We write

For 20 years my father wrote a daily newspaper column. He wrote human interest, local travel, humor, exaggerated family exploits and whatever caught his attention. Through his column - and being considered the regional expert on matters alien and unexplained - he built friendships with readers whose passions took them way outside the lines of our 1950s suburban ordinariness.

What finally floated to consciousness is the fact that he sat down and wrote what today would be the equivalent of a substantial, meaningful, entertaining blog posting five days a week. In addition, he covered news stories, wrote reviews, first-person adventure tales for magazines, juvenile fiction, adult non-fiction, history and travel for publications and one tv script.

The writing he did at home kept him separate from our family parts of most days. His, as he called it, den was off the laundry room at the back of our house, too near the rear patio or side yard for us kids to play (translate: make noise) while he was working. His freelance projects led to other assignments and gave our family resources that his daily job couldn't provide. When his agent (whom we came to call Uncle Hy) sent a juicy check, my brother, sister and I each had a payday as well.

On vacation at our favorite Pismo Beach motel, he sat in the room typing while we watched the ocean or played shuffleboard. His usual arrangement was to leave sufficient columns to cover his absence; occasionally there would be a "reprinted by popular demand" notation as they ran a piece from the past. This trip, he needed to get his copy back to Pasadena for the next day's paper and, while I no longer know the exact details, it involved meeting the south-bound train as it stopped in a nearby hamlet called Edna. A wrong turn took us away from the station, then had us on the opposite side of tracks as he roared along dirt roads to post his columns. We arrived in time and the business of being a newsman's children, for half an hour or so, became urgent and adrenalin-filled.

I just read Dodie Bellamy's recounting of her mother's death, called "Phone Home" from Life As We Show It, and the ways in which she connects it to the movie E.T. I took from it realizations about how difficult it is, as a child or a grown-up, to have even a speck of an idea what a parent is about. When I started to write fiction, I was conscious of wanting not to sequester myself from my son and husband as I worked, yet without focus and quiet was unable to hold my thoughts together.

The volume of work my father produced, the hours he worked at something which clearly mattered to him but which also added to our quality of life, are aspects of him I neither recognized nor appreciated in childhood. It was, and is, my belief that his writing gave him an escape from family life, from immersion in the doings of his children; he was able to maintain distance through virtuous pursuit. Whereas I, after more than a year of short-story writing and another year beyond that of working with a partner creating original animation projects, knew that I was not willing to trade what the writing might bring for being closer to my family. That was not my path.

When I became aware of blogs, and was encouraged by two artist friends to jump in and see...my focus differing from theirs for I wanted it only to be about writing...it took me months to begin. It took me longer than that to commit myself to an acceptable minimum output. There are days when I am without words or thoughts, or without a way to bring them together that won't make me cringe.

Though I have been near it or part of it all my life, writing is still a mystery. Each time I am able to tell a story as I wish to I experience wonder. Though I am considerably older than my father was during his most productive years, I am awed by the focus, consistency and, I imagine, necessity which allowed his work to happen. We pay a price for our gifts, the creative demons or angels that we choose to heed. The extent of his legacy is one I will not possibly match. I do trust, though, that I am a competent steward of what I've been given.

Something under the bed...Part 2

For your viewing pleasure, Pacific Ocean Park in its early, prosperous days. It did not look like this when I visited.



In Part 2, we leave the ocean and climb into the San Bernardino mountains. Once again, I am with my grandparents. My grandfather, whose driving I came to recognize as being from the "accelerator/brake, accelerator/brake" school, was happy to go anywhere, everywhere; the more people in the car the better. (Wherever we would go, my grandmother brought along the picnic hamper with thermoses of goulash, Cornish pasties, sweet mixed pickles that she always served with pasties, desserts, I can't recall everything, as there was food for days, even if we were on our way, ultimately, to a restaurant. Stopping for a picnic was part of the journey - no wonder I came to equate food with love. And she expressed surprise when, as we arrived at our destination, I was queasy and had no appetite. None of the grandchildren was ever able to tell her that Grandpa's jerky driving made us carsick.)

Even now the roads to Lake Arrowhead are prone to rock slides and other perils. In the early 1950s I can imagine them as narrow, steep and fairly slow going; I know we had a vapor lock on at least one drive. On what was probably my first visit with them to the lake, my grandmother chose to tell me undocumented and harrowing tales of our destination. She said (and I haven't googled this to check so please accept it at face value) that Arrowhead was a man-made lake, an existing canyon that had been filled with water to create a recreation - and realtor's dream - spot. She said that many people had drowned there having become caught in the tops of trees which still stood underwater, left behind when the canyon was flooded. In my mind, she described the trees as almost reaching up and grabbing the unwary, wrapping them in their piney branches where I supposed their skeletons - or corpses - remained. I never put so much as a toe in that water and can picture myself becoming hysterical if anyone offered a boat ride. Murderous, submerged forests were added to the list of terrors. Since then I have had the repulsion/attraction conflict about water that covers once-inhabited land. Watching documentaries on the building of the Three-Gorges Dam in China, as villages and, perhaps more importantly, their cemeteries were taken by the rising tide, my thoughts went to ghost-controlled rivers and centuries of a way of life, now gone. The closing line of A River Runs Through It affects me still: "I am haunted by waters."

To be continued further.

Something under the bed is drooling*

(*There was no way I could come up with a better title than this, which Bill Watterson used for one of his Calvin and Hobbes collections. Thank you.)

Irrational. A normally-nourished child of five or so will not slip between the planks of the Balboa pier, plunging to the churning sea beneath. An image lingers of stumbling, of the wayward foot once caught on the splintery board, managing - unaware - to pry itself an opening sufficient to permit the nightmare drop. It is nearly dusk; lights along the pier can't illuminate the ocean below. Vigilance, caution, and slow, slow progress, board by board, may carry me the distance. Someone - grandmother, grandfather - takes my hand without scolding or impatience. I am more sure of foot with their help. To this day I watch every step on a weathered, wooden pier. The water remembers me.

Childhood fears - loathings is a whole separate category - may come from something (the lizard in the shoebox left on top of the trash can at the curb) or nothing identifiable, i.e. malevolent piers. I know I wasn't in an altered state when I rode the Skyway AND the Cyclone coaster during the last questionable glory of Pacific Ocean Park. Both the Skyway gondolas and the roller coaster followed the pier out over the water and neither gave any indication of having been scrupulously maintained. The Diving Bell - read elevator dunked into a tank of sealife, harmless and not - leaked; we stood ankle-deep in water and I imagined all the seams and windows giving way. At Marineland of the Pacific, viewing the creatures from a lower ramp gave me a foreboding of glass cracking and tourists swept away along with the attractions. THAT particular dread manifested, years later and not in my presence, when one of the performing whales gave the window a great whack as he prepared for his leap.

I'll call this Part One - that seems to be turning into a pattern - to be continued.

Once again, to the daredevil surgeons

Life, as I left in a comment the other day, is something I identify as a two-fisted business; it is not a game we play with one hand behind our backs. Whatever we have, we need to bring, even if it has to be carried in swap meet suitcases and duct-taped plastic bags.

Nearly a year ago - June 28, 2009 - I posted the following. I am re-running it now as I am inspired by readers - and writers - to keep excavating and sharing what I find.

Reprinted by no popular demand whatsoever:

A good life and a pain-free life are two different things. It may be that this information is widely available but somehow I have come to it late. In the first place, I cannot imagine how one is actually alive and without pain. Ever. Of any description. How much anaesthesia would that require?

There is too much meaningless hilarity around us, or so it seems to one for whom an authentic, unforced lightheartedness was unimaginable and unattainable for so long. Many of us - and there are days when I am certain the numbers are much higher than that - come from places we recognize in the work of Joseph Campbell as he tells of mythic struggles, trial by ordeal, shamans as wounded healers. Abuse, neglect, exploitation, violence, indifference, damage and despair were not explored in Nancy Drew books. If only she could have solved that mystery, shone any sort of light on all the ways in which children had their souls stolen by predators in business suits, clerical garb or masks that could pass for ordinary.

These children grow with the sense that they have no control over their actions, choices or lives. A malevolent force resides in the space that should belong to heart and spirit, as though even those stout allies fled in helplessness once they assessed the gravity of the wounds. Sometimes the demons win. Sometimes the pain overshadows the ability to believe in anything but the pain. For more years than I can say I thought healing meant that all the hurt would be taken; that what was lost would be returned, like for like; that clarity, decisions arrived at through thought and caution, sobriety and consistency would result and only grow stronger. I believed the past could be rewritten, or more accurately, erased; it never happened. This is what I longed for.

But a piece at a time, over 24 (and counting) years of relentless recovery, I discovered that to exclude certain moments, to somehow have the warping, indigestible parts of my life removed like a curse lifted, would leave me a different creature. I realized there were aspects of me which I actually treasured. I didn't possess the wisdom to know what should stay, what should go, if it had been possible to undo what already was. Which left only one choice: repair what was still fixable, modify or alter the seriously wrecked bits into something that would work well enough, keep moving forward.

(An aside: In the Los Angeles Times of Tuesday, June 16, 2009, there was a front page story headlined, "Cars in Ghana can't be totaled," which told of the Odawana neighborhood of Accra in which no car had ever been seen as too broken to be fixed. The writer described the area, saying "(it) teems with industry and purpose." Reporter Robyn Dixon added, "nothing is ever useless junk.")

Reclamation, restoration, redemption - themes to which I gravitate in movies and stories - result from the pick-and-shovel work of this earthly incarnation and Divine intervention. Pain in some measure still shows up and asks to stay in our spare rooms; in small quarters it sleeps on the couch and leaves its stuff everywhere. And still life is a gift. It will not happen, that all those whom we lost to the darkness will be among us again, with buoyant spirits and anxieties forgotten, so our best plan is to celebrate resilience, grace and benevolence without limit that has never given up on any of us. One day, like the cars in Odawana, we will realize that we, with masterful help, have become the "daredevil surgeons" and found a way to bring our crumpled pieces back to function and purpose. We will continue to grieve, but not every moment, and less for ourselves than those for whom the journey was simply too long.

In quiet

"A capacity for stillness," that is how I think of the primary lesson gained since I stopped trying to be an over-achiever. Years of compressing 30 hours of living into a 24-hour day resulted in pneumonia; the pneumonia lingered and became chronic respiratory infections, chronic fatigue, the usual penalties for not knowing when to stop voluntarily. In retrospect, it is easily identified as part of not knowing a lot of things.

This saga began 20 years ago and I don't recall the moment when I knew it was not meant to punish me but to save me. Learning to be at ease with quiet and one's own company is not something I sought consciously. Being well-behaved, "seen and not heard," were habits from childhood. They bought me some peace in my home but I thought of them as signs of repression; could some part of that behavior be seen as positive?

The learning curve for any new skill seldom goes as I expect. Perhaps it is just me, but I seem to require (by my calculation) a greater-than-normal amount of time to identify realizations, absorb truths, travel from uninformed to a semblance of awareness. This makes it necessary to repeat certain courses. I see you're back taking "Sit Down and Get Quiet" for the third time, Mrs. Kelly. With a determined and patient tutor, Life itself, and my eventual willingness to pay attention, we had something that could, in bad light, be seen as progress.

And now 20 years have passed; arthritis and reduced mobility (plus the 23 stairs between our apartment and the car) have been added to the list and I am no longer confused about why what seemed to be my life took this once-unwelcome turn. In the quiet of mind and body, I've found that I am not who I thought I was. I am some version of a contemplative; not a volunteer in the ordinary sense, but one whose soul required certain conditions in order to expand. Left entirely to the mind, this decision would never have been made.

As I observe the capacity for stillness in my son, I know that it has always been part of me, an undernourished yet significant aspect of my authentic self. I am not able to foresee all the places it will take me, the assignments it will bring, but I know it is the heart of what supports my need and desire to write, to draw, to understand. In his book, The Tao of Being, Ray Grigg says, "Understanding comes effortlessly. It is not acquired but happens...Wonder and soften and open."

Meanwhile,

My fiction writing teacher loathed what she called refrigerator words; words like big or heavy, small, long, far, close...HOW big? she would ask, HOW far? Big tells you nothing without comparison. And so they invented humongous; problem solved. Forgive me, Marsha, for the times I have allowed that easier, softer way to lure me. The ability to think in words and pictures cannot be a common one; finding the reasons why this is similar to that is the game we will be playing until our thoughts run out.

To be a writer is, for me, to be a life-long apprentice. How do you quantify mastery as a writer...do the words cause you to weep, give you goosebumps, send you reeling like a Monty Python fish slap? How it feels in my writer's heart is that fresh degrees of precision await, if I take the time to reach them. Within the writing world, there are measures of achievement - published books, stories and essays and opinions selected by periodicals of note - and yet it does not feel incomplete simply to have a self-assigned task every few days, more often if possible; a sampler of what I hope are my best stitches or the newer ones which I'm trying out.

My memory was once such that my family would quiz me on meals we had eaten in certain locations along the California roads we traveled. Some of the towns we never saw again; to others we returned at least once a year. Now I can remember favorite meals at a Mojave cafe but not the name of the coffee shop. With a map in hand to prompt me, I could at least identify places we stayed overnight. From that it might be possible to recall dinner or breakfast, but mostly the names of restaurants have faded.

Occasionally the specifics are essential to the story, and there is the accuracy death-grip that comes from reporting. Then, if you factor in the vanity of recalling minutia over so many decades (all yawning lapses of time and event notwithstanding), I am uncomfortable, though not every moment, admitting that some of the pieces are gone.

This, you have guessed by now, is tap dancing, stalling before I am ready to burrow back into the cave of the drooling carnivore that "Wedded" turned out to be. On the days when mumbling and shuffling are as good as it gets, I give thanks for whatever sound and movement can be mustered. With the fantods upon us, any sign of life is reassuring.

Wedded

My son, who has never come closer to a farm than a Ventura County strawberry field, can pick a ripe cantaloupe at the supermarket. One of those genes that skips a generation now and then. His grandfather and great-grandfather knew their produce; I, on the other hand, have brought home melons that - for a few days, anyway - were only fit to serve as doorstops.

His last triumph was a pair of mostly-greenish, loofa-scratchy and webby looking things that were perfect sweetness inside. Since I pick husbands as well as I choose cantaloupes, I think, if the possibility ever appears again - and if it does it will be without any seeking from me, I swear - I will let my son do the selecting. Should there ever be another, a sweet one would be welcome.

Last Thursday, June 17, would have been my 38th wedding anniversary. We lasted 22 years. I was betting on our little family, not based on anything other than wanting so much for it to be true. Too many sure things had already been sighted thumbing rides out of town; I should have known.

Some of us come from places that nullify rational thought, giving all notions equal value; a land where there is no such thing as a bad idea. A former roommate devised her own method of learning to parallel park near her job on Capitol Hill; it consisted entirely of smashing into the cars ahead and behind as many times as it took to shoehorn herself into a spot. We lacked the skills, the simple, basic information, to fashion anything enduring out of faulty parts.

Just the act of thinking, of remembering, takes all my energy. I have found truths worth telling, the words are just out of reach. This will either vanish as soon as I post it or it will be continued. Come back, please, and find out.