that’s where all the good stories are. I love the history of
all people. I brood over my own life. Often I wake up at 5 a.m. when it’s still
dark. I emerge from a deep sleep and my mind begins to stir. I will my mind to
stop working. I tell myself, “Don’t start thinking. There is nothing to think
about. Go back to sleep.”
But I start remembering older
years, very often 1993, when I had the corporate driving job for Boston Coach
and Fidelity Investments. I drove a spanking new black Buick Park Avenue. I
took business executives to and from the Boston Airport. I spent hours crawling
through rush hour traffic, but I was getting paid by the hour, so I didn’t
care.
But what bugs me in the memory,
the part I wish I could forget, is the cheap, black polyester pants I wore
every day. Why didn’t I spend another
ten dollars for good pants and get all –cotton which is far more comfortable? Instead I was itchy in polyester and it was my
own fault. All day driving in itchy pants.
My life would be different if I
had bought more comfortable pants. That small memory haunts me, and a million
other memories that I will bury under a pyramid in the back yard as soon as I
collect enough stones.
June
26, 2017
Joe La Suza lives in Carpintaria
which is twelve miles down the 101 from Santa Barbara. They have a great beach
in Carpintaria, smooth sand, no rocks, no seaweed and no tar. Everybody goes
there in the summer. I don’t mind crowds at the beach. Everybody is happy and
relaxed, they don’t bother me. Teenagers used to blast their boom boxes at the
beach, but no more, they have ear buds and smart phones, lying on their towels,
as quiet as clams. They don’t bother me.
A good beach day, we bring big
towels, two Tommy Bahama folding beach chairs, and one large Tommy Bahama
umbrella with a screw-into-the-sand pole.
Almost everybody around here buys Tommy Bahama chairs and umbrellas. We
are part of that crowd.
Except if you go up to Coal Oil
Point where the college kids go – they just bring towels, they don’t being
chairs or umbrellas, for whatever reason – to be different? It’s just something
I have noticed.
We bring books, one for her and
one for me. Sometimes I bring a rolled up magazine, like the Economist or the New
Yorker. Laurie might bring a section of the newspaper, but that seems too hard
to deal with at the beach with the wind and sand. Mainly I just bring a book,
and, as you already know, this year it’s My Struggle by Norwegian author
Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Sunblock lotion, SPF 30.
Chapstick, SPF 30. Don’t forget to
protect your lips. A thermos of ice water. If we think we’re going to stay a
long time, we bring sandwiches. Here at the beach you don’t want anything too
messy. I favor peanut butter and jelly sliced into halves, one sandwich for her
and one for me. Or to be more ambitious,
for a longer beach flop, bring the small ice box with a shoulder strap to
carry, put in Persian cucumbers and hummus, and sliced apples in a small
plastic bag plus the sandwiches.
This is where experience and
team work pays off. Bananas and citrus are messy and might even be sticky.
Apples slices are neat and can be very tasty.
Finally, a flannel shirt for me
and some long-sleeved cover for her – when the sun gets to be too much, or when
the wind begins to blow late in the afternoon.
Lately, we have left the boogie
boards and wetsuits in the garage. Those days might be over for us. Now I skip the boogie board and skip the body
surfing, and just paddle out a bit further and swim back and forth, up the
beach, then down the beach. Good exercise beyond the crashing waves. Loving
salt water, feeling it seep into my bones.
Except for Jaws – you know –
sharks! I’m not going into the whole shark question here, but there are more of
them out there these past few years. Too many if you ask me. Better that we eat
them, not them to eat us. Resume shark fishing is my solution.
I love to merge into the salt
water. Laurie, being a California native, is more fastidious. She goes in the
water only late in the summer when it is good and properly warm. Her beach
history is different than mine. My yearnings, coming from the Midwest, are not
the same as hers, yet we have met and stayed together these past six years and
spent many happy hours at the beach together.
Joe La Suza is a retired
contractor. His voice used to be gruff, now it has a velvet tone, smoother,
less bellowing, no more barking orders. He smiles underneath his broad white
mustache and greets me with pleasure at the Mesa Harmony Garden where we both
volunteer.
Joe drives the twelve miles
from Carpintaria to the Mesa Harmony Garden. You wonder why he couldn’t find a
volunteer garden job closer to home, but I guess he doesn’t mind.
Joe has dedicated himself to
installing an efficient drip irrigation system in our 100-tree fruit orchard.
He has the plastic pipes laid out in four sections, each with its own timer. Each
fruit tree has two driplines to plunge the dripping water six inches below the
ground.
You don’t drip out the water on
the surface, less evaporation steal it. You bury the dripline outlet six inches
down and you put all that water to work. Then you put in two driplines, one on
each side of the tree for balance, because the tree sends out roots to where
the water comes in.
And you have to maintain the
system by walking the lines at least once a week. Hoses break, connections
slip, water gushes out and gets wasted.
Once a volunteer left the hose
running and we didn’t find out until two days later, and $50 worth of water got
wasted.
Joes maintains it all. He has
been faithfully coming to the garden every Saturday for months. On his hands
and knees, pushing his blue foam kneeling pad from one tree to the next, under
peach and plum, under apple, pear, fig and citrus, each tree gets two
driplines, and if they get plugged up with dirt, Joe unplugs it.
But he’s doing all the work
lately, and no one is helping him. He wants help or he wants to quit. I think
he should stop working and take a rest. That’s what I’m doing. I noticed two
things – that he was tired of doing all the work himself, and that I am darn
sure I don’t want to do that work either, so we should take a rest.
Let
nature take its course. Our fruit trees have deep roots and many inches of
mulch for ground cover. They are strong. They will keep growing. But Joe and I
need a rest. I told him – lemonade in the shade for you and for me, maybe a
small bag of Kettle potato chips to pass back and forth, talk about
grandchildren, watch the trees grow. Just watch. You find out things when you
watch. Time to rest. Time to watch. Joe, don’t get mad, just put down your
trowel and pull up a chair under the pine tree.
Randy Stark is not so easy to
talk about. He is difficult. I have needed to defend his behavior, saying oh
he’s not so bad.
He became very angry when he
discovered that the Fund for Santa Barbara had donated money to the Mesa
Harmony Garden. This was filthy money in his opinion. The Fund for Santa
Barbara had also donated money to Planned Parenthood -- baby killers! The garden should not accept
money from that fund.
Other board members found that
view extreme, as did I. Randy is a very conservative Catholic, and this is how
it gets sticky:
The Mesa Harmony Garden is a community
garden sited on one-acre of land that belongs to the Catholic Church. We are a
formally organized non-profit with no affiliation to the Church, yet our one
hundred fruit trees are planted on Church property. In other words, the orchard
belongs to the archbishop in Los Angeles and we’re just passing through.
Remember Joe, out there on his
knees, using the blue foam rubber knee pad, going from apple tree to peach tree
to hook up the drip emitters. Joe could give a flying fuck about the Catholic
Church and its sacrosanct dogma, its ancient ritual and its perverted
priesthood. Yet Joe toils on Church land and you must pay the piper.
And the piper’s name is Randy.
Randy is the deacon for Holy Cross parish, not quite a priest, he was a wife
and a daughter in college. He has a remodeling contracting business and makes a
decent living when he isn’t in church assisting at daily Mass, at funerals,
weddings, and baptisms.
The old priest, Father Louis,
speaks with a slight accent. He is from Belgium and he longs to return to his
homeland next year when he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75. He is
content to let Randy do the heavy lifting.
Randy is fifty-something, a
native of Santa Barbara with a beer gut, a buzz cut on his over-large round
head and a voice to match his buzz cut, loud and rasping.
His devotion to serving God is
sincere. His face twitches when he tries to focus. He represents everything
that is wrong with the Catholic Church – what some people say is wrong. Or
maybe he is just a pain in the ass.
We can’t get rid of Randy, I
have explained that to the other board members, but Randy can get rid of us. He
drops broad hints of influence – talks about a recent phone conversation with
the bishop, talks about old Father Louis not being up to much and leaving the
major non-sacerdotal chores to Randy.
What can we do? Pack up our
fruit trees and leave? We are stuck with Randy and this makes him happy. I am
an observant Catholic myself. That is, I work in the community garden and I observe
other Catholics going in the church for Mass, but I never go myself, except
some days, during the week, I come in the church and light a candle at the side
altar. Close enough. But I went to Catholic school all the way through – Saint
Joseph grade school with Franciscan nuns, Loyola Academy for high school with
the Jesuits, and St. Michael’s College in Toronto, run by a French order known as the Basilians
– they are priests who enjoy a good glass of wine and know the difference.
So, even though I am lapsed, I
can trump Randy on Catholic trivia, or hold my own, and he needs a friend.This
is where my adopt-a-stray-dog personality comes in. Because Randy is not a very
likeable man and he knows it. He talks loudly, adamantly. He can’t help it. But
he serves at Sacred Heart parish, he does the yeoman chores and sees to it that
someone keeps the parking lot swept, sees to it that Father Louis does not
allow too many homeless people to sleep in their vans in the parking lot, sees
to it that the Mexican families don’t make too much noise at the parish center
when the wedding or quinceanera comes around.
He does all that because he
wants somebody out there to like him. Me, I have plenty of friends and I know
how lucky I am to have all these friends, close friends, medium-range friends,
long-distance friends, every day friends, now and then friends, every kind you
can imagine, in abundance. So why don’t I be a pal to Randy?
The other board members at Mesa
Harmony Garden accept him with difficulty. Two Jews serve on the board, Larry
Saltzman and Josh Kane. They are quietly
aghast at Randy’s tirades, and cringe at his friendly smile that often conceals
a tirade about to commence. Our board president has a particular angst. Hugh
Kelly is of British descent, his pleasant accent pleases our ears. He is a
devout and formal atheist. What an exquisite punishment for him, because it has
been Hugh’s life dream to plant and maintain a fruit orchard using the most
advance organic methods. To do it right!
And we do it right at Mesa
Harmony Garden, but we do it on church property, within sight of the rectory
where Father Louis nods his nap, within sight of the parish center where the
Mexican familiar have their feuds and parties, within sight of the Sacred Heart
church itself, where at least one candle burns night and day.
Where
else will they tolerate two Jews, one atheist, and one lapsed Catholic to
operate a fruit orchard whose fruit is donated to the Food Bank? We all get
along with each other and with Randy. We have to get along. It’s our middle
name. Mesa Harmony Garden. Harmony.
We
gathered for a board meeting of the garden, sitting around a square picnic
table underneath a huge pine tree. The orchard is surrounded by a cyclone fence
on all four sides. We have planted table grapes and dragon fruit along the cyclone
fence. We have planted rosa mutabilis roses
outside the fence for beauty. We have done a tremendous amount of work over the
past seven years.
I
told the board members, because Randy wasn’t there that time, “Supposing we
kick him out -- which we can’t do
because he’s the deacon – but just supposing we do kick him out. He’ll just go
and join another group and be a pain in the neck to them. Is that fair? I say
Randy is our problem, and it wouldn’t be fair to the next guy to send him down
the road. He’s never going to leave anyway. We’re never going to leave. That’s
it. Plus he does a lot of work.”
Bless
us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty,
through Christ our Lord Amen.
Try forgetting that prayer. We
only said it every night at dinner for as long as I can remember when we were
kids. The same exact prayer with the same exact words. Everybody said it back then. Everybody
meaning Catholics. Us. Protestants had to make up prayers on the spot, but why?
We had one memorized and ready to go. And Jews, who knew what the Jews did? Mom said the Jews were as good as us but they
were clannish.
I was ten-years-old when I
heard her say that and I almost choked. Clannish? Mom, we’re clannish. We visit
with our relatives and people from the
parish. Period. Us. As in everybody who says grace before dinner just like we
do. We don’t visit with other kinds of people. We’re not in the international
friendship market.
My Dad liked Jews. He did
business with them and they were his friends. Mom and Dad often had dinner with
Art Shapiro and his wife. Shapiro was a fishing tackle wholesaler in Chicago.
The business was called Faber Brothers after the previous owners. There were a
lot of Jews in the fishing tackle business. They didn’t fish, but they bought
and sold and my Dad liked them.
The Suns lived on the corner of
Forest Avenue and 17th Street, on the block where I grew up. It was
a dark and lovely red brick house. As a child I found it very pleasing, and so
quiet. They only had one kid, Billy. They had so much room. I walked by their
house every day on the way to school. I
knocked on their door a few times to see if Billy could come out on play, but
he was younger than me and seemed to be very sheltered. They were the Jews. The rest of the block was
all Protestant except for the Giambalvos. I knew that because if they didn’t go
to school or church with us, they couldn’t be Catholic. I don’t remember the
nuns saying anything bad about the Jews
or the Protestants. They were good people. Too bad they were going to hell when
they died. The nuns didn’t dwell on that unfortunate fact. They kind of glided
past it. My life was not full of glaring contradictions, so I could live with
that one.
I walked away from the Church
when I was 18. When I left for college I stopped going to Mass. Didn’t say
anything to anybody or get mad, I just
stopped going. That’s how it has always been. It would be too much effort to
take up some other religion. Why would I want to be a Methodist or Buddhist or
whatever? Or formally renounce my tradition like it was some kind of debate and
I needed to choose the right side? I would rather stick with the teaching I
grew up with. Stick it in my pocket, or hide it in the garage under a used
tire. I didn’t raise my kids Catholic.
Why do I bother thinking about
these things? Memories are a curse. Bad memories remind me of my stupidity.
Good memories make me wish I was younger which is also stupid. Better to forget
and be here now…… but O God that is vapid hippie logic! Be present? Well, you
cannot really be anyplace else, except the present is such a narrow, tiny
space, and the past is huge, the past is bigger than a cathedral with echoing
marble halls, the years marching by gloriously.
I slept poorly last night, I
began to think about the time we camped on Illabot Creek in the late summer of
1978. Susan was pregnant with Eva. Eugene was one-year-old. My stepson Tommy
was seven, and we weren’t really camping, it was more like we were homeless and
had no place to go.
We didn’t even have a tent, and
the other people wanted us to leave. But I was defiant. Steve and Katy Philbrick said the
camp was full and there was no more room for other people, but I said, “I don’t
have to ask you if we can stay here. This land belongs to Gordy Campbell and a
long time ago he said we were welcome to live here, and we will live here
unless he says no.”
Gordy was an Upper Skagit
Indian and a dead drunk. But it was true. In 1971 when my house burned down and
we needed a place to go he told us about his small property on Illabot Creek
and we were welcome there.
I had that right, at least as
far as Steve and Katy Philbrick were concerned and they became quiet – and
barely friendly.
Where else could we go? We
slept by the creek. I borrowed tools and split cedar planks and made a lean-to.
We had a cast iron kettle – made oatmeal for breakfast and beans for dinner.
Eugene slept in a suit case. Susan and Tommy and I slept on the ground.
Illabot Creek runs right off
the high mountain snow banks in the Cascades. The water came gushing down the
foothills and spread out to flow smoothly over gravel beds. It was purely
delicious water. Even one cup full was worth a million dollars, worth a
mother’s smile and a father’s heartbeat. This pure water was our salvation. The
wind blew through the shivering alder trees over our head. We stayed there all
through August and then found a cabin to rent in Marblemount for $40 a month.
But why remember that? Today is
Thursday, almost the end of June and many years later. Illabot Creek is still
rushing by in cascades of pure water,
but I will never see it again.
Now I live in Santa Barbara and
the creeks are dry most of the year. Mission Creek flows from the foothills
past the Mission, through the downtown area and into the ocean, but this time
of year all you see are rocks and sunshine filtering through sycamore trees. We
are going to the Mission this afternoon. We go every Thursday in the evening,
to the Mission rose garden to do some pruning and dead heading. The garden has
over 800 roses of many varieties. Laurie and I are assigned as volunteers to
one plot of four roses – The four varieties are A Touch of Class, Duet, Sweet
Surrender and Falling in Love.
Part
Three 6,516, July 1, 2017
One of those damn flies is
buzzing around my head. They fly near your ears and make a horrible sound. I
hate them.
It was foggy this morning. We
went for an early walk on the Douglas Preserve. This is an ocean front park on
the Mesa in Santa Barbara. The actor Kirk Douglas and his family donated the
money to buy the preserve and keep it natural so they get their name on it.
Good people. We parked at Hendry’s Beach. We took the winding path through the
forest and up to the Mesa – a bit of
heavy breathing on that climb. At the top we walked across grassland on dusty
paths.
Everybody is out walking their
dog in the morning. “The morning dog walkers are different than the evening dog
walkers. I think I like them better,” I told Laurie.
She said, “Maybe you just feel
more friendly in the morning.”
Maybe.
I have stopped wearing my broad-brim straw hat
on these walks. For some reason it makes dogs get mad at me. How is that fair?
I said to her, “I have the right to wear the hat I choose. I can send a note to
every dog owner in Santa Barbara and tell them to tell their dogs to act
friendly to me and my hat. I can win this argument. It wouldn’t be my fault if
a dog started barking in my face because of my hat… But I give up. I’m going to
wear my baseball hat and the dogs will like me better.”
Then I felt grateful and
squeezed her hand, thinking my biggest problem is I’m wearing the wrong hat. I
should be so lucky.
We came to the edge of the
cliff overlooking the ocean, where the giant Monterey Cypress fell over.
“It got old and it died,” I
said. “Maybe it was the drought that killed it.”
We climbed up on the dead
branches of the old tree and sat down on a bare limb to look out over the broad
expanse of ocean. It was not windy – we usually go in the afternoon and that’s
when the wind blows, but mornings are calm.
“…. It’s too foggy. You can’t see
San Miguel,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Look
over there at those humps.” She pointed to the horizon to the right of Santa
Rosa Island.
“You can’t see any humps. You
just know it is there, so you just think you can see it.”
“No, I can see the low humps.
It’s San Miguel.”
Maybe.
My own theory is that they tow
the islands much further out in the ocean on foggy days, so you can’t see them
because they aren’t there. And they tow them back in later, back to where you
usually see them.
Laurie has never seen a
floating island, but I have seen them. In northern Wisconsin, on the Chippewa
Flowage where we used to go on vacation when we were kids. You get floating
logs and debris and they last so long in the lake water that seeds sprout and
trees begin to grow.
The trees begin to grow on the
floating debris, ten and fifteen feet tall, then the wind catches them and you have this
rare sight of drifting half-acre islands covered with small trees, drifting
across the lake.
I have told Laurie about this.
I am with her six years now. I am running out of new stories to tell her. We’re
getting into repeats. I don’t know what to do about that. She’s heard all my
jokes. But old age is on our side.
Pretty soon we’ll be forgetting the stories as fast as we tell them. Endless
reruns.
We sat on the branches of the
huge old dead Monterey Cypress and looked at the waves and then began walking
again along the path which borders the cliff, underneath towering eucalyptus
tree and pine trees. We came to the edge of the Douglas Preserve and then
walked through the neighborhood for several blocks, past the little garden
where we could easily steal strawberries, past the over grown yard that hasn’t
been pruned or tended in thirty years, past the expensive landscape-designed
front garden with carefully chosen granite stones, past the old yellow boat
parked in the driveway on a trailer.
You don’t see yellow boats too
often. Boats tends to be blue or green.
“But the Taxi Dancer is
yellow,” Laurie said. The Taxi Dancer is the queen of the sailing fleet in
Santa Barbara Harbor. The fastest and biggest sail boat. It’s yellow. So there
you have it.
We came to the Mesa Lane stairs
going back down to the beach, a thousand steps, twenty flights, down and down,
holding the railing, watching one foot after another, down to the sand and the
lowering tide.
The waves come easy on Mesa
Lane Beach, washing up on the sand.
Surging around the rocks, the molten rocks thrown from the cliff top by
a giant baby having a tantrum, scattered here and there. We saw two surfers and
one seal bobbing its seal head just past the surf line.
The tide was low so the beach
was wide. On a high tide there is no beach here to speak of -- just a narrow sandy strip between the
cliff and the ocean. It kind of makes me nervous to sit right under the cliff.
“You never know when the giant
baby is going to throw another rock,” I said. “It could be anytime in the next
hundred years, or in a second from now.”
“Do you think we would hear a
warning sound – a creaking and cracking?”
Maybe. Better to keep walking
and look out over the ocean. You see birds, seagulls going here and there,
wheeling and diving. You see black cormorants racing – they fly fast. And the
World War II bombers come rumbling in. I mean the pelicans. Stately, serene, lords
of the ocean.
“I think they’re just showing
off the way they skim so low over the waves,” I said. “Have you ever seen one catch
a wing and crash into a wave?”
“I never have seen that, but
I’m still looking.”
Pelicans are the biggest,
cormorants are the fastest, and seagulls are the smartest. But not the nicest.
Seagulls are not kind to each other. You throw out a piece of bread on the sand
and they come dashing and fighting and stealing from each other.
Why don’t the seagulls share
the food? Why don’t they take turns? Or give to the oldest and weakest. No,
it’s just the seagull bullies who chase everybody else away and hog all the
food.
“I’m going to teach the
seagulls to share. It’s the kind of a thing people do in California,” I said.
“Maybe," she said.
“We could ask the Governor to
charter a commission, Teaching Seagulls to Share.”
It’s a good half-mile from the
Mesa Lane steps back to Hendry’s beach where the creek flows in and makes a
small lagoon. They have a popular seafood restaurant right there, a place to
dip your ceviche and watch the waves crash. We have never eaten there – too
expensive.
They turned the water off on
the outdoor public showers -- a water
conservation measure because of the drought.
“I don’t like that. They
shouldn’t turn the water off. It’s bad for morale. Moms take their little kids
to the beach and the toddlers play for hours. There is nobody happier than a
small kid at a beach in California. But when you take them home you need to
wash off the sand. You need the shower. That’s what I think.”
“But it saves water,” Laurie
said.
“Better to stop watering the
lawn instead. But leave the showers running. In California we need to feel
good. Suffering is bad. Getting sand in your car is bad.”
We sat for a while on the
benches in front of the restaurant, to watch the surfers and the birds.
“I want to come down here late
at night sometime. I think they turn the waves off at night when no one is
looking, and then turn them on again in the morning. Why waste a wave if no one
is looking and no one is surfing,” I said to Laurie.
“Maybe,” she replied.
July
11, 2017 -- the Quotidian continued, part IV, 7,918 words
Tuesday afternoon. I was
resting in the living room in the recliner underneath the picture window. The
fan was on high. Laurie was resting on the couch flipping through her iPad.
I was sleepy but I managed to
get through a dozen pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume novel titled My
Struggle. I am in the first part of Volume Three, subtitled Boyhood. Karl plays in the forest as a child and he
lives in fear of his Father who is very strict and mean. His family lives on a
beautiful island off the coast of Norway and young Karl rambles and roams for
many happy hours with his friend Geir, just as long as his Father doesn’t find
out that he stole a box of matches and almost set the woods on fire.
I was reading that in the
recliner. It’s not engrossing, not in a compelling way, more like enjoyable and
involving. Naturally, going into the third volume, I have become invested in
the characters, but I can put it down and do something else.
This morning I worked at the
Italian garden. The owner is a professor of medieval history at the University
of California in Santa Barbara. She makes an annual summer journey to Italy for
research purposes – studies on the Italian Renaissance, hours spent in
libraries poring over musty documents. She said she was writing about college
life in Bologna in the 14th century. I said I bet it was all about
parties and beer back then. Is it so different from now? She said some things never change.
I call it the Italian garden
because it is laid out formally with a clipped boxwood hedge that borders a
small fountain. The hedge also rounds off a stately collection of tree roses,
and one enjoys this garden while walking on a path of pea gravel.
It is my pleasure to maintain
this garden. Pleasure – that’s a guarded term. I have spent days and days
complaining about the boredom of my work, hating the trowel and the rake. If I
never see a stinkin’ garden again! I have been doing this kind of work for
years and I do not love plants that much. After a while it all gets to be just
dirt -- dirt with roots and dead leaves and nasty little bugs.
I do not fear the insects and
crawly things. They exist in large numbers everywhere on the earth. I once read
a book about ants and took some interest in their complicated lives. It was a
famous biologist who wrote the book about ants -- E.O. Wilson. And he was a
happy man. So I figure if I studied the ant world I would be happy too.
And that reminded me of when I
lived in Texas and worked as a reporter for the Wilson County News. It was a
weekly paper of 10,000 circulation and I was one of three reporters on the
staff. I covered the farm and ranch news and wrote all kind of stories about
cattle auctions and the price of hay. But one time, for the general amusement
of readers and staff, I hit upon a weekly contest called Name That Bug.
Each week I would find a photo
of a bug, one that was common in Texas, but not too common. Then the readers
were challenged to identify the bug, and the first person to call into the
newspaper with the correct name would win a free Wilson County News coffee mug
and get their picture taken for next week’s edition of the paper.
There was a quite an interest
in this little contest. That surprised me, but actually bugs – when they don’t
bite or destroy your roses – are kind of fun.
That was eleven years ago when
I managed the bug contest. Now I am in Santa Barbara, no longer working as a
journalist, but scraping by on what I can earn as a gardener. I’ve been
complaining a lot. I don’t make enough money in this occupation. Gardening is a
lowly occupation.
This reminds me of the time I
lived in Africa and met the Garden Boy. He was a lowly and humble man. All
garden boys are humble. I am a garden boy and perhaps I should accept my status
with a natural pride. That is what I do and what people pay me to do and there
is no shame in it.
The Garden Boy in Africa was
named Ernest. He wore blue overalls and black rubber boots. He tended the corn
patch at a home on Airport Road in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe -- at the home where I
stayed for a week or so -- stayed with Precious Mataka, the African woman I
should not have married.
Whether we got married or not
was no concern for Ernest the Garden Boy. He seemed hopeless. He was paid very
little and he worked very slowly if at all. He was not a jovial man, nor
somber, more neutral. He did not stand up straight and swing his hoe. He merely
held it lightly and he seemed slightly puzzled as he squinted in to the sun.
I have his photo in my photo
collection. That was in 1997. Ernest is very likely still tending the corn
patch on Airport Road today.
Gardening is a lowly
occupation. Ernest confirmed that. Garden boy. That’s what they call him in
Africa. In all Africa it is a crime to call a man a boy. Not since the colonial
British were thrown out. You cannot call a man a boy, or say Hey, Boy, come
here, chop chop. No you cannot say that or you will get arrested or attacked,
Except the fellow who lives in
the shed in the back of your plot. You call him a Garden Boy. He has not yet
been elevated.
I remember these things, bugs
and garden boys.
I worked at the Italian garden
this morning, to trim the boxwood hedge. That needs to be done twice a year,
clipped nice and square. I do not object to the task, but it pains me to spend
several hours bent over the hedge. I like a hedge that is waist high, but a low
hedge that is knee high means you bend over to trim it and I am getting too old
for that.
So I asked Gavin to help me. He
lives in his van, which is parked on the street in front of our house. We can’t
seem to get rid of him, but I have found him garden work to do, and he is
willing to work, so he is not a bum --
although close to being a bum and I keep an eye on him for that – I don’t care
for too much idle hippie drifting.
But he was eager to come with
me and see the Italian garden, and he took a great interest in being chosen to
shape and trim the boxwood hedge. Gavin is 28 and the world is still
young. So I brought him with me. The
professor came out from her study and she was glad to see me and glad to meet
Gavin. We had a team! We would whip that hedge in several hours. Gavin would
run the electric hedger over the rows and I would rake up the trimmings.
We did it in less than three
hours. The professor wrote Gavin a check for $50. She will pay me later. I
enjoyed it. At least I didn’t hate it. Gavin can be the new Garden Boy. I will
dig out the photo of Ernest, the African man, and share it with Gavin. This is
our fraternity.
Saturday,
July 15, 2017 -- 9,212 words
“Take off your shirt and put on
this gown with the back side open.”
“Okay, but I’m going to be
cold.”
“I’ll be bringing you a heated
blanket in just a minute.”
Sharon brought in the heated
blanket after she got me settled in the bed.
“Which arm do you prefer for
the IV?”
I had to think about that.
“Which arm did they use the
last time they drew blood?”
“I don’t remember which arm,
but they said I had good veins, so you pick the arm that works best for you.” I
thought I was being gracious to the nurse, to make it easy for her to find the
best vein. I had no preference. It’s an art to install the IV needle with the
smallest poke and some people have devilish tough and a hard-to-find veins, but
I am one of the easy ones. She got me
stuck and connected to the drip in no time.
Meanwhile she was wondering out
loud what happened to the nice Hawaiian music on the radio overhead. She called
out past the curtain to the hall and said, “I liked that Hawaiian music. Who
turned it off?”
Then she told me about the time
she was a single mom with four kids living out in the country and one of her
kids got a fish hook in his nose, so she used a wire cutters to cut off the
barb and then pushed the hook on through. That had to hurt. “But that’s what
you do when you’re out in the country on your own,” she said.
I really didn’t want to hear
that little story. She had light-blonde hair cut across evenly around the back
of her neck and straight cut bangs in the front. Her complexion made her look
experienced. I noticed her feet, in clean white sneakers and guessed her feet
didn’t hurt, not yet. It was 8 a.m. figuring Sharon got there at 6 a.m. and her
feet didn’t start to hurt until after lunch, if at all.
That’s why she was still
working, and ten years older than any other nurse on the staff. Good bones and
good posture will save the day if you’re on your feet all day at the day
surgery center.
She got the heated blanket and
put it over me. Then for good measure brought in another blanket on top of that. I was going into zen mode, into the
pre-anaesthetic meditation state of mind. They were going to hook me up with
the happy juice for the procedure, but I figured I would start going there
already.
The way you do that is close
your eyes and leave your body. I can do that easily because I have such an
active imagination and powerful memory. Retreating into my own head is like
entering into one of world’s great libraries
– places I have been, people I have met, recordings of long discussions and
arguments that I have never actually had, but imagine having. Like what Harry
Truman and I were talking about one day when we were out for a walk together.
That was in Kansas City, Missouri,
in the late summer of 1954. President Truman was two years retired from the
White House at that point, and he continued his habit of an early morning walk
in the neighborhood. One day I waited on the sidewalk in front of his house and
asked to join him.
He came out striding briskly,
well suited, clean-shaven, undaunted, “Mr. President can I join you?”
“Certainly,” he said without
breaking stride. I had to jump to keep up with him. We discussed Dean Acheson,
and the United Nations and the Soviet menace. Truman was an outspoken man in
every respect, but he took his retirement seriously. It was no longer up to him
to call the shots. Let Ike do it, he said in so many words.
I was remembering this
conversation with Harry Truman as they wheeled me into the operating room. I
was about to bring up the career of John Foster Dulles, but I was interrupted
by the smiling face of Dr. Hussein, the anesthesiologist. “I am Dr. Hussein, your anesthesiologist.” He
was less than forty years old, slight build, of a South Asian complexion,
strong teeth, heavy beard, friendly smile. “I want to be sure you are
comfortable. I will put some medication in the IV and it will feel like one or
two margaritas. You will be awake, but you won’t care.”
Fine with me. That’s the power
of trust. They draped me around the right eye to prepare removing the cataract.
They call it routine surgery. I see nothing routine about it. Just because
everybody in the room has done this same procedure a thousand times doesn’t make it routine to me.
This is the most important
medical event in the year 2017. This is my life. The entire surgical center,
the entire worldwide medical establishment, all depend on the successful
completion of this “minor” operation on me, That’s how I see it.
The happy juice takes effect.
Dr. Ketchup, the ophthalmologist, arrives. I don’t know how he spells his name.
I don’t care how he spells it. He doesn’t care either. Dr. Ketchup doesn’t do the bedside manner. He
is not the voice of re-assurance. He is the voice of how are the Dodgers doing
today and the pros and cons of investing in real estate in the small town of
Lompoc where he owns some investment property…. All the while doing stuff to my
eyeball. I don’t care what he talks about because I can feel his hands working
and his hands feel good. He’s having a good day, and that is to my benefit. Let
the man work, I say. In five minutes he was done.
They pushed me into the
recovery room. Waited a while. Gave me post-operative instructions and then
called Laurie to come pick me up.
Meanwhile I took off the
hospital gown and put my shirt back on. I was done.
Notes.
His real name
is Douglas Katzev, M.D., chairman of ophthalmology at Sansum Clinic in Santa
Barbara…… The Santa Barbara Surgery Center is located on DeLaVina Street right
next to Trader Joe’s. They ask you to sign a release to resuscitate, to
transfuse blood, to transport you to the big hospital, to allow assistants to
help the doctor, and to allow observation.
The basic procedure was covered
by Medicare and my supplemental insurance from Blue Cross/Anthem. I chose a
slight upgrade on lenses at a cost of $800. They gave me prescriptions for
three kinds of eye drops that would cost $600. I balked at that expense.
It was Aurora, the surgery
coordinator, who told me about the cost of eye drops. I said “I can’t pay that.
My insurance doesn’t cover prescriptions. We’ll have to postpone the procedure.”
“Not to worry,” Aurora said. “I
have a solution.”
She opened her desk drawer and
took out a handful of samples. “Here’s what you need.”
So, Fred wins and big Pharma
loses.
July
21, 2017 – 10,400 words
I had cataract
surgery three days ago. Getting used to new eyes is kind of weird. I don't wear
glasses now. It's like losing my two oldest and best friends -- first thing I
reach for every morning, the last thing I take off every night, my glasses.
They framed my world. Now they are put in a drawer -- useless. It feels
ungrateful to just lay them aside. Maybe I can mount them on a plaque and hang
them on the wall someplace in the bedroom. It's what used to be.
Changes. Seeing the
world with new eyes. It seems a little fuzzy around the edges and awfully
bright in the middle.
Being in the Present.
I
wrote this story about Illabot Creek and incidents that took place in 1971 when
I went there to camp, and in 1978 when I returned to that same place.
More than forty years
ago -- Why dwell on the past? Then I realized -- the story isn't about me or
Young Dave or any of the others. We're just dust in the wind. The real story is
the creek.
Illabot Creek is
alive this moment, and has been and will be, flowing from a glacier mountain
into the upper reaches of the Skagit River. It is one of the most beautiful
places I have ever seen. And the water! The water is so fresh and pure, so cold
and clear, you can just scoop your hand in it and drink like a deer, and the
creek never stops flowing. Right now, this very moment, water is tumbling down
the mountain over boulders and coming to the gravel flats where the salmon
spawn.
That's where we
camped. You have herd me tell stories about Fishtown, where the Skagit River
flows in to the Salish Sea. But up river, up that same river, a drop of water
melts from a glacier in summer heat and begins to flow downhill and down
stream, all the way to the ocean, and it goes on forever.
This
story is about Illabot Creek.
I
was in Marblemount, Washington, in 70 and 71. By 1972 I was living in Manhattan
and selling balloons in Central Park. Then I worked at a mental hospital for
teenage children outside of New York -- I did that for nine months, then I
hitched down to Texas and partied in Austin for the spring of 1973, then I got
in with a gang of hippies wandering around Mexico in an old school bus.
I
came back to Marblemount in 1978 with a pregnant wife and two kids. I did not
have any fun at that time in my life, but I am glad that I had the children.
By
1979, I realized I could never make a living up river so we moved to LaConner.
.... I should write a book ---- oh, I have written a book.
That was the email I sent to
Young Dave. He lives somewhere in Oregon and I get a nice greeting from him
every New Years with news of his family.
We called him Young Dave
because he was only 16 or so during the Commune Days…. when we all lived in a
heap up in Marblemount, way up in the Cascades, pitching tents in the forest,
cooking over a fire, not bothering to clean up. What I remember about
cooperative living is nobody wanted to clean up. The garbage piled up in
plastic bags, but there was no take it to the dump committee. And old cars that
barely made it up from Seattle came to die on the very end of Clark Road where
the commune settled.
The commune started with the
best of intentions in late 1969 when a van load of hippies, following a star,
came upon a fairly nice log cabin at the end of Clark Road in Marblemount.
Someone --- I know who, but there is no reason to tell here – someone had money
from a family fortune and the cabin was bought and occupied.
First thing they did was tear
out the plumbing and electricity – they were gonna live off the grid, and that first
winter it was fine. People stayed warm and well-fed and played guitars and
danced with tambourines. Glenn and Sheri had their baby born naturally by
candle light, and fifteen people shared the upstairs sleeping places.
By spring time word got out and
people flooded in. Everybody from Los Angeles to Seattle who wanted to live in
a commune got on a vehicle of some kind and rode up to Clark Road and by the dawn
of July 12, there were easily a hundred hippies camped there – July 12 being a
memorable day, the day of Henry David Thoreau’s birthday.
Thoreau, if he had been alive
to see one hundred hippies crammed into ten acres of second-growth cedar and
alder forest, playing with nature, and pretending to live for free – if he had
seen it, he would have fled all the way back to Walden Pond.
But as it was, that day was the
high-water mark for the Marblemount Commune. Randy Oliver – more or less the
leader – filled a large pipe with an ounce of marijuana and passed it around the
one-hundred strong circle. It all went up in smoke.
It was just too crowded. The
outhouse overflowed and nobody washed the dishes. Once the food stamps ran out,
the lightweights hitched a ride back to Seattle and left their debris and
sodden sleeping bags piled in heaps.
But a few of us were more
serious and that included Young Dave and myself and Larry D’Arienzo, Steve
Philbrick and one or two dozen steady hands who actually wanted to make a life
of it, and not just a game.
The woods caught on fire that
summer and we all got hired for fire crews. Kindy Creek was ablaze and Jordan
Creek was a blaze, and both fires were close to the commune. Back then you
didn’t get trained for fire crew. If you showed up at the fire camp, sober and
wearing a decent pair of boots, then they gave you a shovel or a pick and sent
you down the trail, earning good wages, fighting fire 12-14 hours a day. With
those fires and several others, we made enough money to get through the winter.
My girlfriend and I did not
pitch a tent at the commune like so many others did. We rented a house because
we were high-class hippies, with hot running water and a roof that did not
leak. We lived in the house that first winter, until January of 1971 when it
caught fire and burned to the ground due to the idiotic unskilled attendance of
– actually it was my fault – for letting damp kindling dry out too close to the
wood stove and then leaving the house to visit some friends.
I remember hearing Mike
Stafflin chant a Buddhist prayer as we all held our bowls of rice over at the
commune – while he chanted I heard the fire sirens calling the volunteers.
Someone’s house was on fire I thought and I wondered who could that be, and I found
out soon enough it was my rented house. I never did meet the owner. I paid the
$50 month rent to Ernie Green who owned the Log Cabin Restaurant.
After the house burned, not
Ernie nor anyone else gave me a hard time or asked how it happened. It did
happen and that was that.
So we pitched a tent somewhere,
but we pitched it in a wrong place and a heavy rain sent a gravel stream into our teepee living room.
Then we moved down the valley to the Old Day Creek Road Commune which was more
solidly structured in that they didn’t let just anybody live there,
We lasted two months at Old Day
Creek Road, but my girlfriend didn’t like it there, so we got another teepee
and pitched it by Diobsud Creek on property owned by a dentist from Bellingham.
We should have asked his permission, but we thought he wouldn’t mind. He did
mind and he asked us to leave.
Now we were stuck. We never thought
to ask Gordy Campbell for help. Gordy
was a friendly Upper Skagit Indian and he was always drunk. He would take a
quart of whiskey and just drain it until he keeled over and passed out. You
might find him passed out asleep somewhere with a sweet smile on his face.
We liked him. Everybody did.
But we didn’t know that his family owned twenty acres of land on Illabot Creek.
“You can live on our property
if you want to, “Gordy said, like a miracle.
So my girl friend and I cut a
path through the bush to the property on the creek, followed by at least fifty
other hippies who wanted to camp there too -- leaving all the junked cars that
piled up on the end of Clark Road, leaving all the soggy sleeping bags and
heaps of garbage and going to Illabot Creek which may have never been occupied
by any person on earth – known all the time to the Upper Skagit Indians, but
they had other places to live.
That’s a speculation anyway. We
pitched our camp there and hoped more fires would start in the woods somewhere
so that we could work and make money.
But there were only one or two
small fires in the summer of 1971 and we made little money and I broke up with
my girlfriend. I was so unhappy about that that I left Illabot Creek and rode
all the way down to Taos, New Mexico. I didn’t stay there long. I kept going.
Seven years later I was married
to a woman from Oklahoma. She was pregnant, we had a one-year-old boy and we
had her son, my stepson, who was 8 years old -- the full catastrophe.
We had been living in a school
bus parked in the back yard of my sister’s house in Venice Beach, California. I
had a full-time job as a shipping clerk, and when I earned enough money to rent
an apartment, we went looking and ran into “no pets and no children.” To this
day, because my sister still lives on California Street in Venice Beach, I can
walk by the modest bungalow that we might have rented except the landlord said
too many children, sorry, no deal. I walk by that bungalow and think how my
life would have been different if that landlord had taken my money and let us
live there.
But I got mad at this and we
headed back to Marblemount – which was an over-reaction to that problem. We
went up to Marblemount in June of 1978 and decided to go back to live on
Illabot Creek. At least until we could find a place to rent. The other hippies
living there didn’t want any newcomers pitching tents. “I can understand that,”
I said to them. “But I have never left a junk car at the end of the road. I have
never left a pile of beer cans and garbage or soggy wet sleeping bags. I have
never stolen from other camps. In short, I have never been the kind of trouble
you don’t want. In fact, I don’t want those kind of people either. “
They weren’t quite ready to take
my word for it, or my pledge of good conduct, and they said they would think
about it and maybe I could live there and maybe not.
“It’s not your property,” I
said, “and it’s not for you to say if we can live here. Seven years ago Gordy
Campbell said I could come and live on Illabot Creek any time I chose to and
until he comes by and says no, I’m planning to camp here.”
Which is what we did.
To
be continued
I’m not saying when I will
continue this story. I don’t like to spend too much time thinking about the
past. It was only hearing from Young Dave that got me started.
It would take me about 500
pages and a hundred thousand words to tell the whole story and bring in all the
people in Marblemount in those days -- Glenn Mazen, Ralph Dexter, Plunker Barry,
Chuck and Annie , Pete Cuthbert and so many more people.
Maybe if I just wrote about
Glenn Mazen….. The last time I saw Glenn Mazen was maybe twenty years later,
maybe in 1998. It was down in Seattle. I went to the Central Tavern on Pioneer
Square and had a beer. I heard this guy pounding the pin ball machine, shaking
it and cursing. Not cursing hard, but cursing methodically, like what you do if
you’ve been playing the pinball machine all day, and the day before and the day
before that.
It was Glenn Mazen! And I
realized it was him and I decided to leave him be because he never looked up
and did not know I was watching him. Even if he had looked up, he would
scarcely have recognized me after twenty years….. I don’t know ….. I just had
this feeling that he would not care to talk with me…. So I left the moment
pass…. And that was the last time I saw him.
Glenn died five years later, in
2003.
July
26, 2017 -- 12,645 words
Tree
Blessings
Enjoying a long neck Budweiser,
sitting on the couch, watching the news, and watching Gary Cooper in High Noon
on my laptop at the same time. Gary Cooper rides off into the sunset with Grace
Kelly. That is so cool.
We’re going to have tacos for
dinner – got the fixins – got fresh cilantro, avocado, salsa, corn tortillas and
a left over piece of pork loin. All is well in Santa Barbara.
I have a title for this week’s
story. Tree Blessings. That sounds about
right. First I write down those two words, then I discover what I meant. Do we
bless the tree? Or does the tree bless us?
I immediately veer to Catholic
school guilt. Going around blessing trees is a religious scam. A way to avoid
the necessary work of planting, watering and pruning. To be really honest with
my own motives, I thought of blessing the trees as a non-strenuous exercise, a
way to avoid honest labor. I could start an earth religion. There’s a lot of
money in religion. I could publish a book of tree blessings. I could establish
rituals and sell tree ornaments, …. Now I have ruined a perfectly good impulse.
Why not just love the tree and let the tree love me back?
Tree blessings. Just love the
trees. Jesus loved the trees. There must be something in the Bible about how
Jesus loves the trees.
Tree Blessings and Garden
Vigils. Prayers, songs, chants and dances. Things to do in your garden besides
work. Garden work is highly over-rated. Get out of the way and let the plants
grow.
Garden Vigils. Healing,
Watching. Sitting. Reading. Napping. Walking. Visiting. Eating. Talking. Hard
work in the spring – sure. But not now in late summer. Let it be. Time for a vigil, all night watching in the
pale moonlight. Night critters coming out of their burrows to say hello. Late
at night in the garden – when the gophers party, and coyotes come to catch
gophers. Late at night in the garden when the dainty skunks sashay across the
street, and walk so pretty through the
hole in the fence and find some juicy insects and sprouts to dine on.
Spring is for hard work in the
garden. Not late summer. Let the ripe fruit fall on the garden. Pick the
grapes, but let some of them fall on the ground. Be generous. Be lazy. Don’t
pick all the fruit. Let it fall. Breathe. Look at the sky. Sit and watch the
garden. You can’t see things unless you stop working.
Last week I wrote about Illabot
Creek and people liked the story. And I said I would continue the story….. but
that would be too hard.
Illabot Creek – the most
beautiful place I have ever camped, and I was so unhappy. It was just bad
timing. That’s when I broke up with Gail Murphy in the summer of 1971. I was camping
at the creek, in the beautiful sunshine and I was utterly broken-hearted. The pure sparkling water. The fresh breezes.
The long northern twilight. And me
suffering. The irony was too painful.
Why couldn’t I find a
campground that maybe wasn’t quite so pretty, but where I could be a little
happy?
Not possible. So I bought a
saxophone. A Selmer tenor saxophone, a beautiful soul-ful instrument. I taught
myself to play it and I played it very well. Howling, screaming, moaning. You
can’t beat the tenor sax for emotional complexity. Picture me sitting on a very
large maroon bean-bag pillow, sitting next to the stream, playing my heart out.
And loud. But away from the other camps. Maybe one hundred yards upstream.
That saxophone got me out of
Illabot creek. You just don’t do wilderness with a sax. You do city. I needed
to get out of this camp and go to town. So I went to LaConner, all 600 people
living there, and no jazz musicians to play with, but more urban than Illabot
creek. I slept in Charlie Berg’s chicken
coop and worked in the boatyard sanding vessels, and got the money I needed to
buy a car. I bought a pristine green four-door 1951 Chevrolet for $125. I loved that car. I needed it too, because you
just can’t hitchhike with a backpack and a tenor sax -- too odd. Either go to the woods or go
downtown.
I left Gail Murphy at Illabot
Creek, bought a tenor sax and a 1951 Chevrolet and drove to Taos, New Mexico,
far enough way to forget her and the creek.
I could not forget her. I forgot
nothing. Taos was no help. This is not a happy story which is why I don’t want
to tell it. I don’t want to remember it, all the details, the way she looked ….
No.
Better to be Gary Cooper riding
off into the sunset with Grace Kelly.
Charlie Berg and Beth Hailey
did not yet live in the house on Fourth Street with the large chicken coop
where I slept while I worked to make enough money to buy the car and leave. At
the time of this story in late summer of 1971, the chief tenants were a couple
known as Truman and Mary. They were an odd pair. Truman played the Violin. Mary
was a Ditz. Forgive my movie metaphors, but picture Katherine Hepburn playing a
ditz in Bringing Up Baby. That was Mary. She didn’t have a clue, but I liked
her. A lot of men liked her. She was friendly in that way. I think that’s why
Truman always had such a sour look on his face. He had two negative choices.
Either pay closer attention to Mary and endure her ditz-itude. Or let her be
free to share her favors with the gang.
One day Truman changed the flat
tire on Mary’s truck. When he was done Mary and I hopped in for a journey up to
the Old Day Creek Road commune outside of Sedro-Woolley.
We got as far as Clear Lake
when a loud clunk and clatter banged around the truck. The left front wheel had
fallen off. The brake drum hit the pavement and threw up a shower of
sparks. The old truck came shuddering to
a stop and the errant wheel rolled into a ditch.
The wheel fell off because
Truman had not fully tightened the lug nuts when he changed the tire. He forgot to tighten the lug nuts? I didn’t
want to go there. It seemed I was getting between Truman and Mary and maybe I
should not be in that place. I don’t know what happened to them, but I expect
they did not stay together very long.
Meanwhile me and a dozen
hippies were sleeping in the large chicken coop next to their rented house. The
house where Charlier Berg and Beth Hailey came to live for so many years before
they moved out to Pull and Be Damned Road on the Swinomish Reservation.
New people moved into that old
house after Charlie and Beth left. They strung up aluminum foil all over the
attic in an attempt to grow marijuana with grow lights. There hare-brained
wiring system and grow lights caught fire and the place burned down.
So the owners bull-dozed the
wreckage and installed a double-wide trailer. Life goes on.
But I only brought up the story
about Truman and Mary as a diversion. I was miserable, unhappy, depressed, and
broken-hearted because Gail Murphy didn’t want me back. This is overlooking the
fact that it was my idea to break up, a decision I regretted after only a few
weeks, but a decision that she embraced as final and conclusive….. making it my
fault, or at least not making it her fault.
Who cares about all this stuff?
People are no smarter now than they were in 1971. I did not get any smarter, I
just got older. And Illabot Creek still flows. It’s flowing right now, not
older or younger, or smarter or dumber, but melting glacier water in the summer
sun and flowing down to soft gravel beds where the salmon spawn.
The humpies spawn in
odd-numbered years. Thousands of humpies spawned on Illabot Creek in 1971. This
year of 2017 is odd-numbered so they should still be there, to love and die and
feed the eagles. It’s an awesome natural drama, to sit by the stream and watch
the now dark and tattered fish go for their last dance, waving fins over gravel
beds, spreading eggs and milt. Tree blessings. Salmon blessings. It goes on
forever.
She wasn’t pretty, but she had
a voice like silver bells.
Quisiera
llorar, quisiera morir de sentimiento
--- words from a Mexican folk
song. “I am like a leaf on the wind, I want to cry, I want to die, because of my
feelings.”
It was sad for me but good
things happened for other people at Illabot Creek. In 1971 Katy came to the
creek wearing nothing but a guitar, striding into view like a goddess. She
liked Steve Philbrick and they camped together. They camped seven years at the
creek. Saved money, bought land, built a house, had four kids, raised them all
and now in sweet elder years they have grandchildren running around all over.
They had it good, God bless ‘em.
August
10, 2017 ----- 14,208 words
I am learning to write in a new
style that I picked up from the Norwegian author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. He wrote
a six-volume autobiographical novel called My Struggle. I am reading Volume
Four which is about his youth. He has just turned 18 and left home for the
first time to take a teaching job in a remote northern village.
It’s not that his life is so
special or different. This is not a man who flies to the moon and jousts with
dragons. This is an ordinary man who writes about his life and he makes it
interesting.
That’s the trick. Make it
interesting. I mean, I already knew that, but I needed some re-enforcement for
my writing. Everything is interesting. The four remote controls on the coffee
table in front of me are interesting. The stack of firewood that has been
sitting next to the fireplace for several years -- there’s a story.
There’s a story everywhere.
Maybe I should finish the story about how I broke up with Gail Murphy and how
that led me to marrying Susan Simple. What I do with deep stories like this,
painful and embarrassing episodes, is to write them a little at a time. One
piece of it today. Another piece of it next week.
I can’t tell it all at once.
It’s too difficult.
My life is full of embarrassing
episodes. It is a huge mass of regret, unhappiness, anger, disappointment,
loneliness and confusion.
But that final breakup with
Gail was a milestone. You could say, to sum it all up, that I was a happy
child. I played and enjoyed life until I finished the eighth grade at St. Joseph’s
school in Wilmette, Illinois. Then I went to high school and had my first taste
of failure – the feeling that I got it wrong, the feeling that I had some
internal wrong quality. I didn’t just do wrong. I was wrong.
That lasted four years. I got
out just in time and went to college. In college I was happy again, because I
was free and I had so many friends. Nobody told me I was wrong. And I began to
believe that I was a credit to the human race.
All through college I was
happy, and the two years I spent with Gail were happy. Then I became unhappy
and that lasted for the next forty years.
Basically from 1971 to 2011 I was unhappy. Forty years. In 2011 I met
Laurie and I started feeling good again.
Not completely unhappy for
forty years, because there were highlights, especially my two wonderful
children. But basically things didn’t work out the way I had hoped. My marriage
to Susan was difficult and stormy. Twelve years of crazy times and huge
arguments. And work sucked. One lousy job after another. I worked. I quit. I
worked. I quit….. I was no good at working.
Can you imagine how important
it is for a man to succeed at work – to have some small degree of satisfaction?
It never happened to me. Dishwasher and ditch digger. Minimum wage. No bright
lights. And who was to blame besides my own sorry self?
So that’s my treasure. Forty
years of disappointment. At least there is a lot to write about.
I can’t even brag about how bad
it was. I never went to prison, or fought in a war, or battled a disease, or overcame
an addiction. I just screwed up on a small scale and I felt lousy. I remember
talking to Dr. Berkowitz about this in 1993 at his clinic in Somerville right
outside of Boston.
Dr. Berkowitz was a small
younger man with a tight black beard like the Smith Brothers on the cough drop
package. He made a good living as a general practitioner, but he could have
made three times as much if he had taken up a specialty in cardiology. As it
was he owned a nice home in the leafy suburb of Newton.
But he worked in Somerville and
served the food stamp clientele that needed walk-in service with family aches
and pains, and he liked talking with people.
I went to Dr. Berkowitz and my
kids went there. I went there more than I needed to because I enjoyed the
conversation. He read some of my writing and said it was good but too
idiosyncratic – too right he was about that. I had to accept his honest
judgment.
So it was the winter of
1993-1994 and the winter was dragging on with frozen piles of dirty snow in
parking lots and sidewalks. By March half of Boston was suicidal and I was one
of them not, not suicidal, but in a very blue funk. Plus I was lonely since I
broke up with Louise – which is another story, a long pathetic, embarrassing
story – but I broke up with her and money was short and winter lasted too long.
I thought maybe to get a medical solution to this.
I said to Dr. Berkowitz, I’m
depressed. He took a deep breath, looked me right in the eye and almost
laughed. “You’re not depressed. You know I have patients who are actually
depressed. They sleep 16 hours a day. They don’t leave their apartment for
weeks at a time. They are afraid to even say hello to the mailman. They don’t
bathe. But they drink and find pills to take, and they don’t get those pills
from me, but they get them. These are people who are clinically depressed, if I
might use a clinical expression, and I treat them as best I can, although some
of them need extensive psychiatric oversight and perhaps sheltered housing and
sheltered workplaces.
But these people are depressed.
You, on the other hand, are not depressed. You got the blahs, you got the
blues, you need a good fuck and if you can’t get that you need a good kick in
the pants. Get out of here and come back when you have a real problem.”
I was taken aback by Dr.
Berkowitz’s unusual vehemence, but I had to admit it was a healing experience,
because what he said in so many words was that I did not have a problem, not in
his experience. I was okay. Maybe all I needed was a week on the beach in
Florida, failing that I might go see the afternoon showing of the Marx Brothers
film at the revival house in Harvard Square….. This was in 1993 when they had
revival theaters in places like Harvard Square -- and film buffs who memorized
every line of Ingmar Bergman’s dialog of death and doom and destruction and
despair and disappointment.
Bergman was Swedish and those
people understand depression. The masters. But Dr. Berkowitz was Jewish and
those people understand laughter. “You’re suffering? You’re dying? And I’m
laughing my ass off.”
I walked out of the good
doctor’s clinic. It cost me $45 to find out I wasn’t really depressed. And he’s
laughing all the way to the bank for ten minutes of work. Except he didn’t have
to work in Somerville with his food stamp patients. He could have been a
specialist with a tony office in Back Bay. He really did like us better than
the uptown folks.
But I am not supposed to dwell
on the past, but to just go to the past, find something there and bring it
back. Today I found Dr. Berkowitz, and this being the present tense in August
of 2017, while Confederate statues are being smashed with ball peen hammers
like they were peanuts or pumpkins -- I
looked him up on Google.
Guess what! – he is still
there, now 80 years old and I said he
appeared younger than me but he was only smaller and shorter than me – but
today, this year, after 54 years practicing medicine he is still doing that,
still dividing the truly depressed from those who just need a fast
you-know-what and a kick in the pants.
I should write him a letter. He
might remember me. I will say one thing about myself – that part about being
idiosyncratic – which is distinctive. People want to put me on a shelf and file
me away in some forgotten drawer, but I don’t fit in any drawer, I stick out
somehow, and for that reason they tend to remember me. So I will write Dr.
Berkowitz and show him this story. He might like it.
August
21, 2017 – 15,906 words
The
Quotidian continued, October 21, 2017
Sending
Manuscripts to the Editor
I
mailed a check to the new editor. Then I will send her several manuscripts,
short ones and long ones. She will read what I send her and then we will have a
discussion as to their worth and ultimate destiny....... this could be fun.....
One manuscript is a memoir of 30,000 words called the Falcon Journal. I wrote
this in 2005 in two weeks at a campsite in Falcon State Park, located in Starr
County, Texas, on the banks of the Rio Grande River.... My girlfriend Laurie
read the Falcon Journal and said she liked it a lot........ Another manuscript
is a novel of 41,000 words called Push the Bus which I wrote in 2007 but did
not complete until last year. The novel takes place in the same campground
where I wrote the Falcon Journal, so we have a connection -- a short novel and
a short memoir, both set on the banks of the Rio Grande River in Texas.
Mabel,
the old woman who lives across the street, likes to read every thing I send
her. I print out a manuscript and walk across the street and give it to her and
she reads it. She likes me, but she doesn't like me that much, so her opinion
has a degree of detachment..... Well she liked Push the Bus quite a bit and she
told me so two times. I had been concerned that she would be offended by the
salty language. There is one character in the novel who is named Tucson and he
cusses a blue streak from morning until night. You get used to it after a
while.
Mabel
grew up on a ranch on Montana and she said she had heard that kind of language
before, so it was no account to her.
Talking
with Stuart Welch, former owner of the Rexville Store near LaConner
Stuart
Welch, my good friend, is an expert on everything. The words "I don't
know" never pass his lips. If I ask him a question, he will have a ready
answer and he is often right. We discussed the upcoming World Series. In a
previous conversation, more than one month ago, Stuart stated that the World
Series would be between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers. He
has not yet been proven right on this.
Stuart
and I discussed the World Series because it is "normal." Normal is
getting to be important because the world is getting very weird -- fires and
hurricanes and the fury of potential wars. The weirdest thing of all is that
man in the White House. You can say a lot of things about Donald Trump, but
nobody thinks he's normal.
I
miss normal. I need normal. I'm a Democrat but I wish Dwight Eisenhower was
President. He wasn't the greatest President of all time, but he was normal and
he had a good smile.
Some
of the world is still normal, like the Santa Barbara Kiwanis Club. The Santa
Barbara Kiwanis Club has been meeting every week for lunch since 1922. It used
to be all men, now it's about half women. The club has evolved over the years,
but it is quite normal. I belong to the club and all the members are more
normal than me and I like that.
And
my girlfriend Laurie is having new vinyl windows installed in her home. Six new
windows and two sliding doors. Getting the whole house done. Using a local
contractor. Installing new vinyl windows is a good thing and very normal.
So
maybe the world isn't going crazy, although Ireland got struck by a hurricane
and the woods are on fire in Santa Rosa in northern California....... Santa
Barbara is safe so far, and has been spared the wildfires, but it is bad luck
to even say that, so erase that thought.
You
can drive only two miles from Laurie's house and see the charred black scars on
the old palm trees where the Painted Cave wildfire leapt the freeway in the
high winds and destroyed 427 buildings. That was in 1990, but you don't forget
something like that.
And
we are not lucky in Santa Barbara because the fire could strike anytime and
everywhere you look it is dry and combustible.
Unfortunately,
wild fires in October are normal, although many people would dispute that and
declare a connection with increased drought as a result of climate change. I'm
not getting into that discussion.
To
repeat:
The
World Series is normal.
The
Santa Barbara Kiwanis Club is normal.
Wildfires
in October in California are normal.
Donald
Trump is not normal. Definitely not normal.
Blowing
Hot and Cold
I'm
blowing hot and cold on this manuscript. It's a memoir I wrote in 2005 called
the Falcon Journal, because I wrote it at Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande River in
South Texas. I had a winter camp site right on the banks of the river. I could
see Mexico on the other side of the water. I could see the twinkling lights of
the little village in Mexico.
I
wrote about the birds, because South Texas is a big winter attraction for
birdwatching folk. The tropical birds come this far north. The northern birds
come this far south. There are more species of birds in South Texas than any
other place in the country, and the birds congregate along the banks of the
river.
I
didn't even have binoculars or a guide book. I just liked camping there under
the acacia tree. I left out crackers for the road runners.
I
wrote the journal -- about my second grade teacher, Sister Virgina. I had a
crush on her. I wrote about the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius. I wrote
about my girl friend Gail Murphy and the trip we took to Mexico in 1970.
The
journal is spare and strong and rooted in a place -- Falcon Dam -- that made me
whole. That's why Laurie and Mabel liked reading it.
I
said I was blowing hot and cold on this manuscript while I am reviewing it. I
always feel that way. Why would anybody want to read it? I ask myself that
question.
I
prefer the living room
I
sit on the couch in the living room with my laptop. I keep it plugged in
because my battery is iffy. I set the laptop down on the coffee table when I
need to stand up and do something. The coffee table was custom made by Laurie's
grandfather, made from maple or ash -- she's not sure about that -- but it is a
very sturdy coffee table and not cluttered with magazines and old fishing reels
and ceramic what-nots. A very uncluttered coffee table, I would say. A very
tranquil, un-busy coffee table.
I
have imagined writing in a proper writer's study, with a desk and a lamp and a
bookshelf lined with treasured volumes. A window to look out of, or an
aquarium. A radio. An easy chair. A door that closes and shuts out the world so
that I might focus on my writing.
But
the truth is that I don't really like to work in a quiet, austere environment.
I prefer the living room, which has a front door, so I can leave. I prefer the
living room because my three housemates are coming and going and I might say
hello and have a brief chat. I prefer the living room because it has the TV and
the radio. And it's near the kitchen where there is food and coffee.
I
like the sound of traffic, so I keep the front door open. I can hear the crows
cawing this time of year, they are busy feeding on the pecan tree in the back
yard.
In
short I prefer working in a sea of distractions. I had ADD before it was cool.
I have the attention span of a gnat in heat.
thank
you for reading this,
Fred
