September 12, 2012 · 4:16 pm

The Memory of Food

I remember my grandmothers in food. The grandmother I called Gram often had a cook in the kitchen. Holidays were huge affairs at her house, all the best silver, glassware, and china, all the best dishes, all their sons and their wives, and a cotillion of dressed-up grandchildren of all ages, making every effort to be mindful of manners.

These dinners began with cocktails and fresh pink shrimp in the living room. Children took note of candy filled bowls on high buffets and soda bottles for the taking in a walk-in ice box. The candy was not so easy to reach, but hang around long enough beneath the buffet and an uncle would go by and pass them down to you. Hard candies, they were always hard candies. We would have preferred them soft, or say, chocolate, but I suppose if you are going to leave it out like that…. which, of course, struck us as wondrous.

Cocktail hour was followed by the procession into a dining room that seemed to seat thirty, paneled in a deep dark mahogany that had once graced the boardroom of a bank. Between the crystal chandelier and enormous window of leaded glass, prism reflections bounced around the high ceilinged room when the sun was at that ‘certain slant of light.’

Young ones started at the children’s table situated near the window, and over the years, graduated to the long table—which meant that maybe an uncle would pour you a taste of champagne. Food never stopped coming. Grandpa had a buzzer by his feet at his end of the table to summon Susan, the cook, but we all knew that Gram had worked her tail off too. This was how she showed her love. ‘Never enough food for the family’ must have been her motto.

Dessert was multiple choice, as at a restaurant. I don’t know where the Southern influence came from, but there was always a pecan pie at Gram’s table—the richest thing imaginable—served with vanilla ice cream on top. And plates of her homemade cookies passed around with coffee and tea, to top off dessert.

My other grandmother, Nana, was as thin as a rail. One dinner at Gram’s would have lasted her all year. Nana had a funny relationship with food, starting every morning when she would mix assorted cereals to make the perfect combination. “A little bit of Kix, a little bit of corn flakes,” (the emphasis always on “little”), followed by the proclamation, “mmm, this is so good!” It didn’t take much to make Nana happy.

One grandmother couldn’t feed you enough. The other grandmother was watching your weight before you were, but both are remembered through food. While Gram’s silver candy dishes were perpetually polished and filled and on display, Nana, I discovered, kept small tins of confectionary sugar-coated hard candies squirreled away in her little pantry. (What was it about grandmothers and hard candies?). And she never said a word about it over the years as I would sneak in, open the tins, lick off all the sugar, and stick the hard candies back in there again. It didn’t take much to make me happy either.

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August 29, 2012 · 7:49 pm

Pass Me My Blog

“Blogs make it hard for me to read full articles. Now tweets make blogs hard to read. Soon, I’ll only be able to consume shapes.” Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box

This is good news I suppose for cave painters. But as writers we have to tremble. Many of us have every intention to write books. In the meantime, we are blogging….

My daughter advises me to keep blog posts short and brisk, “perhaps no more than one or two sentences per paragraph.” (I have to listen to her. She’s the one who helped set up my blog in the first place).

OK, so I am trying. (How am I doing, honey?)

I have to be concerned about my manuscripts, however. Will there even be an audience for book-length works? Then I remember that I read, every day and every night. There’s little blue tin and tint of television light ever emitting from this house. That’s my tribe, and as endangered as it may be, I write for that.

So I see blogging as a literary linking of arms. A pat on the back that we are still here.

I’ll confess, I rather like the regularity of a weekly blog. I also like to imagine that I am E.B. White writing in my boathouse on the saltwater farm in Maine, sending my pieces off to The New Yorker. And although there is nothing particularly hurried to each day up here in Maine, it is amazing how rapidly that weekly deadline comes around. That’s a good thing for an old man like me.

I like the feedback in this too. Look at how one blog can start others writing, and how readily their comments are published. Does anyone remember the odds and the wait with “Letters to the Editor”?

Blogs are accessible. So much so, it’s become the new noun in my weekly writing workshop for seniors. In our workshop we write in longhand, read aloud what we have written at the end of each session, and many of the seniors  refer to it as their “blog.”

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August 23, 2012 · 4:11 pm

The Gods Amongst Us

When I was in my late twenties and living in San Diego I was fortunate to land a position in an interior design firm that had a highly acclaimed name in Southern California. The name was the owner’s, Gerald Jerome. He was considered a master, and no one knew it more or believed it more than himself and his staff. Looking back, we were almost like a cult.

Working for meager salaries we thought nothing of staying until midnight if that’s what it took to meet deadlines. And that frequently happened because Gerry, quite the salesman, made promises he wouldn’t have kept otherwise. None of us could have possibly had a child or a marriage and survived that employment. Still, we were for the most part young and told ourselves that we were the fortunate ones, that there were hundreds of designers out there with portfolios under their arms who would love to have our jobs.

So we worked for the association with Jerome, the hope that some of his genius would spill over, and that one day too we might be on our own. Such is the nature of the field, it is almost medieval like the apprentice system. Gerry Jerome relished that. He had a larger-than-life persona, and oftentimes while we were under the gun he made himself at home in our office, sitting back with a vodka & tonic, telling tales. Meanwhile we were at our drafting tables working, flying down the hall to make blueprints, organizing all the materials he would need for his meeting with the client in the morning, and driving home half dead.

His genius, the look we became so good at, was over-scaled and custom-designed for the most part. His interiors favored textures such as wood, stone, wool, leather, hide, over pattern, unless it was tribal, an ikat or a primitive rug. He combined contemporary with primitive, with little to nothing in between. His color palette favored the naturals, and we tended to steer clear of color with the exception of “Jerome red,” a brick/rust red. Everything Had to Make a Statement. It was design with a man’s hand. And his signature at the end of a job was often a custom designed door that stood twice as tall, twice as wide, made of copper or carved. One had to marvel at how easily it swung.

I knew I was over the edge when one day my brother-in-law, a Boston based writer and filmmaker on assignment in LA, came to visit, and I tried to explain to him that Jerome was “like a god.” All my brother-in-law had to do was give me that look and I knew. Not that I was going to do anything about it. You have to remember, I was in heaven.

Looking back, much was not right. All those hours without overtime pay, the chauvinism we endured, the salaries that might have been better but for the fact that Jerome was fond of making deals with his clients, and often took payment in the form of a rare Pre-Columbian sculpture, a Tamayo or Francisco Zuniga painting, or a large piece of quartz, all of which were showcased in his home in Mission Hills.

And then one day, after he had turned all other clients away so that our small firm could oversee an enormous convention hotel project in Mexico with Westin, we woke to find that the Mexican economy had collapsed overnight and the government had imposed a freeze on the American dollar. I didn’t understand the economics then and I don’t understand it now, but Westin pulled out and Gerry Jerome laid us all off. Just like that.

For years afterwards in whatever I did in the arts, I felt Jerome over my shoulder, bellowing if he didn’t like what I was doing, or laughing that I “designed like a woman” (the ultimate insult).We put up with such behavior in a person that extraordinarily talented or bright, and here he wasn’t even around. I was married and at home with my first newborn when I received a call from an old associate in our firm, informing me that Gerry Jerome had died. He had come home, slipped out of his Italian shoes, and suffered a heart attack while sitting up in bed reading “Architectural Digest.” There always had been a matter with his heart; I seem to recall it ran a little fast. His memorial service had come and gone—while I was in labor and in the hospital giving birth–and I never had a chance to say goodbye to this man who had meant the sun, moon and stars to me. How many people can be that significant in a lifetime?

Later when my life took a decidedly literary turn, I assured myself that I would always have a hand in interior design so long as I had a shelter to live in. I think it was only in writing that I didn’t feel Gerry Jerome lording over me. It is in writing that I would find my own voice, and what looks like my own design style while I’m at it.

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August 15, 2012 · 5:26 pm

Rock-Paper-Scissors

Rocks. They sit here so patiently on my writing table. I don’t know where it all began, but by now it is a collection from various places I have been and loved (where I have left a part of me). A rock is a piece of the place, or the experience, that I can bring home with me. And the memory contained in each one speaks volumes.

One rock I picked up in Argentina. We were leaving a winery in Mendoza and stones such as this were shimmering on either side of the road, so I asked the driver to please pull over. One of them is with me now.

Another rock is from a spa where, in the course of a Native American Hot Rock Treatment, I learned that rocks are alive, and wise, having been here longer than anything else on earth. I slipped one into my robe when the massage therapist went out of the room. That treatment had given me an idea for a scene in the novel I was working on, and it would help to write it if I could hold the stone. Those hot rocks gave me the scene.

During a visit to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, I picked up two lovely rocks that today sit one upon the other, stacked like a cairn, on my writing table. I imagine that they were there in her day too, when she strolled the gardens before slipping back into her writing room. I also like to think that some of Ms. Wharton’s magic might rub off.

In the summer I pick up rocks in The San Juan Islands the way I used to search for shells on other shores. In the Pacific Northwest it is all about rocks and logs. Which brings me to paper….

I am a paper person and can’t remember ever being without it in one form or another, be it sketchbook, notebook, journal, index cards, or a roll of plain white shelf paper. One of the most creative things my mother did was supply us with shelf paper when we were young, which we would roll out before us on the rec room floor. Lying on our stomachs, propped up on elbows, our crayons spread across the linoleum, we drew like this for hours.  Shelf paper had it all over coloring books. No one had to stay between the lines because there were no lines. And we drew as we thought, not in frames, but in streams of consciousness, as in dreams and movies.

Such are my earliest paper memories. So it came as a shock of late when, after being outfitted for hearing aids, my biggest complaint, the noise most annoying, was the sound of paper! What I had always known as silent and contemplative turned into crackling thunder when papers were rustled or turned. I made an appointment and had the volume turned down. Accustomed to my quiet time, I had grown quite fond of it, especially when writing. Just ask the rocks.

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August 8, 2012 · 6:04 pm

Beyond Broken

When we first dropped anchor in Roche Harbor all the boats were pointing in the same direction, as they should, in formation like birds. As we sat and looked out toward the setting sun, some of the boats spun around one way, and others another, until we were all pointing every which way and there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. The sun disappeared and there we stayed awaiting the next shift of our boat, like the calibration or orientation of a compass.

I mention this because before we left San Juan Island another odd phenomena occurred, this time from above. While setting out on a walk in the woods, hundreds of birds—mostly seagulls–swarmed in the sky, circling at random, looking like white confetti against the blue. An hour later as we rounded a point, another swarm of birds was in the sky before us, the same random scribble. Whatever could this mean, we wondered.

I have become very good at doing nothing out on the water. Aware of yet another tragic shooting, this time in Wisconsin, I think my heart is beyond broken. If we can’t get a handle on the assault weapons at least, I am afraid for us.

At the Northernmost point of land in the continental U.S. sits a little white lighthouse, straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. The humbleness and innocence of it—my country is losing that.

On we went into Canadian waters. Salt Springs Island B.C. is where many of our draft dodgers found open arms during the Vietnam war. Many of them stayed and raised families, ran small businesses, and have slowly, happily aged. Our loss, their gain. It looks like it’s been a good life on Salt Springs. Our very institutions are under siege at home: theatres, schools, shopping centers, churches and temples. I’m thinking now if our lawmakers can’t stand up to the NRA and get a handle on our war with ourselves, might there not be another wave of Americans to other shores?

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August 1, 2012 · 7:45 pm

Ain’t Crabbin’

Another weekend bobbing about in one of North America’s biggest bathtubs, The Puget Sound. Azure skies, crayola clouds, and snow-capped mountains surround us. Sailboats by the score with their sails in full, and Washington State ferries looking for all the world like Starbucks cups: green and white and hollow. Seals’ heads poking up and dolphin jumping waves with delight. Buoys that have been converted into high-rise bird hotels. We could take up birding on the upper helm of a slow going trawler like this, for we see everything. Much like going for a walk rather than a run.

With the crabbing season underway we left every entrée open for the weekend and just packed around it with greens and berries and such. Crackers and wine, leaving the cocktail hour open for crab as well. I wish I could say we always only hope to do better than the year before, but it’s a bit more than that. It is in crabbing that I have had my first experience with compulsive gambling. The season is short and trappers have to hustle right out of the gate.

After getting outfitted the first year with a trap, bait, and licenses, and catching a mere two “keepers” (females and undersized crabs are thrown back), we wolfed them down with wine one night at sunset, our eighty dollar apiece appetizers. And that was that for that year.

The next crab season a poacher went off with our trap, or it was dragged off by a boat or whatever. In any case it was gone when we went back. So, back to get reoutfitted. I’ve forgotten how many crabs we caught that season, but we were seriously behind in our investment.

The third season we purchased a second trap. Another investment made, and a smattering of crabs, most of which had to be thrown back. But we were on a roll, and the cost of each crab began to average better than eighty dollars. Plus we had enough that we could now begin to invite others over.

This time, the start of our fourth season, we went out to place the two traps in the water close to shore and one went under and off, buoy and all. One hundred feet of line and it went under, when other traps were all around, their buoys bobbing. One of us thought we had found middle earth or a vortex. The other was sure a seal must have gone off with it, relishing the salmon bait. Both of us were resigned to never seeing that trap again, and I knew I could no longer do the math. But come low tide, when we went back, there it was, back again, not too far from the other one. We feasted that night and the next day on nine large Dungeness crab, with enough left over to make a couple crab cakes. Almost too much at once.

I am going to relax about crabbing…. by going fishing. An older, wiser woman I know has the fondest memories of summers spent fishing when she was young. “It’s not about the catch,” she tells me, “but about the time between the bites. The long and quiet moments when it’s just you and the lake. Catching fish actually interrupts that.”  That’s what I’m after in fishing. I am not going to calculate a thing and I may not even catch anything. In this I may do well.

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July 25, 2012 · 3:12 pm

Five Hundred Writers in Search of an Agent

There we were, five hundred attendees at a conference wearing “Character” tags around our necks and carrying totes emblazoned with the same word. A clown convention, you ask? No, nothing other than the 57th annual PNWA’s Writers Conference, which just concluded this week. Of course I don’t know of a writer who isn’t, in some way, a character.

You could cut through much of this Seattle summer in UGGS and a down parka. Throughout the conference, it was day after day of forecasts reading “a high of 67.˚” And nature even threw in a little rain. Everyone from all the baking and broiling states had to love it.

Writers attend a writers conference for a host of reasons: to hone our craft, to get out of the house and find our tribe, but the biggest catch of all has to be landing an agent. From the moment the registration desks opened, there were power pitch sign-ups and opportunities to practice one’s pitch with fellow attendees. Scheduled into Power Pitch Blocks A-F over the course of the next few days, we were just out of the gate and everything was building to the pitch: the 3 minute opportunity to capture the imagination of an agent. Each writer would have a few stabs at it, as many agents and editors as one writer could see inside a designated block of time. Entering the big top for Power Pitch A, I didn’t know how this would work.

The agents and editors were seated at one impossibly long table with a perpendicular row of chairs before each one. This is where the expectant writers sat, moving up one chair at a time, until it was our time to pitch. And if I think the pressure was on us, I can only imagine what it must have been to be the agent or editor—much like the target in a carnival booth. Receiving one pitch after another, after another….

I fit in four pitches and had requests from each agent to send material. Exhausted and elated, the conference ended. Now home to deliver. To anyone out there who wants to be a writer, I hope you have a lifetime as it may take it. Perseverance, passion, and a bit of carnival-like luck.

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July 18, 2012 · 7:52 pm

Tracing Our Life Stories

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the very first time.” T. S. Eliot

Summery children’s voices through open windows. Wagons, scooters, and strollers–all the apparatus of play. A brother and sister squeeze into a pint-sized motorized car on a sidewalk which is well off the road. The littlest fellow across the street sports an electric bike. He had to have that, I suppose, as his dad rides a motorcycle–to Amazon everyday, where he’s a manager in cloud computing. An Amazon server was recently effected by thunderstorms in the area, but it’s all back up and running, the boy on the electric bike, the man on the motorcycle, and all the companies reliant on Amazon’s cloud service.

One evening in book group we realized that all of us are originally from the East Coast. Our individual paths, however, took us all over the map as we actively shaped our life stories into the tales we can tell today. Though some folks take a more direct route to where they are going or draw no map at all, they are probably not people I know. The people I know tend to be complex, which has me thinking there are a lot of labyrinths walking around amongst us.

I am careful not to call us mazes. A maze is a more crazed path with built-in trickery: dead ends, roundabouts, and decisions to be made at every turn. It’s doable, but usually with difficulty. Lucky are the labyrinth meanderers amongst us! Endlessly winding and understanding that there is only one path and it is your path and you are following it, going forward. Following a labyrinth course, and seeing one’s life as such, is a right-brain activity. It quiets the mind. There is but one choice and that is to follow it, however indirect or circuitous. “A labyrinth is a place you go to get found,” notes writer Sally Quinn, who commissioned to have a 50′ labyrinth built for her walking/meditation purposes in a clearing by the woods at her home in Maryland.

Well, maybe our paths have not been altogether labyrinthian either. Labyrinths are whole and circular with a center. Where you go in is where you come out, and its paths turn and gently fold alongside themselves much like brain matter. I drew my life journey by placing a piece of tracing paper over a map, starting of course with where I began, where I was born. From there, a line drawing of a mythical creature began to evolve and put down legs–if only to spring from. In it I see a deer in flight, a kangaroo, or wallaby, bounding off hind legs. Or possibly an ostrich or emu, sprinting off and landing here, in The Pacific Northwest. The Southern points on my map (St. Thomas, San Diego, and Tucson) were primarily for pushing off, as I know now that I had to go there to get here.

I have been living out West for half my life and my mother in New England still expects I will “move back home.” I am at home, or rather, where I am meant to be on my life’s journey. Whatever the animal/bird pictograph that is my life’s line drawing, it was always heading here. How many times in the woods I’ve remarked, “If I were a deer I’d live here!” And as bald eagles glide at tremendous height over the Puget Sound, “If I were a bird this is where I’d come to live!”

Maybe my mother knows something I don’t. That family plot down by The Connecticut River reserved by my grandparents so long ago for all the clan…. I haven’t decided. I may get lost in the woods yet or fall into the sea, but that plot, I suppose, would make this life story all the more labyrinthine.

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July 11, 2012 · 5:41 pm

Goodbye to a Market

Warning: I’m in a dirty rotten supermarket sort of mood.

A sad thing happened this week in our Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle: the dear little Metropolitan Market closed its doors. Let me say, Metropolitan Market was one of the reasons we moved here. We drew an area about six blocks around “The Ave” and confined our house hunt to that. The idea was to live where we would always walk to town, whatever the weather, and no matter how old we may grow to be. We had found our village in the city. “Why drive, when you can walk?” is our motto, and Metropolitan Market was central to our lifestyle.

Now I don’t know what is coming in, but I do know that recent development in town would have it that every block look the same. Metropolitan Market was different, mid-century architecture, impeccably kept, the staff most personable, produce you could trust to be organic (vs. the supermarket trick, or so I’ve heard, of replacing an empty organic bin with the other variety), and the foods they made, the soups, cioppino, sushi, Dungeness crab cakes, and bakery goods, splendid enough to go on the finest dining table. It was where we all placed our order for fresh turkeys every November, and could find quality kitchenware, chocolates, magazines, and even literary journals. Outside, a plant stand to rivel any street corner in Paris. Come to think about it, Metropolitan Market was our only local nursery too. Now I really am depressed.

Plus I have just come back from a very crowded Safeway where the music is sick, the loudspeakers are loud, the prepared food is fried and the like—although nobody eats like that except maybe the construction workers on their breaks (the ones who are tearing the town down). I don’t know who is employed at Safeway or where they come from, and as for the floral department, their way with plants is to dye phalaenopsis orchids blue.

I simply have to find a way around supermarkets. Something I can walk to, such as the bucolic farmers market on Thursdays. Come winter, move downtown and shop Pikes Market? Everything that is anything is so much further now and it’s time to go from carrying totes to using that cart I bought. A rainproof canvas shopping cart, bright red so cars can see me on gray days. I haven’t taken it out yet because I have some things to work out. My cart questions: do I push it or pull it? Do I push/pull it down the aisles and put the groceries I want to buy into my cart, and take them all out at the register, or will I look like I am shoplifting and be apprehended? Or should I fold up my cart and put it in the grocery’s shopping cart when I arrive?

Didn’t I know this would happen? A long time ago, after my first marriage fell apart, I lived in NYC for a year. I wish I could tell you it was marvelous: The Met! Lincoln Center! Central Park! But it wasn’t. Not that year. I was half crazy with a broken heart, and Central Park wasn’t even considered safe in the daytime. I don’t know if you could call it a phobia exactly, but I developed an irrational fear of bag ladies that year. Not a loathing, more of a trembling. An apprehension that it could happen to me. I knew that there had to be a story behind each and every one of these ladies, and my best guess was that some man had left her in the lurch. I am not sure if I ever got over this fear per se, but I up and moved to California. And now, here I am, thirty-something years later, further up the coast, and about to take up a cart myself. Didn’t I know it?

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July 4, 2012 · 7:56 pm

What’s Going On

We’ve been floating around in the Puget Sound for a few days, tying up at one idyllic island after another. Today we’re at Orcas Island. In a couple days we will move over to San Juan Island. My parents are out boating with us for ten days, and our daughters joined us for the weekend until they flew off on a seaplane to begin getting back to The Bay Area, back to work. The sun was gracious enough to stay out for the days when we were three generations on board one modest boat, so we could sit on deck. Now the four of us are huddled in the cabin, in the rain, reading books.

This was the first time since leaving the mainland we dragged out our laptops and checked in with the world. I wish we hadn’t. Pouring rain might be boring, but knowing the U.S. has sent a flotilla of war vessels to the Persian Gulf has my blood boiling. We have a veteran of WWII on board, and to my mind and his, the U.S. has not involved itself in a war worth fighting since. To me it’s all been the same damn thing since Vietnam. To my dad, since World War II.

Not long ago in downtown Seattle I saw signs carried in a demonstration that caused that déjà vu feeling where the sidewalk beneath starts to melt or break up. Crossing Pike or Pine, I felt as though I had traveled in time. I was sure I had carried these signs before. Startling familiar, the diagonal red, white, and blue, the same graphics of the NO IRAQ WAR signs. For a moment it looked like the same war, the same mistake, was coming around again. Until I got closer. Everything on the sign was identical but the Q had been changed to an N and NO IRAN WAR was the message now. I am going to need one of these signs bad.

Out here it’s the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Over there it’s the Strait of Hormuz.

My dad suggests that I not make too much of it (which no doubt I already have). Try not to worry, these maneuvers happen and sometimes have to be made. It’s a giant game of calling someone’s bluff, I guess. Let’s hope it works. The stakes keep getting higher.

In the meantime the sun has come back out in the Pacific Northwest and the skies are scrubbed to the cleanest, brightest blue possible. The last wisps of fog rise rapidly off evergreen hillsides, the sea glistens deep and black, and bleached white clouds show us the way. We slip into the dingy and are off—leaving our land cares on land. It always works.

We’ll be back, and may celebrate the 4th afterall.

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