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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Sunday, January 10, 2010
Writing is a hostile art.
It would seem passive, since one doesn't have to break out sharp tools to shape wood, or heat glass until it's molten - no, just think of the right verbs and put them in sentences, and write them down. The only work is in the writing - pen scratching (hopefully smoothly! I take pens from stores when signing a check, if they scrawl smoothly), or keys being tapped…
And yet it's the thinking that's the anguish. At least, for me it is. I do it compulsively, banging away at a machine, trying to report whatever is the present topic. I get up in the morning, make coffee, feed the birds, let the cat in or out, and write at least a thousand words, every day. Most days, I'm comfortably over fifteen-hundred words. Lately, over two thousand a day. Writing about this and that, reporting the mundane events (I can look up how frequently I bought bird seed from my copious notes, going back some years, now), or delving into some concept that strikes my fancy, like an intellectual magpie.
But thinking of the words, whatever the compulsion to sit down might be, is the hard work. Just now, between paragraphs, I found myself walking around the machine (presently working on a laptop), looking at it, waiting for some sign of animation, some new reason to engage with it. Apparently, I found one, as I'm sitting here typing this, but it's like trying to dance with a cadaver.
You look for some sign, some twitch of recognition and invitation, some sign of liveliness, but at the end of it, you're going to have to do all the work. So you tentatively lift a lifeless hand, the fingernails grayish-blue, and cup it as the foxtrot teacher told you. Rigor mortis has passed, the fingers are nearly supple.
If you breathe just right, and pretend, you can take this lifeless mass and put glow in the cheeks, and feel warmish breath, and step around the room with it, and sit down and bang out a few hundred words, and maybe keep as much as half?
That's compulsive typing; I often won't call it writing, since the least I can say is that I typed, and there's the word count to prove it.
I could have learned how to type in school, but that was a course that was off-limits to boys, if unofficially. Typing, prior to the computer age, was a skill only required by stenographers (and okay, journalists and writers, but I didn't know I was going to be devoted to that), which was a job held only by women, as nursing seemed to be, even merely a few years ago. Bookkeeping was acceptable for boys to take, but the typing class was filled nearly exclusively by girls.
I ought to have seen further ahead - I had determined, when I was a boy, that I wanted to grow up and be a writer. My mother was a writer, yet died young, so I intended to somehow fulfill her legacy. It never occurred to me that to write, you just have to start writing, like crossing a mountain range. You just keep walking. But I didn't learn how to type when I was in school; if I had, maybe everything would have been different.
In my youth, I wrote, but longhand, and would soon tire of it. I remember one extended effort, that lasted for some months, in which I wrote about a thousand words a day, longhand, in the morning (as I do now) and in the evening. I still have the notebook; it's comical to read that stuff from long ago.
I'd get frustrated, though, and stop writing. For one, my hand couldn't keep up with my mind, so it would take too long to get to the delicious, juicy end of the paragraph I had just imagined, if I had to fill in the preceding blanks. And for another, the tedium of writing longhand would wear me out. My hand would get sore.
In my mid-twenties, I was briefly unemployed. Something snapped, and I brought home a typing course book from the library, got out my grandmother's old Smith Corona from the 50s (still had an unfinished letter from then in the carriage; one of my uncles had given it to her to foster more letters - apparently, she didn't like to type).
Every day, for three weeks, typing from that book was about all I did, other than sleeping and eating. Bangity-bang, all the exercises, over and over and over, and at the end of it, I was doing an almost-solid forty words a minutes, with one error or two.
And I began to be able to keep up with my mind, and I writing improved (you'll have to take my word for it; I'm developing a website that will archive all the writing I have in a digital format - all of it that's publishable, so hundreds of poems and essays - eventually, I'll accrue an amanuensis, and all the other stuff will find its way to a forum).
Years later, having earned some money by typing, and having had some stuff published (however modest the publication), I have developed the habit. When I eventually had a computer of my own, I typed whenever I felt I had the chance, which wasn't often or disciplined enough.
But 2004 rolled around, and I decided I would write every day. At first, I had to remind myself, but soon, I fell into a stride.
I pledged to adhere to a simple rule: when it was time to type, I would sit down and type, and if I couldn't think of anything to write about, that was what I would write.
I would incorporate some thing I had witnessed in my frequent time outside, and a format developed. Most of my life is chronicled since then, but I have also used the same file as a source of raw material, like a cornstalk holding up a fat cob.
So that daily file in which I type, which gets partitioned off into chunks in a directory as I go through the seasons, grows and grows. Lately, it's up to close to three million words for the last six years (and consigned to a repository in Indiana, in the hands of a literary executor - to be published, or not, in event of my death and at his discretion - some juicy stuff in there!).
I consider them my notes, so I'm really the most compulsive notetaker I know.
And when I sat down to write this, I didn't know where I was going, but gradually found out as I went, so thanks for taking the same risk I did (although comfortably easier; good for you).
Sunday, January 03, 2010
 
[note: not all facts are checked, not all images are formatted and uploaded, but the bones of the story are here... all images but Whitman portrait © 2009 Drew Kampion]
My good friend, Drew Kampion, has been sending out Walt Whitman poems every Tuesday for the last year, a practice instituted on the day of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. His selections are pertinent to the times, and have prompted many on his extensive list to explore what the guy had to say, me among them.
I recall studying O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman on the death of Lincoln, which affected him profoundly) in school, but other than that, my exposure was pretty meager.
Along came Drew, though, lighting the Walt Whitman fire.
I don’t know what sort of reaction he was getting with his posts of Whitman’s poetry. I, for one, appreciated it – I have a number of correspondents who are poets, and many who send out poems, which I always enjoy, and sometimes to which I respond.
Also, it was interesting to see Drew’s selections of poems, and their relevance (or not) to our times; or, at least, Drew’s interpretation of it.
Drew has often been out in front in his time on Whidbey Island. He came here in the early nineties (as did I), and soon, established the Island Independent, an alternative newspaper, distributed around our archipelago fortnightly.
[open note to you compulsively-researching Wikipedia editors: why don’t you guys put together a page about Drew Kampion, and one about the Island Independent?]
It was really a great paper, featuring some excellent journalism, and interesting regular features (including, after a couple of years, my food column). A beloved newspaper, for which some still pine.
One of his correspondents, Kim Hoelting, is also a devotee of Walt Whitman. Kim lives out in the Maxwelton Valley, on the southern end of South Whidbey Island, next to a huge, old school, built just over a hundred years ago from native softwood (old-growth douglas fir), and standing strong. Kim uses the hall as his showroom for his imposing lumber selection, which includes book-matched douglas fir planks about three inches thick, three feet wide, and sixteen feet long, and some douglas fir two-by-twentyfours, about twenty feet long, and other large pieces of western red cedar, sitka spruce, Alaska yellow cedar, redwood, maple, you name it.
As I understand it, Kim became a salvage logger after having spent some years as a fisherman in Alaska (Bristol Bay Gillnetters, I think, or maybe a seiner or troller). On his way south, coming down the Inside Passage (relatively sheltered water among the northern end of the extensive archipelago, of which my island is the southernmost), he’d see huge logs on the beach, and began towing them home and milling them up and selling the boards. Often, driftwood, as his supply generally was, are old logs that are completely rot resistant – from natural attributes, and from being in salt water.
Kim began to deal in these specialty planks, and now, does that as his trade. He’s also a construction contractor, having participated in a renovation of the Paradise Inn at Tahoma (known as “Mount Rainier” to the yokels), installing huge Alaska cedar logs along the snow-shedding eaves, low to the ground below a high, steep roof.
Drew and Kim began to talk about working their way through Whitman’s work – which is entirely published in the perpetually-edited Leaves of Grass, deathbed edition, 1892. They had thought about meeting once a week, and continuing until they had exhausted the book, but then came the idea of reading the whole thing in one marathon go.
According to the statistic I saw recently published, the whole work would take about twenty-one hours to read; Drew and Kim made their own calculations (essentially 1.5 minutes per page, having timed various readings with a stopwatch), and determined that the whole thing would take twenty-four hours, one day between sunsets.
They selected a date (I hadn’t thought to ask if it were significant): 28-29 December 2009, beginning at 16:24, the time of local sunset (here in GMT-8 time).
Right on the heels of Christmas, which had me so engaged I hadn’t given his reading a thought, other than to check in when he was looking for recruits to read, and asked for a graveyard shift. I thought I would enjoy that most; I have abundant performing experience, particularly with spoken word, but the idea of not having an audience was appealing – as is my dream of hearing crickets when I get a curtain call, like Daffy Duck would).
Suddenly, it was the day before the event. I had just made arrangements to work in america at my Dad’s house, whipping his garden into shape, and would be leaving for the ferry soon after the reading ended, which felt to me like it was best that I was going to read late at night and early in the morning the night before. I intended to spend the night at my dad’s and commence the garden work the next day, so being short on sleep shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Not only that, but I am as stalwart a campaigner as they come, having slept folded up in the seat of a Fiat to be out of the rain at a trailhead in the Olympic Rainforest, and then hiked twenty miles the next day with a load. Come on, my motto – one of them – is podestis me impedere, sed non me sistere.
"You may be able to hinder me, but you are unable to stop me.”
I checked in with Drew’s email-published schedule (an ambitious piece of work – I have organized poetry festivals, and it’s hard to arrange the timetable), and sure enough, I wa on late.
When I got there, around 11:00 at night, it was well dark, the room dimly lit, and just a few were there. They were nearly two hundred pages into a 455 page book; some hours to go, yet. About a third of the way done.
I hung around until 3:00; I read a bit, I listened a lot.
The book was the culmination of Whitman’s work; originally published in 1855 with a mere twelve poems, it eventually, by the last edition in 1892, featured over four hundred poems, and included the entirety of his published poetry.
The Civil War had a great impact on the nation, and particularly on Walt Whitman. When I left the reading in the middle of the night, they were about to hit the patch of Civil War poems, but I had to go home and sleep, since I needed to get up in a few hours to go off and work.
As tired as I was, I got home just fine; the weather was around freezing, and the roads were a bit icy, but there hadn’t been any precipitation, so they weren’t so bad.
After a mere three hours of sleep, I was up and at it again; I did my morning routine and went off to work for a while.
Around noon, I decided I was too tired to keep working, so I headed back to the reading. They were around page 385; merely seventy pages to go.
Drew and Kim were bleary; Kim’s brother, Kurt, had slept in a sleeping bag laid on a huge plank and piece of foam, so he was fresher than Drew or Kim, but not by much.
Compared to them, I was fresh as a daisy – but still not that fresh; I was quite tired.
I got inserted into the mix of readers – there were about twelve people there, and it was getting down to the end.
With thirty pages to go, Drew halted the proceedings to announce that, and to parcel out the remaining works, so that the ship came into port not by blowing there, but with intention.
I took on a few poems, and was flattered that Kim anointed me to read the last poem, Goodbye, My Fancy.
Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke around 1874; he spent the last eighteen years of his life expecting to die, so much of his poetry from then has an air of finality, and saying goodbye. But not as much as the last.
I read that last poem, and stepped away from the podium. I thought about closing the book, as an act of finality and completion, but left if open, as works of art such as that should remain available for deployment, like an alert fireman.
Silence, for a few minutes.
And then Kim spoke, talking about what a meaningful event it was.
The book from which we read had belonged to Kim’s father-in-law, who died during a marathon reading of it; do you suppose that might have contributed to the power of the event?
People began moving around, and leaving; the twenty-four hours had passed. There was mostly silence. Every word had been spoken aloud; the wooden building would remember it, always.
                            
  
GOOD-BYE my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.
Now for my last - let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.
Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
Delightful! - now separation - Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning-so now
finally,
Good-bye-and hail! my Fancy.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Mortality's been the theme this last week.
On my island, one of my tree-work colleagues was just killed by an alder.
Bobby Stewart was one of those guys who do the work that's too big for me - I'm a horticulturist, a pruning specialist, I work in fruit trees of all sizes, among other things; there's nothing like the skill and finesse and vigilance it takes to be a tree man, and I don't have it. These guys are the top guys, the arborists, the loggers.
As I understand it, he was "wrecking it," which is a logging term for taking a tree down by cutting it from the top, little by little, in situations where there's no room to drop the whole tree. Part of the tree broke off, I am told, and landed on him.
They all call those falling branches widowmakers - my Finnish grandfather, Leo, was killed by one, logging near Coos Bay; I named my chainsaw after him to keep me mindful.
There's very little that's safe about an alder - the only tree I ever fell from, when the only branch that was supporting me gave way, as I climbed high to impress girls - who were not impressed, not even when I fell twenty feet and was arrested by forked branches -- and yet, those of us who really know alders love them all the same, even though they die young and throw branches along the way (I'll write about them next time) - only the idiots call them trash trees, and Bobby, although one landed on him, would tell you it was ready to go.
The next day, one of our sweet friends was experiencing some headache symptoms. I had heard she'd driven herself to the hospital here on the island (she went in an ambulance, I learned; a friend suggested the detail was critical, as perhaps there was an EMT who was heroic, and about whom we don't know, but who would obviously be an agent in the story).
They promptly airlifted her to Harborview, the regional trauma center down Puget Sound, in Seattle.
Turns out she had an aneurysm, and nearly didn't make it.
Later that day, the prognosis I heard was that they were hoping for signs of higher brain function - so it would seem we were about to lose her.
To deal with the pressure of the blood clot, they could either go into her brain via an artery in her leg, or enter her skull the conventional way - which they opted to do. The next day, they operated.
A portion of her skull was removed, and kept in the freezer for later re-attachment; the surgeon said the area "looked angry," and they want it to subside before they seal her all the way up.
She made it through the surgery like a champ, and was even demonstrating recognition of her situation the next day, a day before they intended to bring her out of her post-operative, induced comatose state.
The report I got that day was that she was going to be without this bit of skull for some time, and would be wearing a helmet.
"I think she's going to be just fine," I said.
I remember this from before.
When I was eleven years old, I lived in a little town on the saltwater, much like the town I live in now, but not as bohemian by a long shot.
There weren't that many employment prospects, as we were rather remote - you could either cut grass, or maybe babysit (tried that - the allegedly sleeping infant was actually a profoundly-sociopathic Houdini for two solid hours; I can still see that paltry 37¢ in the mother's fat palm -- "won't be long!") - but if you were lucky, you had one of the few, precious paper routes, delivering the Tacoma News Tribune, published in the city on the other side of the bay.
That was a good income for a kid in the early 70's - hard work, and getting up early on the weekends to deliver Sunday edition, which I would weigh when I finished my route - to determine that, yes indeed, that young guy was walking around with one of those classic, canvas newspaper-delivery bags, carrying upwards of a hundred pounds of newspapers at a time.
You loaded the papers in the bag for a long, looping first leg; the bag was so heavy you had to pull it over the edge of the box the truck dropped the bundles in - and in which you slept if you got there in the morning before the truck had arrived with your bundles. Then you kind of stood up into it and heaved away from the box like a tug from a pier.
You didn't bend over until you were down a dozen or more papers, as the weight of the papers would pull you down, and you wouldn't be able to get up - seriously - it happened more than once. It sounds funny to imagine a kid immobilized by a newspaper bag, legs feebly kicking like a capsized beetle, but it's not. That bag could strangle you, come to think of it.
I had no idea I barely escaped childhood with my life - no, actually, knew it all along, but this isn't that kind of story, so we won't go into it. The history of my scars and scrapes can wait.
I didn't have a paper route at the time, but was hoping to get one - there were only four, one of which was actually prestigious, having the most customers in the shortest distance, and good tippers, to boot (not as compact as a high school friend's route - he delivered papers in an apartment building, and would deposit the requisite amount of papers on every other floor going up in the elevator, then deliver them on the way down, using the stairs - over in half an hour).
My brother, Dan, had the prime route (my other brother had another). He was always an ass-buster, and had rapidly been switched to that one by the manager, and pulled in upwards of a hundred dollars a month, which was a lot for a kid in those days, for an hour's work a day (every day, no days off).
One day in June, I was with a friend, who had one of the subordinate routes. He was going on a trip with his family, so I was learning his route as a substitute, to fill in while he was away.
In the center of my town was a large park, with some great little woods, tennis courts, and a wide-open sports field with a baseball diamond on one side, and goal posts for soccer on the other.
A softball game was going on that day, but nothing organized; not a league, or anything. Just a bunch of grownups playing softball and drinking beer (which was easy to get away with - our town was unincorporated, so only the county sheriff had jurisdiction; we were way off near the county line, and you never saw those guys).
My pal's route went past the field, and then around the corner, looping past the fire station and the doctor's office.
As we approached the doctor's, a van squealed into the parking lot. A fellow got out of the van, ran into the office, came dashing back out, and sped off, around the corner.
"Shit," my pal said, "I'm going to see what's going on - you deliver those next few papers…?" as he ran off. I knew the route already, and was just affirming it for him that day.
He took off around the corner, and was back in a minute -
"Bart! It's your brother!"
I went around the corner to the next street, and could see a cluster of people gathered half a block down on the other side, standing looking at Dan on the ground.
I took the bag off, set it on the grass, and walked across the street to the group of people. I took my time; I was afraid.
I slowly walked up and looked down -
But that's the part I don't remember. I remember looking at him, but I don't remember what I saw.
I was the kid, shuffling that afternoon with his blood-flecked bag and papers, finishing his route.
Didn't know what else to do.
The fellow in the van, one of the drunk softball players, had hit him while he sped down the road - doing fifty in a twenty-five zone. His mirror, we learned later, had clipped my brother in the head, knocking him off his bike and to the ground (ironically, had he been wearing a helmet - they weren't around then - his head would have made it, but his neck would have been broken and he'd be dead).
He lay there, a bloody mess; his newspaper bag was next to him, his bicycle lay there, the front wheel bent. I walked away and sat on the grass.
An ambulance arrived soon after, and he was taken to the hospital in the city, where they hustled him into surgery.
He made it through surgery just fine, but - they took out part of his skull in the process - the part right above the hairline in front. Later, they would insert a plastic plate, but that had to wait until he recovered.
We were able to visit him in the hospital in a couple of days - I was a bit jealous by the attention he was getting, and of all the cool toys with which well-wishers were filling his room.
Dan was fine - I had feared I'd have a vegetable for a brother, but he was fine. Alert, coherent, just the same, but with a big hole in his head.
He came home from the hospital, and life went along just about the same - except that now my brother had this spot on his head with the skin just stretched across it, about as big as a dollar. Right there in front; you couldn't miss it.
He usually wore a stocking cap - a beanie, as the cool set has adopted them now - which made me just a bit less uncomfortable.
And he went about his normal business - he delivered his newspapers, and went to school, and continued his passionate basketball playing.
We had a hoop on the back patio, installed on a huge steel column made by one of the welders at the shipyard where my dad was a naval architect, and Dan would hang out back there, shooting baskets for hours.
He had an odd style of shooting, too - we were soccer players (Little League baseball, although present in our community, didn't have the appeal and cachet of soccer, which was the popular sport - many of my friends went on to have pro careers on the field), and Dan would shoot baskets as if throwing a soccer ball in from the sideline, in which the ball starts behind your head, and with both hands, you toss it as far and accurately as you can.
Dan would nail all the shots, too, uncannily - and had, as a result, an advantage over defenders taller than him, as shooting the ball that way gave him about a foot of extra height, compared to the conventional way of shooting a basketball.
He'd be out there for hours - and you wasted your time if you ever undertook a game of HORSE with him; he'd kick your ass every time.
Once, during Dan's convalescence, the ball rolled under the deck.
"I'll get it!" I said, wanting to protect my gentle, damaged brother. But he was closer, and got the ball, and banged his head when he came back out.
I nearly wet my pants, I nearly fainted, I certainly hyperventilated, afraid that he had damaged himself and was now about to die.
He was rather cavalier about it, though, to the point that he thought my concern and fuss were silly - and I think I'm still getting over that incident, as well.
Two months later, they operated on him again, and sewed this thick, plastic plate in his skull, in place of the missing bone. "Stronger than bone," the surgeon said.
Two operations in two months - a scar beginning above his eye and continuing over the top of his head to the back, from the first surgery, and another going from one ear to the other, the polar route, from the second.
When his hair grew back, rather than being light and rather wispy as mine was (and is still, although much grayer), it was dark and coarse. No one mistook us for twins after that.
And Dan went back to his normal activities, too, playing soccer that autumn, wearing a hockey helmet. I remember parents of the opponents making a stink about it, and my father bitching them out.
Just a few years ago, Dan had a series of small strokes in an afternoon - TIAs, they call them, or "Transitory Ischemic Attacks." He was incoherent, and a girl he was with called an ambulance. He was promptly airlifted across Puget Sound to Harborview, and took up residence for a few days in the same Neuro Intensive Care Unit where my friend is today.
It's a nice place - and a crack trauma center; the finest in the Pacific Northwest (including Alaska and Montana). Our friend will be in nice hands.
But when they told me that she was going to be missing part of her skull for a time, and wearing a helmet, it all came back. "No sweat," I said. She'll be fine - a tough road, but she's a tough dame, and medical technology has advanced in the last thirty years, right?
The medicine of my youth seems ancient and barbaric to me, now - although the administration of it to my numerous lacerations, contusions, sprains, strains and aches (no breaks, I don't think - and I'm knocking wood) is still fresh in my mind.
Perhaps you don't remember pain, but you remember everything else.
Almost.
Perhaps that's best.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I was raised by a woman who lacked emotional nurturing skills, but she was a great cook, with an amazing repertoire - even while working full time, she was able to present a varied menu, items often not being repeated for a month or more.
She was good at all the classics, like Beef Stroganoff, Toad-in-the-Hole (Yorkshire pudding baked with embedded sausages - !), and Macaroni-and-Cheese.
Here, Macaroni-and-Cheese was actually not macaroni at all, but rotelli pasta with a light béchamel (a thickened sauce base made with milk), to which she added grated Tillamook Cheddar (THE cheese, in my part of the world - and back when I was a kid, it was coated with thick wax) - so it wasn't actually a Mornay sauce, being made with cheddar, rather than gruyère and parmesan. All this was assembled in a shallow dish, topped with bread crumbs, and baked.
I had no idea that mac-and-cheese meant something much different to most people until I was a guest at a friend's house for dinner; I was about ten.
"What's for dinner?" I asked his mom.
"We're having macaroni and cheese!" she said, knowing that she was in the process of scoring huge points with her son's little friend.
"Oh boy!" I said, "that's one of my favorites!"
We had a Betty Crocker moment, she and I - I'm sure her hair was in a beehive or something like it, and she must have had an embroidered apron, no doubt, and I'm sure she looked great.
I was presented with that stuff in a box (which, although appearing radioactively orange, is colored - or was - with annatto, the same stuff used to color real cheddar). Rather gluey, bland, no plate appeal…
Of course, I was polite, and claimed to enjoy it.
Indeed, though, I'm sure I did enjoy it - if something's tasty, I want some - and although I have eaten the finest caviar (from Columbia River Sturgeon, made, briefly, by an artisan in the 80s), along with all the other great dishes made from excellent ingredients, I can still enjoy food that's served on the Low Road (see my epigram, High Road or Low?, at geniusweirdo.org).
When I got home:
"You won't believe what she thought macaroni and cheese was supposed to be like!" I sniffed, outraged.
My step-mother replied, "It's best, sometimes, to not ask what's for dinner." How true.
But I was raised surrounded by passion for food. And not like a big, Italian family, everyone carrying on around the pot of freshly-made pasta, but just with the simple, but pervasive notion, that food was supposed to be tasty, nutritious, varied, and you were supposed to cook it yourself.
We had - this being the 60s and 70s when I grew up, and six mouths to feed - margarine and Minute Rice at the table; I secretly relished having dinner at my grandmother's house, because it was real rice, and butter.
I knew what I liked.
So there was good food around, but I think I also was predisposed to be interested by it - the only thing I didn't really like, and would push to the side of my plate (which, two generations away from the Great Depression, was nearly unheard of - waste not, want not, and all that) - were raw mushrooms in the salad. I'm not too keen on raw mushrooms anyway - although I did have some raw truffle once, which I apparently was sharing with a squirrel, but that's another story for another day…
I ate everything. Even the unrecognizable tiny black cubes in the tuna casserole - which I later learned were canned, diced mushrooms. Didn't matter what it was, I ate it.
Once, my step-mother made a meat pie. "What kind of meat pie?" I asked, intrigued and eager.
"I'll tell you after you eat it."
Now, that right there would have flashing red lights and warning bells and alarms - like a flooding submarine - and nobody would eat anything after hearing that:
I'll tell you what it is after you eat it.
But she was such a reliable cook, and I was apparently open-minded, so I merely said, "Okay."
It was fantastic - what kind of meat pie was it? I still didn't know.
"That was steak-and-kidney pie," she said, and it was the first of many I have eaten and baked, and thought about…
"Well, it was great - and next time, could you just tell me what I'm eating? I'm going to eat it anyway, you know that," and she always did.
Food is my dearest, fondest love.
And I'm not one of those portly trenchermen, as one might assume - no, we're blessed with a high metabolism, so we burn right through it - which means we're almost always hungry, like a shrew. But we love to eat! So we get to do it more often! How nifty is that?
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The other day, I wrote about dogs, and how capable they are when given a clear job description (see The Good Dogs).
I promised to make an ironic leap with the topic, so here's my stab at that:
I have a good friend, a Zen priest in fact, which I suppose makes him more the master and me the disciple, but neither of us looks at it that way - he's a fellow crow devotee, which fostered our relationship - at any rate -
He travels with his sons to Las Vegas when they attend conventions (they're in the art publishing and gallery business), and unbeknownst to the casino managers, who see this frail old man and give him a complimentary room, he rakes it in on the slots.
How does he do this?
He whips out his jizo statue and sets it on the machine, and then, if you were watching, you'd see him lean in and caress the slot machine, the way someone does with a favored horse, and whisper; he's making a connection with the machine.
"What people don't realize is that even though a man made it, the machine has a soul," which he treats with respect, and is rewarded with consistent winnings.
Really, he's just tapping into the cosmos's willingness to accommodate our needs.
I've spent a lot of time around theaters, have appeared in a lot of plays, have learned tons of lines. Fortunately, I'm good at the memorization, but for others, it's tough; I do all I can to help my fellow actors out, running lines with each other, until we're all comfortable that we know them.
I was running some scenes with a friend who was in a challenging play; most of her lines were long, non sequiturs (Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)- tricky to learn, as you can imagine: having a thread in the dialogue gives the actor some handholds, but working with random monologues is tough - you have to memorize it until your body knows it, and then deal with the chaos of the scene.
Needless to say, my friend was having trouble, which was why she called me - so I could help her run the lines, over and over.
Still, she was having trouble, which was really frustrating for her.
{note - this is funny - I know what my point is supposed to be, but I look at what I have and wonder if I'm getting close to making it, which shines a light on what would seem to be one of my approaches as a writer - if a topic is difficult to pin down, throw enough words at it to smother it).
"I'll never get this line!" she said.
No.
She won't; she can't, with that attitude.
You see, I regard everything that we say to be a prayer. Any statement can be easily recast to highlight this; in the case of my friend, the frustrated actress, her statement translates, with hyperbole intact, as:
"Please, O provident Cosmos - don't let me learn this line, please…"
I prefer to approach that situation with this prayer:
"Man, this line is a bitch - but I'll nail it down; I'll keep working on it."
Really, it works that way.
Around here, we really try to avoid negative statements, as a corollary of this approach, urging one to remember something rather than admonishing them not to forget.
It works in all kinds of ways, too, such as finding one's car keys - say it out loud - "I really need to find my car keys in the next five minutes, since I don't want to be late…:
And it helps, as in that case, to be specific. I was talking with a friend who runs a non-profit, who said the institution depended on a miracle.
My notion is that they'll get their miracle, but not until she states clearly just exactly what kind of miracle it is.
Of course, it helps to be vague at times, too - since, if there's any order or structure to the cosmos, one might assume that the providence can be obscure but authentic.
Still, if one is willing to be clear with the cosmos, it will endeavor to provide.
Just like a dog; it only wants a good, clear job description.
And that's as easy as talking to a dog.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII. An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years? From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online. He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age. There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive. The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes." -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte. I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]). And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes? That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits. That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.
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