Walking into the Fire

Gary tells me I need to get back to blogging more. I always do what Gary says. So here's the start of my new East Village Magazine column. To see the rest, pick up hard copies around Flint starting Friday.

This month I’m starting my seventh decade. If the Biblically-allotted three-score and ten bears out, I’m down to the ten. It’s a bit shocking.
I’ve been experimenting with calling myself “60” for several months, but it still feels as if that ancient person with my name is somebody else.
Nonetheless, my left brain and the calendar tell the truth: I really was born in 1949.
According to family tradition (most of the principals are dead now, freeing me to embellish as needed), my mother went into labor after hitting a high note at choir practice at a little church in Ohio where my father was pastor.
Her labor, her third, was quick and easy and I was lifted out into the world by Dr. Homer Keck, a beloved neighbor and friend, before midnight. I’d like to think the rest of the choir – not exactly a band of angels, but a motley well-meaning bunch, were still singing. They were supposedly delighted by the fact of the preacher’s new baby, and I was born into an atmosphere of hope and joy.
There’s no way to know if any of this is true, but I’m grateful music – enthusiastic and a little off-key – was part of the hours just before my birth. I was born into music and art – albeit their religious branch -- and I have needed them later, when hope and joy, inevitably complicated by other realities, faltered and got harder to claim.
It’s art and music to which I increasingly find myself returning as I get old. I’ve recently rediscovered Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, for example, and I’ve been avidly absorbed by the spiraling, gorgeously complex movements loaded on my iPod as I walk the neighborhood. It reassures me: humans are capable of creating order and transcending evil.
And on a recent Friday afternoon, I had a chance to meander once again through the galleries of the Flint Institute of Arts. I cherished the pleasure of doing so with Kathryn Sharbaugh, the FIA’s assistant director of development and a fine teacher and ceramicist. As she told stories about the collection, I was touched anew by the power of two particular pieces.
First is a mask in the African art gallery. It’s from the Guro tribe of the Ivory Coast, and was a gift to the FIA from Justice G. Mennen (“Soapy”) Williams. It’s roughly a water buffalo, a feral, dog-like head with horns, jagged teeth and protruding, primal eyes. Sharbaugh said it was worn for ceremonial occasions – often to dance for rain.
What captivates me is the creature’s snout. Three or four inches up, it’s roughly coated with black ash. Here’s why: Sharbaugh said to get the gods’ attention, the dancer would sometimes walk right into the fire, dipping the mask into the flames.
That smoky snout stuck with me. At first the gesture of dancing into the fire seems reckless, even ignorant.
But who among us hasn’t had our trial by fire? And who among us, for that matter, hasn’t sometimes chosen to walk right into the heat of desperate action because there is no other way?

Harmony with the Body at Last

What I like about Tai Chi and yoga are that they're so not-Protestant. When I grew up there was talk of the body, but it was all suspicious and guarded -- the body was a foe, a problem. Rhetoric repeated endlessly that our bodies were the Temple of God but I always felt as if that meant I had to watch myself...the body certainly wasn't mine.

It has taken me my whole life to begin to experience some harmony with my body. I'm very grateful for the lessons of this last year -- for the wonderful tai chi classes this summer under the giant fig tree in LA, and now the Monday and Wednesday night yoga classes at UM - Flint with Rachelle.

Three hundred on Sunday: Bees to Bathrobes

This is my 300th blog entry on Night Blind: Rough Drafts from a Writer's Life.

Since I started the blog in 2005, my most garrulous year was last year, when I posted here 134 times, or every 2.7 days. My second most chatty year was 2007, when I posted 105 times. This year I've been a veritable blogging hermit, posting only 53 times so far -- last winter, as most of you know, included a few months of hell in my life from which I have gratefully scrambled back.

I often forgot to attach labels to the posts, but from the ones I did,the thing I wrote about most, at 72 posts, was Flint, my home for the past 28 years -- this notorious, often infuriating place that prompts so much obsessive reflection and fulminating in my mind and heart. This is where most of my major dramas as a grownup have occurred, so it figures. It is my home; I'm interested in it and always thinking about my life here. The rest of the top ten topics, in addition to Flint, have been writing, memoir, poetry, nature, politics, LA, San Pedro, the body, and tied for 10th place, music and walking. Along the way I've also written about marriage, aging, death, food, insomnia, gratitude, health and hope. Also teaching, of course, and Tonga, the country of some of my early young adventures. And also misanthropy and what I tabbed "cranky standards." I've written about bees and bathrobes and the beer summit, and mentioned numerous people from novelist Charles Baxter to Hizzoner Dayne Walling to my friend and artist Patsy Warner. My former husband Danny has appeared on these screens, along with Jack Driscoll, Barry Lopez, Linda Gregerson, Greg Rappleye and many others. All this is a pretty accurate reflection of the things in my life that matter, that interest me, that worry me, that I love.

The post that seems to have gotten read most often, probably because of Google and which shows up under Google searches, was a piece I wrote last January about artist Jim Dine and his bathrobes. Another one that emerges often on Google is an account I offered about the appearance of Linda Gregerson at UM - Flint -- also one of my own favorites.

Obviously I haven't been as interested in this blog since I got on Facebook, where posting is easy and quick and, I'm ashamed to admit, I like that I get immediate readers, many of whom regularly say something back. As a social networking site, it feels, well, sociable. It usually cheers me up. It hasn't been unusual there for me to get four or five comments on a morning post, but here it's been rare to get even one. So, is it all about readers? When I first started this blog I did it under a pseudonym because I just wanted to write, ship it out to the blogosphere and see what happened. I was feeling reclusive and somewhat darker in my internal life than I am now; my blog entries -- or at least the way I felt when I wrote them -- tended toward the depressive, wrestling with my sadness and regrets. At least that's how I remember it. Things have changed somewhat. I'm less interested in writing about the things that make me sad or unhappy with myself. I'm attempting to savor the present, appreciate the good things in my life, and look forward.

If you've happened into this blog over the past five years, thank you for peeking in. It's been an enjoyable spot for playing out the concerns and curiosities of my life. I hope to return to it, in an attitude of leisurely rumination, a place to keep my writing chops in line when I want to develop my thoughts beyond Facebook's little popcorns.

Boston Herald: Bodacious Breakfast Bites

The only paper at the breakfast table in our hotel this morning was a stack of the tabloid Boston Herald. Its raucous alliteration soon got us guffawing over our scrambled eggs:

Headline: " Banned Nantucket dog's bite worse than its bark."
"Toney Nantucket has long frowned on rowdy rabblerousers running amok on their privileged sanctuary -- but now one four-legged party animal has found himself banned from the swanky isle...Lester, an 8-year-old Bluetick Coonhound who had summered on Nantucket for six years, was unanimously voted off the island at a Board of selectman hearing Wednesday after several neighbors complained the pooch had bitten four people."

Here's one about a 19-pound baby born to a diabetic mom:
Headline: Great Big Baby's Living Large"
"Kisaran, Indonesia-- He's a great big baby, and he just won't stop eating! ...Everyone wants a look at Akbar -- "great" in
Arabic -- who weighed in at a whopping 19.2 pounds Monday and is now drawing crowds. 'I'm very happy that my baby and his mother are in good health,' proud papa Muhammad Hasanudin said. 'I hope I can afford to feed the baby enough, because he needs more milk than other babies.' Crowds pushed to get a peek at the bouncy butterball at the hospital in Kisaran, Sumatra."

Ahh...THIS is journalism.

Rotten Apples

I'm in Boston at the moment, but in my mind I'm thinking about the rotten apples on the steps going down into Burroughs Park in Flint. I've been walking up and down those steps for more than 20 years, and this time of year, an apple tree on the north side of the steps drops its apples and nobody ever does anything about it. So they drop and get in your way when they're still hard, and then they soften and turn brown and send up the most remarkable, tangy scent.

At first it's spicy and the nose dilates like my cat's noses in the morning when they first come up from the basement and sit in the kitchen window sniffing out little birds and squirrel pheromones. Our noses are designed to dredge in information -- is this good to eat? What does this signify? I like how my nose reacts to rotten apples. I don't want to eat them, but it seems to signify rich dynamic nature and the turning of the season.

And my father. I remember my father when I smell rotten apples. In our one acre in McDonaldsville in Jackson Township in Ohio in the early 50s, he planted a miniature orchard of pear trees and a variety of apples -- I noted some of the varieties he loved in my oldy poem "World Travelers." He loved those apple trees. He thought one should not interfere with the apple drops -- he thought that was part of the plan for the other critters -- rabbits and birds, I guess. And he thought rotten apples did as they were meant to, sinking fragrantly back into the soil (humus, he proudly called it, a product of human planning he always believed in and cultivated -- he thought it was his responsibility to add to the humus layer). So those brown rotting apples were part of my father's world view, and also of my childhood, when I'd walk back there and be a little intimidated by their flagrant and fragrant journey back into the earth.

It's So Quiet

After the hustle bustle of LA/San Pedro, the peacefulness of our Flint street is almost distracting. It's lovely. Already feels like autumn -- the angle of the sun changing, the trees thinking about molting, I can tell -- there's that satiation in the air, a little weariness with all the rampant green growth. At night, cicadas thinning out; a train in the distance. After a few bumpy days of getting re-oriented, I'm reconciled and back to savoring the pleasures. A few more cherished days before the Great Again.

Already

...I miss the light. That tangy California sun. It was so gloomy yesterday I took a giant Vit. D capsule last night, and today isn't much better. How will I do without that light? Ted says it's just jet lag, and points out it got up into the 90s in Pedro today. So we're lucky to be here, under the morose parachute of gray. But how will I manage without that light?

The Pattern, Not the Face

I'd rather look at the patterns made by human life and its complications than the faces of humans themselves. That strikes me as strange, but I just realized that when I take photos, as I did with great enjoyment this summer in Pedro, I almost never took photos of people -- unless they were visiting relatives or my husband, and we wanted to document our time together. Otherwise, it's the patterns I love. Looking too closely at faces makes me anxious. But the patterns...oh, there I'm right at home, drinking it in. Above are several of my favorites from the Korean Bell, which is a sumptuously satisfying example of pattern -- curve, color, bird, sky, sea.

"Writing a Novel is Pathetic" and Essays from 6,000 B.C.

Packing up to return to Flint tomorrow, I'm reflecting on some of the pleasant reading my summer afforded me. There were afternoons when I got to read for three hours straight before heading out for my 4:30 walk to the Korean Bell -- it was a luxurious and restful daily ritual.

Above are two I particularly enjoyed: How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, and the massive The Lost Origins of The Essay edited lovingly by John D'Agata.

Hely's rollicking account of a kid who sets out to trick the system by writing a best-selling novel (how hard could it be?), thereby getting even with his ex-girlfriend and humiliating her at her wedding, to which she has smarmily invited him, starts out farcical but despite itself, begins to move into what I'm going to say is actually a sneakily serious consideration of the state of literature, publishing and even the creative writing world of academia (his excruciating description of a "workshop" at a made-up college in Billings, Montana is so close to the mark I had to turn away in shame until I could wrestle myself back into denial and go back to laughing). There are many hilarious quotes. Here's one:

Sadly a memoir wasn't an option for me, because my youth had been tragically happy. Mom never had the foresight to hit me or set me to petty thieving or to enlist us in a survivalist cult. I wasn't even from the South, which wouldn've bought a few dozen pages. Lying wouldn't work; these days memoir police seem to emerge and make sure you truly had it bad. And the bar for bad is high -- reviewers have no patience for standrad-issue alcoholics and battered wives anymore.

And this, about a certain myth to which many of us succumb:

When you think of the great writers, penning a novel seems terribly romantic. You think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Riviera breeze billowing his curtains and the sounds of the Cap d'Antibes street cut by the tapping of his typewriter, as he lacerates the rich and dreams of the past. Or Hemingway, in a hotel in Palmplona in the heat of the afternoon, as bullfighters take their siesta and drops of water bead on a bottle of kirsch. Or Joyce, squinting his Irish bead-eyes as he lends his classical training and his Gaelic imagination to summon up allusie rhythms and language dense and unfolding.
Even lesser novelists seem glamorous. Some scribbler burning twigs in a boardinghouse in the second arrondissemet as he dips his quill pen into the ink. Or a slim and shoeless thirty-something, taking a year off from his job as an alternatie marketing onsultant to sit in a park in Vancouver to Park Slope and type into his PowerBook a wry yet soulful take on the paradozes of hypermoderity.
That is all delusion. Writing a novel is pathetic and boring. Anyone sensible hates it. it's all you can do to not play Snood all afternoon.

Despite his revulsion, the character's novel ends up on the best seller's list -- and then all the trouble begins. Interestingly, Hely's skewering satire has not made it to the best-seller's list -- at this writing he's at 5,191. Not bad really, for a novel about a novel whose smartassed author we like through it all.

Then, the huge essay collection -- which despite its avoirdupois seems quite approachable and readable. D'Agata, a creative writing teacher from the University of Iowa, has assembled with gusto and affection a collection of "creative non-fiction" going all the way back to fragments of prose uncovered from 6,000 years ago. After noting in his introduction that even the earliest pieces of prose were rooted in commerce, he queries, "Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?" And his collections answers, "I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce....compelled by individual expression--by inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt."

In a season when all we read and hear about is failing banks, daunting and horrifying deficits, and rancorous arguments about how to pay for health care, this collection comes as a relief -- and reminder that there's another, more graceful side to human prose expression. Maybe, as in the last entry, a brilliantly concise piece by John Berger titled "What Reconciles Me," there is within us redemption.

Elvis in a Fine Fedora with the Angels

My ticket

Yes, I was there. Summer Tuesday night after a picnic of Kobe Grill crunchy rolls and a flagon of red wine, settled down in the "A" section. Didn't even need the big screens to see Lucinda Williams in her jacket (on the back, a skull with a rose in its teeth -- what's the allusion?) amble out with her three-man band to sing a nine-song warm-up set including "Well Well Well," the "Happy Woman Blues" (I suppose she is happy but it isn't her stock in trade...she's lushly lugubrious, really) and the wonderful ballad "Jackson," on which Jim Lauderdale of the Sugar Cubes came out and beautifully harmonized. She ended with the pounding and angry "Joy," when lead guitar Chet Lyster finally seemed to find his groove.

Then The Man, welcomed giddily by this exuberant L.A. crowd. He's thickened and put on weight since his spiky, pigeon-toed punkster days, and in his fine fedora he looked like an old rabbi, or later, we thought, when the fedora came off, an sturdy Italian fishmonger. He's neither, of course, born Declan McManus, and now in his 50s, enjoying many a comeback, Elvis Costello seemed especially happy to be among the Angelenos. (Getting ahead of my account, when he came out for an encore he ended up staying for six songs -- as the LA Times reviewer put it, he "seemed outright reluctant to put a halt to the fun."

Despite our excellent seats, we had a different feeling about this evening in the Greek than our earlier rousing and folksy night with Lyle Lovett -- when we were in the middle-B section. We thought the mix on many of the songs wasn't right, making it infuriatingly difficult to savor both Williams' and Costello's lyrics, and on one song half the Sugar Cubes started in one key and half another -- it took about two minutes to coordinate this embarrassment -- a weirdness the rapturous LA Times reviewer failed to mention. Also, we sensed that the "A Section" patrons were trying harder to be cool than the middle-class proles in B who had just a bit too much to drink, maybe, and noisily loved their Lyle. The Elvis folks were tres urbane and seemed hellbent on hanging out with their peeps. Lots of sidling eyes, it seemed to us, checking out who else was there. It's hard to resist: I'm a nobody Flintoid but I did wonder if that guy three rows up could really have been Scorsese (Hey, you never know) and if that other guy just behind us is a character actor on Law and Order.

Nonetheless, we enjoyed ourselves, and when Elvis Costello launched into "Red Shoes" it felt like the stars and moon and planets were all aligned, happy and vibrating with the spirit of long-enduring soulfulness.

P.S. I forgot to mention that Costello's band included NO DRUMS, but did include a dobro and an accordion. That was one rockin' accordion player.

Michael's Cat Snowflake

This is what counts as Big News in World 'O Me as my long lovely summer in San Pedro winds to an end. Thursday I was walking down Peck Ave. for about the hundredth time, this hilly street I've grown to adore, and I came upon two men putting in landscaping at the brown house where the white cat lives. This little kitty with the yellow eyes has been one of the delights of my walks -- along with the Grizzled Man, whom I'll write about later, if I see her it's an anecdote, something to tell Ted. She never lets me touch her and I'd sort of named her Pearlie.

So she wasn't there when I got to the house, which is tucked snugly into the hillside facing the harbor and always looks beautiful to me -- California arts and crafts style, with an attractive wood and cast iron fence allowing just a few peeks into the terraced yard extending down from Peck. I always wonder who lives there and if they ever see me flirt with Pearlie.

Two men, robust senior citizens, were putting in big clumps of wheaty-looking grasses, and I stopped to say how good it looked. "Native grasses?" I asked -- something one always hopes for around here, where a deep drought makes fussy annuals like pansies seem silly and ill-advised. They said they didn't really know if they were native but they liked them.

Is the little white cat too scared to come out while you're working?
Oh, you mean Michael's cat?
Ah. Michael.
Yeah, I don't know him -- I just walk by all the time.
That'd be Michael's cat Snowball.
Not Snowball, the other one said, Snowflake.
Oh yeah, Snowflake. That's it. Michael's cat Snowflake.

Sigh. I love knowing she's a Snowflake, here where it never, ever snows.

The next day, Friday, she was out, stretched out elegantly on the sidewalk in the late afternoon sun when I walked by.

Snowflake, I whispered, respectfully. She got up and daintily circled me, sniffing. She still wouldn't let me touch her, but this time she didn't run away.

Why I think I'm getting an ulcer

1. Bees -- Ira Flatow on Science Friday This is so scary.
How Could We Live Without Them?
2. Glaciers -- US glaciers melting Could all that newly liberated moisture what's been flooding the midwest and East with rain all summer?
Disappearing Beauty

3. Sarah Palin. Obama plan is "evil" What will it take to get this astoundingly ignorant attack dog to sink mercifully into discredited obscurity?
I'm Scared of Clowns

A Night to be Proud of Flint

For once, Flint made a choice that doesn't make it look like everybody got too much lead in the water. Congratulations to Dayne Walling -- a Rhodes Scholar! I'm so proud. Also congrats to Dale Weighill, who won the primary for city council person from my neighborhood. I'm hopeful he'll take the spot in the November final. It's interesting and energizing to imagine what these smart young men might be able to do for our city. While I've often cheered on Michael Moore's snide commentaries about the city, I think there's also room for serious problem-solvers who will not see everything as grist for parody, especially delivered from out-of-town aeries. We've been way too prolific in the parody department -- obviously so much to work with, God knows. Now could we have just a little interval of dignity?

Unfortunately, the Hurley Hospital millage went down by about 700 votes. People aren't feeling very compassionate these days -- and it's really hard on folks to accept any more taxes. I'm impressed, actually, that the vote was this close.

It's really sweet that Dayne finally pulled it out.

My Vote is Really Absentee: "Hot Case" Cold

Boo Hoo. No Vote

Ted and I just saw the rather mediocre movie "Swing Vote" in which a good-hearted but dopey drunk (Kevin Costner) ends up casting the deciding vote in a presidential race. Who did he pick? Kelsey Grammer or Dennis Hopper (Dennis Hopper??? Man, he's the one for me...delicious to imagine). Anyway, we were supposed to get the message that every vote counts. Okay, I get it.

Mine didn't. I really wanted to vote for Dayne Walling, the kid Rhodes Scholar whose mother I've known for about 25 years, for Mayor of Flint today. I really wanted to vote in favor of a millage for a hospital that serves the poorest people of Flint. i really wanted to vote for a gay friend who used to be my neighbor at Sylvester Manor for City Council.

But I'm in LA, where at the moment, for example, some guy is going up and down 26th Street with a cart, yelling "tamale tamale tamale" and the guy downstairs has his woodfire grill going in the driveway for an al fresco dinner facing the harbor. It's a long way from what we used to call Buick City. I love both of my locales, but it's Flint that rouses my political passions most -- it's been a long hard trudge, still very much in progress, for the city to pull itself up out of misery. Increasingly, I care about that. I want vindication for GM's abandonment. I want the people who are left, hanging on to whatever they can of grace and hope, to get some reliable goodness.

So anyway, before I left Flint I sent in my request for an absentee ballot -- it was received June 26. Never got the ballot. Until today. Election Day. In my mailbox in San Pedro. It arrived at 11 a.m. PST, 2 p.m. Eastern, giving me six hours to file my vote.

Though I'd essentially given up hope before today, I placed a call to Gloria Boone in the Flint City Clerk's office. Of course she told me I was out of luck with no options. But I continued the conversation. Let's see, it was my fault that I submitted from an online form -- that is "not normal," Ms. Boone told me. I mistakenly sent it to the County Clerk's office. They sent it to the Flint City Clerk's Office (receipt stamp July 7) but apparently it was mixed up in a pile of voter registration documents. I should have checked -- didn't I wonder what had happened? So basically it was my fault. However. my envelope was postmarked July 31...how could anybody have turned this around that fast? Before I got Ms. Boone, another worker told me they hadn't received the ballots until last week. So I'm wondering if my complaints and the series of gaffes were immaterial. Anyway, Ms. Boone said she resented that I was criticizing the City Clerk's office when "we are only human." Indeed. Very human.

I want new city government. I want something to work right. I want government officials to be nice to me and to do their jobs professionally. But at least this time around, I didn't get to say that with my vote.

I see the envelope had written on it "Hot Case." You can see that above. Huh. Right. By now it's stone cold.

P.S. Fortunately, early returns suggest Dayne Walling has a healthy lead, without my vote.

Flint Drinkin' the KoolAid Tomorrow

Check out Flint Expatriates' guy Gordie Young's article in today's Slate: Can Anybody Run This Town?

Here's one of my favorite parts, which I gather is also one of Gordie's favorite parts too since he posted it on his own blog (flintexpatriates.com):

But for me, the highlight—if that's the word—of covering this campaign came when Clack and Walling momentarily joined forces at the Landmark Food Center, the kind of grocery store where a security guard roams the fluorescently lit aisles and customers are required to check their bags at the counter. Flanked by displays of breakfast cereal, the two candidates judged a Kool-Aid-making contest sponsored by three local churches.

Go Dayne -- let's hope the Rhodes Scholar pulls it out tomorrow.

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot and other pleasures

Since I somewhat dissed Charlie Baxter's novel Soul Thief recently, I want to post this ameliorating set of responses as well. I just finished another of Baxter's works -- the charming and stimulating The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Part of a series (they're up to nine so far I think) on writing from the always wonderful Graywolf Press, Baxter's little six-chapter exploration examines issues of staging, the "subterranean," the unsaid, inflection and "face" in fiction. It's a bracing, refreshing discussion and I enjoyed it so thoroughly I decided to require my fiction students to buy it and read it in my upcoming fiction-writing class.

Charlie's the editor of the series, which also includes The Art of Attention: The Poet's Eye by Donald Revell, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts, and the newest, The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song by Warren Wilson College MFA Program matriarch Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Graywolf describes the series as a new line of books "reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism..." each book "a brief, witty and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue." Baxter, always self-deprecating while being quite brilliant, says in his intro, "my critical approach has a certain retro quality here and there. In my earlier book of critical essays, Burning Down the House [a book I happen to love --ms] I was eager to reintroduce an element of performative drama into criticism -- criticism, the dreariest of the arts -- by means of unsubstantiated generalizations and half-legitimated claims asserted a high volume. Here it seemed best to perform a few close readings, acting out the role of the critic-as-sleuth." His effort is entertainingly successful.

I've bought five of these compact volumes so far and after finishing Subtext I've enthusiastically plunged into Voigt's volume, which begins by amusingly describing her immersion in ear training and pitch in a summer job as a restaurant piano player at the age of 19.

These brisk, passionate treatises bring new life to the discussion of writerly issues. I'm grateful and energized by these offerings.

Catching Up with the "Brew-haha"

photo from the New York Times
Did anybody else, I wonder, find themselves squirming at the sight of President Obama and Vice-President Biden in their shirtsleeves at the "beer summit" Thursday? (I really liked Dan Schorr calling it a "brew-haha" on NPR Saturday)

I know it's old news now but I'm still thinking about it. The dimensions of power were blatant and awkward. Obama and Biden obviously could afford to almost loll in their rolled-up shirtsleeves, leaning back in their chairs. Meanwhile, Gates and Crowley showed (who wouldn't, when meeting the president of the United States?) in suits and ties, and sat up straight-backed in their chairs, knowing that half the world was watching. It looked like Biden and Obama were the only ones to reach for the peanuts, Obama even doing a little thing with his hands that almost looked as if he was tossing the peanuts into his mouth. How could anybody swallow anything in that atmosphere?

The self-assuredly casual, incongruous rolled-up shirtsleeves, a privilege of the Alpha Dogs, along with the beer, the peanuts -- none of that could really soften the significance -- the painful unresolved tensions, the media circus -- of this bizarre event. I couldn't believe CNN did a "countdown" to the "beer summit," yet I was right there waiting and ultimately embarrassingly transfixed.

It's Almost Like the Greeks

Universal

Pulling a Rappleye here, not that anybody's noticed:


"poof!"

The reason, in my case: There's some suggestion that posting a poem (even in draft form) here counts as "publication" and in some quarters thus precludes official submission.

Lassitude as Literature: Wearisome "Soul Thief"

I just finished reading Charles Baxter's latest novel,The Soul Thief, and I'm unhappy with it. It seemed so phlegmatic and depressive, and as several reviewers have noted, the plot device that concludes it is cynical, unimaginative and disappointing. The plot, in which a character named Nathaniel Mason is creepily shadowed by another man, creepily named Jerome Coolberg, has two parts: one situated in Buffalo, New York, in the Seventies, when the "identity thefts" occur, and another in the Nineties, when Mason and Coolberg meet up in LA.

It's not as if the book is devoid of pleasures -- it is, after all, Charles Baxter at the loom, and as a much-revered writer's writer, he indisputably knows how to weave John Gardner's "vivid and continuous dream."

As a part-time Angeleno, I was quite fascinated and amused, for example, by how Baxter's disheartened protagonist describes LA. Here is how he sees LA's airport, appropriately some might say abbreviated LAX, through which I've traveled about 40 times over the past eight years:

Although most airports seem to have been designed by committees made up of subcommittees, and are inevitably unattractive and unsightly, Los Angeles International has an exuberant ugliness all its own. The atmosphere of non-invitation is quite distinctive, as if the city's first representative, its airport, is already disgusted, perhaps even repelled, by the traveler. The recent arrival might well imagine that he has landed on the set of a low-budget futuristic film, most of whose main characters will die horribly within the first forty minutes. The pods, as they are called, are careless maintained, and an odor of perfumed urine wafts here and there through the bleary air.

The enervating experience of LA continues in the protagonist's (to me) hilarious take on the thinly disguised (I think) Chateau Marmont (or maybe the Beverly Hills Hotel), which Baxter calls "The Fatal Hotel" ("Celebrities have died there," his host tells him as if assuming the torpid Nathanial has a taste for morbid fun):

...For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pur floral forlornness. They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning. Scandalized, I saw stains.

Oh, snap! as Jon Stewart would say. Those stains! That's Baxter at his sharply observant best -- but unhappily, Mason's adrenaline in response is among the most energetic moments of the book.

Here's my fantasy, wholly based on conjecture, of what was happening to Baxter -- an old friend from the Eighties in Michigan and a much-cherished teacher in the Warren Wilson program when I went through -- when he wroteThe Soul Thief. I imagine that the experience of seeing his wonderful novel Feast of Love translated into the relatively pallid movie version made him feel violated. I imagine that it felt as if the hard labor of creation was twisted and and its loveliness ripped off. I imagine if he ever went to LA to consult on the making of the movie that it would have struck him, Charlie Baxter, very much as it did the dyspeptic Nathaniel. And I imagine that's why this novel, which never sees enough light, or like an iPhone that's not fully charged and can't quite pull in the call, is the dim and depressive reverse image of The Feast of Love.

How to Serve Tea and Plaudits for Rex's

So, while the airwaves are full of matters of import, drawling Jeff Sessions boringly and predictably interrogating Sonya Sotomayor, I've decided to broach my own issue of consequence: How To Serve Tea.

When I got sick last winter, among other changes I made, sadly abandoning my beloved double espressos at Steady Eddy's for instance, was to cut out almost all caffeine, and my morning beverage of choice became herb tea. Since I felt like I was sacrificing, I became quite attuned to making sure the new way was as pleasant as possible, and thus I've turned into something of a tea crank at restaurants.

First, there always should be non-caffeine options -- and not just some boring decaffeinated green teabags, but at least a handful of lively caffeine-free choices -- Steady Eddy's at the Flint Farmer's Market has one of my favorites, a pomegranate blend, and they also have peach and several citrus varieties.

Second, and to the point of this post, is how the hot water is served. Some places bring the cup filled with hot water and the little pitcher also filled with hot water. This makes no sense, unless you're also offered two teabags, one for each container. If it's served this way, you have to decide where to put your teabag. Obviously you'd begin with the cup, but then that means by the time your cup of tea is properly steeped, the bag is half-used up and your pitcher of tea would then be weaker than your first cup. Instead, the pitcher only should be filled with water; you put your teabag in there and fill the cup from the pitcher, so that all the tea is of the same strength. Then if you want more tea, you ask the server to bring you another teabag and fill the pitcher, not the cup, with fresh hot water.

Water in the teapot only -- hooray

Finally, the cafe should serve all kinds of sweeteners -- not just the excreble refined white sugar and Sweet 'n low. There should be raw (probably turbinado) sugar, Equal and Splenda. I'm a Splenda fan myself and my husband prefers Equal, and we find it irritating when neither are available.
Four kinds of sweetener -- hooray

The restaurant which consistently meets my tea-serving standards is Rex's Cafe at the corner of 22nd Street and Pacific in San Pedro, where I took the photos included here.

And I added a photo of my breakfast this morning, to note that they serve the best fruit bowl in town -- ordered with my disturbingly mammary but delicious "Green Eggs Cabrillo" (there's spinach under that cheese sauce).
Man, this breakfast needs a bra

Rex's is one of my favorite breakfast spots in Pedro -- a cheery yellow interior, friendly bi-lingual service, consistently fresh and delicious food, including excellent steel-cut oatmeal, and an interestingly varied and mellow clientele.

There, now I feel better. Bring it on, Sessions.

We're Laughing on the Outside for Spamalot

Here's what you do on a globally-warmed singeing hot Sunday in the midst of a deep recession in LA: get in your American car, crank up the AC, and drive downtown to the Ahmanson Center as fast as you can and get the best seat you can afford to "Spamalot." Then laugh your ass off at the old Monty Python favorites like "I Am Not Dead Yet" and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

John O'Hurley is King Arthur and his madcap crew includes the amazing Merle Dandridge as the Lady of the Lake, Christopher Sutton as both the hilarious "Not Dead Fred" and "Prince Herbert," Rick Holmes as Lancelot (yes, he "comes out" in the second act) and Ben Davis as the musical theater maven Sir Galahad.

I have to admit that "Bright Side" missed some of its deliciously dark incongruity for me by not being warbled by Jesus (oops, I mean Brian) from the cross, with harmony from the thieves, but that lacuna was almost completely redeemed by Prince Herbert's over-the-top renditions of "Where are You?" and Galahad's jazzy "You Won't Succeed on Broadway" ("unless you've got a Jew").

It's impossible not to feel joyously philosophical about life at the endearing, precocious finale, when the crew released clouds of giant confetti on the audience. Most of us joined in on the last refrains of "Bright Side," whistling from center front orchestra and mezzanine alike. Don't know if there were any Bernie Madoff victims or foreclosed inhabitants in the crowd, but for a minute we were all thumbing our noses at bad news and dreadful possibilities.

Clearly, we're not dead yet.

Alva's Does It Again with "One Wing"

All I have to say about last night's sterling performance at Alva's is "Wow." Laurence Juber, former lead guitarist with "Wings," played two generous sets, just one guy sitting alone on the stage with his beautiful maple Martin guitar, and blew the rest of us away.

People rushed to the counter in the Alva's lobby at the intermission and bought his CDs like crazy -- I was among them. I want this beautiful music in my life every day.

If it's yellow...

Mark Rothko
The City of LA is under a severe drought watch, and a number of strategies are being suggested to help save water. The most common goes way back for Ted and me: "If it's yellow, let it mellow...if it's brown, flush it down." We figure this has saved us at least five flushes a day. And, well, we keep the lid down in between. Aren't we the thoughtful pair?

Elephant parade in LA

Photo from the LA Times
One thing I really wish I'd seen: the annual walk of the elephants through downtown LA at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning. (We didn't arrive in LA until 5:30 p.m. that day, safely far away at LAX) It's a tradition going back to 1922, according to the LA Times -- walking 11 Asian elephants three miles to the Staples Center for the Ringling Bros. circus. LA Times elephant story Here's the really eerie part: that was also the day of Michael Jackson's funeral in the Staples Center. A lot of the hundreds of people in the streets waiting to get in thought the pachyderm parade was part of the MJ rites. Could things get any weirder? Do you think the elephants remember that walk, year after year? Has it become part of their literature, a story communicated to the young calves?
P.S. I feel sorry for the elephants. They shouldn't be walking through any damn city. They should be enjoying tall grass and fresh air. But still: to have seen that...

Reprise of the Lilies

While Mark Sanford, clearly in a state of wrinkled-forehead manly disarray, is blathering on about how he "developed a relationship" with a "dear, dear friend" and spent five days crying in Argentina, I repaired to the back yard to document this year's crop of lilies. They are right on time compared to last year, when they showed up here on June 21 -- and they've been blooming brilliantly for a few days. Thirty-five of them today. A finer entertainment than prurience and politicos in "serious overdrive." Lordy, lordy.

Moving Water

The muddy, gushing water of Gilkey Creek after today's heavy rain was marvelous. Mother Nature's energy: the earthy smell of the water, the sloshing noise of it, the green branches bending over the rushing water -- all refreshingly vital and cleansing.

On Coming Back to Life at The Pacific Rim

"poof!"

Saturday night at Alva's

My last weekend in Pedro for awhile, we had a date almost as good as the Obamas', and not at taxpayer expense, not that I begrudge them! Our date was dinner with Teddy and Dennis at ShinShin (hot&sour soup, crabs rangoon, lemon chicken, spicy beef, good Mexican beer) followed by a fine jazz set at Alva's -- both in that charming little off-the-beaten- path block of Eighth Street.

The trio tonight was called CPT Kirk (yeah, Captain Kirk), a snappy combo of keyboard, drums and bass guitar -- all original work, all intricate, tight and immensely energizing. The band is made up of Kirk Covington on raucous drums, Scott Tibbs on passionate keyboard, and wiry, Rufus Philpot on dazzling bass guitar. Covington, a husky middle-aged dude with a scuplted white mohawk culminating in a tiny pony tail, let loose with gutty, exuberant vocals I found cathartic, and the interplay between the three was easygoing. The music, as usual at Alva's, is what really matters. As Covington noted at one point -- "it's so quiet...and no cigarette smoke." That's the pleasure Matt Lincir, Rosalie and Alva's son and the major domo of the Alva's series, so lovingly engineers. His audience -- of about 30 or so tonight -- clearly are devoted to the music, and are attentive, even rapturous, listeners. I thought Covington, Tibbs and Philpot (OH! CPT -- now I get it even further) were superb and perfect for Matt's audience -- they seemed totally, lustily engaged. Their fusion of funk to tribal rhythms to hints of boogie woogie to twining, interlocking jazz patterns was electrifying. They played just one hour-long set, enough -- the sound is loud and hits the brain like deep-tissue massage. My brain, always looking for a break from verbal demands, loved it. I wish they had a CD out -- I'd love to try writing to it, especially poems.

The full moon added benediction to the scene, gleaming over Eighth Street and then still dangling over the ocean from our back deck when we got home. Turning the other way on the deck, we could drink in the sparkling lights of the harbor, especially the blue scoops of the Vincent Thomas bridge.

I've really loved this place this time around. I admit it: this time I hate to go back.

Wolfie Is Still Perdido

Poor Wolfie and Poor Raven

Telephone poles on Peck and Gaffey around Angel's Gate Park and the Korean Bell are still plastered, poignantly, with flyers seeking the missing Wolfie. I have been quite captivated by the Wolfie narrative -- offered in both English and Espanol. Sadly, somebody went around a week ago or so and scrawled "Still Missing" on the flyers. In the meantime, the pleading in two languages has produced no results.

"Mi perra se ha perdido. Lo estrano mucho." There's something about the word "perdido" that sounds more operatic than "lost" -- more extravagant and sad.

And in the meantime, Wolfie's distraught owner "Raven" says she just wants him back -- NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Sin hacer preguntas.

So sad - reminders of desperate loneliness on every corner. Too bad. Where is Wolfie?

Busted My Idol Cherry

...and voted for Adam Lambert. Yeah, that boy rocked all season, and sizzled right off the stage with one of my all-time favorite songs, "Change Is Gonna Come." Sam Cooke would have LOVED it. I got goose bumps on my goosebumps.

I like that I got to vote right here on our hillside in LA, after the quake this afternoon. It all seems so right. It only took five tries.

And by the way, go Lakers. In the other room, on the other TV, Ted survived a near-death experience as the Lakers took it to the last second 105-103. Phew...

Just another Tuesday in La-La Land.

Shakin' and Quakin'

Just had the second earthquake in three days in old LA...this one a 4.1 which lasted just a couple of seconds, but it's unnerving after Sunday night's 4.7 -- this new one, already being labeled an aftershock by the USGS, had its epicenter just 3600 feet from the last one.

Our apartment is between the little southeastern "bump" of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, west of Long Beach on the USGS map above.

I had just gotten home from a nice long walk along the hills of Peck Street and up to the Korean Bell. I wonder what it would have felt like up there, where the wind today was so stiff the gulls were flying backwards!

For some reason, I feel happy. Little quakes keep you in the present moment, that's for sure.

So, hey, I'm staying loose and keeping close to the doorframes. Stay tuned!

A Morning with Gilkey Creek

There's something I've been wanting to write about, something that's nudging at me, a bone in my throat, an agitation in my craw. (What is a craw, anyway? Note to self: Google "craw.")*

I begin with little winding Gilkey Creek, a feeder into the Flint River. It has been part of my life for about 25 years -- since my first husband, Danny, and I moved into our house on Seventh Street. Back then I started walking and jogging along the creek and over its three little foot bridges as part of a route through the neighborhood that has continued to this day.

Here's the thing: sometimes I am in denial about the huge chunk of my life that I've spent in Flint -- I don't know why, exactly, except that as I've said before in many other contexts, I never thought I'd stay this long, and sometimes it simply doesn't feel like "my kind of place" -- or the kind of place I thought I'd end up. Going there in my thinking dangerously leads to "it wasn't supposed to be like this," or, "I could have done better..." And thus to a tunnel of self-doubt if not outright self-recrimination, and nothing good comes of that.

But then, there's this little creek that I've been pausing to look at on its many curves and byways when it's crusted with ice in February and gushing with green life in early May; there are sometimes ducks noodling around under the bridge on Brookside. I've noted the way October leaves dapple the water in red and gold; I've delighted in the little rippling rapids at the footbridge by Kensington. This little creek has meandered its way into my daily life, and I've come to count on it. Maybe it's like an arranged marriage, where after years of just living one day after the other, you suddenly realize you've grown fond of the mate conjoined to you by fate.

There's passive aggression in keeping my feelings at bay about a place I've lived in much longer than the whole of my childhood, much longer than anyplace else I've ever lived, for that matter. It strikes me suddenly that one can take out one's individual resentment and disappointment on the land -- by withholding commitment, by ignoring its needs and travails. By simply refusing or failing to notice.

This dolorous line of reflection from individual circumstance leads me deeper: sometimes individual difficulties, unresolved baggage about ourselves, can become something bigger, taking a toll on Mother Earth. If we're not taking proper care of ourselves and unearthing (ohh...untentional but lucky slip...to "unearth" like digging potatoes out of the dirt, a gift, a consequence of our husbandry) thus, unearthing the meaning of our lives, perhaps we also stop paying attention to the natural world that sustains us.

So this is partly an argument for taking care of ourselves -- not just at the superficial "yes, I exercised today," but at the spiritual level -- "yes, I am finding a path to forgiveness, moving on from the griefs and disappointments of the past."

I woke up Saturday, in short, and decided to get up and go to Gilkey Creek, where good-hearted folks not as ambivalent or reclusive as me had organized a Flint River cleanup, including my little tributary. This new, uncharacteristic decisiveness, not without resistance or misanthropy, overall felt refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed the morning, getting muddy on the banks while tugging out drenched plastic bags ("Toys 'r Us" being the predominant logo in my assigned stretch of creek), shards of styrofoam, candy wrappers -- the usual detritus of thoughtless humanity.

Hmm...that casual little reference just jarred me into insight -- "my little tributary" -- it IS my little creek, as it is all of ours. As I was arguing myself out of bed, dreading having to interact with "people" in my current not-quite-completed rehabilitative state, I thought "you don't have to make nice with the people. But you could care about the creek." That little creek in all its imperfections has given me many moments of pleasure. It's part of the land that was here before us and now, as always, is deserving of our love.

*Craw: a pouch in many birds and some lower animals that resembles a stomach for storage and preliminary maceration of food (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

Art Walking Flint

Walking into St. Paul's Episcopal Church tonight, I felt like Flint was a real town for once. It was the monthly art walk, and like last night, this was a blessed, lovely May evening. At the church's big door, a friendly guy hailed people in, eager to show off the church's Tiffany stained glass window, which is indeed breathtaking. The gentleman gave everybody a little handout, delightful reading, with words that vibrate my childhood memories: narthex, transept, reredos, font...I love that sanctuary sensually without regard to dogma because of its colors and shape and art, including floor tiles in the chancel made by Albert Champion at Flint Faience Tiles in the 1880s -- the same company, artistically spun off using the same materials as spark plugs, that made the tiles in my own bathrooms.

It was my friend, the multi-talented Grayce, who got me to step away from lingering reclusiveness again tonight (two nights in a row...this is big), and I wanted to go because she was showing her porcelain fish in St. Paul's parlor. ( I like the idea of art in church parlors, too -- better than in my day, when the evangelicals of my childhood objected to decoration in a sanctuary as if the spectrum itself was somehow ungodly. Who were these people, so frightened of pleasure?? ) Grayce in her red sweater greeted visitors with the verve of a woman 30 years younger -- maybe it's art and poetry that keep her vibrant -- that and her Ohio pedigree.

Out on Saginaw Street there actually were people: a blend of young and old, many children, even music in front of Flint City T-Shirts, where I bought two shirts, one a muscle shirt that amusingly claims "Flint: The toughest town around since 1855" and another one, old postcard style, that says "Greetings from Flint Michigan!" Art students from Davison High School were showing their work at the T-Shirt shop, and a couple of kids sang and plunked on a keyboard and electric, um, ukelele, I think? It was sweet to see all the kids, hanging out in their bohemian garb, lounging on benches, having a little downtown adventure. Down the block, a couple kissed and nuzzled between venues: he in a beret, she in black hair with bangs. Is this Paris, for gawd's sake? Before I knew it I caught myself stopping to stare and smile, wanting to congratulate them, and then I realized I knew them. So glad to know the cosmo couple kissing on the street.

As I say, just like a real town. It felt good.

Jazz and a Full Moon over Flint

Last night at the Flint Institute of Music's warmly intimate MacArthur Recital Hall, nerdy-looking and distinctly middle-aged guitarist Lawrence Newman sat inconspicuously in the background for the first eight pieces while a wonderful collection of jazz musicians -- from the Flint Institute of Music faculty and the Limonest Conservatory in France -- performed a free concert. Then, on the ninth number, the flutes, trumpets and a trombone came out onstage to join the guitars, saxophones, vibes, piano and bass and the whole crowd played three numbers announced as Larry Newman compositions: "Aisle Land," "Voices," -- my favorite of the three -- and the buoyant "Stride" which ended the two-hour show. Throughout the three fabulous performances, Newman stood up and wandered toward the spotlight, but mainly hunched over his guitar or kept a sidelong glance on the other musicians, smiling as they played out his work. As we used to say in Ohio, "Who'd a thunk?" It was terrific entertainment and one of those nights -- a prototypical Flint kind of thing, psychologically speaking -- when one goes in with an open mind expecting nothing in particular and then comes out happily surprised and satisfied into the moonlight.

Invariably, I found myself thinking typical Flint thoughts about the FIM musicians and wondering -- hell, they live here? Where? How do they feel about plying their trade in this old town? Do they wonder how they ended up in Flint when they wake up at 4 a.m.? Where do they hang out? Does a night like last night make it all worthwhile? Do they say to skeptical colleagues from more glamorous ports, "you know, it's not a bad life after all?"

It's true the Midwest has its moments -- of stubborn resilience and serendipity. Sometimes Flint is like the Susan Boyle of cities.

Anyway, I loved the curly-haired, intellectual-looking Jeff Price, an FIM faculty member and saxophonist, gently introducing the show by describing an afternoon in a bar in Lyon, France, wishing his musician friends could play in Flint. Something that starts in a bar in Lyon, France and ends up in the MacArthur Recital Hall pleasing all the rest of us on a balmy May night isn't all bad, and I thank Price for making it happen. The money came from rich people, of course -- the small cadre (and smaller and smaller, one worries--let's hope there are no Madoff victims among them) who keep some of the finest things in Flint going -- in this case, the Patricia Cumings Dort Fund and the David T. Dort Fund.

About halfway through the show, I leaned over to my neighbor and friend John, who's about 20 years my junior, and said the music was making me thirsty for a glass of vin rose and a dark little French cigarette. Back in my day you could still hear jazz from time to time in smoky cafes if you knew where to look -- even in Ohio. John, on the other hand, said he'd never heard jazz anyplace else than in a concert hall. Too bad! We reflected on where it all started -- certainly not in a hall where everybody there looked, uh, well-educated and maybe dressed up a little for the occasion. Does it make it all too astringent, I wondered, like seeing some arcane little piece of a water jar in the Kelsey Museum in A-squared?

So yeah, full moon. John and I walked from our increasingly leafy street to the FIM, and then back, in richly silver light of the moon over the Flint Institute of Art and then Mott Community College and then over our own houses in something like a painting by Rene Magritte.

Lilac Day and Joey the Cat Sings Led Zeppelin

This is the first day of lilacs in Flint. The distinct perfume, wafting over the familiar curved sidewalk at Pierce Elementary School. First, my nostrils, as they say, flaring in recognition, alert -- before my mind said, "lilacs." This confirms my long-standing argument with a long-standing friend on the subject "which comes first, thought or language?" First my nose knows, and then my voice whispers "lilacs." Need I say more?

Do you think the children still in school noticed that today was the first lilac day, garrisoned in their late-spring cages?

On another subject, Adam is singing "Whole Lotta Love" on American Idol and my cat is wailing along with him. Either Joey Two the Golden Feline is a true rocker or Adam's Led Zeppelin rendition is hurting poor Joey's ears. Well, Simon says "nobody can top that now." He should have heard my cat Joey.

"The Pleasure of Doing" -- from The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I'm enjoying Alison Anderson's translation from the French of Muriel Barbery's charming bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In Chapter 18, the book's cranky yet vulnerable main character, a widowed concierge, is remembering a scene in Anna Karenina when an aged Levin is scything, at first awkwardly and then, as he works up a sweat and moves through his exhaustion, "his painful gestures become more fluid." Here's the lovely passage that follows:

A welcome breeze suddenly caresses his back. A summer rain. Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will.

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this -- ridiculous journal of an aging concierge -- if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

Here's to scything and writing -- the pleasure of doing.

Today's Flint Walk: "My Lizard Likes Them"

In bright sunshine, I met Helen, a woman I'd seen walking from time to time. (It felt soothingly Old World that we shook hands; she looked like she might be in her 80s but has a fine strong handshake. I will mourn the loss of shaking hands if the flu epidemic forces us all away from simple physical gestures.) Helen was walking her dog Maggie, who Helen said is 17. We stopped to chat on the sidewalk east of Pierce School, looking at the caved-in spot where the big old ash tree used to be until a December ice storm got it.

We started talking about dandelions, which are just busting out all over the yard around Pierce's playground. Helen confessed she actually likes them and feels no need to root them out. The other day on her walk, she said, she ran into a woman with a handful of picked dandelions. "Oh! So you like dandelions, too!" Helen exclaimed. "No, I feed them to my lizard," the woman replied. "My lizard likes them." We smiled broadly at each other. What a great neighborhood!

I recalled how in Ohio's early springs my mom used to pick dandelion greens and cook them up in a cast iron frying pan with a vinaigrette dressing -- it was fabulous. But as I told Helen, I never have enough nerve to pick the greens from my own yard to try this dish, which was one of my favorites as a kid. I keep thinking about the parade of dogs on the street and the raccoons that obviously explore my back yard at night. When I was six and we moved from the country to the city, one of the things my mother mourned was the ready supply of "clean" dandelion greens in April.

I still might try it, though. Helen reminded me I could just wash them carefully. Next week probably will be too late -- the greens have to be young and tender.

Wisdom from Rumi and Martin Seligman

Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" this morning on NPR was a reprise of a 2007 show about the Persian Poet Rumi -- Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Balkhi al-Rumi, born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan.

His words -- often offered in the declarative couplet structure called the ghazal -- are startling relevant and refreshing. For instance, "Water the fruit trees and don't water the thorns."

That makes me think about psychology super-star Martin Seligman's notion of "Learned Happiness" -- the bracing follow-up of his earlier, gloomier but pathbreaking conceptualization of "Learned Helplessness." Seligman postulates, with scientific evidence in support, that it is possible to teach oneself to be happier, even in the face of life's challenges, disappointments, chaos, troubles. Seligman, a self-professed pessimist, doesn't offer his ideas in saccharine "don't worry be happy" naivete, but in a sober analysis that we can affect even our brain chemistry by actively choosing what we think and do.

Part of it is simply moving. Rumi was a dervish, who whirled while reciting poetry as, it has been suggested, a way of centering around the meditation. As Persian-American Rumi scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz said, paraphrasing Rumi's ideas, "If you don’t plow the earth, it’s going to get so hard nothing grows in it. You just plow the earth of yourself. You just get moving. And even don’t ask exactly what’s going to happen. You allow yourself to move around, and then you will see the benefit."

When I see my neighbors gardening in these past glorious spring days -- all of us out there raking, planting, pruning -- and when we're all getting re-acquainted with each other's dogs on our daily walks -- I'm thinking we're moving resolutely, sweetly and gently toward happiness, resilient and intrepid even in the face of a scary and depressing year.

How I got to happiness tonight

Let's say I was 13, still living at home in Ohio with my parents, and imagining a life I might like. Suppose somebody told me that when I grew up, one night I'd be sitting in a spacious home with soft hardwood floors -- my home -- in a LazYBoy with two cats snuggled up together on my lap. Suppose somebody told me I'd be a writing teacher and that I'd just gotten back from having an hour-long massage that I can afford even in troubled times because I just sold a poem to of all places, the Educational Testing Service. Suppose somebody told me I'd have a husband who loved me and that I would fly across the country to my other home in LA several times a year. Suppose somebody had told me that I'd write a monthly column that people peruse while having breakfast at the Farmer's Market and sometimes I stealthily watch them read it and see them smile. Suppose I'd known that I'd turn out to be a grown-up woman who loves silver maples and drives a red car.

I would have said, "Wow, that sounds like paradise."

Coming Down

What's the best way to celebrate the end of the semester?

Veg out with take out from Olive Garden and watch American Idol. No need to think, judge, ruminate, cogitate, obfuscate. Just masticate and vegetate.

Thanks to Katie Alvord

...for her generous blog entry today about my novel, Night Blind, and my visit last week to Finlandia University in Hancock, MI. Here's the link to what she wrote: Alvord on Night Blind. Alvord is the energetic and prescient author of the still good-selling 2000 book Divorce Your Car: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, Katie's book. I met her in the chapel of Hancock's tiny Lutheran college (it used to be Suomi) on Maunday Thursday...an auspicious day and place for making new literary friends. It's so encouraging to be reassured that my 2006 book, forged out of decades of turmoil and rejection, still has legs with new readers. Thank you, Katie!

A Perspective on Healing

" .....it is only by being willing to face, consciously experience, and go through our wound that we receive its blessing. To go through our wounds is to embrace, assent, and say "yes" to the mysteriously painful new place in ourselves where the wound is leading us. Going through our wound, we can allow ourselves to be re-created by the wound. Our wound is not a static entity, but rather a continually unfolding dynamic process that manifests, reveals, and incarnates itself through us, which is to say that our wound is teaching us something about ourselves. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same when we get to the other side of this initiatory process. Going through our wound is a genuine death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered part of ourselves is potentially born."

Paul Levy's "The Wounded Healer" in Pinchbeck, Daniel {ed.}
Toward 2012: Perspectives on the New Age, 2009 pg. 37.

Imperial Blues Soothe Blue Flint

Lil Ed Williams strode onstage at the UM - Flint theater with little fanfare tonight, and with his three side men, the Blues Imperials, played nonstop, exquisitely craftsmanlike riffs for an hour and forty minutes. His signature red fez bobbing, with a merry "Ya'll doing okay so far?" after every second song or so, Lil Ed worked his way through a classic delicatessen of tasty guitar plaints and satisfyingly familiar narratives about screwing up, losing women, hopping trains and desperately picking up odd jobs.

(Blues lyrics can slide into the ludicrous, of course --the most hilarious, well, the worst -- metaphor on tonight's playbill being "I gotta check my woman's fluids; somebody else is sticking a dipstick in her oil pan..." concluding, in wounded pride, "a good dipstick is hard to find." Oh lordy -- though maybe the auto theme was handpicked for Buick City) Myself, I prefer the simple, articulate, desolate "my woman left me and it's nobody's fault but my own..." which was how the best song of the night played out.

But Lil Ed didn't mess around, barely talking between songs, just calling out a key before launching into each musical entree. The most flamboyant he got was toe-walking on his red Converse sneakers and a mercifully brief foray down the aisles near the end of the show. What the enthusiastic, almost all-white, almost all late middle-aged, almost-full house crowd got was damn good music, a gift at the end of one of the best spring days of the year after one of the worst winters of the 21st Century. Flint isn't the only place that can benefit from the blues cure these days, but it sure is one of the places that needs it most.

Adult Domestic

This may sound odd, but...I'm trying to grow up. The events of the past six months of my life plunged me into a strange new life cycle, in which in fear and panic I regressed and almost collapsed, the architecture of my self seriously compromised. The near loss of one's self is an extreme and frightening thing. If one makes it out of the tunnel alive, as I did, much is changed.

I was just standing out on the back porch in the last light of this gorgeous spring day and thinking something like, "I'm experiencing this differently." The air smelled good. I heard the robin doing that bubbly melody in the mulberry tree. The sky, deep blue overhead and lighter, cerulean behind the western line of roofs and budded-out maple trees, filled me with gratitude. I've seen it all before, but somehow I'm different now; a certain doubt-filled anachronistic naivete and denial has leached away. The words to describe it aren't coming out right; there are poems to be written about this eventually.

Another, similar moment. Today I was out in the front yard, raking. Since we bought this house I've hesitated to bond with it fully for some reason, and that means I've almost never treated its yards, front or back, with the proper care, leaving the mowing and snow removal to a GM retiree who'll do everything that needs to be done for $25 a pop here and there. But today I was raking it myself, systematically and serenely making little piles of dead grass and sticks, leaves left from October. Putting them into the big brown lawn bag, bending, breathing, raking. It felt like an adult thing to do: taking care of my own piece of earth, doing what needs to be done. Most of my life I have not felt like an adult, for whatever reason, as if I didn't have what it takes, couldn't make a convincing case that I met the criteria. But today, raking quietly in the April sun, my life re-arranged by crisis and recovery, I felt peacefully, tentatively whole. Quietly, unsensationally grown up.

900 Pages to a Cowardly Ending

Disappointing Doggies
I even bought the large-print edition of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle so that my aged eyes could stay with all its 900 pages. David Wroblewski is a graduate of Warren Wilson College, also my MFA alma mater, and he's currently our biggest celebrity, his book about the mute son of dog breeders an Oprah selection and still on the best sellers' list. I wanted to celebrate it, and him.

And I was making progress conquering my insomnia and the last dregs of a hard winter of recalcitrant anxiety and withdrawal from a nasty drug named Klonopin, so it seemed delightful if I woke up in the middle of the night not to stress out, but simply to breathe deeply, reach for the fat novel at my bedside, snuggle up to a pile of my favorite pillows, and escape into the life of dogs.

So, for the first few hundred pages it worked -- I thoroughly enjoyed the boy's relationship to his dad and the kennel full of soulful canines, one of whom, the charming Almondine, gets her own point-of-view chapters from time to time.

But then hell on wheels, the thing turned dark, darker, darkest -- and though I kept with it right to Page 899, the ending drove me to the brink of derangement. Yes, there was at least one moment, staring at 4:03 a.m. on the night stand, that I considered maybe just a teenie half of a Klonopin. Wroblewski, if I'd fallen off the wagon I'd have blamed your hopeless ass. My saner side, the kind that knows how to separate myself from a disappointing piece of writing (oh students, you've trained me so well) won out and I'm still K-free. But PUHLEEZE! I want a little hope after 900 pages. I want good to triumph and evil to at LEAST be found out.

Oops, Wrong Dogs
A question: has the Quentin Tarantino approach overtaken our best writers? Did Reservoir Dogs somehow get mixed up with the Sawtelle Dogs?

And another question: does my wish for a different ending make me rub-ish and unsophisticated? Are the Warren Wilson alums supposed to prove our mettle with unrelentingly bleak assessments of the human condition?

I say no and no. I'm too old to seriously convince myself that being jaded and cynical is the route to cool. I want relief from reflex pessimism, which does no good. I want suggestions that all this pain and travail means something: I want acknowledgement of life's complexities and rich exploration of how something matters. And while our ultimate fate is dust, along the way we struggle for justice and truth and, dammit, hope. It's hard enough to find all that in actual daily life: I was very disappointed to find not even a little in Wroblewski's final pages.

I'm still here

Resurrected, in bright sun at Big Mac

It's about time I check back in and clarify that I am still here and still alive and, on this eve of Easter, I'm feeling somewhat resurrected myself after a long, hard winter. I'm 25 pounds lighter, emotionally re-adjusted and physically purged. And apparently back to almost full health.

And just got back from a sweet writing gig at Finlandia University in Hancock, in the UP. I'm writing this from a motel room on the strip in St. Ignace -- where it's blessedly quiet in this off-season weekend. My hosts at Finlandia were wonderful; the audience in the chapel for my Thursday talk and reading was attentive and literate. Thanks to Suzanne for arranging everything and to Lauri Anderson for the picnic ham, beans and pecan pie around the kitchen table.

They put us up in a quirky little guest house on the campus where we pushed two metal single beds together in the hot top floor bedroom for one of the best night's sleeps we've had in ages. The next day Suzanne took us for a drive to McLain Park, where we stepped over piles of late ice in the sand and soaked in the brilliant sun -- a bright liquid light that is different than Flint. Then on to Calumet, where we paid tribute to the arch of the Italian Hall, all that remains of the Christmas Eve tragedy when 73 were killed, trampled and suffocated on the staircase after somebody criminally yelled "Fire." I love the architecture in the old mining towns -- that orange sandstone that doesn't crumble.

I feel like I reclaimed a bit of my writing mojo in the UP -- a fine place to do it -- and I'm very grateful.

The Opera House in Calumet
The Arch of the Italian Hall, Calumet
Ice on the Beach at McLain Park, Hancock