Winter Solstice 2011

Not much cohesion here, but who'll notice?

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time learning how to be alone. And I have to say that I got pretty good at it. When I was in the navy, it became a great skill in an environment where privacy, if you were lucky, was a few moments alone in the latrine. I think about this--being alone--now because we are finally in winter, which is arguably my favorite season. Winter seems to be a time when expectations and requirements are few, though that might be a self-imposed illusion.

Also when I was a kid, I had a small-town paper route that required me to physically collect money from each of my customers so that I could, just as physically, pay my bill to the paper's publisher. It was when I learned how to deal with money: The publisher gave me a bill every week, and I was responsible for getting the money. I had to pay the bill on Saturday morning, so I would go out on Friday night and gather coins from the subscribers. Winter nights in the Midwest can be quite cold and snowy, but I would simply dress for the occasion and trudge through snow and darkness. It was great fun, really. Between my house and the streets that made up my route was an open field in which I spent many, many hours, and on those winter nights I would often perch myself on a large granite boulder and stare up at the stars. Or, I'd sit there as the snow fell and simply enjoy the silence.

The boulder itself was, in fact, always a mystery, and as I look back I wonder if it was an erratic left behind by one glacier another. In subsequent visits to my hometown, I believe I have found that boulder near the Little League fields I played on. Now that I think about it, the boulder also plays a role in my first novel, a terrible piece of work that starts with the line "Neil Armstrong broke my heart in 1969."

Where I live now there is no snow, and I must travel into the Sierra backwoods to experience such a thing. My favorite days there include not cold so much as gray skies and falling snow--a diminishing of sight and sound. There are few experiences as nice as this. For the last several years I've spent a couple of January nights snow-camping with friends in Yosemite Valley, and a couple of those times we've lucked into fairly heavy snowfalls. Those days and nights are wonderful.

After today, the days get longer in small increments; life tends to speed up, and soon enough I'll think about getting the spring garden ready for planting.

The Art of Dining Alone

During a recent 2-week-long stint working and living alone in the Pacific Northwest, for the first time in many years I had to both shop for groceries and prepare all of my meals. I've made my own breakfast and lunch for decades (and why not?) but have been fortunate enough to benefit from someone else's culinary expertise for most dinners ("suppers" if you're from the Midwest, as I am). And while I am certainly able to prepare many things other than oatmeal, sandwiches, and salads, doing so is not something I'm particularly motivated to do.

During my 2-weeks alone, however, I actually had to plan ahead: Breakfasts and lunches were both easy and consistent, but dinners were another matter. I tried to choose well: turkey burgers, fish, different turkey burgers, different fish. What was different about these meals, I think, was not just the food itself, but the fact that I was dining alone. Dinner is the only meal that I consume in the presence of other people; breakfast is always alone (and usually at the office), and lunches are most often taken in the dismal confines of my corporate cubicle. Dinner, however, more often than not finds me with spouse and children: an end-of-day commotion. So, without the family, I often communed with the television, which seemed to lecture me more than communicate.

This is not, though, a story of sadness. Rather, it comes to mind now because I will soon be spending a little over a week traveling alone, and during that time I'll be fairly itinerant without even a refrigerator to keep things cold or a stove to make things hot. Again, though, breakfasts and lunches will be easily managed grab-at-the-chance type of meals. Dinners will be different, and I probably will not even have a television set to keep me company. In previous journeys, as a rule I picked up a sandwich at a grocery store, then consumed it in my hotel room or in a park. During a trip to Brussels a couple years ago, I did force myself to dine at a couple of restaurants (sitting outside both times), but always had the feeling that breaking bread even with a stranger would have been nice. I have had good luck at bed and breakfasts: In London once I shared a table with 2 elderly English women who shared their experiences living during and after World War II, and in a pub in Edinburgh, Scotland, I shared a couple of beers with a drunk Swede who told great stories. On my first trip to London, I went into exactly one restaurant for dinner: a bright Italian place in which I first tasted Pinot Grigio. It had been a long day of walking, and the wine is what I remember the most.

On my upcoming trip, I will be heading into new places, and I hope to be brave enough to venture into more than one restaurant, for I've always advocated that we learn a lot about people and cultures through a couple of things: their cemeteries and their food. We'll see what I learn most from during this trip.

Practice

Writing poetry and being alone not only require practice, they also require that certain willing suspension of disbelief: Fictions have to be accepted for what they are. Writers of all ilks struggle with both--writing poetry requires such precision that it is easily abandoned, while solitude requires confrontations with demons and angels alike.

Being alone is the easier of the two when one gets beyond the initial realization that nobody's around to help. Writing poetry? One of the hardest things to do well. I have known many very good poets, and I continue to admire how they can be so precise, how their works can be multi-level structures built in just the right way.

And I am always looking for new poets, though this task is not easy. Visiting City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco can be of great use, but I think I am now a greater fan of Powell's Books in Portland, where stacks and stacks of new and old collections of poetry are waiting for good homes. On my recent trip to the bookstore I selected two books: Ted Kooser's collected poems Flying at Night, and W.S Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. Both have remained in the darkness of my knapsack for a few days. Merwin is less direct and often challenging; Kooser uses language accessible to anyone. Reading from Merwin's book, I am reminded of reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Morrison's Beloved--books that require a suspension of disbelief and a particular relaxation of the mind to be enjoyed.

Here's one from Merwin:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

And one from Kooser:

Advice

We go out of our way to get home,
getting lost in a rack of old clothing,
fainting in stairwells,
our pulses fluttering like moths.
We will always be
leaving our loves like old stoves
in abandoned apartments. Early in life
there are signals of how it will be--
we throw up the window one spring
and the window weights break from their ropes
and fall deep in the wall.

Of course, I'm no literary critic, and I don't know enough about poetry to discuss either of these intelligently (Shawn at These Rivers is one to follow, however). It's just nice to once again find poetry that I think is "good."

Navigation

For a full week now I've been residing in the Pacific Northwest, not too far from Portland. It's a wonderful place, Oregon--greener than most of California this time of year. I'm really doing little more than working my regular job in a different place for just over 2 weeks, with my commute lasting all of 10 seconds, a full minute if I go downstairs to brew tea before sitting at the computer. I have a dog and a cat to keep me company. The dog is friendly enough but misses its owners and knows that I am a mere interloper. When I leave the house, the dog greets me and then stares through the window to see if its owners are there. I take the dog for a walk each morning before work, before sunrise, and it seems happy enough. I allow it to spend much of the day on the bed I occupy at night, but we have agreed that it will sleep elsewhere at night. Dogs belong on the floor.

It is quite odd, this living alone even temporarily. Unlike travels or backpacking, I have no destination, no itinerary, no agenda. Not knowing my way around too well keeps me fairly close to "home," though I did figure out the mass transit system well enough to get me into downtown Portland and back again, and each day I pedal or walk ever-widening circles, and on a bike after work this afternoon I discovered great bushes of wonderfully ripe and sweet blackberries. I have also learned both the compass points and the sounds of local traffic patterns. Just knowing east and west allowed me to ride to places on a bike that I would feel lost in if I were driving a car. We often miss so much while driving--the sounds of things, how to tell east from west by the feel and sight of the sun.

Even walking around downtown Portland left me disoriented since I had no familiar reference points to work with. I knew a river was somewhere, and I knew that some streets divided the region into quadrants, but just as I was in Brussels a couple years ago, I was more lost with my map than I was this afternoon on a bike with only a sense of direction to guide me. And when I stopped for lunch at a brewpub in Portland, I considered such things: the feeling of being lost amid commotion, the lack of a true sense of direction. (It's not supposed to be a metaphor, though it perhaps could be.) I stared out the window of that brewpub and admired the locals' ability to turn down just the right street that would lead them where they wanted to go. Me? I needed a good hour to figure out how to find where I should catch the bus for my return trip.

A Walk in the Park

I see him before the dogs do, and I almost succeed at getting their leashes hooked to their collars before they do see him. He's walking across the park I often visit with my dogs when I need a lunchtime bite of fresh air, and he's carrying the day's newspaper. He doesn't flinch as the dogs and I reach him at the same time. "I could tell they were friendly by their body language," he says. I don't tell him that the older dog once bit a neighbor and, perhaps, killed another neighbor's dog that happened to get into our backyard. He doesn't need to hear these things.

"That dog [the old one] reminds me of a dog I used to have. It died when it was 18 years old. I've always felt bad because I made my mom put it down."

Then he introduces himself and asks my name. I tell him the truth. He then asks what I do for a living, and I tell him only half the truth, that I teach part-time at a local community college. We've never met, and he doesn't need to know the other details just as he doesn't need to hear the sordid details about the dog. He tells me he went to the same school, got his A.A. degree in criminal administration. Some day, he says, he wants to continue to get his B.A.

I ask him what he does, and he says he's on disability because of his depression. There was a time, he says without my asking, that he didn't take his medication and things weren't so good. Now, though, he's hopeful that his new medication will work better, and he assures me that he takes it as he should. He tells me about his drinking, too, how he paid the price for a DUI about 7 years ago. Now, he says, he limits himself to one beer a night, which, he learned from a class he had to take when he got the DUI, "most people can do." I ask him if that beer goes well with his medication, but he answers that he's just fine.

He then tells me other stories about his neighbor's pitbull that used to wander up and down the sidewalk and once chased his cat into his garage. He loves his cats, he says. The neighbor is better about the pit bull now, letting the dog out only as far as the driveway. He worries about his mom, though, because she's elderly. I tell him I once had a Rottweiler attack my knee as I was running around the track at the local high school.

I ask him if he comes to the park often, and he says he does, it's like a sanctuary for him, a place where he can sit and read the paper. "It is nice," I say. The young dog has been whining to get moving; she knows that being on a leash is no good if she's not walking. Our 10-minute conversation ends easily enough. He starts toward a picnic table so he can sit and read, and I start the dogs toward home. "Good luck with teaching," he says. "Some day you'll make full professor. You're certainly smart enough."

"Sure," I say, thinking that I should tell him that he's wrong, that the semester ended yesterday and I have no idea if I'll ever teach at that school again.

The sun is trying to come out after a couple days of not trying at all, and the dogs start to pull me back to computers and deadlines that never seem to go away. The young dog isn't whining now, and I wonder if in some dog-sense she's looking forward to sticking her nose through a hole in a fence we'll pass, a fence that keeps one small pit bull confined where it's supposed to be. If the pit bull's there, the young dog will bark and snarl and pretend she's a match for everything bigger.

And, sadly, I think I'll have to find a different place to walk the dogs at lunchtime.

I Read the News Today, Oh, Boy

Someone could tell me right now that I look like I've lost my best friend, and that wouldn't be too far from the truth. At least, a boyhood best friend, someone I have not seen for at least 2 decades. He was replaced by other best friends over the years, but, perhaps because of other things going on right now, his dying seems especially cutting.

Our fathers worked together for many years, until our family was sent into California exile at a time in my life when I shouldn't have been going anywhere. But, sometimes we have choices; sometimes we don't. He was more of a trouble-maker and certainly braver than I ever was, but we shared many escapades, some of of which were downright dangerous and life-threatening but even today are also secret. Hell, now that he's dead, the secrets are even stronger. My grandfather met him once and told me later that "the has the devil in him." He was right.

Until my family moved to California, though, I was able to keep him out of serious trouble if not potentially serious danger. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't smarter; I was just more of a coward. But, from California, I couldn't do much for him. He ended up in more jail cells than I know of, and, I think in Southern California where he lived with a Mexican woman and her kids, the police had cause to shoot him. Bad stuff.

Again, though, maybe it's the other stuff dancing around me that makes this whole thing seem worse. I'd like to learn how he died, whether or not he had it coming, whether he had a choice. Regardless, I hope things are better for him now.

Things We Find When We're Looking for Something #2

Something I've found about writing fiction: the characters that I've developed--or in some cases that have developed themselves--linger long after we've all said goodbye. Ruby, for example, who was one of the 2 protagonists in one novel, let me know that she's still alive and well in Reno where I put her several years ago. Actually while in Reno recently, I investigated some of her haunts and found that not much has changed. Jerry, the other protagonist in that book, seems to be less present, so perhaps the relationship he and Ruby developed didn't grow as I thought it would.

Likewise, from the latest blog-blockbuster "Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch," several of the characters still give a shout-out every now and then when I see a passenger train or even look down some train tracks. These characters might still be present because it wasn't too long ago that I was enjoying their company.

But, really, I'm here to bury characters, not to praise them. In fact, I'm currently formulating some new ones, though I sense that these will be mere offshoots of those in "Whiskey." I'm of the belief that many (or maybe most) writers simply work with the same themes and characters with each new work, though this might pertain only to me. Who knows.

So, the link to the previous post: in Green Apple Books, I was scanning bookshelves when not only a new title but a new premise came to mind. It was nice: I saw the title's words rather than thought of them, and this might have happened because my little brain saw a word or two on a book cover when my eyes did not. (This happens: quite often, if you are used to proofreading, your brain will see a typo before your eyes do and then you have to get to work finding the thing.) And, for once, I had my own pen and notebook with me and didn't have to steal from Kominski. Here's what I wrote for the title: "Things We Didn't Say Yesterday." Then I circled the word "Didn't" and substituted "Couldn't." So, one of those will be the title: "Things We Didn't Say Yesterday" or "Things We Couldn't Say Yesterday." A subtle, but important, difference in meaning. It reminds me of a line by the poet Jim Daniels': "For every poet who considers the rhythm of the word 'dark' and the word 'darkness.'"

It was nice coming up with not just a title, but also what the story will be about. Thanks, Green Apple Books. Thanks, Kominski.

Things We Find When We're Looking for Something

Getting out of ruts is a good thing. With both days and nights filled with not necessarily fulfilling activities, my Subaru and I headed west. Not quite lighting out for the territories, but the Subaru and I both have lost a certain amount of the ruggedness required for a true quest.

San Francisco is always a good destination: more polite than Chicago, less expansive than London. The weather was too warm for January, but I'm not the type of jockey who looks a gift horse in the mouth. First, Green Apple Books: new and used everything, with an annex of everything else. Time was pretty much measured legally by the number of quarters we--but mostly Kominski--dug up to stuff into the parking meeter. You learn to look through merchandise quickly when you're under that kind of pressure. A compact publication of Heart of Darkness fits the bill here, something that'll also fit in my back pocket the next time TSA inspects me. (Cue the Rolling Stones' song "Connection": "My bags they get a very close inspection. I wonder why it is they suspect them.")

After Heart of Darkness is a different part of town on the way to City Lights--different bookstore with different character--and another parking meter that needs an about an hour's worth of coinage to carry it to the 6:00 pm free zone. Even verb tenses change in a different part of town.... Kominski, he's brave enough to walk into a wine bar and ask for change, though he promises them we'll be in shortly to buy something, to contribute to the bottom line. Good choice. Pinot Noir served from a cask, a plate of cheese, polite, yuppy dining. We even get an education about the differences between growing wine in Oregon and wine in California.

I'm wearing a black sweatshirt I'd picked up a year ago--a Green Apple sweatshirt. We're drinking politely when a young woman approaches me from behind an comments on my sweatshirt, on the Green Apple logo. I must've looked confused. "You know what's on the sweatshirt you're wearing?" she asks. I tell her I do, and she says she just loves Green Apple books and used to live in the same neighborhood. Kominski tells her we're writers, which is probably more true for him than for me. I mean, he actually writes stuff. The good thing? She doesn't bat an eye when she hears we're writers (real or pretend). That's nice. You tell most people something like that, and they want to know more. It was like having my parking validated, or maybe my ego. She slides back a door to show a stack of lockers because she just has to show me her canvas bag: from Green Apple Books. Nice. She's also the third person in about a month recommend the Latest Showtime Hit Californication. She lingers and talks for awhile, then returns to younger people.

There aren't many people in the place, and when we head out for a proper meal we wonder how long the joint will be in business. We go to Coppola's for dinner. Good stuff. More wine. We are seated in Mr. Coppola's private booth, which actually is roped off. Ha! Photographs and drawings of naked people decorate a couple of the walls. Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now all in one night. (Yes, there is a connection, but not to the Rolling Stones.)

Used to be we'd hang out in North Beach until midnight. Older and wiser now, we leave much earlier than that and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge just as the a-couple-of-days-beyond-full moon rises above the City side of the Bay. At home alone the next night after watching the Chicago Bears lose, I bring up the first season of Californication on Netflix and watch 4 streaming episodes. Not bad, with ideas about writing and writers mixed in with the debauchery. But to all you sensitive types, it is an adult show. If you're easily offended, stay away. There. You're warned. Kominski puts it well, though: You have to study what people expect you to be.

The Heat of Things

I don't remember when I did not dislike July in Northern California. High-pressure systems press in, the air goes still, and even the dust stops moving. I'd hoped to be somewhere cooler this weekend, but poor communication and ongoing work-related tasks dictated otherwise. Having been to neither mountains nor ocean for over six months is creating its own high-pressure system as I get squeezed tighter between two ranges of mountains that roughly run parallel the Sacramento Valley. Chicago and Portland for a couple of days each were nice respites, but those trips seems too long ago to make sense. Perhaps a scheduled quick jaunt to Portland next week for a wedding will draw a bit of steam out of the kettle.

Nobody, though, has made the various beds I lie in; responsibility for mattress and bedding is my own and there is little reason for complaint. And a recent lunch with a writer friend and an email from a different writer friend that same day helped me re-evaluate a bed I would choose over the others. Sleeping in it full-time is neither possible nor practical, but like in a Motel 6 someone has left the light on there.

Yes, that is a couple paragraphs of poor writing; I can admit that. If I want to blame anything, though, I'll blame the heat.

Blackberries

With various deadlines gnawing at my little brain and a fledgling summer cold pressing against the remainder of my body, I do the wise thing after a long day at work and go for a 24-mile bike ride. I'd left the office with good intentions--take work home with me and make some progress, then brew some peppermint tea and tackle preparations for the course I start teaching this week. Having loaded my bike onto my car 10 hours earlier, however, was akin to loading obligation into my life, so I promised myself a short ride at an easy pace. Short turned into average once I got going, though, and easy switched to less easy when someone passed me and pressed my not-yet-extinguished enjoyment of competition.

Concentrating on catching the rider ahead of me (which I never did) was at least good for forcing the weight of deadlines into a small mental compartment; how my cold will respond is still in question. But, at the end of the ride, I wandered to the small patch of wild blackberry bushes I have visited several times this summer, each visit finding a few more ripe berries that, for some reason, the birds and other people seem to have overlooked. Happy to sacrifice pieces of skin to the brambles, I experimented with small berries and large: which are the sweetest?

It is, perhaps, a silly quest to find that one perfect berry, and each time I found what I thought was a good one, I continued picking and hoping to find a piece of fruit that was even better. Always searching for something better might be the sign of general unhappiness with what is, but rather than dwell on that, I'll dwell on remembering the taste of those berries that were just right--warmed by the afternoon sun, purple and sweet, within easy reach.