Owl at Night in a Silver Maple

There's no hour of the day or night more ambiguously quiet -- or more lonely, depending on the night -- than 2:30 a.m. I'm restless in my bed when Ted's not here; I pile on quilts, preferring the ancient beautiful one my mother and her friends made decades ago. I buy 400-count sheets and drink decaf green tea before turning in, but still, even with these rituals and totems of peace, I often toss and turn without my mate.

Maybe last night it was the full moon that woke me up. Does the moon seem smaller sometimes now, more imperiled and too easy for humankind to reach? I want to believe there is something we can't overrun.

And in the damp, shiny dark after a day of rain, there was an owl in the silver maples, rare in these parts and miraculous, mournfully who-whooing. Sadness for our brief lovely life overtook me. I got up, pushed open the window as far as I could, hoping to catch even a brief silhouette of the bird, a flutter, a connection in a lonely hour. But all the dark offered was his melancholy call, who-who-who, until 3 a.m. when I fell back into a fitful, moonwashed sleep.

I Blame the Lilacs

Aren't lilacs just too damn sentimental and audacious for their own good, climbing over everything and exuding their promiscuous spring perfume, making everybody feel light in the head and full of anachronous longing? I mean, really.

Yeah, I'm mad. Pruning down my lilac bush for the winter, I was awkwardly wielding the big clippers somebody gave me for a housewarming gift ("Hint hint," I thought they were saying) back when I moved into this respectable, lilac-strewn neighborhood. I reached up, twisted the wrong way a centimeter too far, and pulled a muscle in my lower back.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. So this is what it feels like to be old.

I've come up with amazing new ways to get my legs into my jeans, leaning back on the bed and gingerly sliding a foot in, cussing and aiming for the pantleg from a not-so-pain-free distance. Putting on a pair of socks is a major operation, not to mention tying my beloved New Balance walking shoes or other more graphic tasks of personal hygiene. I have to plan my time, since, for example, the Lehrer News Hour starts out pleasantly enough with Margaret Warner but ends with ten minutes of me moaning and groaning trying to get out of the recliner. Lifting a carton of soy milk off the top shelf of the frig proved perilous, and opening the trunk of my car called out an expletive deleted. I'm a slow-mo woman this week, walking like Montgomery Burns and muttering at every required and ordinary movement.

It'll be good to have my body back again. Was I young once, physically nimble enough to take advantage of the lilacs?

One bird

The flutter of a silver wing at breakfast, and there was a tufted titmouse, one of my favorite birds, perched on the power line just outside the window. We peeked shyly at each other for just a second before he darted away.

Only one, when they usually travel in flocks. Was it just me or was he a little disheveled, a bit flustered around his topknot?

Yet it was a joyful sliver of morning. With this little bird on the list of disappearing species, a heartbeat of hope.

My Imaginary Family

One of my favorite features in the Saturday Flint Journal is "People," the thin little pull-out tabloid almost lost between Sports and Classifieds. It usually features some local yokel on the front (I was once one of those featured yokels -- me and the mutt of the month competing for readership, and I think the mutt won). "People" is a rich storehouse for a hermit like me with no family within 200 miles. I really don't miss having a family to speak of -- in fact I'm grateful for it most of the time, but I get perverse vicarious delight from reading every word about engagements, weddings, wedding anniversaries and geezer birthdays. Not to mention the Pet of the Week.

Today's is Dixie, a two-year-old beagle/terrier mutt. Somebody slapped a yellow bandana on her for her desperate closeup. Her long pink tongue sticks out, and she's smiling in that doggie way as if she knows how much this matters. The way she's sitting there, her little white paws on a hard floor at the Humane Society, breaks my heart.

On the engagement and wedding pages, I look at all the panicky smiling couples in their fancy clothes, their heads touching, the guy's hand tenderly and tastefully on the girl's waist, the women in complicated upswept hair and lacy headpieces, the guys looking slightly strangled by their unaccustomed tuxes. Stiff little flowers, rosebuds with sprays of cliche baby's breath, seem to interfere with hugging. But everybody's smiling. Looking at all of them, the Nicoles and Scotts and Caras and Lances and LaCreshas and Fruquwas (that's the guy) and Sarahs and Dereks, I think, yes indeed, there is somebody for everybody.

And then on the next page, there are the anniversaries: names from another era -- Harold and Phyllis and Shirley and Kenneth and Gordon and Tom...and these couples suggest the toll the years take, a whiplash of time from the hopeful naivete of decades before. The couples are thick and wrinkled, bespectacled and silver-haired -- and still smiling, thanks, I think, to "Cheese." I think they look surprised, and relieved, that they've made it this far. I wonder if they still like each other. The contrast between the two sections -- the young beginners, the weathered survivors -- is almost more than I can take before my second cup of tea. It makes me want a drink.

But the best of all is "Generations" -- the photos where somebody whose 15-year-old kid just had a baby in the family tradition lines up with great-grandma, grandma, mom or dad and a tiny papoose, usually in the arms of the oldest relative, little aware of his or her place in history.

Today's "People" yielded a Generations bonanza: SIX GENERATIONS. Unbelievable! Great-great-great grandmother Lucille, 98, holds little Devan, five weeks old. Arranged around the aged granny and thumb-sucking infant are great-great grandmother Norma, great-grandmother Brenda, grandfather James and mom Nicole. I try to calculate how in the hell this could have happened -- everybody procreated before the age of 20, I guess, and everybody lived. What relentless family-making!

I'm amazed. My GRANDFATHER was born in 1870 and has been dead since the early 50s -- my mother was born in 1910 and didn't get around to giving birth to me until 1949. I come from a long line of extreme late-bloomers, some of whom never actually bloomed. I, for instance, never had kids myself, and I'm still waiting for the break that will bust open my expected celebrity to snare me a mythical -- if truncated -- twig on my family tree.

So my historical family, the people we call ancestors, are largely mysteries to me. And what I know of them, through various myths, memories, scars and resentments, are filtered through "he said, she said" second- or third-hand accounts at best.

My Ancestors Aren't Listening

And, to continue with the above...

The energetic and wonderful New York hip hop playwright Will Power, who's a visiting professor at UM-Flint this semester, came to my fiction-writing class this week. At one point, he said he calls to his ancestors when he's writing, and they often answer back. His ancestors, he suggests, consistently wish him well and enhance his creative juices.

I'm confounded. I'm trying to figure out how this works. As I just wrote above, in the family category, almost everybody before my generation has now kicked off. My brother and sister and my cousins and I are what count as elders now. And coming after me, in my immediate family, a single nephew and three nieces. Two of the nieces are in adult foster care, and the other, carrying a big weight of historical expectation if you buy such logic, is a beginning doctor in the first year of her residency.

I'm pretty sure my ancestors are mute.

And I have no reason to believe that if they knew me, that they'd like me or wish me well. They were very religious and didn't seem receptive to nonconformists like me, especially women like me. In their way, they were nonconformists but intolerant ones -- their nonconformity was rooted in passionate belief that everybody should be like them.

The stories I've heard about my ancestors depress me. I'm feeling cynical today, but even the most colorful ones, like my Grandfather Vandersall, a traveling evangelist, seem screwed up and unhappy. What would they say? I keep thinking, from the Great Beyond, that they might utter, like Philip Larkin,

"Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself."

"Feast of Love" -- Not So Bad After All

To be honorable, Ted and I went to see the movie this afternoon, and in our view it wasn't nearly as bad as one would think from the L.A. Times review yesterday. (Or that website that said it sounded like a Thanksgiving porno movie. Horn aplenty? -- well there's lots of sex in this movie, but that's not its main attraction.) In short, we quite enjoyed it.

It wasn't all the way we would have liked -- Chloe didn't work for me (didn't say "Fuck and be damned" a single time!) and was prettier and more dewy than I imagined her, and I REALLY wished they'd have kept it in Ann Arbor. Nonetheless, we were both quite touched by it. We saw "3:10 to Yuma" yesterday and while we enjoyed the reminder of the great old Western's durability (and it was fun to know that it was drawn from an old Elmore Leonard yarn), the narrative was murky, violent and its ultimate "message" if there was one, was cynical or indeterminate, depending how you looked at it. This might be an impossible comparison, but we found ourselves talking about how we "felt" on leaving each movie. "Yuma" left us feeling ill at ease and mildly despairing -- also a bit exhausted by the de rigueur, noisy shooting of almost every main character, not to mention almost all the minor characters and the horses they rode in on. Feast of Love was quiet, wise and sweet, and we left feeling warmly thoughtful and loving.

We also compared "Feast's" character development to the "relationship" aspects of, say, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Big Love and the new Tell Me You Love Me, where people's dysfunctions are laid out week after week and nobody seems able to talk to each other or actually, dare I say it...grow. In this movie, people talked to each other, sometimes a bit too earnestly, but sometimes quite endearingly, and we both found that a great relief. My god, were these characters perhaps changing and being changed by love? Yes, and narrowly escaped the saccharine with doses of gentle humor.

So, now I say, fuck and be damned, it's worth checking out.

"Glimmerless" Feast of Love? Skip the Movie, Read the Book

You've already seen the previews, and today, in the Calendar section of the LA Times, is a full-page ad for the movie "Feast of Love." It looks and sounds so promising -- featuring Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Greg Kinnear, Fred Ward -- and directed by Robert Benton, who also did "Kramer v. Kramer."

Most exciting of all, though, in my world, is that the movie is based on a 2000 novel by Charlie Baxter, long a Michigan resident and writing teacher at U of M, fairly recently departed to Minnesota. He was an old friend in my early days as a poet, and has had a long and much-beloved tenure on the faculty of Warren Wilson College, where I got my M.F.A. Baxter has written many novels and one of my favorite collections of essays about writing, Burning Down the House.

My husband and I loved The Feast of Love (Hollywood removed that pesky article) -- it was one of the first books we shared after reconnecting in 2001. I remember huddling happily in my little high-ceilinged kitchen at Divorcee Manor during one of Ted's earliest visits to Flint, listening to an interview with Charlie on NPR. Ted and I both loved his characters, including one named Charlie Baxter who begins the novel by suffering an "identity lapse"; the laconic Bradley, with a dog named Bradley; the inimitable Chloe, whose favorite interjection was "Fuck and be damned," and her ex-stoner boyfriend Oscar who, Chloe says, is "real good looking once you get his clothes off and into his characteristic behavior."

We also loved that the story was so rooted in the Midwest -- actually set in Ann Arbor; Chloe and Oscar make love once on the 50-yard-line of The Big House. First bad sign: in the Hollywood version, the story's in Seattle. Not the same, not the same. Not to us beleaguered and sensitive Michiganders.

As Ted and I feared, the movie apparently hasn't made the translation well in other ways from Baxter's rich and humanely developed characters. I'd heard rumors Baxter wasn't happy with the screenplay. Today's LA Times also ran a review, and a fairly damning one at that. (No chance of the Flint Journal doing the same, even with local connections, since they fired most of their local reviewers). Under the headline, " 'Feast' doesn't bring enough to the table," reviewer Carina Chocano says "Robert Benton's film about love and loss is free of catharsis and is neither funny nor sad." She adds, "Underneath the characters' surface diversity, they are flat and one-note..."

In the opening of the novel, Charlie's protagonist Charlie, trying to orient himself back to himself, poignantly states, "I am glimmerless. I write down the word next to my name."

"Glimmerless," as it happens, seems unfortunately to describe the movie. But it in no way describes the novel, which is abundantly three-dimensional, thoughtful, funny and sad. Sounds like this is one time to skip the movie, and read the book.

It's Happened At Last

Boo hoo... sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth...

Today Night Blind finally slipped into the dreaded seven digits on the Amazon rankings. I knew the day would come. I'd been saved by those blessed single sales time after time, just when I got to 800,000 or even 900,000, somebody somewhere in the world would buy the book and swing me back into the Elysian Fields of five digits for a few exhilarating days, and then I'd watch, philosophically expecting the scoops and scallops of the long climb back up, up, up. But today there was no last minute reprieve.

Like a colonoscopy, the dread is worse than the event. To my surprise, I'm not in a funk. What do the Amazon numbers mean anyway?

Instead, I feel an invigorating and cleansing sense that something's over and done with. Almost exactly a year after its publication date, the book has made its venture into the market. And, thanks to the Internet and POD publishing, it is still in the world, its fruit available to be plucked. I suspect from time to time somebody will find the book and pick one up, and that will be fun to see. But perhaps I'm letting go of the obsession.

So (taps playing on a cheap boombox) one last dirge: here's goodbye to that dream that the book would magically climb into the world's embrace.

Now it's time to move along.

Thanks to everybody (there are more than 500 of you) who bought it so far; thanks to all who've written to say you stopped everything to finish reading it; thanks to all who've told me Gabriel Bonner was an irresistible cad; thanks to all who've said, "I felt like I was right there." Thanks to Theodore, gift of God, who made me do it. Here's to the dancing nuns of Brunswick, Maine. Here's to pelicans, a clear view of Catalina, seals barking at midnight, Fred, Ethyl, Einstein, Pink, silver moons, the early bird special at Chicago, a pox on Blackthistle, and thanks oh thank you goddess for the SST.

And thanks to the immensely supportive and not at all comatose Gary at East Village Magazine for harassing and needling me into writing, writing, writing again -- and for giving my new writing a beautiful home and lots of readers.

Thank you all very much. And now to whatever comes next.

Saturday Night with Robert Hass

This day started glumly with the specter of 40 freshmen papers to grade on a shimmering autumn day. I wanted to be elsewhere. Doing something, anything, else. All those oppressive theres for theirs and vice versa, mixing up the place with people. There were no theirs there, as Gertrude Stein would not have said. All those defiantlies for definitelies, adverbs all earnestly confused by silly spell-check. Their grip on rules is slippery at best, these children of the American high school.

But they were writing about the Farmers' Market, and as I read them I began to hope: they sampled cheese and apples and stared at red speckled beans and noticed the man with a funny hat and let the chocolate from a fresh croissant squish out onto their chins and looked into barrels of fish and made the vendors name them: whitefish, wide-mouthed bass, catfish. They made fun of the overweight rock band but sat in the sun to listen. They chose honey wheat bread and noticed a woman slowly going down the aisle (they spelled it isle, but still) in a walker. They bought cheap lockets and they held hands with their boyfriends and bought pints of raspberries and baskets of plums.

So I gradually perked up. At the end of the day, I went for a walk, wanting to go as fast as possible, wanting to breathe in the almost-autumn evening. Without my now-familiar backpack, I felt light and lithe. Back home, I poured myself two fingers of single malt and sank into a deep bath as, on the TV in the background, Tom Friedman repeated his mantra to Tim Russert: compete, connect, collaborate? Is that the third C? I'm always missing something.

Fresh from all this generally joyful sensory mishmash, it felt right to settle down with Liesl Olson's piece in the latest American Poetry Review, "Robert Hass's Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens." I'm especially interested in Hass because he made a memorable visit here to UM - Flint in the fall of '06, coming to support and celebrate our "Green Arts" program designed around the Flint River Watershed. After reading from some of his new poems at a big community event, he genially lingered at the de rigueur party in my own living room. He seemed to love the Flint River in the same way he has loved many rivers, and just before his reading that night, he went off by himself to walk along the river, a beleaguered waterway that people are only beginning to see -- again -- as life and art. He said it looked as beautiful as a French painting. My students and I have never forgotten that.

Anyway, I didn't think Olson's treatment was much about guilt -- though certainly that is present in his work and that point would have been clearer had she noted his alcoholic mother; can any child of a drunk mom not feel guilty? It's best conveyed in "Our Lady of the Snows," I think, from his 1997 collection Sun Under Wood.

But the piece did help me understand the swing in his work between abstraction and an immersion in sense detail -- in a way, that is the manifestation of a kind of guilt, the pulling back from delight: he has been accused of "evasion," as she points out, by some critics, and in a taking the risk of "delimiting terror, in sizing it down." She asserts that Hass's poems often "begin with and return to the safety and pleasure of small things: a bath, a dragonfly, a late dinner, 'the little flare of dwan rose in the kernel/of the almond.'" That's part of what I love about his work, though -- the assiduous naming and sensory vividness played against and offered in answer to the Big Ideas, whatever those are. I've read his poems to my students to point out that explicit, sumptuous love of naming, and then have to sit back while they notice all the abstractions, too. Why did he do that? they ask. And I say, I don't know...think about it more. Now I could quote Olson in answering, "Pinning down the precise words of things is not always enough to satisfy what Hass is after, but it becomes the source of exploring language's power and its limitations, or what a word can do."

Olson's piece is accompanied by an absorbing set of 14 poems from Hass's new collection, Time and Materials. I remember when he told us the proposed title for this new book, his first in eight years, we tactfully turned away and groaned. It seemed so...plodding. But Olson says it "emerges with tremendous, expansive grace," and especially praises its confrontation with war. I can't wait to see the whole thing. Here are two tiny appetizers:

Iowa, January

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.


After Trakl

October night, the sun going down,
Evening with its brown and blue
(Music from another room)
Evening with its blue and brown,
October night, the sun going down.

Thirty Years Ago...

...this was me, standing outside my second house in Tonga.

Finding an old photo can be a bit jarring. But I like the looks of this young woman. She was having high quality fun. Note the bare feet...ah, that was reckless, with so much sharp coral around. That black British one-speed was my constant companion and friend -- imagine the pleasure of piloting a bike all over a remote, impossbly green Polynesian island, 9.000 miles away from home. There were moments in those two years, I must say, when just being there was enough -- an unalloyed satisfaction.

Life doesn't often offer such pure pleasure. Here's to Peace Corps.

Letting the Honda Gather Dust

Carbon Footprint report: I haven't moved the car out of the garage for five days, and it feels good. I walked to work every day this week -- always going in on the same exact route through Mott Community College, and altering my return route every time. It seems at the end of the day I'm more in a mood to wander. There are many cute little corners to explore, like the one block of Eddy Street between Avon and Crapo, where several of the houses are exquisitely restored and maintained, with fences and flowers. On Avon between Second and Young street is a Greek revival house that's gorgeous; mounds of brilliant impatiens are in full bloom. If I go straight from Kearsley on Avon across Court, past Seventh Street where I lived for 15 years, I can turn down Wellington and go through Woodlawn Park where the tops the the trees are already turning red and gold, and come up out of the park into my own quiet and lovely neighborhood -- from there I'm only a couple of blocks from home.

I'm still getting used to it, though. The other day from work I happily picked up the new UMF campus bus which circles around to the Flint Farmer's Market. I loaded up on peppers, green beans, potatoes, yams, a hunk of stilton cheese, some fresh turkey tenders, a half dozen Honey Crisp apples, and happily picked up the bus back to campus, only to realize that my haul weighed about 20 pound and wouldn't fit into my beloved black backpack. Thankfully my amused colleague Stephanie agreed to take my bags of stuff and drop them off on my back porch. I'm glad it worked out so well. That night I had a fabulous supper of fresh Michigan food -- baked turkey, a sweet potato, green beans, and for dessert, half an apple with the mango stilton. I've never eaten better.

And the Honda stayed in dry dock for another day.

"Henderson the Rain King" Considers His Shiftless Son in Malibu

I'm starting a longer piece on Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellows' rambunctious 1958 novel, but wanted to throw out an appetizer here while I'm working out what I want to say about the rest of it. As Bellow's antihero tries to size up his life, he also describes and bemoans the lot of his seemingly clueless children. Here, waiting in the dentist's office to get a bridge repaired (dental work figures amusingly -- and cringingly -- in the overall story) is how Henderson thinks about his eldest son Edward, a roustabout who has a red MG (bought by Dad) and "thinks himself better than me."
The most independent thing this kid had ever done,' according to EH, was "dress up a chimpanzee in a cowboy suit and drive it around New York in his open car. After the animal caught cold and died, he (Edward) played the clarinet in a jazz band and lived on Bleecker Street. His income was $20,000 at least, and he was living next door to the Mills Hotel flophouse where the drunks are piled in tiers."

Anyway, my favorite part of this section is where he remembers later visiting the shiftless Edward in California:

"I found him living in a bathing cabin beside the Pacific in Malibu, so there we were on the sand trying to have a conversation.
The water was ghostly, lazy, slow, stupefying, with a dull shine. Coppery. A womb of white. Pallor; smoke; vacancy; dull gold; vastness; dimness; fulgor; ghostly flashing. 'Edward, where are we,' I said. 'We are at the edge of the earth. Why here?' Then I told him 'This looks like a hell of a place to meet. It's got no foundation except smoke. Boy, I must talk to you about things.'"

Ah, the Midwesterner's aversion to the coast, to all things Californian. Has there ever been a more damning description? I can't help but smile. Yes, the dangerous, slothful beaches. The decadence. The insidious opposite of Henderson's raw vigor.

And what about those semi-colons? Why did he use commas in the first series, but dragged us through those heavy semi-colons in the second? I think, as Philip Roth wrote in a 2005 memorium analysis, that Bellows "breaks loose from all sots of self-imposed strictures, the beginner's principles of composition are subverted, and...the writer is himself 'hipped on subperabundance.'"

But my sister and brother Midwesterners, what of California?

Electronic Immortality for a Granny

My maternal grandparents near the end of their lives: Amy Youtz Vandersall and Rev. William Austin ("Aust") Vandersall -- in Findlay, Ohio

By coincidence (or mystical correlation) in the last week, I've been given two fascinating gifts. First, aimlessly Googling the other night, I came across a handwritten letter from my own long-dead grandmother, Amy Youtz Vandersall, in an online genealogy site. She'd written it to somebody offering information about tombstones of obscure ancestors, in 1931. Though I'm not particularly interested in the content of her letter, the shock of seeing my grandmother's handwriting, delivered through Google, was considerable. How amazing that this note of hers, on letterhead from the family homestead at 1208 N. Cory St. in Findley, Ohio, an address that carries considerable emotional impact on me because it is where my mother grew up, and where many of her hopes and heartaches originated, should appear on the Internet. If my grandma only knew!

And the very next day, I received an even more astonishing gift from my beloved cousin, Dr. Amy Vandersall (named for that same granny), a retired art history professor who now divides her time between Boulder CO and New Haven CT. What she sent me was our granny's Bible. My cousin Amy and I are both avid word people and, even in our relative apostasy (yes, that IS a pun), we're deeply interested in family history -- not just the lines on genealogical charts, but the stories, the heartaches, the sorrows, and the joys. We think our grandmother was smart in a way that society didn't welcome. Her brain probably tormented her -- there were not enough outlets, though she bore her husband (the traveling evangelist William Austin Vandersall) five smart kids and ran a scrappy little mission of her own. We think she was manic depressive, inheriting it from her father (who committed suicide) and passing it on to at least one of her children, who passed it on to at least one of his.

Anyway, I'm intrigued by the notations on some of the pages -- the margins of Bibles were spaces for not just spiritual, but intellectual engagement back then. For example, on the page shown, John 19, she writes ""It is finished" is one single word in the Greek perfect tense, "It has been completed." This fascinates me -- her curiosity a grammatical, linguistic one, not a comment about dogma. And in Matthew 16 she notes: "Thou art Peter = petros = a piece of rock - "upon this rock = petra = a mass of rock."

There are, of course, comments which do seem to be explicitly spiritual in nature. In the poignant and perplexing story of Jesus's encounter with the "woman of Canaan" in Matthew 15, where he says, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep," the woman says "Lord help me." She says her daughter is "grievously vexed with a devil." He replies, seemingly cruelly, "It is not meet to take the children's bread and to cast it to dogs." Undeterred, she persists, ""Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table." My grandmother wrote (was she noting an actual moment of bitterness?) "few crumbs of thy mercy." But she added in the margin, ""So we must give God right in all he says vs. us and say, "Truth told" praying till we overcome." And of course, in the scripture Jesus answered "O woman, great is thy faith," and healed the child.

My grandmother had a difficult and, I suspect, tormented life, and she ended it in dementia, shuttled from one child's home to the next until she died in the Fifties. She was often cruel. Everybody did the best they could, I suppose. We never understood her because we never knew her before all her life's difficulties took their toll. In the photo below, sent to me by one of my distant cousins, Frederick A.Thornton, my grandmother looks so lovely (she's the one on the left in the back row -- she was about 24 when this was taken) And now, with this gift of her much-thumbed Bible, I can imagine and try to honor that woman, her fertile mind pulsing with energy and possibility. And I can offer sorrow for her sorrows, and acknowledge that there was also goodness in her DNA. Some of it has survived in me and all the rest of her descendants, and now we can offer her a bit of immortality in this amazing electronic world.

Walking Off the Carbon Footprint Blues

One of the sweetest Flint facts recently is that our PR-challenged old burg got named the 2007 Best City for Walkers by WALK Magazine. People laugh when they hear this.

But I know a lot of devoted walkers. I watch them fondly from the window of my second-story writing room: the judge in his mid-calf socks and white teeshirt, the woman in red with the black Scotty, the doctor cooling off after a run, the mother of twins striding along with her double stroller, the couple across the street who always hold hands. I like being in a neighborhood of walkers, and while I’m not the type to run out and say hello, seeing people stroll by is a quotidian joy.

I walk the ‘hood myself, but I’ve been craving a different kind of walking. I’ve been craving the kind of walking that replaces the car. With the price of oil over eighty bucks a barrel, the earth heating up and my cholesterol too high, why the hell am I driving two miles to work? Call me a Calvinist, but I like walking with a destination. So off I go, until the winter dark and ice settle in, on a daily round trip on foot.

To set the stage, here is what usually happens when I drive: back car out of garage, trying not to hit the chimney (again) or Mary Helen’s flower bed (again). Watch for walkers on sidewalk. Try to hit the green light at Court. Try to hit the green light at Mott. Cuss out other drivers who won’t go fast enough (45, way over the speed limit, but still) to hit all the lights green on Court. Turn on Harrison and curse the jerk who designed that narrow spot. Rush by new MTA Center, trying to ignore the seizure-inducing new digital readout. Turn into UMF faculty lot. Circle to top level, brakes squealing. Pull into same spot I’ve been pulling into for the last 20 years. Lock car, go down stairs, enter French Hall.

Elapsed time: seven minutes. Mood on arrival: cranky and aggressive.

It’s not that I’m all serene about walking. Getting ready requires work, and I’m a fussbudget. I run around muttering where’s my cell phone? Where’s that black umbrella? Driver’s license, Health insurance card? (I’m morbid by nature and afraid of dying anonymously) Where are my keys? Where’s my favorite cap from the Duesy Museum? I check the Weather Channel and hit the john one last time.

Finally, though, I tug on my leather backpack and amble down Maxine. Say hi to neighbor working on front yard. Count Walling signs: five so far. Williamson: none. Count For Sale signs: good, only two. Wait at light on Court and stroll across. Bid hello to Woodside Church, thinking how cool that it was designed by Saarinen. Savor moment of happy vindication for my gender at the pastor’s name on the signboard: Deborah Kohler! Walk through Mott, noting the Gorman Science Center with its lovely sycamores.

Proceed by Parking Lot 6 and Continuing Ed: note purple flowers with dark green leaves. What are those? Will Google later.

Warily approach pedestrian bridge into the MCC north parking lot. Hope it doesn’t have any Minneapolis-type cracks. (I’m a little gephyrophobic – word nerd alert – afraid of bridges, always grabbing my husband’s hand and holding my breath, especially at Zilwaukee) Check out the Gilkey Creek restoration below – a nice distraction -- the water’s sparkling. Make it across okay: Say thank you to the sensor at the automatic doors. Bid courteous good morning to Safety Guy. Walk through lot and exit through entrance ramp to assert my libertarian rights. Take a gander at the perfect mammary dome of the Longway Planetarium. What IS that color, anyway? Fuschia? Periwinkle? No, just turquoise, like an Albuquerque sky.

Walk by FIA, admiring the oxidized sculpture of kids dancing around the maypole. Note to self: join FIA on Internet quickly, before tonight’s opening. Scare squirrel on Kearsley. Cross Crapo on green, to assert my libertarian rights. Note beautiful stone house on corner of Kearsley and Thomson, watch out for oldsters at Kearsley Manor. Pass the stately Whaley House. Note to self: go tour it some Sunday afternoon. Cross Chavez and note with pleasure the new castiron railings on the bridge (take a breath, Jan) over 475, bedecked with daffodil bouquets and musical notes. Stride past the UMF dorm construction, ogling the giant dirt pile and noisy bustling trucks. Note hardhat construction guy walking around with -- my god, is that an actual blueprint? How attractive!-- rolled up under his arm. Note construction guys taking a break at the smokers’ picnic table. Go in the back door and up the stairs past the blocked off second floor of French Hall, hoping to see more construction guys. Have to settle for pounding and drilling.

Elapsed time: 39 minutes. Mood on arrival: mellow, full of sense delight and ever so slightly…saintly.

It’s a win-win thing, this walking to work. How nice to replace a carbon footprint with – novel idea! – my actual footprint, falling gratefully and gently on the earth.

(This is my new "Village Life" column for East Village Magazine. You get a sneak peek here. For more good stuff, check out www.eastvillagemagazine.org. They're undergoing some site repairs so it may call for patience.)

"Glamping:" New Definition of Wussitude

Vacation season is over, but OK, I have to do a separate entry on this one, which I've been chewing on ever since I saw an article on it in the LA Times August 19. There's this thing now called "glamping," (glamour camping) in which people with way too much money go "camping" without really having to rough it. Here's a quote from the article about one of the featured families, the Bondicks:

"After typing "luxury" into a Google search along with "camping" and "Montana," the couple settled on The Resort at Paws Up, a 37,000-acre getaway in the heart of Big Sky country. It's a place for affluent travelers who want to enjoy the outdoors but can't fathom using a smelly outhouse, a place where paying someone to light the campfire is a badge of honor, not the mark of a Boy Scout flunky.

The Bondicks, who live in a sprawling home on the edge of a state park outside Boston and hire a personal chef at home, shelled out $595 a night -- plus an additional $110 per person per day for food.

It's a hefty price to sleep in a tent, but the perks include a camp butler to build their fire, a maid to crank up the heated down comforter at nightfall and a cook to whip up bison rib-eye for dinner and French toast topped with huckleberries for breakfast."

A camp fire butler???

Friends, I'm over here sputtering for breath. I don't even know where to start. Why don't they just get him to put on a little suit and hold up a lantern in their front yard? Oh, man...

For one thing, I'm a known pyromaniac. Boy Scout flunky??? I think not, mes amis. Back in my camping days, I cultivated a fondness for fire-making rituals: preparing the ground, piling up a stone circle, gathering, sorting and sizing sticks of graduated thickness. I had to decide whether to build a cone-shaped or pyramid-style pile, and when and how to light it. I've been known to reward myself with a snort of camp Bushmill's for a one-match fire. (Lesson #1: don't put the bottle too close to the fire). Some of my campfires were works of art -- one thing I could do -- sort of proudly, oh, Wiccan or something. It was a matter of honor.

So, a camp fire butler??? If you were here, you'd hear my loud and lusty snort of disdain.

Friday Mix: Tony Snow's "Poverty," Pavarotti's "She," and Sad Goodbyes

On my mind, catching up:

-- Can you believe Tony Snow said (OK, this is old news, but, I still fume every time I think of it) he was leaving the White House because he couldn't make it on his $168,000 salary? So like the Bushies: doesn't he know how ludicrous that sounds, how actually wounding it might be to regular Joes and Janes out in America living on a quarter of that or less? Clueless, clueless.

-- How fabulous to hear that the late great Luciano Pavarotti referred to his voice as a "she." I have to talk to my creative writing students about this! I've always contended cultivating the reader is about seduction...now perhaps we could say that's true of the voice as well. I'm besotted by the notion of the voice as a woman within, making beautiful sounds out of the breath of our bodies.

-- Sign of impending autumn: last night I heard only two cicadas. A different kind of music: as my friend Sherry predicted, they sounded a little creaky and despairing, poor things.

-- Here's a tribute to two beloved pets: Jake and Helen's lovely old dog Kisha, who was gently put to sleep last weekend, and Teddy's Snoopy, whose fluffy coat we've all stroked happily as he padded around nuzzling us and saying hello at her many parties and dinners. She found him dead -- apparently peacefully -- on returning from DJ's party last weekend. It's hard to say goodbye to these animals who have graced our lives and been in our families for years. Who said you could judge a society by how it treated its animals? In these two homes, now missing and mourning their canine companions, love abounds.

A Dark Day of Remembrance

I heard the news on I-69 coming back from seeing my therapist in Okemos. Back then, a tumultuous time for me even without world events, I didn't like listening to the news, so I was playing Mozart variations on the CD player, in particular the one from which we got "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." I tired of the bubbly melody and on impulse switched over to NPR. The first thing I heard was a man's voice say, "And where the World Trade Centers used to be..." and the world, as they say, changed forever.

Everybody's got their story, of course. I remember rushing in to UM-Flint and hugging my not-yet-ex-husband, though we had staked out individual outposts by then; I had installed myself in a small high-ceilinged refuge in an old downtown apartment building. (From my art deco windows I stared out at a huge ceramic elephant at the Happy Elephant Day Care Center across the street. The elephant never looked happy, but more often morose and stranded on his pedestal. The day care center, and the giant sculpture, are now both gone.)

I went to VG's and bought a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, and canned peaches. The parking lots were almost empty, as was the sky. We'll all always remember that, I bet, that silent sky.

My husband invited people over that night for the comfort of marinara, one of his trademark dishes. It was a strange night, sitting in a house I'd abandoned after 15 years, with six or seven other dear friends. We drank a lot and watched CNN obsessively -- I'd been living without TV at my apartment and I was grateful to be where I could keep track, even with my ambivalence. I think I took a puff on somebody's pipe and the high was dispirited and made me clammy. When I left, my husband and I, still in deep confusion and mourning about our estrangement, tried to hug each other, but the intensity of the situation was simply too grave and too complicated. I wrenched myself away and fled back to my apartment to no TV, and no man in my bed. It was my great-grandmother's bed. Long before,I'd written a poem about my husband and me together in it; that night the bed connected me with both ancestral history and my immediate emptiness. It was a peculiar, sleepless night. I've often thought that was the one night I could have slept with my husband again, but it wouldn't have been fair -- the two immense sadnesses, the enormous and frightening losses, were too confusing, too inflammatory, like sleeping with nitroglyerin under the bed.

And I was in love with another man, and he was 2500 miles away. I wondered when and how I'd see him again. Every moment seemed suspended, every certainty undone.

The next day there was a spider in my shower. I couldn't bring myself to kill it. I gently scooped it up with a kleenex and carted it outdoors.

High Heel Hangover

That was all well and good, but my calves ache today and my right kneecap in particular is complaining. I am not a young woman.

But what the hell. Here's to parties! When I left, Dennis was impressively swing dancing with Phyllis in DJ's dining room (DJ'd taken out the table) while other people watched, all smiley and cheering. That mini-tableau alone was worth it all.

Carolyn Heilbrun and A Pair of Party Shoes

This is going to sound really incongruous, but I wore high heels for the first time in years tonight, and it felt great and it was fun, and when I got home, thinking about it, my party in high heels led me back to the feminist scholar, mystery writer and author of the wonderful book "Writing a Woman's Life," Carolyn Heilbrun, who killed herself at age 77.

This is how it went: I was in the mood to get dolled up for DJ's annual cocktail party -- an affair that cross pollinates Flint's wealthy set with a band of artsy academics every September. The magic we secretly hope will happen is that the people with money will fall in love with the rest of us and give us some of it for our programs -- but it's not a heavy agenda and most of us on both sides tolerate it, especially after the booze and great food kick in. DJ and his partner Dave have a big house in the fanciest part of town and they cater the whole thing and we stand out on the terrace sipping martinis, gossiping and making bon mots while the moon rises. Some years I don't want to go. Some years for some reason, this bash makes me think about what I haven't done with my life and I feel old and I resent the part of the invite that says "formal" and I think morosely about the past and dreams that didn't come true, and I can't find the right clothes to wear and I fight whatever role I think I'm supposed to play.

But this year I'm in a happy, untroubled state of mind. So today I carted myself off to Merle Norman and got a pedicure and manicure (deep red polish) and then -- in a rare impulsive decision, tried on a pair of totally impractical open-toe black party shoes with three-inch heels.
And bought them. And wore them, clicking along, a sound I haven't heard my own body make in this millenium, adjusting my gait to the architecture of being three inches taller. I felt like a walking suspension bridge. I felt my calves tighten, working to balance my stride -- skills I proudly learned at 16 and abandoned decades later when the whole idea of getting uncomfortable for style -- something about sexuality tied into it, lengthening the leg for a man's gaze -- seemed silly.

I remember the moment I gave myself permission to give up high heels. It was in the 90s and I went to Ann Arbor to hear Carolyn Heilbrun speak. I'd avidly read "Writing a Woman's Life" and from my lucky front row seat, I noticed she was wearing exceptionally sensible black shoes -- thick soled and flat. And then she said something about it -- that she'd decided life was too short for sore feet. I felt liberated and relieved.

Most of us who admired her from afar were shocked when she committed suicide. Those who knew her, though, reported that she had talked about it openly over the years. As one Google site puts it, "Heilbrun had written about planning for years to kill herself by her 70th birthday. 'Quit while you're ahead, was, and is, my motto,'she stated in "The Last Gift of Time" (1997). 'Having supposed the sixties would be downhill all the way, I had long held a determination to commit suicide at seventy.' "

But then, according to the obits, she found life so rich and enjoyable in her sixties, and even at 70, that she decided against it. She was quoted as saying, "I entered upon a life unimagined previously, of happiness impossible to youth...I entered into a period of freedom, and only past 60 learned in what freedom consists: to live without a constant, unnoticed stream of anger and resentment, without the daily contemplation of power always in the hands of the least worthy, the least imaginative, the least generous."

What's weird about this is that when I donned heels tonight in a spirit of fun, I felt that my playful gesture was part of my own "entering upon a life unimagined previously, of happiness impossible to youth." It's easier now, in this time of my life, to claim my right to enjoy myself. I wasn't on the hunt, I didn't care if I was the belle of the ball. I was just dolled up on Saturday night, perched on my new black shoes, balancing my mature woman's curves and teetering playfully along, like walking on stilts, under an amiable September moon. I like to think Heilbrun would regard my fancy shoes, a whimsical extrapolation of her views, with amusement. I wish she hadn't stopped finding life amusing -- the world is diminished without her.

Anyway, walking out of the party alone, adjusting my eyes to the dark driveway, I almost bumped into a stylish old gentleman in a tuxedo enjoying a solitary cocktail. "It's a beautiful night," he said, and I said "Yes, it is," and as I clacked away he said, "Have a safe drive home" and I warmly said, "You, too." And then I liked how I thought I might have looked walking away from him, all woman, poised and purposeful, clicking down the street on my own terms under an orange cone of street light.

Labor Day Weekend at Pt. Fermin Park

I'm in Flint and Ted is in San Pedro these days, and the only thing that makes it bearable is that Ted sends me fabulous emails. Here's a sunset shot from Pt. Fermin Park and Ted's description, copied with his permission, of his walk there last night:

"My Pt. Fermin walk was a sensual delight. Even at 6:45 the park was still jammed with people. It was a veritable gathering of the tribes as I recognized family gatherings of Mexicans, Croatians, Italians, Blacks, Persians, Islanders, Koreans, Thai, a few groups I couldn't pin down, and a sprinkling of mutts like me. BBQs flourished and the intermingling of their scents was one of the most powerful sensual delights of my walk. It was a cornucopia of odd and familiar smells, each one suggestive and appetite arousing. By the end of the walk I was famished. Visual and sound cues were equally as delightful, from the cheery babel of happy families appreciating the cool breezes to the colorful clusters of party balloons, kites, and gliders. Almost all who were left in the park moved to the west wall to witness the sunset. When the bottom edge of the sun hit the ocean, I was further delighted by catching sight of a hawk gliding about 30 yards over my head. In a rather stiff breeze, it held a stationary position perfectly. It was really quite incredible. The entire crowd was drawn back and forth between observations of the hawk and the rapidly setting sun. When the last edge of sunlight sank into the Pacific, people lingered, savoring these simple pleasures as long as possible. I was one of them. What felt particularly good about the experience was sharing it with such a diverse clutch of people--in harmony and peace."

Thank you, Ted. Here's to harmony and peace on this quiet day.

Preface to Walking to Work

There's a scene in B.F. Skinner's novel Walden Two in which the kids are required to wear large lollipops coated with powdered sugar on ropes around their necks -- they are told they have to wait to lick them, and if they give in, their tongue marks on the sugar will give them away. It was supposed to teach them discipline, of course, but although I've always admired Skinner's unsentimental observations of human predictability, how he cheekily forced us to acknowledge how we opt incessantly for the tastiest pellets, today this fragment of Skinner's highly structured utopia seems unpleasant and even mean.

I've rarely admitted it, but I'm sort of an impulsive and impatient person, maybe a little ADHD -- I tend to flit from one task to another without finishing any of them, then come back around later -- constitutionally I don't stay with one job very long except when I'm writing, which is one thing, curiously, that can totally absorb me. And it's gotten worse as I've gotten older: my concentration isn't the greatest and my mind is rangy -- I keep thinking of things I need to do, like unload the dishwasher or send an email to my brother or put a load of clothes in the laundry or fill the bird feeders. Tempus Fugit and all that.

As a child, however, I was exemplary.

My powdered lollipop was church. A preacher's kid, I had to sit still and behave, my mother at my side, smelling wonderful and in her Sunday best, enforcing order. She made me good at it. For 18 years I sat still in various pews. I counted ceiling tiles and browsed through the hymnbooks (I noted in one of my early poems that the last page of the hymnbook listed the dates of "all the Easters until the year 2000" which fascinated me -- I calculated that I'd be 51 that year and couldn't imagine what I would be like...when the year actually arrived, I changed my life dramatically and I wonder if the seeds were sown, a time-release germination, in all those hours of holding myself in). For years I hypnotized myself watching how the light came through the stained glass windows, until my dad finished his sermons and I was free. He was efficient and well-organized, rhetorically speaking. Sculpted to the expectations of his audience, his sermons usually ran between 20 minutes and a half hour, never more. Those were my training sessions.

I concede it wasn't all arduous: I loved the stained glass windows and the movement of blue, red, green and yellow light. The little scrawls and drawings I created on small pieces of recyled notepaper my mother provided were among my first stabs at self-expression. Eventually, if only out of boredom, I started paying attention to what my dad said. While I ticked off the minutes I formed responses I offered, precociously I'm pretty sure, over Sunday dinner. Thus I became a critic at a very young age. It was because of sitting still.

But as a middle-aged woman, I'm a flop at sitting still; I am restless and heated and transgressive. I lower myself into a chair at the breakfast table and then jump up five times to do something else; when I'm watching TV, I get up ten times an hour -- that might say as much about TV as about me, but still. There's a lot to do. And frankly, part of me lustily claims my right to not sit still. Not sitting still is one of my accomplishments.

And that brings me to the subject of why I've never walked to work, even though I'm only a mile and a half from the halls of UM - Flint and my desk with its humming Dell and all my piles of handouts and messily stacked books. Despite my bouts of whining "entitlement" despair about my so-called career, usually I can't wait to get there.

The Bug in the Dryer

The problem with my sorry excuse for a career, after a day of meetings in academia, is that I care more about the dead beetle in the dryer tonight.

No wonder I don't have tenure.

Maybe it was a cicada -- I couldn't tell for sure. Its wings were half burned off and it scared me a little: a dead thing in the basement, after all, and me home alone for the first time in months. Where had it been lodged -- what garment did it ride in on for its final scorching trip? I lifted it out with a dryer sheet and carted it upstairs in a fragrant little static-free packet, wanting to treat it with respect. I thought it needed to be back in grass. Oh, easy empathy for the stowaway husk.

But I've dug out Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, which my father read at about my age, and I've dug out You Must Revise Your Life by William Stafford, and I've opened Henderson the Rain King to the first yellowed page and read "What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation." I start to smile and I'm so happy both books are at my bedside, I can't wait to read them again. My fluffy pillow in the red pillowcase and the big brass bed seem like objects of a good life and outside the cicadas whirr -- the ones that are still alive, that never ended up doomed in the dryer in somebody's summer shirt.

"We" do not include "You" but Gonzo Goes!

I'm crabby again. Flint's already getting on my nerves. Here's the latest chigger in my linguistic getalong:

At three separate restaurants since getting home -- in three different strata, (Olive Garden, Bob Evans, and the Red Rooster) our servers insisted on using the smarmy "we."

"Are WE ready to order?"
(What, YOU'RE going to dine with us? But I hardly know you)

"Will we be having a cocktail before dinner?"
(I don't know if your manager would approve, but before you take off your apron to join us, which you apparently plan to, yes, bring me a kamikaze, wouldja? I bet this job makes you thirsty as hell, and I'd be glad to tip one with you, but just don't put it on my bill.)

"Would we be interested in a sample of today's wine for 25 cents which will go to charity?" (Great idea, by the way -- see, I'm not totally nasty. Bring me one of each.)

"Are we enjoying our [steak gorgonzola/strawberry waffle/wilted spinach salad] so far?" (I don't see you eating, chump -- and I'd enjoy mine a lot better if you weren't violating my pronoun protocols)

"Are we planning on having dessert?"
(This is just too creepy, that you've crawled inside me but don't know the answer to that one...of course we were planning on having it, but we have a superego, too, honey, not big but as persistent as a mommie chihuahua, and we can look in the mirror, can't we? Follow my lead, darlin -- neither of us needs any more avoirdupois around the hips, and I mean that kindly)

"Are we perhaps interested in a takehome box?"
(Who're YOU feeding back home? I've got my guy right here, thank you)

Who trains these people?

I know, I know, I'm a spoiled brat. Lucky to be able to GO out to eat. And afflicted with a rash of verbal pet peeves. While the world falls apart, THIS is what bothers me?

OK, we're shutting up now and taking our new water filter out of its box. We're giving up bottled water for good. See, that matters.

And celebrating the at-last departure of one of the worst Attorneys General in history, the last holdout from the Texas mafia of the worst president in history. And THAT matters. Gonzo gone!

We're pretty pleased. Here's my 25 cents -- let me try that pinot noir. What charity again? Now we want to try the syrah. Here's another quarter. Here's to a new gov'mint someday soon. We like that zin. A quarter for some brunello? Oh, what the hell, bring us the whole bottle.

Back in Buick City

The first night, velvet humid darkness, the Midwestern weather of deep summer that's inscribed in my bones. Loud cicadas, trains in the distance. A huge comfort to be what is literally "home" for my body and my "soul." Don't know what that is, exactly, but whatever essential part of me, the part that combines all the other parts and works intuitively with the universe -- that part is rooted in a Midwestern August night when the air is so thick and fragrant it's like breathing golden honey.

Second night, a raucous thunderstorm, tornadoes in Fenton just a few miles south. As agitated as the goldfinches which swarmed to the feeder on the back porch just before the storm, Ted and I wandered from window to window, outside to inside to outside, floor to floor, watching the storm come in and over. Hallelujah, I got that drenching I'd been dreaming of in arid L.A. We drove to the Red Rooster for dinner through giant puddles, cars daring each other through about a foot of rushing water the sewers couldn't handle. After two glasses of petite syrah, wilted spinach salad and scallops in a lime sauce, not to mention shared chocolate torte and an hour of conversation with Teddy and Ted about the existence of God and the chances of morality in the post-God era, I dragged Ted out for a long walk in the neighborhood. I can't go out in the dark so it was a luxury with Ted. Gilkey Creek, overflowing, sang a rushing cantata as we walked along.

Homemade pizza tonight with Gary Custer, Ed and Casey, Nic, Jessica, Mike, Roxana and those three little aliens they called chihuahua. I know this isn't exactly a diary but it was sweet out there in the lengthening shadow of the 300-year-old burr oak. Sake under the stars. Ain't so bad to be back in Michigan.

Tidbits from an LA Summer

Packing up to leave in the morning, I have a few remaining glass beads to string on the necklace of this summer's memories. Here's one of my favorites:

We discovered the wonderful Rosalie and Alva's, where we spent three memorable weekend nights. In a cozy block on Eighth Street, comfortably up the hill from all the harbor melee and cruise ship fracas, across from a church and a Chinese restaurant, this longtime ballet school opens up to live music on weekends. It's got a 1921 Steinway, fabulous acoustics, and seating for about 50 people, and everybody there loves music. Our first visit we caught zydecosis from the amazing fiddler Lisa Haley, guitarist/songwriter (and Pedro native) Chuck Alvarez and former Monkees backup guy Skip Edwards.

The second night we donned earplugs for Ohm, a fusion rock/blues band made up of Chris Poland (yes, the former Megadeth guy, I'm not kidding) Ginger Baker's son Kofi, also an awesome drummer, and surreally fabulous Robertino Pagliaro on bass.

Finally, on our third visit we relaxed in our second row seats for jazz by Rick Zunigar, former Frank Zappa bandmate Sal Marquez, bassist Jeff Littleton and Raul Bonda on drums. Though it took Marquez till the second set to get his horns straight, it still was marvelous music.

Rosalie and Alva's doesn't have a liquor license, but there's no uncorking fee for taking your own, and sometimes Matt, Rosalie and Alva's son and the genius behind this labor of love, offers hors d'oeuvres. The cover charge ranges from $10 to $20 a head and is well worth it. We felt incredibly lucky and privileged to enjoy this spot and the superb music. I will miss it in the cold days of the Michigan winter and return to it fondly next year.

Coif Calamity at the Canton School of Beauty

Pour etre belle, il faut souffrir. To be beautiful, you must suffer.

I just got back from getting my hair done at Hollywood Beauty Center, where Esteeve, a bubbly Persian emigre who once closed up the store for Sacha “Barat” Cohen and did his hair for $250, made me watch “White Chicks” on a DVD player while he dyed away my gray and gave me youthful highlights. Last time I told him I didn’t think his other favorite movie, “The Professional,” was a chick flick and he should rethink his offerings. At least this time the movie had “chick” in the title. It’s the price I pay, along with the icky smell and the four hours of torment, for letting Esteeve make me “double – no triple – beautiful!” as he always says.

I do it to brace myself for the banks of fresh-faced students awaiting me at UM – Flint. Every year I am a little older than they are, of course, and by now, I’m so much older I’m practically a crone. I vainly think doing something to my hair will help. So I stoically cart myself into whatever hovel of female sado-masochism I distrust least, and reluctantly submit.

It’s a wonder I go at all. In the perilous business of getting “beautiful,” I got off to a very bad start. Today, sitting in Esteeve’s rowdy salon, the memory of my calamitous first encounter with official beauty flooded back.

I was nine, and I kept getting hints I shouldn’t spend so much time climbing trees and getting scrapes on my knees. I felt a melancholy ambivalence. I was proud of being a tomboy, and my mother seemed to like me like that. She was deeply skeptical, if not outright disdainful, of what she considered to be shallow blandishments and alterations like shaved legs, lipstick, padded bras, pointy-toed shoes and dresses that crimped and cut off a woman’s breath. Style? Nonsense, she would have said.

So the impetus for my beauty rite of passage probably came from Dad. An Indiana farm kid turned preacher, my father believed men should be men and women should dress like the Lennon Sisters. It’s not unlikely he noticed his little daughter was a bit haphazard in the “girlie girl” department.

I had naturally straight hair, and usually my mom hacked off a swathe of it for bangs across my forehead, making me look like a small Polish Marxist. I didn’t object or dislike my hair, but I was told if I went to the Canton School of Beauty, I could have curly hair, and, according to my dad at least, that would be a great thing. I could get “a permanent” and go to fourth grade with a whole new look....

For the rest of this account, go to www.eastvillagemagazine.org and scroll down to "Essay: My Bouffant Bat Mitzvah."

Dopedust

Stardust: What a dumb movie. Not enough to satisfy either kids OR parents, in my view. Don't bother -- too many characters, too many ripoffs from other, better movies in the fantasy genre, an annoying lack of internal logic, tiresome deus ex machinas (shouldn't one per movie be the maximum by law?). I hate these movies that defy all the guidelines I proffer to my fiction writing students.

Several reviewers praised Michelle Pfeiffer as the chief witch, but I thought her overacting was mostly propped up by special effects. The more interesting role -- the only ten minutes or so of actual fun in the whole movie -- was Robert DeNiro as the cross-dressing Captain Shakespeare -- gruffly thuggish on the outside, and locked in his captain's quarters, prancing in front of a mirror in a pink corset, voguing and singing "I am the very model of a modern major-general" from the Pirates of Penzance. Eventually, he gets outed and whaaat? The crew still loves him. "We always knew you were a woopsie," one toothless pirate exclaims. "Arrggh," the Captain replies. Ahh, DeNiro as a pirate drag queen. Life is good. Wait for the DVD -- it's funny.

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.