March 4, 2012 · 3:22 am

A Dirty Word No More

Two images have struck me of late. One, a sign at the entrance to a children’s playgarden at The Northwest Flower and Garden Show which read “Go Play Outside.” I can’t remember whether it was punctuated with an exclamation point, but it very well may have been. That age-old admonition to go outside and play being almost extraordinary in our day.

The second image was a recurring scene in the film “The Cure” which I recently viewed in which two neighboring boys in the small town of Stillwater, Minnesota play imaginatively in a garden. Despite the fact that their play was bent on violence utilizing action figures and staging mock attacks and wars, I found it remarkably reassuring and I knew just why. Hey, it wasn’t a computer game.

One boy in “The Cure” was infected with the AIDS virus. The mother of the other boy forbid her son to associate with him. But by being engaged in the natural world the boys forged a remarkable relationship. They worked with what they had: dirt, rocks, water and plants. Digging, sculpting, imagining and creating they found that they could forget all their troubles. There isn’t a gardener on earth who hasn’t had that experience.

“I started to understand something about plants by handling them,” noted landscape designer Russell Banks in his memoir, The Education of a Gardener. “It was on one summer holiday when I was perhaps fourteen that, bored with the riding and jumping competitions at a local agricultural show, I wandered off to the flower-tent…  (Thereafter) all my pocket money went on rock plants. All my holidays were given to my own personal corner of the garden. I would bicycle for miles to get a basket of leaf-soil, I would steal grit, sand or gravel from roadside heaps and I would borrow a horse and cart to collect stones which were hard to come by in our stoneless countryside… I was seventeen when I was given a grass slope, a few cartloads of the local ironstone, a few bags of cement, some plants and a piped water supply with which to make a small rock and stream garden. For three months I really lived in and with this miniature world as I struggled with my pocket landscape. Each stone represented the possibilities of a cliff or a mountain top, my dribble of water could be a lake or river or cascade and three pigmy junipers were a forest. A few moist and shady inches on the north side of a stone were a Himalayan bog… a handful of grit on the sunny side of the same stone stood for a hot stony hillside… a six inch fall of water was a Niagara and my friends who came to visit me at work I saw only as giant feet and legs, so immersed was I with my Lilliputian problems.”

It is interesting to note that the boys in “The Cure” were approximately the age of Russell Banks when he began shaping his surroundings. The important point here is that for all of them the contact was physical, the experience was real, and they all saw themselves as part of the natural world.  It is in going outside to play that we first bond with our environment, and this is essential. Children who are taught first that the rainforests are endangered, global warming is upon us, and the environment disastrous before they have had a chance to engage with it and enjoy it can hardly be expected to become the earth’s stewards. My guess is these children will stay firmly wired to the television and computer. We are far more inclined to love and protect what we know to be ours.

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February 24, 2012 · 5:13 pm

Rewriting My Life in San Francisco

I am standing in the windows of my daughters’ second floor apartment in San Francisco. Double Decker buses regularly roll by the windows and the view goes both ways. We look out at the passengers as they peer in at us. I have become accustomed to that in this city. When I first started visiting San Francisco I saw the inhabitants as characters in a play. How theatrical they all look. Clothes as costumes, accessories as props, and people as troupe. Somehow everyone here is younger and has more energy, more imagination and resources then the rest of us, it seems.

Cities have always been a place to reinvent oneself, and San Francisco is becoming my second city. I want to visit as often as my daughters will have me. Their place is between Haight Ashbury and Buena Vista. I won’t give out the address but Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane reportedly lived here. This means more to me than it possibly could to my daughters. She had to have been the age they are now. We all were at that time. And here I am now, dreaming of reinventing myself yet again. Cities give us this sense of permission. Interesting, the anonymity we can feel in the city. It’s the small towns that invade our space.

I dream of putting a writing table in a bay window such as this, looking out to colorful Victorian architecture, stain glass windows lit at night, pedestrians, the small circle of people at the bus stop, and those riding by eye-to-eye. I am thinking I may never run out of material here. And although I have never lived in San Francisco before, I am thinking that I will feel I have come full circle.

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February 9, 2012 · 7:57 pm

Musings from the Yard Guy

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”  Margaret Atwood

Next winter, should we start to complain about the gray season in Seattle, remind us that spring comes early. Chances are that as soon as some of us start to wonder if we can take it anymore, the season will turn a page. Already it seems to be upon us.

We have been enjoying a string of beautiful days in Seattle. The sun is clearing the sky of cloud. I do not have to imagine blue, it is blue. Crocuses are pushing up everywhere. Look up, and some trees are in bud. My neighbor’s hellebores are in full, outrageous bloom. It’s here!

With nature you just have to be there, be very, very present. So I dropped everything and ran outside to “spruce up” (I love that phrase) our little city lot. The Pacific Northwest is populated with cedars, redwoods and pines. The earth glows green, the light is green, and naturally, it smells green. In Southern California and the desert, the color green goes gray. Here, even the most mature and ancient trees shine with spring green. Each new leaf is a beginning, and each year I feel I’m being born. If I were a bird I’d fly to this part of the country. Whatever kind of creature, I’d fly, crawl, burrow, hop, swim or walk. I have found a sense of place here that I consider sacred, especially in the spring.

The Seattle Flower and Garden Show opens its doors this week. That is what I’m working toward, like a penance. I’m trimming and pruning and weeding and raking and mulching all around the house. Trimming incessant ivy and tying climbing hydrangea to the back fence. My husband is traveling and I am signing my emails to him each evening, “the yard guy.” By week’s end I intend to get to the show, that’s the goal. I just don’t want to go until I have my house, er grounds, in order. I want to go knowing that I can hold my head high, that my particular plot of earth is cleaned up and ready to receive any plants or bulbs I might carry home from this moment on.

The best is all ahead. When I am tending a garden, the plants’ well-being and my own become inexorably linked. And it works for writing as well. The door from my writing room will be thrown open to the terrace and I will start every day out there puttering around in the garden, finding my thoughts, and watering—which is like prayer or meditation, and then slip back in and write. The days will be longer. No more growing tired and ready for a nap at 4 pm.

I know I am getting ahead of myself, but I did the most significant thing this week: I opened a window. Imagine, after all this winter huddled up with rugs and throws and fireplaces. Such a simple gesture: open a window! It hits me like an epiphany every year.

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February 3, 2012 · 4:11 pm

What a Girl’s Got to Do

I am up early and watching the light come on in the east. The homes on that side of the street are utterly dark. All that is visible are the slices of light between the homes. It is much like reading a negative. I have noticed paradigm shifts like this occurring all around lately. Seriously, it’s almost seismic.

I have the most extraordinary girlfriends. One of them phoned this week to inform me that she has been offered an outstanding professional commitment for a year in Jacksonville, Florida.

“But did you tell them you are married and live in California?” I asked.

“They know that,” she said, adding “but I just might do it.”

I tried to think of how she could swing this. Yes, her children were grown and gone, but her husband is a partner in a firm and not exactly mobile. Their marriage is solid, and they are just now coming down the home stretch of a long remodel on their beautiful home, and I know she had been looking forward to that.

“How?” is all I could think to ask.

And she proceeded to explain to me how it just might work…

Perhaps I couldn’t see it at first because I am too tangled in my own paradigm shift. My role has been changing and I don’t have to go to Jacksonville to get it. It’s here. Graduate school sealed the deal for me. During those two years my husband became an exceptional cook. Now here we are. Me with my MFA in Creative Writing under my belt, and he’s still cooking and is better than ever—because all these things, writing, cooking, take practice. Anyway, every sign around the house seems to say that I am now free to write. I’m trying to get used to that and take myself very seriously as a writer, knowing that my husband may very well be retiring by the time we see my writing career take off.

Back to my girlfriend, the one who I honestly think is going to choose to go to Jacksonville. For one year. And rent a charming little bungalow. And decorate as she pleases by hopping around antique shops and such. This is their agenda, for she has her husband’s backing entirely: when she isn’t flying back, he will fly out and together they will explore The South. All the places they want to discover: Charleston, Savannah, Beaufort, South Miami and Key West. As she names them, I realize how much I have longed to see these places too.  They will have one year to do it all and will approach it as they have France or Ireland or any other country. Get a car and go—submerge themselves in the culture, knowing that in a year it will be over and they will both be home in California, all the richer for the experience, as with Ireland or France.

She left me feeling envious of her opportunity. I know what my writing room means to me; what married woman doesn’t fantasize about having her own bungalow? Imagine being able to spring for that. And the romantic interest that could occur looking forward to seeing your lover, your husband, on weekends. And too, all that autonomy throughout the week…

I think she’s going to do it. She’s brave and brilliant and her husband is, as I said, a gem. It’s funny:  I can remember when my friend wasn’t particularly fond of flying. And now she’s all over the map.

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January 30, 2012 · 8:18 pm

Word Search

I am looking for a word that may not exist in the English language. “Generative” is the closest I can find to describe what I’m after, but only with a great deal of pulling and stretching. What I want is a word to express the consideration of generations other than one’s own, both older and younger. Can “generative” do all of that?

MacMillan dictionary defines generative as “capable of producing something.” Merriam Webster as “having the power of function of generating, originating, producing or reproducing.” The Free Online Dictionary as “of or relating to the production of offspring.” None of these work. A quick search on the internet turns up Generative Learning as “learning that fosters experimentation and open-mindedness,” and Generative Leadership, “the ability to evoke creativity (in people or situations)” or “providing contexts or conditions in which good things can come into being.” Nice, but not entirely what I am after.

I’ve noticed that we tend to get locked in our own generation like a gated community—gated with denial, while, as with races and cultures, there are so many more benefits to be gained by associating outside of it. One of the richest experiences each week in my life is the writing workshop I conduct at a local retirement home. The participants in the workshop turn their memories into stories, and week by week they are, in effect, writing their memoirs. I consider them some of my dearest friends, and role models on how best to age. Remember they came of age with Roosevelt, not Reagan, and are often times more liberal, more progressive, than their own children or many of today’s young.

One moment we are young and sliding down banisters. The next moment, it seems, we are reminding ourselves to hold onto the rail, not wear socks on the stairs, and take it slowly. How can it go unnoticed that life slips by speedily, and should we be so fortunate, we will all be in our nineties one day? My elderly friends tell me that “it is like being invisible, going to town, or riding a bus, people seem not to notice us.” How can we not see ourselves one day in every one of them?

Just as children enrich our lives, the aged can grace it beyond measure. One is an elixir of innocence and imagination, the other, of wisdom and acceptance. Navigating midlife, I want them both as ballast. It’s a matter of where-we-came-from and where-we-are-going, as we search for what-is-the-meaning-of life. This is our quest.

My father paraphrased it, “Life goes on until it ends.” I just think we need to be both beaming the headlights and looking out all sides, the rear view mirror and side mirror, as we travel along.

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January 23, 2012 · 3:55 am

Standing Room Only

Anyhow: from my standpoint the only thing—if you’re some sort of artist—is to work a little harder than you can at being who you are. While if you’re an unartist nothing but big and quick recognition matters.

                                                                        e.e. cummings, in a letter to his daughter

 

When my aunt was single and in her early twenties, she worked as a flight attendant. No one in the family today can recall the airlines, but knowing how glamorous she was, I am going to put her in a Pan Am uniform for the sake of the story. In any case, she flew a transatlantic airline for a few years in the 1950’s.

As a child I adored the collection of vintage figurines my aunt brought back from abroad. German alpine woodcarvings, handcrafted and handpainted, which my grandmother displayed on a shelf in her home in Connecticut. I was asked not to play with them, so I sat and sketched them, filling notebooks with those folkloric characters.

Years later my aunt told of a time when one of her planes was grounded, in Germany I believe, and a passenger, a renowned composer and Soviet Jew, was ordered to be removed. She and the staff stood helpless, passengers sat frozen in their seats, for they all could guess where he was going… the 1950’s was still a time of remote forced labor camps in Siberia.

I was fourteen or fifteen when she told the story, tangled in adolescent angst, and I’m sure I gasped, saying something like, “Oh no, not an artist… how could they take an artist!”

I know this because I remember my uncle’s reaction. “What do you mean?” he turned and asked me. “Are you saying that an artist’s life is more valuable than say, a tree surgeon’s (what he happened to be), or anything else?”

And I believe I was unable to answer him, for my answer would have had to have been, “yes…”

Random, remembered scenes like this often contain larger truths. Perhaps that is why they linger, as it can take a lifetime to figure them out. Am I really an elitist? In this regard, it would seem so. An elitist about the arts. This is for those of us who grew up under the sheets and blankets with a flashlight, reading throughout the nights of our childhood. I don’t know how else to say it, but I loved my time alone.

Our house today is all about books and candles and music. Oh, and food. Walking by at night you won’t see the blue tint and quiver of a television light in our windows. “I have always imagined,” Jorge Luis Borges stated, “that paradise will be a kind of library.” Well I am making mine now. The dining room doubles as a library, the living room, a salon. I remember standing and applauding after reading The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri. So swept away was I, my living room became a Carnegie Hall for her debut collection of short stories that evening. It welcomes many such writers, though not always with a standing ovation.

Regularly, Benaroya Symphony Hall is filled to near capacity for visiting authors at Seattle Arts and Lectures. And when Anne Lamott came to town on book tour with her novel, Imperfect Birds, it seemed half the city’s population tried to squeeze into a smaller hall to see and hear her. We were there early and it was standing room only. Suddenly it reminded me of attending mass on an important religious holiday, say Palm Sunday, long ago. Looking around at the literary community on such a night, I thought, this is the new church.

For me it is and always has been. When I first began to lapse as a Catholic, my glamorous, Pan Am aunt tried to interest me in coming back. She was my godmother afterall and had a vested interest, by suggesting I might prefer High Mass. “The music, the vestments, why it’s like opera!” she exclaimed.

So I light every candle and dim the Venetian chandelier in my high-ceilinged living room and play Andrea Bocelli, and I am at church. In any case, I feel grace. Call it a Creative Force, a Creative Being, or The Great Creator, it’s the arts I worship. All of them.

 

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January 13, 2012 · 1:59 am

At Sixes and Sevens

I really don’t know what became of The Red Hat Society, but it turns out that my little bookgroup in Seattle could give it a run for its money. This Saturday we will be hosting a tea. How did it happen that women with a love for fine literature and wine or champagne and memoir until the wee hours, will be throwing a proper tea at two o’clock in the afternoon?

A younger woman joined our group a few years back. It was big of us to open our arms to her in that she is gorgeous, striking like a runway model because she was one—for Calvin Klein no less. Turns out she’s the most prolific reader in the group. Our challenge every month is to suggest a title she hasn’t yet read, but we love having her. In her company we all feel a little younger, hipper, smarter, and we’ve all made a conscious effort to be a bit more fashionable. That’s saying a lot in the land of Northface fleece, Merrill shoes, and Wellies.

Anyway while the rest of us have sat around quite comfortably, all being mothers of twenty-somethings off-somewhere-doing-something-splendid, our young friend is still immersed in the twenty-four hour job of raising a child day in and day out. You can tell because there is always a time that must be allotted for her to decompress. When she first joined our bookgroup, her daughter was three or four years of age. Now she is seven, and even A. A. Milne didn’t want to go there. “… now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now and forever.”  Apparently seven is more complicated. Even for an only child, precocious and enchanting, with perhaps more than one child’s share of the advantages that come from having two highly devoted and intellectual parents.

“Tell us,” we asked, “what can we do for her?”

And that’s when it hit us. We could rise up like aunties and throw a little tea party! She could bring her friend, and they in turn could bring their dolls. The American Girl doll, which is a phenomena in itself. Released in 1986 by Pleasant Company, the American Girl doll was there for our girls and they are here for today’s girls. Otherwise, god help us, it would be a total Barbie world. Really, we only had to turn to The American Girl catalog for ideas, but we were not born yesterday and had an inkling of what constitutes a proper tea. One of us remembered cucumber sandwiches in white bread, with the crusts cut off.

“Off with the skin on the cucumber as well!” she cried, recalling that too.

Everyone ran in every direction. The Calvin Klein model mother sped off saying something about “tulle and crinoline,” what she would wear, I think. I signed up for table décor, for which I intend to place small individual pails planted with bulbs: hyacinth and mini daffodils, at each setting for everyone to take home. We will make it look as springtime as possible. Petits fours, placed before the dolls, will look like splendid cakes.

The magic has begun. We are all nearly as giddy as we expect the girls to be on Saturday. The American Girl dolls, of course, will be composed. I turned to Fannie Farmer and Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking for further suggestions. Irma is especially helpful. She offers four menus for afternoon tea. One menu starts off with Dry Sherry, which we will skip. Tea #2, Dubonnet; Tea #3, Claret Cup; and May Wine for Tea #4. We will have to do without all of that, but I may make her Poppy Seed Custard Cake Cockaigne, p. 689. We will all take tea, and the dolls of course will have their own tea set too. Porcelain, of that we can be certain.

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January 7, 2012 · 1:43 am

“How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways…”

Every year at this time when transferring birthdays I want to remember onto the new wall calendar, I include those of the dearly departed. It’s my way of celebrating that person on his or her special day, be it a relative, friend, or dog. For in some families, dogs are people too. In our case: Spooner (5/14), Callie (8/9), Sunny (3/13), and Coco (9/11).

From the very first writer’s conference I attended, I was struck by how extraordinarily well writers age. They just keep doing it. I’m thinking now, there was probably a dog behind each one. Every writer on earth should have a dog, and every dog, a writer; it’s a match made in, let’s say, heaven. To the extent that “writing is the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair,” as Kingsley Amis suggested, I don’t know how I’d do it without a dog willing to log hours upon hours under the writing table, where I keep the dog bed. Toys are scattered around the room, the house, or out on the terrace in the summertime—but it goes without saying that throughout the day, the dog is usually by my side, or breathing her doggy breath at my feet. And nonjudgemental, did I mention that? That could be what helps drive the critic from the room when I am writing.

Coco is my current companion. We’ve had three Golden Retrievers and this crazy little mix, and one by one they all became writing dogs. With Callie I started a memoir, and with her daughter, Sunny, I completed it. As Sunny began to age we went looking for the next adoption. Coco is half American Eskimo and half poodle. We knew nothing about the American Eskimo breed and only looked like we were looking it up in reference books, for having seen her and held her, we were already sold. With Coco’s help we weathered the death of Sunny, and I went for my MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard and wrote my first novel, Black Angels. Lately we are at work on the sequel. Being a small dog, she may outlive and outperform them all and see this one too through completion.

What makes us so compatible, writers and dogs? High on that list has to be a fondness for walks and naps. Throughout the year writers look for every opportunity to walk the dog. And come spring, could those be human scratches at the door too? As for my napping, like writing, the dog is nonjudgmental. My husband would come home and have a fit, but my dog will unquestionably sleep alongside me on the sofa anytime I want a nap, morning, noon, or night.

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January 2, 2012 · 12:52 am

Light as a Feather

“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”(Chinese proverb)

Darkness and night had been closing in on us like a vise. So much for film noir winters in Seattle. You can deal with it, or do like the birds and head south. With our daughters living in San Francisco, my husband and I chose California for Christmas. I haven’t told them yet but it may always be this way.

We are driving. “Welcome to California” reads the sign illustrated with yellow poppies. The sky lifts; it is higher here and blue. Mt. Shasta is straight ahead and pointy. Soft grass on one side of the mountain, on the other, craggy rock. Black angus dot the golden fields. Pine needles shine in a silvery light, looking like feather trees. Rocks glow like mica. Everything is shining in this state. There’s a glare to the light, and something we haven’t seen for months: jet streaks across the sky. And things we never see in Seattle such as trees laden with oranges like ornaments. For the color and the light alone, we are glad we are coming.

I believe it’s a California bylaw that things are never quite what you expected. On Christmas day we dressed and stepped out with our daughters for a Moroccan dinner in The Castro. Later, to my sister-in-law’s home in The Bay Area where the food and the wine  never stop and every room is filled with art, one room flowing into another. Something has come back, it seems, a painting, a piece of sculpture, a magnum bottle, from every place they ever traveled and every event they ever attended. All together, assembled, arranged, and showcased, as one giant celebration of life.

Returning, a steady rain accompanies us as we make our way through The Pacific Northwest. That’s alright, we are over the hump now in terms of darkened days. Sod farms as green as Ireland, tree farms, and despite all the trucks on the road, we noted that not one was carrying logs. When the housing industry is down, the trees get a break. Clear cut areas have a chance to grow back, which has to be good for the birds.

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December 18, 2011 · 3:18 am

Turning Up the Volume

No wonder I get along so well with the elderly members of my weekly writing workshop in a local retirement home. We have so much in common. Call me precocious, but just this week I was diagnosed with hearing loss.

Hearing loss is something that can sneak up on you, unknowingly, over time—I had just assumed it would be a good seventy, eighty, or ninety years. But no, mine arrived early. And I thought my husband was talking lower for some reason, that various rooms had acoustical problems, that cell phones didn’t work as well as land lines used to, and that no phone worked as well as when you can see the person talking. A week ago I almost excused myself from jury duty because whenever the judge brought his hand up to his mouth, I was challenged to understand what he was saying. Turns out, of course, I’ve been supplementing my hearing with a little lip reading. And it wasn’t acoustics in the room; it was my inner ear. How long this had been going on I do not know, but I wish I could do my MFA in Creative Writing all over again. For words were what we lived for at Goddard, and there were numerous readings where, if I hadn’t arrived early enough to secure a seat up front, I was often challenged to hear. I’d like to try it again with the new devise being manufactured for my ears now.

I am surprising not only my husband and friends, but also myself, with my forthright, proactive response to my hearing diagnosis. Heck, I am even blogging about it. Perhaps I just think there are other things to worry about, and as my mother suggested, this is one problem where something can be done. (I am, by the way, experiencing hearing loss before either of my parents). In any case, I am trying to look at needing hearing aids simply like needing reading glasses. For forty years I didn’t think I’d ever need glasses either, and now I wouldn’t think to read without them.

We will just have to see. No doubt I’ve been living with more than my share of quiet, and in many ways it’s been rather nice. I am not so sure I want to hear everything. And chances are I’ve been doing a lot of nodding in social situations the past few years, and it remains to be seen whether I am as agreeable as it appeared. These are questions that only hearing aids can answer.

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