Further Reflections and "Judgement at Nuremberg"

All right, then, the Amazon numbers aren't everything. Writers, of course, always struggle with whether what we write is "good" or "good enough." Sometimes when I reread what I write, I loathe it. Sometimes I wonder who that woman was. And sometimes I reread something I've written -- like the last couple of chapters of my novel -- and I think, damn, that ain't bad. On a good day, "sales" or even "acclaim" doesn't matter. It's what I do. It's what makes me happy.

I found the start of a short story in this computer last week that I'd entirely forgotten about: a couple in the early stages of their marriage go to get their taxes done by a recovering alkie who's married a rich woman. When they arrive, there's a peacock on the roof and everything smells like a skunk. Oddly, I couldn't remember writing it -- but I remember the incident that prompted it. I have no idea where I wanted it to go. Nonetheless, the start I discovered interests me now, like inheriting a little heirloom from somebody else. Mysterious, this creative urge.

Bottom line -- I'm going keep writing because writing makes my brain feel good.

Last night, watched the 1961 Spencer Tracy flick "Judgement at Nuremberg." What a pleasure. Especially noteworthy was the surprisingly lovely and low-key Marlena Dietrich as the haunted widow Mrs. Bertholt. I loved the scene where she's serving Tracy (as Judge Haywood) coffee in little cups in her boarded up flat: trying to grasp what's happened and cling to her elegant life. Yet we know she can't face it: her husband had been hanged for atrocities. A marvelous portrait of yearning for the old civilities and the mourning and anger that comes when denial breaks down.

See, I've forgotten about my Amazon numbers already. Oops...

Off to see "Stardust" in search of coolness on another day bereft of sea breezes.

Falling, Falling Down the Amazon Rapids

I've known all along this could happen, like death, and I've tried to prepare myself. But as it gets closer and closer, every day without a sale, I'm no more resigned than I ever was.

My book is about to hit the one millionth mark. On Amazon. The sales rank, that is, NOT, my dear friends, the sales.

I've seen it happen to others, and I've even gloated with shameful schadenfreude as the books of people even MORE famous than me sunk into seven digits -- books that have won awards, books that were reviewed in the New York Times, even books of people I was once married to.

As the dreaded milestone approached several times, I was saved at the last moment -- the last time, when I'd hit 957,000, by a mystery buyer. Ted swore it wasn't him -- offended at the very suggestion that he would intefere with his woman's Amazon rank. And he made me swear it wasn't, well, me. I swore.

Now I'm at 805,000 again, and I just know this is the time it's gonna happen.

I have a couple of printouts to prove the book hit 5 digits several times -- hovering at glorious 45,000th in the halycon days right after it came out. It has plunged into that lush territory a couple of times since -- usually for about three minutes right after a single buyer ponies up. Not that I'm constantly watching, you understand. But it's like going through one of my childhood home towns, Nellie or Blissfield -- you have to be constantly watching or you'll miss it. (OK, I just didn't want to say "blink" this time. But what a nice concise verb, what a fun cliche!)

I don't know what I'll do when it happens. I'm better off without lurid Bushmill's binges, I've learned. Maybe I'm better off without my Amazon bookmark, without my trigger finger on the tormenting mouse. I know, I know, on to the next thing, the next book, the next act of audacity and hope.

It's just that, I still love my baby and I haven't quite cut the apron strings. Here's her pretty cover, if you want to make my day and buy, buy, buy:



And this helpful link:
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Blind-Jan-Worth/dp/0595399770

A Beautiful and Deadly Harvest

Who can explain why something deadly is also so beautiful?

The castor bean plant popped its pods, so to speak, in the last few days, but I couldn't see any of the beans on the floor of the deck where I'd moved it to keep it away from children and passersby. My gardening friend Michael and I had been watching this volunteer plant for weeks and neither of us could resist letting it grow, out of curiosity and respect, even after we figured out it was a castor bean plant, producer of ricin, one of the most toxic substances known.

Yesterday when he came by and we looked at it, he said he thought the beans were still inside, and in the interest of safety we should probably remove all the pods and see what we could find. We did and they were. We harvested 28 beans. As we had learned from reading W.P. Armstrong's website, we could see that the design on every bean is unique, like snowflakes. We also read that while it was not dangerous to handle the beans, as few as three of them, if ingested, could kill a child, and eight of them could kill an adult human. We handled them delicately. I washed my hands thoroughly afterwards, but later, when I lined them up on the kitchen counter to take a mug shot of the lethal little beauties, fat with poison and dead ringers for the bloated ticks they're named for, I could swear my fingers itched.

While we were pulling out the beans, one fell off the deck and onto the driveway below. Michael immediately went downstairs and was gone a long time. When he came back, he had the errant bean in his hand, and, relieved, I slipped it into the white envelope I'd pulled from my husband's desk.

I can't explain exactly how I felt looking at these beans. They are beautiful to me -- partly because of their idiosyncrasy, and partly because of their potential. I need to destroy them, but before I do, I'm inclined to offer a tribute to this powerful survivor, an intimidating and formidable harvest from Mother Earth.

Now there's another volunteer plant in a pot out front. Michael says it's a passion flower, a copious vine, and we've decided to place it where it can climb up a big old evergreen trunk in the corner of the porch, without anything to stop it.

Homesick for a Downpour

I miss rain.

It's hot. Yeah, yeah, it's a dry heat. And that's just it.

California hot makes you wake up with dry eyes. You get headaches. Your sinuses, their weird, bony cavities scorched down to their tiny hairs, ache and cry (a brittle rasping little yawp) for relief. Your finger tips pucker and your rings slide around on the flesh, which suddenly looks all knuckly, giving up its plump moisture somewhere else, probably the mysterious dark organs. You lose your appetite even for fresh asparagus and chardonnay.

Sleep is restless. You wake up at 3 a.m. your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth, and you're pretty sure you've been gasping for breath and snoring. Up naked, you wander your digs, the dry bottoms of your feet scritching across the unrefreshing vinyl. You're looking for water. In the dark like this you feel like an animal, maybe even an insect, a cockroach. You feel around under shelves in the dark kitchen, and when you find a bottle and crack off its lid and drink it, you let a little run down your thorax. You think you can feel the water actually moving into your body, rushing through a hundred parched capillaries, and then you feel your human body again, your heart and your elbows and the wrinkly part of your eyelids. It's a startling sensation, the body's machine taking hold, and it vaguely frightens you. To calm down, you stare out at the banks of harbor lights which almost always do the trick. But with no moisture in the air to make them twinkle, they glare back charmlessly, hard and arrogant and bright. You primally fear thirst. You know there's a lot of water out there but you couldn't drink it. You sneak back to bed, into the barren sheets.

In the morning, you feel irritable and parched; you have to apologize to your partner for your sapless remarks, the words catching in your throat, even before 9 a.m. The morning paper crackles, sere and staticky as you flip each page. Your horoscope doesn't mention water: it says you should hunt alone. Even bullshit has more juice than that. Even the news is dessicated and harsh.

You have work to do, but you don't want to do it. All you want to do is flop down on the crinkly dry couch and watch CNN, which is repetitive, droning and dry.

This is when all those other words wash over you: cloudburst, deluge, drencher, drizzle, flood, mist, monsoon, rivulet, shower, sprinkle, stream, torrent, volley, wet stuff -- and you know it's about time to get back to Flint.

On Not Dancing at Avalon

When Glen Larson and Bruce Belland of The Four Preps wrote and recorded "Twenty Six Miles Across the Sea/Santa Catalina is awaitin' for me," neither of them had ever been there. The song shot to #2 in March of 1958, but Belland said he didn't make it to the island, bought in its entirety in 1919 by William Wrigley of gum fame, until 1961.

By 1958, though, the palatial Avalon casino, with its huge ballroom, had been going great guns for 29 years. The casino, which we can sometimes see on very clear days from Pt. Fermin Park in San Pedro, reminds me of the Pantheon -- a pantheon to dancing. People used to ride a boat over from L.A., dancing all the while, then dance up a garlanded walkway from the dock to the ballroom, and then dance up its ramps to the ballroom floor, where thousands of people could mix. And then they'd catch the boat back and arrive in time to turn up for work the next morning. Here's how it looked, empty of its revelers, when we recently trudged up those same ramps, wondering how women did it in high heels, and feeling every calf muscle. It's still a gorgeous, glimmering room, and you can step outside on a wide balcony and survey the whole harbor of Avalon.

Our tour guide said Wrigley, a tycoon of particular rectitude, declared many rules of behavior for the ballroom. No drinking, for instance. No smoking. And no "close dancing." Ballroom dicks used to walk around sweeping their arms between offending dancers to maintain propriety.

Gum was allowed.

Our guide asked if anybody wanted to dance, but nobody did. "You'll regret it when you get home," he warned. But the only place to get boogie-inducing courage was a bar way down on the beach, and the big glowing floor intimidated us -- not to mention all those other strangers, wheezing from the long ascent, in bermuda shorts and Hollywood teeshirts.

Big bands still perform at the casino -- which means, we learned, not "a place to squander hundreds of quarters on slot machines while drinking watered down rum and cokes," as I'd always thought, but rather, "a gathering place."

As a kid growing up in the Fifties who wasn't allowed to dance, and who still can't do much on a dance floor except shake my anarchic booty to old R&B, I find this all impossibly dazzling and exotic.

Touchy Feely Nixon

The gift shop is the only refuge for irony, the only acknowledgement of an immense pop culture legacy at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda -- there, you can buy mugs with photos of the 37th president bowling and a mouse pad showing him shaking hands with Elvis Presley. You can buy little tins of "Presidential Peppermints." You can pick up 50s-style coin purses, those soft rubber yonnis, amusingly sexual, that you open by squeezing open a slot at both ends -- they say "Nixon" in red, white and blue. You can get "Highly scented First Lady Travel Candles" and my favorite, under the label "1600 for men," a jar of "Power Muscle Soak" bath beads bearing the presidential seal.

But as soon as you walk into the cool capacious lobby, past a plaque recognizing creepily echoing names like Mrs. Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo and Robert Aplanalp, you know that the Nixon library is about warm and fuzzy reconsiderations of history, about rehabilitation, about compassion for the dark and star-crossed Quaker prince.

Disturbingly, it works. Diving into the Nixon story, the way it's told in Yorba Linda, upended my blase hostility, unquestioned since the youthful certainties of my generation's righteous Sevenities indignations about Watergate.

I didn't want to go. I never would have gone there, but for the entreaties of our visitors this week, a pair of lively young academics. One was still in diapers during Watergate and the other wasn't even born. They shamed us into chauffeuring them 40 miles from San Pedro's cool breezes by gently insisting that they "wanted to know." My resistance to submerging into that grim time seemed shallow at best.

As one of my companions noted, all the docents look like Pat Nixon -- they are kind and solicitous and stiffly proper, eager to talk about Pat's rose garden and the reproduction of Nixon's favorite White House space, the cozy Lincoln Room, complete with his favorite slouchy brown chair. There is no mention of the moniker "Tricky Dick," no mention of that infamous First Dog Checkers, no mention of the good cloth coat, no audio clip of "I am not a crook."

Instead, a wall of framed letters from kids after Nixon's 1960 defeat to the much-hated JFK. From eight-year-old Bob Fahlstom of Evanston IL, "I feel very sorry that you lost. I'm a small Republican. I beat my brains out working for you." From Debbie Rathbun, age 7, "Dear Mr. Nixon..."Don't feel too bad, our class voted 23-8 for you. So you're still the president of Room 16." From James G. Mead, Age 7 ("but wish I was 21,"): Dear Nixon Your debates are the best. I think Kennedy is a hothead and he fell you with a lot of balony."

There is a bizarre mural by Hungarian artist Ferenc Daday, ironically a perfect example of a Soviet-era propaganda poster, depicting Nixon at Andau in 1956 after the Hungarian revolution. In the center, Nixon in a beige trench coat pats the head of a small girl who reaches up to him with a sprig of flowers. There are peasants leaning toward him, a triptych of women weeping in the background. The accompanying plaque says that during Nixon's visit, "he stayed up all night riding in a haywagon pulled by a tractor as he accompanied the freedom fighters on their rounds through the countryside to search for others who had escaped the Soviet crackdown."

Weirdly, it's believable. This same man who'd made a name for himself on HUAC, jubilantly nailing that commie Alger Hiss from Whittaker Chamber's pumpkin papers, believed that freedom from Communism was the great good, the all-consuming goal. He had a certain naive purity.

As has been widely noted, the Watergate section itself, remarkably, has been totally torn out. In that hallway, instead, are white walls randomly splashed with olive drab paint, some of it leaving long, morose drips. The exhibit was gutted in March by order of Timothy Naftali, the library's first federal director, a Harvard-trained historian. The action is part of a major change from being a privately run facility — the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system — to an institution run by the National Archives. The federal librarians had long known the earlier Watergate version was a whitewash, and perhaps their new attempt to document the story will wrestle more honorably with truth.

Most powerfully for me, Nixon's tormented guilt and the narrative of his doomed ascent from a struggling rural childhood, makes George W. Bush seem even more banal, more shameful, more infuriating. The library is situated on the 9 acres of Frank Nixon's original homestead -- the house, a small, tidy cottage that looks like something out of Bedford Falls, can be toured, and there's a big California pepper tree that Frank himself planted in about 1912 -- all seemingly part of that hopeful American dream, the hardscrabble Nixon family running their market, hanging together at the death of Richard's little brother Arthur. At his worst, Nixon spoke clearly and passionately, evincing a complex intelligence. His fall is all the more awful because of where he started -- not entitled to anything, not the smug beneficiary of wealth or connection. If you're looking for it, there's a vein of horrific implication about what this means in the Nixon library -- a Horatio Alger story that ends up wrong, a reverse image of a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington tale in which the individual's corruption and failure is unsparingly public and cruel.

Of course he deserved it. But it feels like something different from the cynical and doggedly unapologetic and presumptuous abuses of power at work today in the depressing presidency of Royal George.

" I think Nixon was a sad and pathetic man," one of my young companions remarked on our last swoop through the gift shop. I groaned and reluctantly agreed.

Personally, confronted with those glum walls in the scoured Watergate hallway and what their hard silence implied, even after contemplating the nostalgic Nixon home, even after breathing in the perfume of yellow roses (like an aerosol can in a bathroom, maybe?) I still wanted to deface something, draw a big peace symbol onto the blank whiteness or scrawl, "Nixon lied." I had my hand in my bag, reaching for a pen. My husband stopped me -- for my own good. He was right. I'm pretty sure there were cameras everywhere. Even without the catharsis of graffiti, I had to face the facts, so to speak: the telling of even the darkest history is always changing.

Happiness for Comedians

Milestones for two funny men:

1. Dr. Woody Allen!! It's his first honorary degree, and of course, it happened overseas. It's a "doctor honoris causa" from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The citation lauded him for "having offered an original and personal view of the world from which we have all benefited, and in recognition of his work in the cinema, which represents a bridge between two cinematographic traditions: American and European." The only other recipients of honorary degrees from Pompeu Fabra have been Desmond Tutu and historian Miquel Batllori.
He said, humbly, "I've never graduated from much in my life" and recalled how he'd dropped out of film school at New York University. "The work involved going to watch films and write about them. I saw lots of films but in the end I failed," he said. Ha ha!
Here's Woody as "Virgil Starkwell" (best nom de thug ever!) in "Take the Money and Run."

So now Woody's not just a beloved nut, but an academia nut! He deserves it. His satires of pomposity and elitism are, in themselves, intellectual -- not to mention zestfully accurate and affectionate.

2. Steve Martin marries again -- to Anne Stringfield, a 35-year-old writer and former staffer at The New Yorker. Guests for the event last weekend didn't know about the wedding -- they thought it was just a party. According to tvnz.co.nz (New Zealand? Okay, students, it was the first item that came up on Google. I'm guilty) "Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey presided over the ceremony and the best man was Lorne Michaels, the creator of 'Saturday Night Live,' a popular US television comedy show that Martin has guest hosted more than anyone else. Martin, 61, sported a mustache that he has let grow for his role as Inspector Clouseau in an upcoming sequel to the 2006 movie 'The Pink Panther.' "

Martin's 1991 movie "L.A. Story" is one of my favorites about the City of Angels, and it's the one that romantically co-starred his first wife-to-be, Victoria Tennant. In particular, here's a snippet from a dining-out scene at the main character's girlfriend's favorite restaurant, "L'Idiot" -- I think, um, it's on Las Palmas Avenue:

Guy with neck-support: I'll have a decaf coffee.
Trudi: I'll have a decaf espresso.
Movie critic: I'll have a double decaf cappuccino.
Policeman: Give me decaffeinated coffee ice cream.
Harris: I'll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon.
Trudi: I'll have a twist of lemon.
Guy with neck-support: I'll have a twist of lemon.
Movie critic: I'll have a twist of lemon.
Cynthia: I'll have a twist of lemon.

And then we see a huge mound of lemons tumbling out of the kitchen...

Anyway, hearty congratulations to both of these cherished comics, who have made the rest of us so happy so often.

Goodbye #1: Farewell Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis: 1913-2007

Some memorable quotes from one of psychology's most brilliant curmudgeons and one of my idols:

"I would have liked having children to some degree, but frankly I haven't got the time to take the kids to the goddamn ballgame."

"Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional."

"The art of love is largely the art of persistence."

"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."

"There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy."

"There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational."

"We teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist."

When I discovered Albert Ellis while getting my M.S.W. at Michigan in 1980, it suddenly seemed possible to make sense of human travails -- my own and those of my clients. And he delivered his pungent advice with a puncturing and cleansing humor that was a great relief to me when surrounded by people at Michigan who seemed humorless, elitist and arrogant. A rascal and big-mouth, Ellis founded the school of cognitive behavioral therapy (actually, he called his branch of it "rational emotive behavior therapy") and wrote 78 books. I read the one above from cover to cover and used it daily with clients in my brief three years as a counselor. I applied it to my own tempestuous life as well, and I think it helped. And I daresay I use it today in my teaching.

He is one of my intellectual grandpas, and I'm very grateful for his breathtakingly sensible work.

Below is a photo of Ellis, right, with one of my other heroes, Aaron Beck.

Goodbye #2: The Best Tabloid Ever

Can it be? I'm in shock and mourning -- the world's greatest tabloid ever, the Weekly World News, is shutting down Aug. 3. Life in the checkout line is gonna be so damn boring from now on.

According to Frank Mastropolo, apparently from Weekly World News, here's the official announcement. "Magnificently Trashy" indeed!

Excess Hollywood: WEEKLY WORLD NEWS DEAD AT 28!
Freaks, Geeks, Weirdos!

Weekly World News, the newspaper of record for the deranged, announced this week that it was folding on Aug. 3, leaving Bat Boy, Zombie Elvis and P'lod, the extraterrestrial who had an affair with Hillary Clinton, homeless. No reason was given by American Media for shutting down the almost-entirely fictional, magnificently trashy supermarket tabloid, though declining circulation was suspected. Launched in 1979, the rag somehow managed to beat the rest of the news media to scoops like "Oprah to Replace Lincoln on $5 Bill," "12 Senators Are From Outer Space" and "Pope Wants Mel Gibson as Successor."

Jefferson and Dionysius in the Back Yard

I’ve been thinking about back yards. As I write this I’m sitting in a place with no backyard – with no yard at all. It’s an apartment on a steep hillside overlooking the L.A. harbor, and all the other little bungalows and apartment buildings, terraced by law so as not to cut off the view of the row above, are so close together I can hear my neighbor on one side snore and on the other side, sneeze. Sometimes we yell “Gesundheit!”

People cultivate cacti, aloe, portulaca, pansies and hibiscus in pots on their tiny porches and decks. Here and there is a nook just big enough for a thick-necked palm or a medusa’s head of bougainvillea. But no back yards.

One can develop a taste for it: if you can at least see and hear the clanking, ever varied harbor, with its container ships, liners, tugboats, yachts, flags, cranes, bridges, foghorns and of course, the sparkling sea stretching out beyond the breakwater – all that business you don’t have to tend to but which goes on with or without you -- you can actually relax and forget about your claustrophobia in your microscopic high-density bit of real estate. The harbor’s a big complicated front yard, hard-won and shared by everybody on the hill.

For back yards, you have to go to the Midwest.

At home in Flint, I have a fine back yard. Midwesterners generally do: small or large, usually with a swathe of grass that we mow – one week diagonal, another straight across, another up and down. The night after you mow it, it smells fabulous and for most of the summer, there are fireflies courting in the fresh-cut blades. I’m thinking about how sweet that is.

Back yards offer solace and – old-fashioned word – surcease.

One of my first memories is sitting in a galvanized iron tub in a back yard in Ohio, cooling off on a hot August day. Another is shelling peas with my mother -- on our laps, bowls of fat pods, fresh picked and still sun-hot from the garden. I remember how happy she was -- peas right out of her own garden! We ate them that night.

I got married once in my back yard –the leafy triangle behind the 70-year-old house of my first domestic era. We piled up a feast on a long table, and we sat out there drinking champagne until 3 a.m. The next day two dozen plastic corks poked up from the grass like shuttlecocks.

I celebrated my second marriage in a back yard, too – new husband, new house, new back yard to seed with memories. After dinner al fresco, we put up a big screen and showed an outdoor movie of our California rites. We served drinks out of the garage and lit sparklers after dark.


Back yards can be theaters for revenge. A buddy of mine said when he got divorced the only thing he took was his Weber grill – totem of the back yard life. I like to imagine him using it still, vindicated with every juicy bratwurst in his new, happier life.

Back yards are our own little nature preserves, where we exclaim over cardinals, yell at squirrels, equivocate over bunnies and try to get tomatoes to grow. Sometimes, they’re graveyards. Our late cat Joey, a transplant from California who zestfully claimed our Flint back yard, is buried under the bird feeder where he loved to lurk. We had a funeral for him one summer evening after a game of croquet (another backyard must) and after a few toasts, we took turns spooning him into the cone of good Flint dirt we’d hollowed out for his feline eternity.

We like to own our back yards, and in the city, of course, we put up fences – not out of hostility or fear, like at the Mexican border or around the Green Zone, but, I contend, out of respect for our neighbors and a deep-seated taste for privacy. I think we bound our back yards too because we revel in idiosyncrasy and we want that undisputed spot where we can be ourselves.

Not to get too high-falutin’, but it just occurred to me that Midwestern yards reflect an itchy tension in the U.S. of A.: the front yard is sort of Hamiltonian, where we defer to the majority and keep up a respectable, potted-geranium face; the back yard is Jeffersonian, where we assert our personal liberty and, say, flaunt our taste in hostas or let the crabgrass go wild or put a terra cotta Buddha under the mulberry or even, say, hopefully throw out the occasional cannabis seed if we damn well please. Front yard, Apollo; back yard, Dionysius.

So, my fellow Americans, there’s something worth fighting for, if you ask me: the right to back yards. The right to those earthy squares of liberty, where, on certain summer nights, you can lie down on a quilt and listen to the cicadas until, as James Agee once remembered, the night is “one blue dew,” the stars “wide and alive…each like a smile of great sweetness.”

This essay is also available in www.eastvillagemagazine.org under "Village Life: A Smile of Great Sweetness." Photos by Ted.

Bittersweet Stax Archeology at the Hollywood Bowl

It was a great L.A. night -- clear skies, that breeze with a faint hint of sea water, the "X" of the searchlights overhead, many bottles of wine uncorked -- undoubtedly pricey meritages and spritely chardonnays -- in the box seats. On our bench six rows behind the ritzy section and crammed together with a bunch of other oldies, we were happy, too, with our very drinkable pinot noir in plastic cups, as Eddie Floyd in his classic tuxedo kicked things off with "Knock on Wood." Then followed Lalah Hathaway (Donny's daughter), William Bell ("I forgot to be your lover"), the remarkable Mable John belting"Your Good Thing (is About to End)" Angie Stone, and the guy Ted and I most wanted to see and hear, Booker T. Jones ("Green Onions," of course).

Booker T and the MG's Then

The second half was devoted to Isaac Hayes, whose slow, unsteady gait during the long walk to his keyboard prompted shocked gasps from the crowd. On the big screens, it was painfully apparent that even sitting down, settling down at that keyboard was difficult for the colorfully-robed legend. That entrance built drama -- the blast of his lush, urbane hits with a terrific back-up band was immensely reassuring and a relief. In one pause he sighed, "I'm glad to be here." He announced he's coming out with a new album. From the back, someone shouted, "We'll buy it, Isaac!"

This was part of the Stax Records 50th anniversary tour -- a celebration of the Soul/R&B label hatched by Jim Stewart and his older sister,, Estelle Axton in Memphis in 1957, originally as Satellite Records, probably because Sputnik had just been launched. Estelle, married and with a couple of kids, took out a second mortgage on her house to do it. Eventually, Stewart and Axton combined letters from their last names and made it Stax. Estelle kept her job at a bank until 1961.

And of course, from that old theater in Memphis, they eventually recorded songs and artists that my generation avidly danced to at all our high school proms and made out to in our fathers' cars on summer nights a lot like last night. It's impossible to hear these songs without feeling a bit melancholy. Our youth is gone.

And, well, the artists themselves are so...old. Well, it has been 50 years. But... I found myself worrying that somebody would fall or lose the beat or miss the note. I turned to my friend Dr.Teddy about halfway through and said, "It's like they dug these people out of a museum." The oldest of the lot is Mable John, who's 77. She clearly wobbled in her R&B shoes but momma, she managed to deliver the message. Eddie Floyd, formerly of the Falcons which included Wilson Pickett for a time, moved carefully but stylishly. William Bell is 68 and Booker T, who we thought looked best but didn't have to sing or move around onstage, is 62.

Booker T Today

Even the youngsters brought on board for variety, new Stax acquisition Stone and Hathaway, are 46 and 39 respectively.

Isaac Hayes, who's hardly the oldest among them at 64, was hardest to watch. I mean, this guy was the rumble-voiced sex god of my twenties: how can he be walking like an old man? A 2006 stroke may be the reason for his halting movement, though I note on Wikipedia he and his fourth wife just had a baby last year, his 12th child. Okay, something still works. Not that any of us should be making 12 replacements of ourselves, but...forgive me, one craves signs of vigor.

Everybody came back onstage for the final performance, a somewhat pensive rendition of "Dock of the Bay." It was a nostalgic tribute to the era, to Stax Records, and to Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in 1967. I think I'm relieved, though, that he died young. At least we didn't have to see him stagger across the stage. Maybe it's better to listen to the music at home, with all the trappings of denial in place and, especially, no dancing in front of mirrors.

Phil Weiss His Own Man, As Always

Molting is a great thing -- I've done it once or twice myself. And now the intrepid Phil Weiss, to whom I'm indebted for many kindnesses, including reconnecting me with the man who's now my husband, has just accomplished a molting of his own. He's left the New York Observer, where he was a columnist for years and a recently converted blogger, and has taken his blog, MondoWeiss, with him. I've changed the link to MondoWeiss at the right so that you can see what he's up to.

The change, it seems, like many moltings, was accompanied by some personal pain and intellectual wrestling: in short, Weiss, who's nothing if not a dogged questioner, has been re-exploring what it means to be Jewish. After an apparently intense season of reflection on his own roots, omnivorous reading, conversations with scholars and other experts, and trips to Israel and Syria, he found his views about Israel changing. This was what he wanted to write about, and his blog on the Observer sometimes drew 100 comments a day. But the financially beleaguered Observer's new owner, an observant Orthodox Jew named Jared Kushner, didn't like where Weiss's intellectual journey was taking him.


Weiss and I got to know each other through our Tonga books -- here is the cover of his chilling 2004 account of the Deborah Gardner murder, the same tragedy, though fictionalized, which begins my novel Night Blind. Weiss has moved on from Tonga and his long obsession with the 1976 murder -- I congratulate him for that, though I know that at the heart of his obsession was his passion for justice, fairness and reason. Perhaps those same qualities are at play in his current transition.

You can read the whole interesting story, from Weiss's perspective, in the June 4, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine -- www.amconmag.com.

What To Do With the Castor Bean

So, it's a castor bean. I finally found out that's the volunteer plant in our porch pot -- one missed by the renegade flying car.

It's a fascinating plant. Related to the Mexican jumping bean and, like coffee, not technically a bean, it is one of Southern California's native species. And its Latin name suggests its danger: ricinus communis -- it's got ricin in it, the deadly poison. Its name suggests that its beans, described by some as "beautiful," look like engorged ticks.

The seed pods on my plant haven't popped yet. So what should I do?

According to W.P. Armstrong in his wonderful Bio 101 web page "Wayne's Word" from Palomar College, "The spiny seed pod or capsule is composed of three sections or carpels which split apart at maturity. Each section (carpel) contains a single seed, and as the carpel dries and splits open, the seed is often ejected with considerable force. Walking among large castor shrubs on a hot summer day can be quite an experience, with the sound of exploding carpels and seeds flying through the air and bouncing off road signs, sidewalks, and your head.

"Although castor oil is rather malodorous and distasteful," Armstrong continues, "it is the source of several synthetic flower scents and fruit flavors (esters), such as jasmine, apricot, peach, plum, rose, banana, and lemon. The chemicals (esters) responsible for these flavors and aromas are obtained from ricinoleic acid, one of the important ingredients of natural castor oil. In fact, ricinoleic acid comprises about 90% of the total triglyceride fatty acids of castor oil. Castor oil is also used in making soap, inks, and plastics; for preserving leather; as an illuminant; in Turkey red oil for dyeing and finishing textiles; and in brake fluids and certain insecticidal oils. Even after the oil has been removed, the poisonous crushed seeds or oil cake (pomace) makes an excellent fertilizer.

"Brazil and India are two of the major world producers of castor oil," Armstrong writes, "although the plants are grown commercially in many other countries, including the United States (New Mexico, Texas, and the midwestern United States). It has been estimated that the world production of castor seeds was nearly one million tons in 1970. In terms of total production, castor oil is one of the world's most important industrial vegetable oils."

So should I murder this complicated plant?

A Non-earthquake and the TransPac

TransPac yachts waiting for the start at Pt. Fermin, with the fireboat spouting
Photo by Ted

...I'm glad for the marine layer this Monday morning, cool and calming. The marine layer is a blessing of coastal mornings, gentle overcast, yielding serenity like a fresh snowfall in Michigan. Out here they call it May Gray and June Gloom and complain about it. I prefer it, though, to the white sun and early heat some mornings. I don't know if they have a name for it in July -- I'll call it the July Sigh...it's soothing. As a Midwesterner from "lake effect" country, I'm used to thick overhead clouds. I feel at home on the edge of gloom.

Big event this weekend: at about 1:30 a.m. Friday night, a huge crash, breaking glass, heavy cracking sounds. What the hell was that? We leaped out of bed forgetting we were naked. First thought an earthquake, never far from our minds here, that little subliminal itch of dread. But nothing shook. Next thought the harbor -- also never far from our thoughts these scary days. No flame amid the sparkling lights, no smoke cloud on the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

Turned out there was an old red car nose up in our front yard -- lost its emergency brake on the steep hill above us, slid down, driverless, and rammed into our brick and clapboard walls. In minutes paramedics briefly checked in and then departed, seeing only four of five of us in hastily donned bathrobes and sweats, sleepily gaping at the pile of masonry and muttering holy shit. Then the landlady, looking remarkably stylish, and the flash of many photos for insurance. The inevitable cops, then the car's chagrined owner herself, anxiously sweeping up debris. We slipped back into bed and by morning, the car'd been towed off to auto rehab, where it would undoubtedly say it never meant to hurt anybody.

Meanwhile, yachtsmen and women were preparing for the race from Pt. Fermin to Hawaii -- they gathered at the point yesterday and finally took off for the 2,200-mile run at about 1 p.m. I loved watching them congregate and circle, waiting for send-off. I hope they have OnStar, a lot of spam, and some good blues for the journey.

Keokuk in the Summer of 1970

I love Iowa. I know nothing whatsoever about today's Iowa: my infatuation is wholly based on one long summer, the summer of 1970, when I rode the bus for 24 hours from Ohio to Keokuk, Iowa, to be a student intern at the town's little daily newspaper, the Daily Gate City.

When you're a geezette like me you get to the point where you remember more about the past than about what you did last week. My mind is full of memories about Keokuk. I lived in a hot, dark walkup apartment with the Daily Gate City's city editor, Eleanor Waterhouse. She was from Hawaii and had graduated from Punahoe, but there she was in Keokuk, having the time of her life cranking out dead-on, devoted community journalism.

As long as I adhered to her exacting journalistic standards, she let me do anything I wanted, even teaching me how to develop black and white film in the high-ceilinged darkroom. She was about five years older than me and kindly cleared out a corner of her living room, where I slept all summer on a rollout single bed. We cooked on a little gas stove and parceled out yogurt by combining it with jello to make it go farther. You could smell the graineries around town -- a burned, nutty smell. There was a factory that made rings for pig's noses. I interviewed a rock band and for about a week was one of their groupies: Ellie ran the story.

Almost every day after work we'd go to the city pool and swim. The Chamber of Commerce motto that year was "Life is Good in Keokuk" and people all over town drove around with that declaration plastered to their bumpers. We mocked that motto, but we too were having an excellent life.

And of course, there was the river. Keokuk is in the so-called "tit" of Southern Iowa that dips into Missouri, right on the Mississippi. Yes, emayessessayessessaypeepeeaye. There are locks in Keokuk and on steamy moonlit nights we'd go down to the river, sit on a bluff, and watch barges go through. I loved that river, and even now, whenever I fly over its massive brown curves on my way from Michigan to California, I gaze down in reverence and awe. In the summer of 1970, I knew I was having an American Experience.

Context: this was the summer after the Kent State shootings, when four died and nine more were wounded by National Guard gunfire in front of Taylor Hall, then the home of the journalism program. My program. I was in another campus building when the shootings happened, but I got there shortly afterwards and saw the blood. A guy I was dating then was the R.A. in a nearby dorm. He saw Sandy Scheuer, a speech therapy student caught in the crossfire, dying as he watched, helpless and shocked.

I wasn't political -- I didn't know anything about politics, or particularly care back then -- and I wanted to get away, not knowing till much later that there is no way to fully escape the effects of tragedy -- the effects of seeing blood everywhere, the young Guardsmen firing on people their same age -- all of us naive American Baby Boomers. Something had gone terribly wrong. And I thought Keokuk would be a fine place to avoid it all.

In some ways it was. Ironically, I met and eventually dated the son of a local brahmin. He'd graduated from Princeton and came into town for -- yes, I'm not kidding -- National Guard duty. I smoked pot for the first time in his little Porsche parked in an overgrown hideaway on the river, lush water collecting in verdant shallow pools about a foot from the headlights. It was if nothing else mattered -- no Vietnam, no Kent State -- only the river and this good-looking boy and kissing in the cattails.

And I covered a visit to town by Sargent Shriver, at a Democratic fundraiser that was so much fun I believe it was the first time I considered joining the Peace Corps. I remember only that he was handsome and charming and willing to talk to a kid reporter and that the Democrats under those hot Midwestern tents were a lot more fun than their GOP counterparts, whom Ellie and I also covered.

I'm remembering all this today because of a Slate piece on Christopher Dodd, an RPCV who, of course, is running for president. Incredibly, though his poll numbers put him near the bottom and he's WAAAAYYY behind "Obamilary," it sounded as if he was having fun there -- appearing with Paul Simon and introducing himself as Art Garfunkel. Then the two of them warbled a series of Simon and Garfunkel hits. That's what Iowa does for you -- makes you happy and maybe a little crazy after all these years. I love Iowa.

Re-enactors on the Hill Top

Last weekend was a big event on the hilltop above the Korean Bell: Old Fort MacArthur Days, when historical enactors assemble in various tents, teepees and, let's say, yurts to pretend to be old timey Red Coats, Yankee rebels, pirates, rummies, clansmen, crusaders, Hussars, ladies in pushed up lacy bodices and fancy hats, mercenaries, generals, old west women of ill repute. Abraham Lincoln was walking around in his stovepipe hat. Somebody appearing to be Kit Carson sweated up and down the walkways in a long fur coat and handlebar mustache. There was a half rotted corpse on a stake and rows of artillery shells for sale. Also, though I'm not sure what it had to do with Old Fort MacArthur, there were gladiators. Ted says he swears some were Carthaginians, and he says he knows his Carthaginians.

Here's my favorite photo of the afternoon:



A few roustabouts slurped from tankards, and one festooned cad yelled, "Rum! It's not just for breakfast anymore."

While we watched, a guy with a bullhorn announced that World War II was about to begin. Five minutes later, after some convincing booms, bangs and puffs of smoke, it seemed to be over.

I've always ridiculed the idea of re-enactors, for some reason -- perhaps some vestigial puritanical distrust of theater and people running around saying "forsooth" is in my bones. But everybody on the hilltop appeared to be having a great time, and I found myself enjoying the crazy playfulness. And it was especially great they got the war over with so fast. Could we copy and paste that efficient tableau, please, the war where everybody simply kicks up a lot of dust and nobody really dies?

Bees in the Lavender at the Getty Villa

Yesterday, a visit to the Getty Villa in Malibu. One of my favorite moments, walking through the lush herb garden and coming across hundreds of honey bees in the lavender. So that's one place, at least, where the bees are thriving. What a feast for the senses. What reassurance in worrisome times.

Remarkable Birth Stories

Rachel Kellum gave birth outdoors. And she has documented this amazing self-chosen rite, an event during which she was surrounded by strong, beautiful and skillful women, on a website that I've added to my links list at right. This is by way of introducing her and her brave and moving devotion to natural childbirth.

I met Rachel at the Readers and Writers in the Rockies conference last month and was struck by her earthy and loving demeanor. As I've explored her website and browsed her master's thesis providing context for her conscious decisions about how to deliver her two sons, I've been further engaged and absorbed.

Childbirth is one of life's central events that eluded me, and though I've made my peace with it, the fact that I never had a child is one of my life regrets. However, one of the most significant gifts of my life was when my beloved friend Ellen invited me to be her birth coach; I was there that first week in October many years ago when her child, Claire, was born, and I deeply mourned when Ellen died cruelly just two years later from pancreatic cancer. But I am so grateful to have been at the side of at least one other woman during her labor. And if she ever needs to be reassured, I can tell Claire heartily about how much love was in the room the day she was born.

It is thus quite moving to know that women still are encircling each other at the moment of birth and bringing children into the world in an embrace of welcome and love. The images are graphic, but Rachel has set up the site so that if you prefer to read her stories without the photos, you can do so. Personally I find the ritual they document incredibly powerful and significant.

Leggy Palm Trees, Startling Underarms and a Podcast

Yes, it's been awhile. But now I've polished off the spring semester, gone to Crested Butte, Colorado for a writing gig -- sponsored by the meritorious Crested Butte Friends of the Library and the powerhouses of the Readers and Writers in the Rockies -- closed up the house in Flint for awhile, and made it back to our sweet apartment overlooking the L.A. harbor. Many thanks to these generous, literate and energetic folks in the high Rockies, a spectacularly beautiful spot.

As you can see, things grow big and fast in the sea air. Above is my favorite succulent, which almost doubled in size since I was last here. And what is that "volunteer" with the thistly pods in the corner pot? Ted's son says it's poisonous. Any help out there?



In San Pedro today, it's hot -- the big American flag at Ft. MacArthur blowing the wrong way, out to sea, meaning the Santa Ana winds might have kicked up, sending LA smog our direction. We're spoiled out here -- usually it's the other way around, the sea breezes blowing inland, keeping us smugly cool and enjoying reasonably clean air.

This is the first break I've had in months, and I'm glad to be here on this hillside perch, with the opportunity to ruminate, cogitate and contemplate. If I listen to my marketing mentors, it's time to aggressively "brand" myself, but as I wrote to my brother this morning, that seems just too sadomasochistic. Besides, what would the brand be? And where would I put it? I've never gotten a tattoo; I'm way too old for further scarring. Mother Nature already seems far too busy obliterating the flawless skin of my youth. Where did THAT age spot come from? Is that new? Why do my feet look like an old lady's, bony and white, suddenly, with those, oh god, bunions? Whose underarms are those, rudely doing this startling hula thing when I'm just pointing out something to the world, trying to be cool and cosmopolitan? Whose hands are those -- not mine, damn it, those are my mom's. See, I don't need no stinking brand: I get a new one just about every day. Thank god my man loves me anyway. I'm gonna treat this guy good every night, doncha know. Put on the blues, daddy, it's time to dirty dance!

Okay, well then...A lot to process about Crested Butte, the status of my novel these days, and the state of the world in general. But for now, here's simply a small greeting and update from the land of the leggy palms and blue horizon.

In the meantime, if you'd like to listen to my podcast, recorded a couple of weeks ago at BookExpo, here's the link. It will show up soon on www.janworth.com as well.

http://www.bookexpocast.com/authors-studio/

Here's what I see from our porch today -- including this intrepid little cactus that seems to live through everything:

Lord Jim, a Mother Lode and my Mother Tongue

It's amazing how one thing leads to another. A couple of weeks ago, from a box in a closet, looking for something else, I retrieved my high school paperback copy of Lord Jim and started rereading it. The reason this particular book drew me in now is a topic for another time. But something startled me as I thumbed through it. In the margins and on top of many pages, I'd scrawled words I was learning as I read.

In my still-childish hand, on the browning pages are: prescience, torpid, furtive, truculent,alacrity, lugubrious. All words I have loved my whole life. Is it possible Conrad's lushly styled prose is the lode from which I originally mined these words for my vocabulary? The habit of words, the hunger for them, springs from a deep well.

When I left my first husband and moved to Sylvester Manor, a granite pile in downtown Flint filled with a lot of other weepy and disappointed women, one of the first things I did was put a list of my favorite words on the door of the fridge. Along with unearthing Lord Jim, I just found it, tucked in a journal from that time: aileron, catalyst, springerle, baleen, ephemeral, mango, jettison, meander, suffused, inexorably, vituperative, sobriquet. These words comforted me because I loved them -- loved knowing them, loved the way it felt to say them, the way my mouth moved around them, loved their precise complexities. They offered order and continuity when all else was chaos.

And while looking for that list, I came across a third artifact -- a little brown leather ring binder notebook of my mother's, in which she kept lists of words. Like Lord Jim, this was another lode -- a Mother Lode of deeply emotional significance.

It's roughly in alphabetical order, with definitions. I see some of my words are also hers: "catalyst" and "ephemeral" jump out. For some reason, the "e" and "p" pages have been lifted out, so the first thing I see when I open the little book is this: "escargot - snails" and "epicurean - refers to Gr. philosopher who was fond of luxury & sensuous pleasures." Each word and definition adorns the lines in her neatly curved handwriting, as distinct to me as her voice but easier now to enjoy, preserved in many old letters and her prolific notes to herself.

It interests me that it is not so much the words in sentences; my mother collected individual words -- protean, pizzazz, platitude. On the page, they are like bouquets where no two flowers are the same, a cornucopia of words in which each one registers on the mind like an individual gourd, bright and textured -- catatonic, cowl, curmudgeon.

My mother kept her cache secret. I never saw this little notebook until after she died. It was in a drawer in her desk. She didn't write where she found the words or why she liked them, just list after list, in her own hand, crisp and quaint: "dichotomy -- a division into two subordinate parts -- hence a cutting in two," "debacle -- an overthrow, rout or sudden disaster," "drivel - foolish talk."

I think she kept these words simply for herself, for her own pleasure, or like me, for reassurance, like a stash of kruggerands in a vault. Or like dozens of idiosyncratic buttons in a tin, which I also found among her effects. I knew that she loved words -- she used them playfully in conversation, insisting that we pay attention. But I wish we'd talked about all these individual choices; I would have asked her why she liked them. There's also sadness in it -- that she saved these words in solitude, for what? for when? Did she whisper them to herself in a dark night? Did she leaf through the pages for tonic when she was down? Did she review them as she aged to remind herself that, in fact, she had used her sharply observant and cataloguing brain?

Here's the way Lord Jim and my mother juxtapose. As I riffled through the novel, I realized with a start that not all the words at the top were in my hand. Some, I see, are in hers. She must have picked up the book after I left and pulled out her own: rancor, moribund, fecund. We pursued our lexicons out of the same book, but at different times. What was she thinking when she picked up my habit? Why this book? What did she think about Marlowe's story and the fate of the poor Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna? Of course I'll never know. What I do know, though, is that her hunger for words continued long after her children left home, driving her into the small and tattered libraries we left behind.

Robert Pinsky is fond of saying that the art closest to poetry is dance -- the body is so intimately involved in both -- poems literally come from the poet's breath. Touching my mother's notebook, holding it in my hand, I realize my poetry began even earlier -- from the person who gave me breath. My mother conveyed to me a visceral love of the way words work in the body, in the mind, and in the heart. They come from hunger, sometimes a secret hunger. And they live after we die. So this is to celebrate Joseph Conrad and Carol Worth, beloved progenitors of my mother tongue.

Fighting Fanatics with Delight

Maybe one reason Christopher Hitchens' hot new book "God is not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything" grabs me so primally as a preacher's kid is that I know in my gut the suspicion fundamentalists have for what I might call "the good life" -- those dangerous and wily worldly pleasures. It's not just his contention, offered in comments at an interview Ted and I attended at BookExpo in New York last weekend that "religion is the most important fallacious explanation of life and its meanings," but, as he added in his acknowledgement to novelist Ian McEwan, that "the natural is wondrous enough for anyone" without a supernatural overlay.

Fundamentalist religion as I knew it was rooted in repudiation: it deeply mistrusted the body, calling for women (in Ohio versions of the burka) to cover their bodies. It was very uneasy about art or any kind of decoration; wasn't too comfortable with music except of the sacred sort; it rejected dancing, rejected wine, and certainly did not talk of pleasure except as a seducer into sin. As I wrote in Night Blind, "It was sometimes hard to keep straight what we were saying yes to, except homegrown roughage and modest silence."

My mother, a person of great sensual appreciations, never trusted the "holiness" movement for just that reason. Her natural instinct was to welcome, not to repudiate, the world. I've often criticized my father for falling into the tight-lipped fanatic school, asserting it was my mother's essential joi de vivre that saved me from fanaticism. But then I remember the raredos.

It's a story many of my friends have heard and reheard -- about how my father tried to make a wooden screen, what he called a raredos, for one of his churches -- artfully decorated, painstakingly hand-carved with a symbol he found particularly moving -- tumbling bunches of grapes, signifiers of fruitfulness and ripe harvest. The church members mutinied over this intrusion of art into their bleak chancel and made him take it down. In a twist of wonderful irony, it became the headboard behind my parents' bed. (the photo above is of an antique raredos in the UK).

Driving home from school the other night, I caught a snippet of something on NPR that struck me so powerfully that I determined to remember it -- only a few words stayed in my brain, and then when I got home I forgot to pursue it. But tonight I finally found it -- an interview with the Egyptian writer Ali Salem interviewed by Dick Gordon on "The Story." In describing what he thought might be the road to peace, Salem said the extremists had to get jobs -- something to be proud of so that they would not be "miserable." He said, "what characterizes the fanatics is that they don't find on earth anything delightful."

And according to Hitchens, for related reasons, growing bands of religious fanatics are craving the Apocalypse, consumed by a massive and communal death wish. "They want it to be over," he said in New York.

Could this be the answer to the world's chaos -- to protect and stand up for and restore delight?

I suggest we start with jobs for artists and robust funding for the arts -- before the fanatics' misery overtakes us all.

Fireflies

Is it possible they awakened, or arrived, or whatever they do, over just one night?

The first surprising glow in the corner of the eye (did I just see that?) then another by the bird bath, then another back in the corner by the floppy hosta, and then a whole yard full, the green, just-mowed, fragrant yard oscillating and aglow, silent, pulsing and unexpected. Not last night, but tonight.

Last night a dream of shattered glass, wandering the house in that bellicose dark of 3 a.m., my telltale body goosebumped with fear. No sleep and the BBC up loud to scare away trouble.

Then tonight, first fireflies, dusk a velvet plush, and just like that it's summer.

(image above, Empire of Lights, Rene Magritte)

A Doctor in the Family

This is for Lauren Carol Worth, M.D., my niece and goddaughter. Today family and friends, a tribal gathering of two distinguished ancestries (A wonderful mix -- second generation Lebanese and Syrian restauranteurs, WASPy teachers and engineers, spawn of British whalers and Quakers, Dutch Calvinists, farmers and preachers) celebrated our daughter and granddaughter as she graduates from the Wayne State medical school. She's flying out tomorrow with her mom, Gail, her father (my brother Wes) and her brother Michael to return to California, where she's starting her residency in San Diego. We are immensely proud of this smart and beautiful young woman.

It was one of those days, sitting in the shade of her maternal grandparents' congenial yard on Grosse Isle, when the years both melted away and presented themselves as something formidable. We note the absences -- especially Lauren's paternal grandmother, my mother Carol Love Worth, who would have been so moved by Lauren's accomplishments that she would have melted with pleasure. My generation -- Lauren's parents and aunts and uncles -- are becoming the elders, though the grandparent Daranys -- Joe and Elaine and Chuck and Frieda, for instance -- show inspiring fortitude and longevity. These are good people, people who've struggled and survived and continue to deliver love and support in giant portions.

And these young kids coming up -- a tableful of new doctors, a doctoral student in environmental science, a self-declared "policy wonk," a kid about to join the Peace Corps, a women's basketball star from Wayne State, and maybe most important to our communal safety, an apprentice electrician -- blow me away. They sat there eating their earth-friendly fruit and vegetables and fretting about the state of the world and pledging to do what they can to make a difference. I believe they will. Driving back north on I-75 in deepening evening sunlight, I took in the Detroit skyline and its Ambassador Bridge with renewed appreciation. The vista looked beautiful this time -- the architecture of a place that's somehow nurtured these fine children. It's time tonight to indulge in a moment of gratitude and hope.

A Caveat About the Cosmopolitan

Dear Reader,
Ted appropriately wishes me to clarify something about his exceptional foray into the world of cocktails. He notes that the amount of alcohol he consumed that day in NYC represents about 20 percent of the total amount of alcohol he's swallowed in his entire life. He's not a teetotaler because he's in recovery, but because -- perhaps luckily for him -- he has never liked the taste of the stuff. This matters to him, and to me, because he does not want his decision to take that drink to be a sign that he was a jerk, numbing himself out in my moment of need. Also, he doesn't want a reader to think I enabled a dangerous experiment and a consequent fall from grace. On the contrary, he wanted to share the moment with me using my ritual of choice: one stiff drink. Since by nurture or DNA neither of us is particularly addictive, one round was more than enough to fulfill the liturgy. And our later, blissful ride with Rickshaw Harry provided the benediction.

We both understand what's at stake for our friends and loved ones who are, in fact, in recovery, and we want to be sure our experience in New York, and my telling of it, doesn't make light of their often monumental and awesome struggles.

48 Rings

Possibly the best tonic for disappointment and weariness after New York is walking around my familiar old neighborhood, back home. On Franklin a medium-sized Norway maple had been chopped down since I left, and big hunks of trunk were piled at the street awaiting pickup. I paused to look and counted the rings: 48. That makes me think the much bigger trees on my own street must be at least 70 years old. Without putting too fine a point on it, I noticed the rings got wider with age. Open to the hopeful possibility that things grow bigger and better with years, I took a grateful deep breath and walked on.

Mallard couple in Gilkey Creek, muddy and full after recent rains -- a sign, perhaps, of the improving health of the watershed.

Ted's Cosmo and a Rickshaw Ride in Central Park

Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.

If I were a rickshaw driver like Harry in New York, I'd have that famous mantra handy, too. We met him outside the Roosevelt Hotel, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street, Friday night after an exhausting and not very happy day. As I had expected, I didn't place higher than my finalist berth in the ForeWord contest, and in the sweltering Jacob Javits Convention Center at BookExpo America, as the winners were impersonally announced on a PowerPoint screen, my roiling mammalian brain let my conscious mind know for the first time that I did, in fact, really care. Disheartened and coated with clammy sweat, I proceeded to my appointment in a steamy little BEA booth to record a podcast about Night Blind, during which my passionately prepared answers to five prepared questions seemed vapid and rote. "To hell with corporate economics," I found myself exhorting to the weary interviewer and two unflappable underage techies. "I'm tired of not having control over what happens to my writing. Writers are always at the bottom of the food chain. But now I have this beautiful book, and I made it happen." They smiled faintly and fussed with various knobs.

Outside the cavernous hall, waiting for the hotel shuttle, my brave ferocity evaporated, along with a couple of infuriating tears. "What's the point," I muttered to Ted. "Maybe I could take this if I was 37, but I'm 57, and I think I've about had it." He rested a reassuring arm lightly on my shoulder. His touch, unconfining and eloquent, was a gesture vastly better than words, which for the moment were the enemy.

We decided to eat in the mostly deserted Roosevelt Grille. I ordered a kamikaze, my favorite cocktail lately and also a metaphorically sound choice for the occasion. "I think I want to drink in sympathy," my teetotaller husband said. I've never seen him drink; I should have said no but I said yes and the waiter and I decided he should have a Cosmo. When it came, Ted bent over slowly like a large animal, sniffed it, and sipped it without lifting it up. It touched me -- how he sacrificed his abstinence like a ritual to exorcise disappointment, and how he seemed to taste the drink with his whole body. Then he sipped it again and again and then he picked up the martini glass in both hands like it was a coffee mug and drained the rosy dregs.

"I feel zingy," he said.

A baby grand piano in a corner played some indistinguishable tune, mechanically programmed, without a person. The vestigial bench, pulled out as if to make room for, say, Art Tatum, looked undusted.

"That's depressing," I said. "It's New York City, for godssake. Couldn't they find some actual hungry kid to actually play piano?"

"Labor unions," Ted speculated, wiping a drop of cranberry and Triple Sec from the corner of his mouth.

"That sucks," I said. I couldn't see the point of being witty, even though we were sitting so close to the Algonquin Hotel you could get there in the time it takes to say "Razors pain you, rivers are damp."

After dinner we went outside for fresh air. That's where we met Harry. "Want a ride around the park?" We paid him $60 and clambered into the little buggy and, with an innocent tingle of the bike bell, Harry pulled away into the early evening traffic -- black Lincolns, UPS trucks, yellow cabs. For a half hour our carbon footprint was nil.

He said he was 50 and drives the pedicab four hours a day, after going to school to be an air conditioning repair person. His wife is a Colombian dance choreographer; they don't always get along. Beads of sweat sluffed off him effortlessly, and he talked and pulled our 350 pounds and breathed in miraculous congruence.

At the south end of Central Park, he took us to the "literary walk," its quadruple rows of elms shimmering in the evening sun. Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott silently peered over strollers. At the Reservoir, he said he always tells passengers that's where Holden Caulfield saw the ducks -- and, when we let out with appreciative "ohs" and "ahs," he said Ted and I must be educated.

"A lot of people don't know what I'm talking about when I mention Catcher in the Rye these days," Harry said. A little boy with big eyes stared out of a horse-drawn carriage, and I smiled at him. He looked a little afraid, as if it was all too much, to be at the mercy of the big clumping horse, smelling the unavoidable pungent dung. I reached for Ted's hand and it was there, welcoming and warm.

Back at the hotel Harry gave us his card: Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, it said.

And I found myself calming down, murmuring the rest of Dotty Parker's New York rosary, also my own: "Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live."

Oh, No, Not New York

So I'm sitting with Ted over late breakfast at Tom's Coney Cafe on Dort Highway, dreading New York. I'm eating a turkey and swiss croissant and drinking a decent cup of coffee and reading, ironically, the New York Times -- one of our daily treats from (she lowers voice to a whisper) the corner Starbucks. There's an article about how Lou Dobbs doesn't tell the truth -- particularly when it comes to leprosy in the U.S. Apparently he said there were 7,000 cases in the last three years -- mostly perpetrated by those pesky immigrants -- when really, it was 7,000 cases over the last THIRTY years. Confronted with his statistical creativity by David Leonhardt of the Times, along with suggestions Dobbs has been offering broadcast exposure to white supremacists, Dobbs replied, "You've raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive." Funny how raising the level of something can be offensive.

A big glamorous black woman comes in and Ted says, "Is that LaKisha?" We're on the lookout since she rolled into Bishop Airport Sunday night. Don't know if she favors these Dort Highway dives, but we're at home here. A roly-poly guy in the booth next to us orders a "Jy-Roe" and the waitress impatiently corrects, "HEE-Row." I can almost hear her say, "HEE-row, dumbell." "Okay, HEE-row," he tolerantly repeats, "Whatever, gimme one." I like a place like that. Two guys in Harley teeshirts amble in and order platters of two coneys each, even though it's barely past breakfast. I think the slim young woman in a nearby booth, chain smoking and rather wearily done up in a wide metal belt, short skirt and tight top, might have come off the circuit further down the road. We're all in this together.

So anyway, even though I'm enjoying my New York Times amid the comforting dishevelment of my Flint brothers and sisters, I'm dreading the actual city of New York. Friday morning Ted and I are jumping a jet to Newark airport, plopping down in our overpriced room at the Roosevelt Hotel, and enduring three days at Book Expo America.

I'll be one of 30,000 authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, scam artists and hangers-on competing for space in the aisles of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The number of booths are in the thousands. Among other rules, they say bookbags on wheels are forbidden, for some reason.

It's a trade show, the business end of the deal -- and I've decided it is time I abandon my fantasy life of grassy, nurturing artist colonies and rambling ruminations on line breaks and symbolic intent for the bottom line.

My book will be displayed a couple of places, a single dandelion in an overpopulation of weeds (weeds are wildflowers by another name, right?) and I'm supposed to find out if I win, show or place in the ForeWord Magazine Literary Novel of the Year Award (for the record, there are something like 40 rubrics and 650 finalists...only ten, however, in my category). I don't think I'll win: a fancy-schmancy Solzhinetsyn collected and a reissue of a novel with a new foreward by Wole Soyinka are the front-runners, I predict. ForeWord has found a brilliant way to cater to all us independently published authors desperate for exposure; yes, I bought the gold-embossed "Finalist" sticker for my book. Fifty-five dollars, if you must know.

Then I'm recording a podcast at the iUniverse booth: five minutes, five questions. Then Ted and I are going to try to snag autographs from the likes of Wilbur Smith and Alan Alda. I'm going to fight for a front-row seat at an interview with Christopher Hitchens and have breakfast on Sunday with Ian McEwen and a couple of hundred of his other best friends.

It's just that I'll feel so...small.

Just one little Flintoid with half a foot in LA, treading into Gotham City with all the rest of those rabid writer/aspirants. Oh, the horror.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, No, Not the Tufted Titmouse

One of my students said she was walking around the UMF campus recently when suddenly an adult bird dropped out of a tree and landed on the sidewalk in front of her, dead. She's not particularly a birder or environmentalist, but it freaked her out and she didn't stick around to try to figure out what might have happened. She said she thought it was a crow. She rushed away and left it there.

I thought of that incident last night when I opened my Flint Journal. I swear, in the melancholy department it's not safe to open the newspaper anymore. The first page headline cried out "Dying Birds" and said the West Nile Virus is decimating bird populations in the U.S. -- particularly American crows, but also robins, chickadees, bluebirds, blue jays, house wrens, and tufted titmice.

Damn it, the tufted titmouse? I love that bird -- not just its hilarious name, but its perky little topknot and the way the cheery birds sweep onto the back yard feeder in small bouncy cadres, dropping down from the neighbor's cherry tree one by one to grab a seed.

Should we be getting ready to lose everything we love? I'm thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's gut-wrenching villanelle, "One Art": "The art of losing isn't hard to master," and wondering if I have the intestinal fortitude for what sometimes feels like a looming environmental collapse. I remember that no matter what people say about the underlying acceptance in Bishop's poem, written after the suicide of her longtime lover Lota, the last word, undeniably, irrevocably, is "disaster":

"...the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."

I don't want to lose the tufted titmouse. Is it too late?

Early Morning at Flint Northern

I know what I was thinking: nobody'd show up at a high school in the north end of Flint to hear a talk by two college English teachers. Especially, I thought, not at 7:22 a.m., when the first class was supposed to start. My colleague Janelle Wiess and I were there because of Jeanette Rousseau, a UMF alum who's been teaching English at Northern High School for about six years. After agreeing to the visit, I spent a week dreading it. I've heard repeatedly that the Flint schools are disastrous, chaotic, peopled by unruly kids -- the Flint Journal recently ran a story saying some schools don't even have enough money for toilet paper, and teachers and parents were bringing it in.

I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. and on a rainy morning, drove down bumpy Mackin Road and into Flint Northern's long driveway. There I was startled to encounter a virtual traffic jam of buses, cars and kids pouring into the beige Seventies facility. As Jeanette directed, I went around to the "flag pole" side, the student entrance, where a crowd of dozens of kids, regular kids in jeans and backpacks, moved patiently through the metal detectors. It was 7:05 a.m. when I made my own way in and found the office. I had a few minutes to relax before reporting for the first class. The place hummed with secretaries getting organized, phones ringing, students dropping in, teachers checking in -- obviously at full tilt. The classes went great -- the students respectful, alert and asking sharp, cogent questions. At least half said they want to go to college. Attendance policies, plagiarism, how to get help from professors, all relevant concerns, emerged, in a room festooned with assignment directions for "oxymoron" and cinquain poems, tips for MLA Style, and bumper stickers like "Hate is not a family value" and "If you stop to think, don't forget to start up again."

What struck me most, simply, was the obvious energy for school. Despite all the recent district-wide brouhahas and brutal funding cuts, somehow, the community is still getting schools to happen. Maybe my expectations were low, but it amazed me that the students were there -- somebody got them there -- at 7:22 in the morning, in big numbers, at an hour when I'm usually just rolling over in my brass bed and clicking on Morning Edition. It touched me. And then that they have to go through metal detectors, one by one, examined by security guards. And that they might not have toilet paper (they later assured me they did, at least at their school). I wish school was unambiguously safe -- I wish they didn't have to have metal detectors, but they didn't seem to object, waiting their turn. It seems sad -- students could be forgiven for beginning to believe that we don't care about them, that education, based on our fiscal betrayal and their crowded and crumbling schools, doesn't really matter all that much. But this morning I felt a glimmer of hope. I hope against hope they can't wait to get to school -- I hope once they get through all the obstacles, what happens in those wide institutional hallways and bustling classrooms makes them believe their minds are the best thing they've got, on a rainy morning in the middle of May.

A Brief Report

Lilac week. Breathing deeply on a walk like drinking sangria. My brain is lavender.

The sweet and promising smell of fresh paint on Calumet. Hopeful, even as I fight off melancholy: my man gone for now.

This morning, boisterous spring lightning and thunder, drenching rain. Grateful for all that energy. Lonely.

Bob Woodward, Will Ferrell, Lakisha Jones and Burning Snow

What a week in Flint, Michigan. In San Pedro, my second home, we're never surprised by movie-makers putting up detour signs, taking over Pt. Fermin Park -- sometimes for weeks at a time -- or setting off explosions at midnight at the harbor. In Flint, though, it's something exceptionally rare.

So the town was feverish and hysterical this week when Will Ferrell and Woody Harrelson, along with trucks, vintage cars, light set ups and dozens of crew rolled in to film scenes for "Semi-Pro" featuring the 70s fictional basketball team, the Flint Tropics. The scenes they filmed in Flint involved transforming streets into winter, so crews from a company named "Snow Business" piled supposedly biodegradable fluff on several city blocks. And they stripped the leaves and buds off trees along First Street, trees which didn't seem to know that Hollywood trumps Mother Nature, especially in a cash-strapped town. They claim they'll replace those trees, but it's galling.

And the other day some of the leftover "snow" caught fire. Ironic twist on the Hollywood week. Snow smoking around the stripped locust branches. Ah, yes, things are going great in Vehicle City.

In the midst of the "Semi-Pro" hoopla, Bob Woodward showed up, part of UM - Flint's Spotlight series, to sell books, talk to high school students, and deliver a noon talk to a couple of hundred grown ups. I bought a copy of State of Denial and got it signed by the man himself -- who despite his recent wiliness and self-promoting actions confusing truth with fortune, remains a journalistic hero of mine. I was a young reporter at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot during Watergate, and every day in '73 and '74 was more exciting than the last. We idolized those boys -- and believed in the power of the word, of relentless research and fearlessness, to bring down evil. What's happened since? Even Woodward sits a bit too comfortably in corporate laps and the Washington press corps have the spine of eels. Still, it was stimulating to see Woodward in person and hear him talk about how he interviewed Bush for three and a half hours over two days. Stunningly, he claimed to have asked him 500 questions. It seems our president isn't a guy to go beyond the one-word response. Truth, ah, elusive truth slinks off, neglected, into the darkness.

Finally, Lakisha. She got her "American Idol" mojo back last week and squeaked through to the final four. Flint celebrates her with so much obsession it's...dare I say it?... embarrassing. Better, though, to rest in the talents of a powerful gospel shouter than corrupt politicians and industrial decay.