A Supposedly Fun Thing He'll Never Do Again

I've read more about David Foster Wallace than I have read his writings themselves. I have one of his works on my bookshelf (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), but over the years I've read snippets of his stuff here and there. Whether familiar with his works or not, though, I was nevertheless surprised when I read in today's newspaper that Wallace is dead, apparently accomplished through self-inflicted hanging at home in southern California.

Far be it for me to question a person's reasoning for suicide, but even in my amateur status as a scribe, I become somewhat nervous whenever I learn of a professional, famous writer deciding to see what dreams may come. Even those of us in the minor leagues, after all, usually cheer those who have made it to The Show, despite our petty jealousies.

After finishing the paper, I slid Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing from its place between Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect and Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, and I thumbed through its pages to see what I could see. On page 4 I found this: "In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from [Illinois] farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore." I like that quote, for it reminds me of the first time my father took me to play tennis on similar courts. Later in the book though, is this:

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out...,whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.

The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Dislike being watched.

There is more, but I think the point is well made. And, just to delve deeper into writing-type things, I opened John Gardner's classic On Becoming a Novelist, and found this in the preface:

The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow--long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. The writer may be undermined by creeping misanthropy, while the writer's wife, or husband, is growing sulky and embarrassed.

I certainly do not know if Wallace suffered from such frustration, but I do understand how any writer might suffer in such a way. Gardner also writes that while people will encourage others to be doctors and business executives and housewives, those same people will openly point out the lack of opportunities for dreamy eyed and idealistic writers. (When I was 13 or 14, my Aunt Wanda said this when I told her I wanted to be a writer: "Why?!" If I had said that I dreamed of being a brick-layer, she might have applauded.)

Hemingway, too, has something to say about writers, and I found this in his On Writing:

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Hemingway, like Wallace, offed himself, though he opted for a double-barrelled shotgun instead of a noose.

It is unfair, however, to say that writers either have or deserve extra helpings of angst, anxiety, and self-pity; they are, in fact, as a group, probably more prone to whining than are other professions. Often as I stroll through Sears or Target and see a man my age selling vacuum cleaners or plasma TVs, I try to imagine what his dreams are: is that what he envisioned for himself when he was 13 or 14?

Wallace, for whatever of his reasons, is dead, and I do not feel the same sense of loss I did upon learning that Raymond Carver was dead. People are killed or kill themselves every day, and I don't believe that a dead writer necessarily deserves more attention than anyone else. But I do think I might have missed something in Wallace's works, something I now might need to discover.

Commuting Home and Wishing I...

Words and ideas, as of late, have been like rain in Sacramento's August: rare as a good steak. (Note: beware of pseudo-writers bearing weak similes as gifts.) Perhaps happy with the completion of a short story, I've found comfort nesting in my laurels. I do have an idea of another short story, the genesis of which occurred last year. The premise has been fermenting in the back of my fat head for awhile, and now it seems to be moving forward a bit, its parts congealing. The working title is "Sixes and Eights," but the plot and characters still need to sort themselves out.

Part of the overall problem, certainly, is the unknown audience: the few friends who have professed to occasionally stopping in here are, it seems, occupied with life's business, and there is nothing quite so futile as writing for nobody. From talking now and then to other writers, however, the hope that someone is out there reading is good enough--and it often works for me. The Internet is a grand thing, and there is always a chance that someone will stop by. It is (sticking with weak similes) like fishing: you cast the bait into the water and hope a fish is hungry. I certainly imagine some people reading; in fact, I imagine specific people, whether they like it or not. Oddly enough, there is no attempt to publicize anything here, so if there are no readers, who is to blame?

Quite often, the ideas for writing come from visiting the past. At least, from visiting the past--locations, people. The past is a dangerous place and time to visit, however, for a person can get stuck there and accomplish nothing of value. This, I think, in some ways makes writers of science fiction superior to the rest of us: if they are good, they do not suffer the past, are not burdened by it. Perhaps they carry their own brand of pessimism, however, in that they often imagine a burdensome future.

When I teach college composition classes, I impress upon my students the importance of knowing their audience; I have not, however, learned to apply that to my creative writing. I wonder if I even want to know much about whatever audience is out there, for if I did, I might try to be too specific, too particular. Perhaps not having a defined, static audience should make writing easier; who knows? When asked if he had an audience in mind when he wrote, the poet William Stafford answered, "No, it's just for myself. I'm very indulgent at the time of writing. I'll accept anything, any old trash; it can never be low enough to keep me from writing it." That's a good approach, isn't it?

What We Talk About When We Talk

The doctor says he has recently returned from a trip to Fiji, where he volunteered in a clinic when he was not diving in the clear ocean water. He says the medical care and facilities in Fiji are terrible, saddening. "Isn't it frustrating," I say, "to know that so many people could be helped with only a modicum of decent care?" He says that, yes, it is frustrating, and he says that the patient he thinks of the most is a 17-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with leukemia, but who will die soon because she cannot get chemotherapy. "After diagnosis, a person usually dies within 2 months without treatment," he says. "They are basically just waiting for her to die."

When my 15 minutes are over, after I have been probed, prodded, and pumped, after my test results are interpreted and explained, I leave the doctor's office reassured that I have more than a few good years remaining--at least unless I "get hit by a truck on the way home," the doctor says. He's a realist and has seen such things happen, I gather.

The morning air is hot as I head home, taking the long way and driving by my high school, through a couple of neighborhoods I have not seen in many years. Though I think about the young girl in Fiji, my drive is comfortable, and I am anticipating my flight to Portland this afternoon. From PDX I will drive north toward Seattle where I plan to spend some time with my oldest son, and a day later descend to Portland for a visit with a sister, a niece, and Maya the Amazing Basset Hound. Leaving the old neighborhood I stop at a stoplight and watch automobiles turn in front of me. In one, a white pickup truck, a young man leans part way out his open window with his cellular phone pushed against his face. Just as my light turns green I hear him say loudly, "Go to hell and die, you fucking bitch." I wonder who is having a worse day: him, or the person he is speaking to.

*

The flight is fine, and at PDX I find that Hertz has reserved a Chevy Colbalt just for me. Trusting the wonders of modern marketing, I anticipated that the car would have an auxiliary jack for my iPod, and I am free to enjoy several hours of uninterrupted music, stopping only once at exit 39 on Interstate 5 for a drink at McDonald's. Arriving at my destination just south of Seattle, I enjoy 2 cold Coronas with my son and a portion of my wife's family, and the next morning awake to cool, clean air and a couple acres of green trees. Late that afternoon, after a good day of conversation and dining, my iPod, the Colbalt, and I head south, and I successfully navigate thorough rain and dark to my next destination just south of Portland, where Maya and her human family greet me with kisses. The 2 days are pleasant. The weather is good.

Today, on a day good for such things, I accompany my sister to her church, where people sing, pray, and seek comfort. I also am asked if I am single, if I am a church-goer at home, and if I like Oregon. These are easy questions to answer, and I do. The pastor, who is enduring his own personal challenges, reads as though he has read poetry aloud; he reminds me of Gallway Kinnell, even Robert Bly. Part of his reading today is of Moses, of Moses' time beyond the wilderness where he encounters the burning bush. As the pastor speaks, I think of the story of Gilgamesh, which I've recently read on my friend Shawn's recommendation. Gilgamesh, too, seemed to go beyond wilderness in his quest, losing and finding much along the way.

I think of places I have been, those places beyond where I intended to go, and then think of what I have found there. The pastor also speaks of how, to paraphrase, we often find what we need in places where we believe we will find nothing.

*

After brief goodbyes to my sister and the Colbalt, I board the flight home and assume my aisle seat toward the front of the plane. The plane fills until, finally, a woman sits in the middle seat next to me. I boarded in group A, but, because she lost her boarding pass, she was relegated to group C. Still, she secures a seat near the exit. During takeoff, we trade pleasantries, brief details about where we have been and where we are going. She tells me that her husband died a few weeks ago, and she has been staying with her daughter and is now on her way home for the first time, where she will finally have to face a quiet house in which for over 20 years she cared for her husband who first had Parkinson's, then Alzheimer's. In the next hour she will show me a photograph of her husband from 1984, when he worked with the Los Angeles summer Olympics. The man I see appears vibrant and happy; his thick dark hair has as single white streak down the middle. She then shows me a picture taken of him several years ago, and she points out how different he looks though I can see his eyes are not the same eyes, the hair entirely white. "I cared for him with no help," she will tell me. She will also describe how, even when he could not speak, she continued talking to him, reading to him.

"You are easy to talk to," she says, and I want to tell her that I really am not, that others find me impatient. "You'll have to tell your wife about the old woman who talked to you on the plane," she will say more than once. As with other, similar encounters, I do not know what she wants from me, so I let her talk, and she tells me other things. Before flying to Portland, she had visited her sister in El Paso, Texas, because that sister will soon be dead, too. And she tells me that, 5 years ago, her daughter's husband died at the age of 44 while exercising. He had been a Marine, was in good shape, and died suddenly. I suddenly can't help but think that my doctor has been keeping something from me, which is why he mentioned getting hit by a truck.

There are other, more mundane things: the other daughters; the unmarried grandson; the travels to Portugal and Spain just after her husband became ill; the daughter who lives in South Lake Tahoe and likes to snowboard after years of surfing in Southern California; the 17 years of working with first and second graders, experience that, she said, prepared her to care for her husband.

*

And later when I am home, the trip's events and nonevents sorting and sequencing themselves in my memory, the person I think of most is the man yelling into his cell phone as I drove home from the doctor.

Forgetting What Might Not Have Happened

I have never seen a David Lynch movie that I have, on the whole, understood. I have, I think, understood portions of Lynch's movies. Then again....

Ethical and slightly off-topic disclaimer: I am not a movie critic. Or, I am not a trained movie critic--I can describe why I like certain movies, but I cannot always argue that a movie is either "good" or "bad" in the same educated, technical way that, say, Pauline Kael once did. More often than not, I tend to focus on dialogue: what's realistic, what's phony, what's forced. I have always enjoyed listening to people--their words and their voices--and I can hear your voice even as I type, even though I might not have not seen (or heard) yours for years.

But, David Lynch... Blue Velvet is linear enough for me to "get." Mulholland Drive is less so (but stars Naomi Watts, and that's good enough.) Eraserhead--too far gone for me. Wild at Heart-- almost as understandable as Blue Velvet. Which brings me to this: For the past year or so I've wanted to watch another Lynch movie, Inland Empire. So, on the first night of a four-day period of coming home to a relatively empty house, I bit the corporate bullet and stepped into Best Buy in search of a movie or two not just to view, but to own. Specifically, I was searching for Inland Empire itself because our local family friendly Blockbuster Video apparently did not stock the film. Best Buy, though, was not the best choice, and I had to rely on Border's to save the night.

My DVD player accepted Inland Empire as though it were a long-lost friend. Skipping through the credits, I sat back with a cold Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde (lager, not woman)--and found the first scene oddly familiar, the second scene predictable. Yes, I had seen the movie before. Don't know when, don't know where (though I suspect it was during a visit to the northern California coast).

Perfectly fine, I thought, for I have misplaced experiences many times before. My backup for the night--and this is part of the fineness--I had also bought Lynch's Lost Highway, and I knew I had not seen this one. And it is, oh, somewhere between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive.

And as you might have guessed, there is more to the story--something that happened today. On the last day of this time alone, I came home from work to find that my son's obnoxious and petulant puppy, probably pissed off that I had not left yet another of my shoes within easy reach, had removed from the bookshelf David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish, turning the book's cover into so much confetti on the living room floor. There are incisor holes in many of the pages.

I want to think that this is a smart dog, that the book's subtitle of "Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" drew her to this book and not to, oh, Frommer's Guide to Vancouver and Victoria. (I mean, how could she possibly get to Canada?) And maybe she had watched a Lynch movie while I was at the office, and she wanted further edification. And, maybe again, she wanted me to find this in Lynch's book:

"You want to do your art, but you've got to live. So you've got to have a job, and then sometimes you're too tired to do your art.

"But if you love what you're doing, you're going to keep on doing it anyway."

Which echoes what a poet/teacher told me recently when I told her that, apparently, poetry is now dead to me: "writing is breathing for us."

Maybe the dog knows this.

Warm Depths of Memory

Shit River ran beneath the bridge that connected the navy base in Subic Bay to the streets of Olongapo. Lord knows where the river's name came from, but I would guess that the sewage had something to do with it. Beneath the bridge in long, narrow boats stood women (girls, probably) dressed in the finery of princesses. Their aim was to entice the sailors to toss coins into either the boats or the water, and in the water itself were boys who would angle into the depths to chase the fishing-lure-like glitter of pesos. Pesos were worth so little, even to the most impovershed sailors, that flinging a few off the bridge was cheap entertainment. And those kids, they dove deep.

In Olongapo itself we would prowl the bars, spending too much time and too much money on women who confessed to loving us or agreed to love us for a short time if not forever. The beer was cheap; the local rock banks were loud and good; the afternoon rainstorms drew the heat from our skin while it excised humidity from the air around us. Once, alone where I should not have been, I wandered backstreets after sunset and wished I hadn't tried to walk back to the base from whatever bar I'd left. I finally flagged down a jeepney and paid my way back to the main gate, and both the driver and I were happy.

Jack, from Hoboken, New Jersey, caught the clap 5 times in Olongapo. Jack was a hoot: I once almost got dragged to the brig along with him after he'd smarted off to an insecure warrant officer as we walked through the main gate in Yokosuka, Japan. He also got kicked out of a hotel in Perth, Australia, for general misbehavior and casual drunkedness. I was in that same hotel, and we had couple of midnight vistors: police officers who woke us up to ask if we were the ones dropping beer bottles off the room's balconey. We weren't, and we said so. They didn't believe us but left anyway. My roomate and I weren't sure if that visit was better or worse than someone knocking at the door 6 hours later to ask if we wanted tea. And Jack had the best tattoo I've ever seen: a parrot smoking a cigar, right on his butt. Great tattoo. He was also aboard the ship during the Vietnam evacuation, and he told us stories of the ship full of refugees, of how perfectly good helicopters were pushed off the flight deck to make room for others. He said he would watch as the helicopters settled on the surface for a moment, then sank dutifully--worthless as pesos, maybe.

I have thought about these things because of Denis Johnson's book Tree of Smoke, which now has about 60 pages farther from the back cover than it did a few nights ago. In the book's second paragraph is this: "...Seaman Apprentice William Houston, Jr., began feeling sober again as he stalked the jungle of Grande Island carrying a borrowed .22-caliber rifle."

Me: I have been to Grande Island, which was a short boat ride from a dock at the navy base. I drank beer and snorkled there, and I remember how clear and warm and clean the water was as I enjoyed an afternoon respite from Olongapo's commotion. I didn't, of course, have a rifle.

A few pages later in Smoke: "Houston took a train from the naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, to the city of Yokohoma...".

Me: Those are other places I have been, and though Johnson's book doesn't stay long on Grande Island or in Yokosuka, I nevertheless enjoy this grounding in the story: You find something familiar in a story, you get hooked easily.

Bug Bites

The bug, if not well fed, is at least being encouraged. And if not Shangri-La on the horizon, there are a few possibilities: Chicago, Death Valley, Europe--maybe in that order of occurrence if not order of possibility. Of these, Death Valley is the most intriguing (and most definite, for that matter), for it is not yet on my list of places seen, places traveled. So, and perhaps because I've recently written a short story titled "The Map-Reader" and have been in a map-reading frame of mind, I thought it would be good to actually figure out where Death Valley is. What I found is, it's a long way from home.

The drive, from here, would require a few hours of driving east, many hours of driving south, and more hours of driving east. Which reminds me: the first poem I had published was titled "Heading East," but for the life of me I don't know if I've got a copy of it. This was before computers were household products and could save everything electronically, when I wrote first in long hand, then transferred to a typewriter, but years after I actually learned to type on an old Underwood in the solitude of my bedroom, and also years after I took a typing class in high school and managed to talk my teacher into giving me an "A" so I'd have a 3.0 GPA, which in turn would reduce the amount of money I had to pay for car insurance. If not for PE and typing, who knows where I would have ended up when it came to grades....

Back to Death Valley, which is on this fuzzy map.



And, according to my World Book Encyclopedia (1970 edition), was given its name by a "group of pioneers after they crossed it in 1849. They call it Death Valley because of the desolate desert environment." Which, to me, doesn't sound so original. The World Book again: "Death Valley is a deep trough, about 130 miles long and from 6 to 14 miles wide." And this: "Mining towns sprang up...with such names as Bullfrog, Greenwater, Rhyolite, and Skidoo. The towns died when the ores were exhausted. Today, only cluttered debris remains."

I like that: "only cluttered debris remains." Of course, nearly 4 decades after that was published, I wonder if any debris remains, or if it does, whether not it has remained cluttered.

Such road trips to such places are good for all of us, and Mapquest says that the distance from my house to Death Valley is about 455 miles following a route that might look like this:


And there are places to stop along the way: Mono Lake and the bookstore in Lee Vining; Mammoth Lakes; Bishop. Once, stopping in Mammoth Lakes on the way to a backpacking trip, my friend Tom bought 24 dozen doughnuts and ate them over a 5-day period. Okay, not quite 24 dozen, but a lot. Must've been good doughnuts.

This will not be a solo trip. Rather, Kominski, with some kind of snakes on the mind, perhaps, envisions grand mountains and deep chasms of.... what? Literary material, perhaps, the kind a person can store up for some time before needing it.

The Princess Wants Me, This I Know

First, as I have said before, let me say this: I do not believe in angels, at least not the winged sort the Catholic family I knew as a boy framed into paintings and hung over the headboards in their bedrooms.

I do, though, believe in princesses. And now, there is a princess who needs my help. How do I know this? Because she wrote me the email that I now share with you.

Dearest One,

I am delighted to write to you. I am sorry if this mail will come to you as an embarrassment or a surprise, I just felt like emptying myself to you, to confide in you, as I'm faced with total frustration and hardship.My earnest prayer is that you find this mail in good health and blessings. My name is Princess Helen Keita,The Daughter of (Late Chief Adam keita) Who lost his life in the course of the crisis here in Cote D'ivoire on the 7th of November last year on his way to his office.My late father was a cocoa merchant.My father willed in cash,the sum of $8.2 Million US Dollars which he deposited in a financial institution here in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa, I have decided to offer you $1.2m for your assistance with enabling conditions for the release of the fund which are as follows:

(1) That I must be 30 years or above.
(2) That upon request for the release of the fund,There must be evidence of investment intentions especially outside West Africa,

I contact you therefore to confirm if you can absorb me in partnership in your company or possibly assist me in any investment opportunity in your country. When I reach an agreement with you, the financial institution will release my fund to you and I will come over to your country to commence business partnership with you and as well complete my education.

All that I want is your sincere and genuine help in helping me to see that this fund is released to you and come to your country where you will also help me invest this fund in a very good business as soon as it is released. I cannot allow the money remain here, because of the war here which poses a great threat. My life and future solely depend on this fund. If you have heard from the news for the past few months now there has been intense fighting and bombing by the troops and I will like to leave here as soon as the fund is released. I expect your urgent response including your addresses, your mobile telephone and fax number.I wait to hear from you, thank you for the expected co-operation.

My regards,

Princess Helen Keita.

Feeling the Bug

At a time when I should be feeding the pig, I am instead feeling the bug. The traveling bug, that is: that wanderlust-carrying critter that lurks around nearly every dark corner. Part of this feeling is driven by the number of frequent flier miles I've accumulated on one of the surviving airlines, enough miles to get me to and from Europe once again.

A woman I work with is planning such a trip for next March, when she and her daughter will travel to London and Madrid, with a brief stop in New York thrown in just to keep the domestic economy stimulated. She says, "You should go on a trip, too. You never know when those FF miles will be worthless." I agree, too--the way entire airlines are dropping out of the sky, who knows how long such perks will exist?

A couple of problems, however. First, I have only enough FF miles to travel in the off-season, so I'm limited to those times of the year. Second, because of my wife's work schedule, she would not be able to accompany me in said off season. Which means, then, that I would more than likely have to travel alone once again, since scheduling these trips is not easy for anyone.

Of course, though solo trekking has never caused me much mental anguish, sharing a few experiences would not necessarily be bad.

Where to go? Oh, probably once again England, for I do not think I saw enough of the country, specifically London. Some people believe (one of George Bush's favorite lines, and I'm sorry for using it) that returning to places visited before is somewhat limiting. But, to his credit, my friend Shawn understood my reasoning and said, "That's why we have to go back." Kudos to him for getting my point without my really articulating it.

Why? Well, my brief stay in London was a bit frenetic, and I never stopped moving. Afraid to linger in one place too long because I feared not seeing something else, I did not nurse my visits as I should have. I also did not visit enough pubs, and that is truly a bad thing. And will I go? Right now, it is difficult to say.

The Real Me

"Can you see the real me, can you, can you?" (Pete Townshend)

Spending hours with old and older friends over the course of a couple months brings the realization that conversations with them are never new. Highlights and lowlights might be over-, de-, and under-emphasized, but the conversations themselves have been going on for years. And, if you pay attention, you'll learn that some of these friends, especially the honest ones, have more insight into the real you than you do yourself.

Good for them for keeping you honest, for simply calling your bluffs rather than pushing you off of one.

Solstice

Yesterday I read this: "Summer solstice, the longest day of the year, inspired Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and is associated with the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden."

Then, this morning as I walked along the American River about 20 minutes before sunrise on the first day of summer, I thought this: If you have to get exiled from someplace, what could be better than having it happen on the longest day of the year? You'd have plenty of daylight as you packed, consulted your map, built your shelter, and finally lay down in anticipation of the next sunrise. And, alone as you were, I imagine that after a day or so you'd feel a bit relieved that the threat of exile was gone. How good is it, after all, to live in constant fear of being exiled?

But, today, more detached than exiled, I was glad to be out early, before the sun began toasting the Sacramento Valley. When I was a kid and for once in my life happened to listen to my father, he said that he had always enjoyed the early morning. Decades later I would understand why as I stood on the catwalk of an aircraft carrier somewhere on the Pacific Ocean and watched the sun come up and the dark go down. Then, later still, I learned how a man alone in a car in the middle of Nevada could feel quite good while counting pre-sunrise contrails. Even in the grip of something unpleasant that same man might find comfort in what the morning sky offers.

This morning the sky was a layer of clouds that shrouded the Sierra Nevada and suppressed sunrise, which was not such a bad thing considering predictions of an afternoon temperature north of the century mark. I was reminded of at-sea days in the southern Pacific when we would sleep not in our stifling berthing compartments but, if planes weren't flying, on the ship's flight deck. Those days, the sun rose and set heavy on a flat horizon, and the water barely moved. Once, standing on that same catwalk with some shipmates, we watched a strange line of something in the water, and the line was moving toward the ship. Minutes later that line turned out to be a pod of porpoises that edged alongside the the ship's bow--several hundred pounds of prime porpoise keeping pace with millions of pounds of sailors, steel, machinery, and assorted petroleum-based fluids.

The clouds dismissed the sun just before I reached the half-way point and turned west, and I was glad for the warmth on my back. And in the late afternoon doldrums, I found this from Act V of A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains...."

At some level in the heat, that line made sense.

Father's Day

My Old Man

Nearly deaf from 30 years
of forklifts and diesels
you step out of the shower
as boldly now
as you did when I was
eight and awakened to
the size of men.

That’s it, isn’t it—how we
carry ourselves and towel
dreams from our bodies when
we know it’s time to put
our backs to work.

Casting Characters

With turns of luck and manipulations of schedules, Kominksi and I find time for books, beer, food, vintage cars, deer in the headlights…. Twenty years ago we could not have imagined how things have turned out, but I’ve learned that if you write enough fiction, the plot you’ve painstakingly outlined often gets out of whack, especially when major characters start to think and act in ways you don’t want them to. Sometimes they fall in love, sometimes out, and sometimes they simply remain where they are. Or, now and then they can be killed off when they get in the way, and now and then they simply die unexpectedly and leave everyone else to adjust.

A week later my oldest son graduates from college; ceremony leads to celebration, and assorted characters assemble in the backyard to toast the academic rite of passage, to embrace the graduate literally and figuratively before letting him go. It is a good thing to have worked hard at something and finally to be recognized, and I want to say “Go west, young man,” or something just as trite to encourage worldly exploration. I want to relate to him how invaluable such exploration can be.

Another major character, the graduate's brother, has news, too: he is moving to Salem, Oregon, in a matter of weeks, something that has been rumored for half a month and something that many of us have advised against, considering the impetus. I do not want to say “Go west, young man”; I don’t want to say anything trite. For some unclear reason I instead want to embrace him and not let go, to relate to him the risks in such a move—such exploration. (See “Wanderlust” in “Scribble, Scribble,” August 8, 2007.)

The hypocrisy is not lost on me.

One very major character is not in attendance—the 95-year-old family matriarch, who decided she should instead ride in an ambulance to the hospital where she could enjoy a steady morphine drip. On the way to visit her today, I told my wife I remembered when my oldest son graduated from kindergarten, and here he was a college graduate. And I thought of my grandmother being 95 and how many experiences she has had, and that she would trade none of them if doing so would get her out of this hospital room. She asks about the graduation and says she is sorry she missed it. (People who are 95 do not have to apologize for anything, do they?) And we tell her of the grandson who is moving to Oregon, which does not necessarily bother her. She understands how people move.

She, too, certainly never pictured herself like this when she looked ahead decades ago: small in the hospital bed, her hovering family asking if she needs anything.

We check our schedules, change our plans, curse our luck--and everyone remains in character: some major now, some minor.

Staying Put

In the Sacramento and Las Vegas airports, a person can access the Internet free of charge. In St. Louis that same person has to fork over $7.95 a day. Which, to me, seems kind of pricey, especially compared to "free." And who spends all day in an airport, at least by choice?

Anyway. I left St. Louis this morning and passed through Las Vegas this morning, stopping to let the hopeful off the plane and their counterparts on. I actually did not know I would be stopping in Vegas--I thought the plane would go through Kansas City. These might be important details. I sat in the aisle seat in the hopes of making a quick exit when I finally reached home, and because the plane was full, I had two people sitting next to me. The first to arrive, a short, pudgy woman who I would learn when airborne could down an entire pouch of peanuts in one gulp. Impressive. She never explicitly said she wanted to sit in my row, just kind of grunted when I looked up at her and asked if she wanted the window seat. She shut both window shades right after snapping her seatbelt closed, and soon after liftoff was asleep.

The woman who sat between us must have had a bad night, if not a long weekend. Thin and blond, she wore a gray dress, and shoes patterned with black and white squares and decorated with dull buckles. She carried only a purse and what must have been another dress in a garment bag that she shoved unceremoniously in the overhead storage compartment. She, too, began to doze not long after we took off: her head bobbed up and down a few times; her body did the pre-sleep twitch. And, soon, her head was on my shoulder. Each time I tried to edge away, my other shoulder extended into the aisle and I would be bumped by either someone walking toward the bathroom or one flight attendant or another.

So, I stopped moving away and let her sleep; I read, alternating between Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent (a kind of travelogue) and Don Waters' Desert Gothic (short stories). My friend Tom gave me Waters' book, and the story "What to Do with the Dead" I read while riding Amtrak across Nevada just after last Christmas. It is one of the best stories I have read in a long time. It is also set in Nevada.

As I read Bryson's description of visiting Newport, Rhode Island, the blond woman woke up and tapped me on the shoulder 4 times. (I counted--it was as though she were knocking on the door.) "Where are we?" she asked. I did not know how to answer, but I did not think the obvious "in an airplane" was what she wanted. "We just left Las Vegas," I told her. She looked at me, her thick lips open enough to show white teeth, and seemed to process what I'd told her before mumbling something about Sacramento and going back to sleep. Dozing on and off for the remainder of the flight, she would speak to me once more: "Do you know why it's taking us so long to land?" No, I didn't know. "We're almost there," I said, which caused her to mumble something else about Sacramento.

And then we did land, and she took her purse and her garment bag and followed me off the plane, stepping on my heel with her checkered shoes as she hurried to get into the terminal. "So sorry," she said, though I doubt she knew why.

Resting Up

Two days and one college graduation later on the outskirts of St. Louis, it's a night in a Quality Inn--the room stinks, the walls look like they're being painted. But it's a room with 2 beds in case I want to sleep around. Some thunder & lightning & rain & hail last night that added up to a nice dose of natural Midwestern hospitality. Many thanks for that, weather-planners. California might not provide more than a thimble-full of clouds from now until November, so I shall remember the pleasant meteorologic event.

Also met a long-lost relative today. Well, not so much long-lost as hidden from the family 50 years ago when young women could be forced to "go away to school" and then surrender their baby to adoption. She, this relative, is genuinely glad to be meeting a wide array of new people, all of whom are connected through blood, story, and myth. "I am part of you" she might like to say to all of us, and I would like to say that I hope she got the good parts from all of us....

Addendum to "Laying Over."

I never got to spend my 4 shiny quarters. I sat down to tie my shoes and call my wife, but as I was fondling my laces 2 women--sisters--sat down next to me and immediately engaged me in conversation. For the hour we waited I learned many things: they had just returned from a cruise from Los Angeles to Ensenada, Mexico, and were on their way to St. Louis. One of the women, the one who talked the most and sat to my left, told me of her travels: born and raised in Connecticut; years living in North Carolina; now moving to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In fact, just before the cruise, the sisters had driven from Asheville, North Carolina, to Cape Giradeau, where boxes had yet to be unpacked. The talkative one has been happily divorced for 16 years; her sister has lived in the same house in Dallas for 18 years, where her husband works in the oil business. They both tell me of their children, but I let the details slip by as I wonder if I can extricate myself from the conversation without appearing rude.

But I can't (or don't)--I am stuck with them until we board the plane. I disclose as little as I can about myself as they alternate talking to me, to each other, and to various sons and daughters they talk to on their cellphones. "Here's your mom" and "Here's your aunt" bounce between them and into the phones at various times. Then I hear about their recent road-trip from Texas and up the Midwest to the Dakotas, then around other places. The talkative one says, "I'm lucky that my sister's husband lets her travel with me whenever she wants to," and I think of Ann, the woman I once met on a beach and said something similar about her husband ("Beachcombing", March 11). I am thankful that I have to share only minor details about myself (the number of children I have fathered).

One good thing about letting people talk is that you don't have to.

Laying Over

Leaving Las Vegas....

A bumpy approach but a smooth landing--a good combination if you can get it. From the air, the Las Vegas Strip looks like any other city, just dry, more dusty. Fortunes won and lost down there. What happens here stays here if you believe the TV commercials. I wonder what has stayed and will remain for a long, long time. Thousands of stories in the Naked City, and where would we be without them?

The airport seems more like a casino than anything else, and I've got 4 shiny quarters in my pocket just ready to go--drop them in, press the button, watch the wheels spin. I figure my quarters will stay here, too. The woman behind me calls to cancel her facial scheduled for Monday. Maybe her face will stay here now. "I just want to come home," she says, then: "Yah, that sounds nice, but..." (That's not a typo: she says "yah" for "yeah.") The older woman next to me ends her phone call with "sorry we can't get there in time for the cocktail party. If we could've gotten a direct flight, we would've been there." She and her husband are trying to figure out how to program their cellphone, something I understand. The woman standing at the window is wearing a skirt that stops precisely mid-thigh, and she seems to be laughing with someone as she talks on her cellphone. "John Littleton" is paged to return to the security checkpoint to reclaim his property--what could that be, shoes? maybe a puppy in a box?

The men who now infiltrate the seats around me talk about buying real estate, and they use "dare" for "there," "dem" for "them"; they talk quickly and remind me of Midwesterners. Wait: I'm a Midwesterner and I don't talk like that. Maybe they're from the Other Midwest.

Time to find a slot machine--these guys talk to loudly and too fast for me.

Taking Off

Sacramento International Airport.

At least, I think it's an international airport--I know there are a couple of flights to Mexico each day, and maybe one to Canada. That's about how international we get.

And now, cleared as a non-terrorist and with my shoes back where they're supposed to be, I'm 100 feet and 60 minutes away from take-off. I also have 4 quarters in my pocket, quarters I hope to turn into a fortune during the hour layover in Las Vegas. Across from me, 2 men out of 3 are talking on their cellphones. The woman behind me is texting on her cellphone. The man a few seats down from me, his sunglasses on and a toothpick in his mouth, types on his computer. We are all connected to the wireless world, nothing in our lives more important, apparently, than our connections. If we didn't have modern technology, how modern would we be?

On a bike ride a few days ago, I watched a buzzard not quite get out of the path of an oncoming Chevy pick-up. I watched as the buzzard flapped its wings, banked left, but didn't have the needed altitude. At this airport, planes taking off occasionally "encounter" birds, which from what I've heard is not a good thing. (As I look through the airport's large, clean windows, I hope the birds will be napping until my plane is above their glidepath.) I thought it somewhat ironic when I saw the buzzard fall to the asphalt: an eater of roadkill becoming roadkill itself. Riding the same route today, I passed the buzzard again where someone had moved it to the bike lane. How respectful. The bird--large and brown and oh-so dead--hadn't been touched by other buzzards. I wondered if there is a buzzard code of ethics: eat anything but your own kind.

Standing By

I first flew in an airplane when I was about 15 years old. That was back when people dressed up when they flew, when they didn’t wear flip-flops (and probably not thongs, which is what we called flip-flops then) and tank-tops. I remember dressing up a bit, probably wearing the best clothes I owned: a pair of slacks, a shirt with buttons, dress shoes. That’s about as good as my wardrobe gets even now, though I think I do own a tie that is probably coiled on the floor in the back of my closet.

This wasn’t long after we had moved from Illinois to California, and I bought my own ticket with money I’d saved from my paper route I was forced to give up when we moved. I was on my way to reconnect with friends I’d left behind. I don’t remember anything about the trip itself, and I find it odd that I recall what I wore on the plane and that my ticket cost $168. Go figure. I was also flying standby, which you could do then fairly easily. You could go to the airport, buy a standby ticket, and someone at some point would say, “Standby passenger Bob, please come to the counter.” (In the navy, when our ship was at sea and the water was rough and the ship was about to turn, a sailor would announce over the intercom, “Stand by for heavy rolls.” Then the ship would turn and roll, and the people who were prone to seasickness would do so. It was great fun for those of us who did not get seasick.)

My cousin, the oldest cousin in the family, was flying with me, sitting behind me; she must have been visiting from Illinois. As we sat on the plane, I read the information packet about what to do in an emergency. “Hey, Bob,” she said when we started to taxi, “we’re moving!”

This same cousin is graduating from college in just a few days, and I am going to attend the ceremony. When she started college a half-decade ago, I promised her I would do this. I am very proud of her because sometimes her life has not been easy. She once was a flight attendant for a major airline (she might have even started out as a stewardess), and when that airline was bought by another major airline, she worked for that airline for awhile and then lost her job—was “furloughed.” Afterward, she toiled hard: sold real estate, worked in a coffee shop, raised 2 sons, managed to stay married when all hell was breaking loose around her… And all the while remained in school. I have known other, less inconvenienced people who dropped out at the first challenge—you teach enough college, you see it all the time.

Oddly enough, she was unfurloughed a few of months ago, so she has been flying again. The thing is, she also has enough years working as a flight attendant that she can retire relatively soon. Then, if all goes well, she will become a middle-school teacher, a profession that is not unlike working as a flight attendant. So, I will be flying to St. Louis in a couple of days, and along with my sister and an assortment of my cousin's acquaintances, friends, and relatives, I will watch the graduation and be very happy.

And already I’m thinking: teaching middle-school kids? Cripes! Talk about standing by for heavy rolls!

Working Words

As I was driving to work before sunrise this morning, after spending the better part of 5 days working with wood and dirt in my back yard, I turned off National Public Radio and opened the car window so that premature bits of sunlight could come in. I was not especially happy to return to the office, but it was today's responsibility. I was trying to think of what to write here (or whether to write anything at all), and here's the first sentence that came to me:

One of the college courses I sometimes teach is centered around literature of and about the workplace--you know, where you spend so much time often wishing you were someplace else.

Knowing, of course, that I could not stop with a single sentence, I sat down tonight and belched some more. They go like this.

If, like me, you spend many hours in a corporate cubicle, maybe you decorate your walls. I have a picture of my wife pinned to one wall, and I have two buttons; one button reads "Another Writer for Peace," and the other button reads "Another Veteran for Peace." On the door to my filing cabinet, I have photographs of Yosemite, snow camping, backpacking, back-country skiing, and Martha's Vineyard. I don't have any poetry, though I do use some words from one version or another of Magnetic Poetry to keep my photographs in place.

In the class I teach, we examine not just poetry but also short stories and essays that, thematically, relate to the workplace. Some of the poems are written by people you might have heard of: Marge Piercy ("To Be of Use"), Carl Sandburg ("The Dynamiter"), and Theodore Roethke ("Old Florist"). But, frankly, the textbook I have to use is lousy--thin on content, short on relevance to the students.... So, sometimes, I sneak other works into the course. For example, Phillip Levine. He is not only one of my favorite contemporary poets, he's actually written entire books that contain nothing but work-related poetry--such as What Work Is. Most of Levine's poems are, however, a bit too long for me to type accurately, so I'll provide just a few stanzas from his work.

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

. . . . . .

Growth

In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only one man spoke
to me and then to command me
to wheel the little cars of damp chips
into the ovens. While the chips dried
I made more racks, nailing together
wood lath and ordinary screen
you'd use to keep flies out, racks
and more racks each long afternoon,
for this was a growing business
in a year of growth....

. . . . . .

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another....

I also bring in something different, a Sandburg poem that is not in our authorized text. I'm not a big fan of Sandburg, but, like Levine, he uses a language common to most of us. Here's one of his complete poems (from Chicago Poems).

Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work--long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the clew, the how and the why of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists and the fingers that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories," and the feet of these move slower and they have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the
downtown streets.

There is, of course, always something more to say. Perhaps tomorrow.

Basin & Range

When you know you need to say something but do not quite know how to say it, you get this....

The first long car ride I remember is a night-time trip from northern Illinois to western Kentucky, from our home to my great-uncle's farm. It is the first family vacation I recall. Of course, it might have been a daytime ride that has simply grown darker over the ensuing decades. I was probably 6 or 7...maybe 8 or 9. Maybe 4 or 5. My great-uncle had tractors and pigs. I have 8mm movies of me sitting on the tractor and of pigs sticking their snouts through the fence. We made that trip once more when I was a kid, and on one trip or another my oldest sister got one of my younger sisters to close her eyes and open her mouth, and then my oldest sister put a frog in that open mouth. Ha ha ha. You have to love oldest sisters. I also remember looking for Boonesborough, something that certainly betrays my age. (Sing along: "From the coonskin cap on the top of old Dan to the heel of his rawhide shoe....")

But Kentucky is not what I want to discuss....

The second long car trip I remember was from that same spot in northern Illinois to Ohio, though I don't remember exactly where. We where there for a family reunion, but there were no tractors or pigs. Decades later I would return to Kentucky for a family reunion, and someone from Illinois would show up. But, again, that's not what I want to discuss.

A third trip involved driving all night with my grandparents to Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada, for a wonderful fishing trip. We drove through International Falls, the first place I encountered the odor of a paper mill. Later in life I would encounter that same odor in Pensacola, Florida, and Antioch, California. Once you've smelled it, you always will.

There were other car trips somewhere in there--shorter trips to Michigan and Wisconsin and Missouri. On the way to Missouri for summer vacation, the car somehow ran off the road and we bounded through a field until the front wheels dropped into a ditched and everything stopped moving. That was fun.

For all of these trips, I was in the back seat. My first trip in the front seat was when my father and I left that place in northern Illinois for a new place in northern California. We headed south on Route 47, turned right on Interstate 80, and then didn't stop for several days. In the car with us were a dog and a hamster, both of which were on their first long car trip. If you want to make a 13-year-old boy miserable, put him in a blue Ford station wagon, and send him cross-country with a silent father and no radio.

There were few car trips for several years afterward. Then, during another batch of several years, most of my miles were nautical. When I finally got back on land and bought my first car (a Honda Civic), I discovered that I had learned something from even my limited number of trips: I like long car trips. I even started calling them "road trips" because it sounds more romantic in a Kerouac sort of way.

And believe it or not, everything that comes before this is a waste of time--merely a setup for the main point. Of anyplace I've driven, Nevada's Basin and Range has become my favorite. Interstates by design and nature are not especially attractive, but Interstate 80 from one side of Nevada to another is a good thing. I don't remember making the trip with my father, our dog, and our hamster, but I remember the first time I did it alone: leaving Sacramento about 3 a.m., getting to Park City, Utah, about 12 hours later. I was in a 1984 Ford Tempo, and I lost radio reception so was alone with my thoughts for a long, long time. I realized on that trip that my father must have felt the same thing when he was driving us west and I was looking out the window on the north side of the car: nobody to talk to.

I have since made the west-east-west trip* many times--alone, with my wife and sons, with my friend, with my friend and his wife--Reno-Sparks-Lovelock-Winnemucca-Battle Mountain-Elko-West Wendover... Last year while driving alone from my home town in Illinois to St. Louis, following part of the same route my father and I took, I found that flat Illinois prairie is certainly nice, but it is not...expansive. Perhaps other places, provide what Nevada does--northwestern Oregon is certainly wide open, and what I've seen of Arizona might be the next best thing.

But cruise control and good music an hour before sunrise in Nevada, either alone or with someone sitting quietly in the seat next to you, is treasure.

* Kominski has experienced this place, so perhaps he'll chime in.... Anyone, of course, may comment.

North by Northwest

Portland, OR

The Southwest 737 lifts off from SMF and heads northwest, and just as we reach 10,000 feet the sun rises between twin Sierra peaks. I think of Icarus--not because my wings are melting but because like most sons I never spent enough time listening to my father. About 90 minutes later we descend into cold and sunny PDX, where I am embraced by family who after a couple stops transport us and an energetic basset hound toward the Oregon coast. How green are the valleys and hills, a nice change from the great central valley of northern California that is already acquiring its normal shade of summer brown. The sun is full, and Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens are bold against the blue sky. It is Chamber of Commerce weather.

We pass through Tillamook but do not stop for cheese. I was last in Tillamook 2 years ago when one of these same family members attended a memorial service for a friend but left me to wander rainy streets and to sit comfortably in Muddy Waters Coffee and Tea Company. During that same trip we buried the cat Phoenix in the back yard, so that trip was nothing if not unique. On this visit, after Tillamook we proceed north to Manzanita Beach for a run across the sand, a nice respite for a chronically painful lower back that a day's worth of 800 mg. ibuprofen has done very little to help. I've been eating the pills like candy for the last week. On the sand, I run with Maya the Amazing Basset and am happy there is one creature that has legs shorter than my own. It's not Chariots of Fire by any means, but I'm proud that I can still out-run a hound dog, at least until it gets bored with me.

Farther north is Cannon Beach where we romp some more and search for shells of the nautical variety. Kids fly kites. Humans let their dogs run free on the beach. Seagulls--rats with beaks-- glide above us; dead ones decompose in feathery clumps at our feet. Several hours later we are in Tualatin, a place I have grown quite fond of even if I do sometimes have to bury cats.

The next day we visit Powell's Books, a place you could get lost in and not complain. I pick up a new soft-cover Moleskine notebook, Edward Hirsch's Special Orders (new/poetry); Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (used/fiction); and Tim Cahill's Lost in My Own Backyard (used/nonfiction). I would buy more, but I am limited to carry-on luggage, which is probably a good limitation. There are volumes of Emerson and Thoreau I caress but finally reject, and an apparently newly published collection of Vonnegut essays that will have to wait until I get home and can use my Border's gift card, a gift from a son who understands this book-thing. Some people might find this bookstore overwhelming, nearly unbrowsable because of the sheer number of possibilities. This is a bookstore that offers a color-coded map, it is so large. There is a coffee shop.

Another Southwest flight takes me southwest. The plane is full and the man in the middle seat next to me takes possession of my shoulder space and our shared armrest so that I spend the entire flight listing to starboard. He pulls one cell phone out of his pocket and one from his little cell-phone holder, and he shuts them both off. I read the current edition of Harper's Magazine and finish right before touchdown--nearing depression because of how bleak articles in the magazine make the economy out to be. The man in the middle seat turns his cellphones back on as soon as he receives permission, and I think again: what would happen if we had phones but nobody called? Hell, nobody calls mine. Outside the airport the air is too warm for early April, but it will have to do.

Another Place I've Been Before

Gualala, CA

Notes not from the underground but from California's Mendocino Coast... Kominksi recently described a diagonal descent to the southeast, and you should know that you can slice a different diagonal to the northwest and get just as far. My diagonal cuts out of the Valley and onto the coast--no hawks on signs but cows mingling precariously across Highway 1. Somewhere on the rocks below there must be a hefty bull carcass sustaining a Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his family.

I leave home planning to listen to my iPod's current audiobook selection History of Hitler's Empire (download for about $19 from The Teaching Company). But, when the iPod goes missing, I fall back to a CD of Paul Zarzyski, whom I have heard read thrice at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. When Zarzyski is done I start on the first of 4 Led Zeppelin CDs. Nearly 4 hours after leaving home, I'm greeted by a friend and a couple of borderline Border Collies, one of which is blind in its left eye like Jim Harrison, who writes wonderful novels and novellas, as well as essays about road-trips, cooking, and drinking. (I recommend the lengthy novel Dalva as a starting point, then work backward from there.) The dogs will come to tolerate me after a few hours; my friend has come to tolerate me over the span of nearly 20 years.

It is 2 days of, for me, basically nothing but watching someone else work. I prepare some classnotes in preparation of my next meeting with a classroom full of obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry students I have inherited and will spend 12 hours with over the next 3 Mondays. They might not know yet that I, too, lean toward obnoxious, demanding, petulant, and angry. A trip into town produces chicken and wine for dinner; a brief conversation and an exchange of money with one of the owner's of Noma, where I habitually buy artistic works and trinkets; and, from Four-Eyed Frog Books, Cormac McArthy's Child of God, the first sentence of which is about 70 words in length. Whoo-hoo: we got us a string of words here! After an afternoon hike, we drive to Pt. Arena for a bit of grub, and I'm shown where the town's working pier is--someplace where commercial fisherman still work. We don't linger in the cold wind, but I tell myself to return one day to see the fishermen in action.

The TV is not turned on the entire time. In fact, it's not even close to being excited. After evenings that include good food and samplings of whiskey, wine, and beer, we sleep in our respective tents each night, unmolested by skunks, raccoons, bats, coyotes, mountain lions, deer, bears, or ticks, all of which are known to pass through. I listen to the not-so-distant ocean, and I think of the nights I stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier listening to the radar antennae spinning and the ship's bow cutting through water.

I arrived on my birthday, and I left 2 days later. At home, I learn that my dog spent an unsupervised evening feasting on garbage and then depositing it on the carpet. He doesn't seem especially pleased to see me, perhaps because he knows he can no longer sleep in my bedroom: Alpha male displaces animal. It is the start of a new week--4 days of corporate work, 3 nights of teaching at 2 different colleges, then off to Portland for yet another 3-day misadventure.

Fresno Ball, Mall, and Mom

There's a Thomas Boswell book with the title Why Time Begins on Opening Day. Get it on Amazon. 43 used & new available from $0.01. Penny for his thoughts in paperback. So you'll know why my vacation pilgrimage to the annual Fresno State Pepsi Johnny Quik Tournament means business. Drive the Big Valley from Bay to Basin. San Joaquin Valley where Lake Tulare once took first place in lakes West of the Rockies. Valley of flowers as described by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield in the book Indian Summer: Traditional Life among the Choinumne Indians of California's San Joaquin Valley. 17 Used & new from $7.45. 125 pages. 8 ounces.

"Indian Summer is a fascinating record of the beauty and biological diversity that the San Joaquin Valley has lost and the equally tragic loss of most of its indigenous people."—Wilderness Record

Drive pickup rather than fly SFO or OAK to FAT. 580. I5. 152. Highway 99. Denny's Endless Pancakes and Coffee $4.99 @ Badger Flat Road. Poverty Flat Undercrossing. Highway 233 and the Palms of Robertson Boulevard. Anderson Pump Company. Road 15 3/4 Ave. 20 1/2 Exit 147 1 1/2 miles. Fractional destinations border The California Aqueduct. Rivers dry. Canals bring water. Trucks bring bees. Commerce in Pollen Nation. Managed nature. In Los Banos, Marx sells Cadillacs. Hawks on the signs. Bugs on the windshield. Signs of times: "Food grows where water flows.", "We farm. You Eat.", "Amazing companies doing amazing things for amazing people." On Almond Avenue, trees in bloom purple and white, dropping petals like a snow day. Blossom Banks in the Irrigation Culverts. Only spray paint dustings of flowers yellow and purple on deep green hills. Flora Digs Fauna. Up in the heavens, clouds give shade and hold water. Energies hold vapors, shaping themselves in the wind. Puffy spirit manifestations: faces, dogs, birds. When bodies die, spirits rise to be clouds. Energies attract the vapors. We remake ourselves in the atmosphere or spinoff to the stars in space to live on Asimov Place. Terrestrial life separated into seasons of games with innings. Top and bottom. No clock. Joy when you come home. Make your pitch. Play the hits.

Johnny be nimble,
Johnny be quick.
Catch the ball,
Swing your stick.

Between games, the F-no Malls are F-yes! Urban Outfitters and Ed Hardy Obey Laws of Fashion Island with Bebe. Swing it at the Mall. Eat like kings at Plaza Ventana, Royal Orchid Thai, and Sam's Italian. Week of games. Hosted by Fresno Bulldogs with Charlie at the gate where Augie coached before fame. Foul ball off Steve's bat for Keven's daughter Mila. Nick hits one off the wall at 380 for a double.

Baseball gods are good to Utes. Humans not so good to each other. Ask the Choinumne. Ask the Earth Mother. Return trip In Rainbows with alternating sun and clouds. Hot sun. Thunderhead shade. Majestic thunderstorms driving the wind farms of Altamont. Back to Mom. You can work with her. You can take her out for a meal. You can give her presents of symbolic significance. But after dinner before the check she leaves and screams, "You'll pay for that!" That's Mother Nature for you.

"Is it hot in here? Or is it just me?"

Fresh Meat

Kansas City, MO

This is a city of meat. "Have a steak," I'm told whenever I come here; "Have a steak?" I'm asked whenever I get home. And jazz: the city is famous for its jazz, something I once referred to as "the tofu of music." The last time I was here, some coworkers and I dined at The Majestic, which apparently has both good steak and good jazz, and we were seated at the table closest to the stage. My coworkers ate steak, and I ate chicken. A pianist and a stand-up-bass player entertained us with jazz. I had chicken again this trip, but not at The Majestic. Nothing bovine-like for me, even in this trip when we have lunch in a place adjacent to what were once expansive stockyards from which the occasional steer was culled and then served at the very table we gathered around for an hour or so. Fresh meat everywhere.

Enough of what I ate. Who cares, really? I don't even care.

Trains, jazz, mutual funds, meat, the Missouri River, the Hall (as in Hallmark) family.... St. Patrick's day, rainy and cold: the Power and Light District was full of drunk young people, and I felt both old and boring as I worked my way through the rain and the drunks. I stayed in the downtown Marriott, which, as in my previous visits, was filled with young military recruits destined for one service or another. A couple of years ago as I was pedaling hamster-like on one of the stationary bikes in the hotel's gym, one young army recruit asked me if I was headed into the service, as well. I told him I'd done my time decades earlier.

"Why'd you sign up?" I asked.

"The education," he said.

I said, "There are other ways to get an education." But I thought this: You are young and stupid. There is no sane reason for you to go into the army, no sane reason for your probable deployment to Iraq.

On this trip, I encounter a group of drunk and soon-to-be-drunker navy boys who are lugging several full ice chests into the elevator I had, for a few moments, treated as my own. I know they are navy because they have "U.S. Navy" on their shirts. I watch them an think: Fresh meat everywhere.

"I'm not drunk, but he is," one says to me while pointing to his friend.

His friend says, "I think it's safe to say that we're all drunk."

When we reach the lobby, they lug their ice chests out. "You should get some marines to carry those," I say, but they either don't think it's funny, or they don't get my point. Pick one....

I am on the 18th floor. Many years ago Kominski and I spent a quartet of nights in Chicago's Hotel 71, and we were treated to a corner room that had many windows. Our room overlooked the Chicago River and Marina City. The rock band Wilco's CD Yankee Hotel Foxtrot * had just been released. We kept the drapes open all night, something I've pretty much always done when staying in hotel rooms where nobody can walk by and peek into my room. In Kansas City during this stay, I do the same thing; red from Crown Plaza, blue and white from AT & T, green from Holiday Inn fill the room all night.

That's all--the tofu of writing.

* Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot: If you were talking over a radio on the military, those are the words you would use for Y-H-F.

Beachcombing

A couple times a year, if I play my cards right, I'm fortunate enough to spend some time on the Mendocino Coast in northern California. At different times of the year, I'm less fortunate and spend a few hours in my dentist's office where the woman who cleans my teeth not only tells me to floss regularly, she tells me of how her marriage is going and how her husband still hasn't found work. She asks me about my sons and wife, though I usually answer with only minimal detail. She has been cleaning my teeth for 13 years. At some point during my last visit she mentioned something about telling her husband that she thinks of some of her patients as second husbands, and that I was one of the good second husbands.

Before I saw her last week, though, when I walked into the small waiting room, I saw that there was a new photograph on the wall, a photograph of Balling Ball Beach on the aforementioned Mendocino Coast. I've been to that beach, where at low tide boulders shaped like, well, balling balls are visible. Seeing that photograph made me remember my last visit there, during high tide, unfortunately, and my encounter with Ann, an encounter noted in my trusty Moleskine. Here's what I wrote.

Walking on the beach, I encounter Ann, a woman whose first words to me are, "Do you have something on your mind, or are you just walking?" She is, she says, here with her husband, and they plan to move to the area from Southern California. He is an oceanographer who wants to buy a boat and is somewhere looking for one; she is a writer who dreams of writing the next Disney blockbuster.... She comments on my wedding ring and does not seem surprised that I am allowed to "wander," and she says that her husband does not mind if she wanders now and then. She seems to be about 60, though she says her husband just turned 50, the age at which she "met her true love."

There was more to the encounter, certainly. She had been walking her 2 dogs and approached me as I stood looking across an ocean; I am not sure of why she bothered to speak to me. Somewhere in our conversation we spoke about the difficulties of trying to write, so I must have mentioned that I've had some experience with both difficulties and writing. We shook hands early on, probably when we shared names. I doubt I shared any information about my wife.

And, yes, I know that is not much of a story. I probably did have something on my mind that day, maybe memories about looking out over that same ocean from the opposite direction. I do hope her husband found a good boat, and I hope Ann writers her blockbuster. I also hope that my dental hygienist's husband finds a good job sometime in the next six months.

Deadhead Ed's Dead

There are little things that happen to you here and there now and then. They define your future and refine your personality through experience. Momentous in retrospect, they linger then rise to loom like mountain peaks in the ridge of memory, defining your line of sight, brought forward through the prism of a personal seismic semifictional alignment. Where is this going? I’ll tell you where. You never know. And that’s the point here. These are all big philosophical ways of saying you never know what things or which people will shape the paths in your life. Because little things point to bigger ways.

This is one of those moments that happened way before the Zapple Records Grateful Dead vinyl conversations. Before the late night calls of “NARR! EPPIE CAH!” meaning drives to West Sacramento over the Foggy Yoyo Causeway for a Cup of Joe. Before the legendary pickup slow motion rolling crash in a Winters farmer’s field. Before the first 80 degree day of the Davis spring where all who knew arrived unspoken for six packs of Tecate. Before the Beer and Loafing story of rafting in the long river afternoon. Before the ball playing quacking antics of the Ducks tossing and whacking softballs. Before the all-night parties hosted by the Flying Andersons. Previous to the obvious.

To quote the Great Gelfond: “This is my theory, which is mine.” So let’s get on with it. Let’s start with another complicated yet simple definition of a way. Let’s get tribal. Back in the day when the Grateful Dead were a band, there were people who followed them to attend concerts. Even though the band made records, it was the feeling that many people got at their live concert shows that set the stage for a lifetime appreciation. This feeling was a collective experience, a vibe that connected the audience to the performers and back again, where everyone became a part of a bigger thing in the moment. Some pictured this effect as a flying dragon biting its tail to form a circle.

[Here I digress into symbolism. That topic is better covered in a turn of the century French Literature class at Sproul Hall at UC Davis. Let’s not do it here. My apologies.]

Those who went to the shows regularly to participate in this tribal ceremony were called Deadheads. Because of his apparent tribal affiliation expressed in dress and music, some people affectionately labeled Young Eddy Weber as Deadhead Ed. Like other nicknames bestowed on other luminaries such as Johnny Mike, Hippie, and Woo Woo Woo, the name stuck. I think we all have enough information at this point to proceed with the story. No more butt cheese. We have no time for that now.

Ever notice how some important events tend to coincide? Ever wonder why when it rains, cows don’t go inside? Outside the Barns of Tercero in late spring or early summer, a number of us decided to honor the three night annual appearance of the Grateful Dead at Winterland with a commitment to drive back and forth seeing all the shows during Academic Finals Week. Various sacred roots and chemicals were consumed.

In this state, I entered Winterland, an ice rink converted to a celebrated concert venue. This was our temple for all things Grateful Dead. On this night, Bill Graham provided pre-show entertainment in the form of a volleyball court in the middle of the floor. The winning team would play the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic for a donation money prize from the concert promoter if the health provider’s team won the championship. Rival teams were formed randomly on the spot and announced under banners of geography: East Bay, Marin, Peninsula, SF…and DAVIS!

From my seat in the balcony, I ran down to the floor heavily blazing in my mind to find most of the people representing Davis already on the court. Organizing the team was Deadhead Ed. As my wild-eyed self ran up, he was already staring into my wobbly eyes with their unreliably dilated pupils. His trademark wide smile invited me onto the space of the court anyway. Play began against Marin.

The first ball I touched went flying into the crowd. The announcer said, “We’ve got some toasted flakes here tonight.” I was a little nervous out there on the big stage. Ed looked at me with that look where his head tilted to the side, eyebrows raised, and mouth corner smirked. I took that as a friendly reminder to get my shit together. The rest of the game, we played in tune with synchronized setting, spiking, and serving. High fives all around. Ed’s big smile shined liked a quarter moon even in defeat. Fighting hard, we lost 19–17 to Marin who went on to beat the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.

This should be the end of the story. But the vibe was wrong. The songs went slow and low. The crowd was bumming. Concern was in the air. The band and the crowd sensed that the Free Clinic should get the money anyway. So after the first set, Bill Graham came out and said they would get the donation. The second set took off and blew the roof off the house. And out on the floor, a girl popped and dropped her contact lens in the middle of a song. Standing there with a smiling Ed, I saw the flickering path of the spinning lens tracing down to the floor. Reaching down, I picked it up and handed it back to the girl. Ed smiled and we all danced the night away even though I don’t dance.

But since then, when I feel something strongly in the moment, I do know how to smile while I look someone in the eye. I also know that when I focus on anything in any condition, I can create the confidence to get it done. Thanks, Deadhead Ed. Thanks for teaching me to feel the joyous grace of the moment. Even though you're gone, you'll not be forgotten. The night we met to celebrate your life, there was a huge quarter moon smile in the sky. They say your heart was too big for this world. "NARR!"

Classmates [dot] Com

As someone who is awkwardly bent toward nostalgia, I often delve into the Twilight Zone-ish idea that my 12-year-old self still delivers papers after school. Okay, that's not simply bending, and it certainly isn't simple nostalgia--it might be a problem. But, since I can't afford a shrink, you'll have to ask yours what he or she thinks.

Wait--I've digressed somewhat. Consider this: Have you ever wondered if people you think about occasionally think of you? For example, think of someone from high school, someone you spent a lot of time with and thought of as a good friend. Imagine you still think fondly of this person, though you have not heard from him or her in a long time, and then weigh the odds that this person is sitting in front a computer right now and thinking of you. Or, maybe not thinking of you, maybe thinking of a good recipe for salmon, one that can be used for next Saturday's gourmet club.

Which, naturally, leads me to Classmates.com, a website devoted to nostalgia if ever one existed. You can do some things for free on this website. For example, you can set up a profile that someone, maybe that old friend who isn't thinking of a good recipe for salmon, can read. When you log into this website, you can see how many people have viewed your profile, and how many have left you messages.

Now for the sad part. I set up a profile several years ago, but seldom do I actually log in. Recently, however, I did, and I found this: 16 people have viewed my profile, and 2 have signed my guestbook, whatever that is. Yeah, that's it: 16 + 2.... The 16 viewers are anonymous, and I am not interested in them. I am, though, somewhat interested in who signed my guestbook, for these people made an effort to let me know they're out there somewhere. One signed in the summer of 2007, and one signed just a couple of months ago. The thing is, the only way I can learn who these people are is by giving Classmates.com some money, which I've almost done a few times but, those same few times, have balked just short of entering my credit card number. (And if you're thinking that maybe it's not 2 people but the same person, I've admitted that as well. Just let me have my fantasy, okay?)

I would like to ask those 2 people some questions: who? what? where? why? when?

Being a cheapskate is not always such a good thing.

Where I'm Calling From

Kominski introduced me to Raymond Carver's writing sometime around 1985 or 1986 when we worked together on micro-documents to support a major banking institution's software products. Kominski would later become my boss, but that's not part of this story. We had a co-worker named Jim, an old guy who liked to drink his lunch more often than not. Jim's not part of this story, either, though I think I'll write about him at some point. Some other people, writers we worked with but who are not part of this story, are Ken, who was my boss before Kominski; Richard, who had a great sense of humor; Steve, who was an obnoxious twit with some bad habits; Suzie, who is probably instrumental in that banking institution's success; and Cliff, who must have attended the same Twit School that Steve did. Ken and Jim and Richard are dead, and I'm sad about that. There was a Deirdre, too, an Englishwoman who is now probably married to a Baron.

Raymond Carver, who also is dead, wrote wonderfully polished short stories and, to a lesser extent, poems. In fact, I sometimes use his poems when I teach a literature class, something we can't discuss because I'm really not supposed to use those poems in that class. I read pretty much every Carver story I could find, and then I read them again and again. When I was a college undergraduate, one of the professors who taught poetry writing classes I took had been great friends with Carver when Carver was in Sacramento, but I would not learn this until graduate school where I took poetry writing classes from that same professor. I don't know where I learned this.

Some of Carver's stories are the basis for the movie Short Cuts, which is one of my favorite movies. Some of Carver's life is allegedly documented in the book The Honeymooners, which is one of my favorite books.

I left that banking institution much too soon; it was the best job I've ever quit. I left for various reasons, all of which seemed sound at the time. One of the reasons was to go "home," though I've never really felt at home here. I did go to graduate school, which was a good reason, and if I had not come back, I would not have met some wonderful people. The job I left that banking institution for was the worst job (okay, only) job I've ever been fired from. I had left my wife and sons behind while we waited for our little tract home to be built, and I ended up working at a place that made me miserable.

So, I spent a lot of time alone. I went to class at night, and I drove home on weekends. One night when I was not in school, I wandered into Tower Books, picked up a copy of The North American Review, and saw inside that magazine a small note that Raymond Carver had died. I put the magazine back on the rack, left the store, and thought, "well, that sucks." I didn't have many literary heroes, and one of them had died. This was in 1988, and he had died, apparently, on my wedding anniversary.

Raymond Carver is buried in a scenic cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington, where you can catch a ferry to Victoria, Canada. From the grave you can look out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which just so happens is mentioned in the book I'm reading, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings. Several years ago our family went to Port Angeles as part of a vacation, and we took that ferry to Victoria, which is a nice city I'd like to visit again. We also went bowling, and that was fun too. One morning when everyone was sleeping, I started the rented van and drove to the cemetery; I then walked around until I found Carver's grave, which is marked by an impressive piece of granite. Tess Gallagher, Carver's wife when he died, has a grave ready for herself, too. There's a small bench next to the graves, and there was a metal box that contained a notebook for people to record their thoughts.

I felt a bit odd standing there, as though visiting graves was not a normal thing to do. (And maybe it isn't--I mean, it's not like I really knew the guy.) One of his poems, and one of my favorites, is etched onto his gravestone. It is entitled "Gravy," and I think you should look it up.

When the Muse is Recalcitrant

I actually wanted to use an adjective a bit more harsh than "recalcitrant," but I'm trying to pretend that I am cultured and have reached a point in my life where I can be forgiving, diplomatic, and kind.

None of those adjectives is accurate, certainly, but if I'm being kind to the Muse, I might as well be kind to myself.

I tried last night to draw the Muse cloak-like around me, conjuring the best I could with a bottle of Liquid Sunshine Blond Ale brewed by the Hoppy Brewing Company. The Muse, though, was happy to let me drink alone. And, having spent about 4 hours back-country skiing yesterday, I was sound asleep not long after the bottle was empty. I was, frankly, exhausted, which I gladly enjoyed if only because exhaustion for once trumped insomnia.

Early this morning, then, after an invigorating (if brief) bike ride, I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea, perused the Sunday paper, and began leafing through various volumes of poetry. I am reading Passage to Juneau and Ansel Adam's autobiography now, neither of which inspires much creativity. I was hopeful that my thin books of poems would hold something for me, for in addition to needing something creative to work on for personal reasons, I am also supposed to present a poem at next week's meeting of my writers group.

Hope, though, doesn't always float. I found some wonderful works from my favorite poets: Raymond Carver; Phil Levine; Stanley Kunitz. These guys!

And then I found this, a poem I first read (and memorized) maybe 25 years ago, written by William Stafford. [Note: you'll find much better discussion of poetry at "The Great American Pinup," which is linked from this site.]

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt--ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

I am not exactly sure of why I settled on Stafford's work, but I think it might be because I keep thinking about people--some who have "come in their slow way into my life"--I have known for a long time. Recently, for example, I made contact with someone I knew in high school. The contact was actually accidental, but I then bungled a reciprocal connection. I also recently dreamed of a friend, also from high school, who was the best man in my wedding, a man I have not spoken to in many (too many) years. And, finally, I have been thinking about another visit to my hometown in the Midwest, which I know is something I should not either consider or do.

As I read, as I looked for something to write about for this blog, I discovered a couple of things that might serve as material for the next couple of posts. We'll see.

Yosemite

What's a smart thing to do when you've got a nasty head cold, a day of vacation, and persistent friends? Spend a couple of winter nights in Yosemite Valley, where you can trudge through the snow in your Sorels or on your skis and take some photographs.

Fuzziness in this picture is actually snow. Hard to see here are traces of green pine boughs to the left and right. Green is also reflected in the water.



I considered cropping out the top portion of this one, but I like the hint of granite in the background.



The final photograph is of our campsite after we'd shoveled out from a night's worth of snow--as in, all night. Each of us had to periodically push against the inside of our respective tents (mine's in the foreground) to keep the snow from accumulating and collapsing the tent walls. And all night we could hear minor avalanches of snow dropping from the nearby mountains. (If you're reading, Shawn, this is about 75 yards in from the parking lot at Camp 4.)