Bittersweet Stax Archeology at the Hollywood Bowl

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

Booker T and the MG's Then

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

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

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

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

Booker T Today

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

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

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

Phil Weiss His Own Man, As Always

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

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


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

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

What To Do With the Castor Bean

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

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

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

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

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

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

So should I murder this complicated plant?

A Non-earthquake and the TransPac

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

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

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

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

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

Keokuk in the Summer of 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-enactors on the Hill Top

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

Here's my favorite photo of the afternoon:



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

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

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

Bees in the Lavender at the Getty Villa

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

Remarkable Birth Stories

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

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

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

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

Leggy Palm Trees, Startling Underarms and a Podcast

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord Jim, a Mother Lode and my Mother Tongue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting Fanatics with Delight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fireflies

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

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

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

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

(image above, Empire of Lights, Rene Magritte)

A Doctor in the Family

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

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

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

A Caveat About the Cosmopolitan

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

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

48 Rings

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

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

Ted's Cosmo and a Rickshaw Ride in Central Park

Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.

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

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

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

"I feel zingy," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, No, Not New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, No, Not the Tufted Titmouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Morning at Flint Northern

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

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

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

A Brief Report

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

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

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

Bob Woodward, Will Ferrell, Lakisha Jones and Burning Snow

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

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

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

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

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

Mesmerized by Trees

Here's a the first half of my May column for Flint's East Village Magazine. The town is almost exclusively notorious, but the trees in my neighborhood are lovely. For the rest of it, check out eastvillagemagazine.org.

One of my first great losses was not a person, but a tree. It was a maple in the front yard of a parsonage in Ohio. The tree was about 25 years old, with a series of satisfying saddles, and I climbed it with increasing strength and skill for about five years. I vividly remember getting as high as I could on summer days and hugging the trunk, riding a breeze or simply blissfully hanging on, smitten by green. Much later, when I encountered Federico Garcia Lorca’s luscious poem ‘’Green,” I thought of my hours in that tree — “Green, I love you, green.”



Unfortunately for my spiritual development, I blamed the church for the tree’s demise. Denominational bureaucrats in the optimistic boom of the 1950s decided to add on an educational wing. They actually moved the parsonage up the street a block, and my beloved tree was uprooted and chopped up to make way. Seeing the huge hole where the tree had been was my first experience of grief, and I’ve never quite trusted organized religion since.

So I learned a dual lesson quite early — not only that one can have a specific and individual relationship with a particular tree, but that trees can’t be taken for granted. There are always people around who’ve got a better idea than a tree. And they are usually wrong — obscenely wrong.

And here we are 45 years later, experiencing not just global warming but global melancholy, the zone for maples, for example, seemingly moving northward, and the trees that we’ve come to love in peril from all manner of blights, wasps and compromised habitats.

This is all to get to an ode of praise — a tribute (I desperately hope not a eulogy) to the trees of our neighborhood. In my frequent walks from Woodlawn and Burroughs Park east across Sunnyside or Calumet to Pierce Park and back, I’ve fallen in love with a dozen trees.

Some were planted by design, part of a “tree plan” of a city once more gracious in its priorities. Some are there by “accident,” volunteers from seeds dropped by birds or carried by wind. Like the houses and residents on our leafy blocks, the trees have character and individual histories to be known and cherished.

Take for instance the immense silver maples providing the beautiful arbors over Beard, Maxine, Blanchard, Kensington and Linwood. According to Mike Keeler and Sherry Hayden, longtime environmentalists and neighborhood activists who took me on a fabulous “tree walk” recently, these trees are at least 60 years old. They were planted in what former Parks Director George Liljeblad calls the “tree lawns” between the sidewalks and the curb about the time the houses were built, mostly in the mid-1930s.

(Sherry notes that cicadas love the old maples. If you walk along Maxine on July or August nights you can hear them chirping out what, as a poet, I’d say are long summer spondees, aural neon advertising “SEX-SEX-SEX” or iambs like “Love ME. Love ME. Love ME.").....

A Sensualist Moment on Earth Day

Eighty degrees on the back porch, I'm sitting in the shade reading rough drafts of student short stories (kids getting lost in fields, car wrecks with no seat belts, creepy neighbors, insane miming clowns, threatened virginity, a lottery winner losing it all -- the usual panoply of the Flint imagination) and the sun moves gradually onto the slate porch floor. I feel its radiance before it gets all the way to my toes, still in their thick winter socks. I'm drinking strong black tea -- nothing fancy this time, just the real goods, pekoe with the bag left in a half hour. Two yellow tulips blooming along the fence; two dozen more buds about to pop. A mourning dove chases his girlfriend around the yard. She stays just a few inches ahead, making quick swerves to the right and left. Eventually he'll catch her: she'll let him. A bee zips by my ear. A bee! Could it be a honeybee? Is it possible they're not all dead?

Since it's the end of April, I allow myself not to be anxious about the heat. It can be 80 degrees on April 22. That's not so unheard of.

When exactly did the sun become the enemy? In my lifetime -- after centuries of reliance and celebration, after centuries of art and poetry and worship. Today, I'm willing to take it the old way, so beckoning, so beneficent. Today it feels like a gift. I watch the oblivious doves -- adorable, panicky bobbers almost put on the "can shoot" list but saved in a Michigan vote. I'm trying not to think about Blacksburg, those unrelenting images of guns and blood and grief. I'm trying not to think about the worst week in months in Iraq -- hundreds die in markets -- in markets! -- those gathering places where there's food -- the one thing we must have to survive, and hope, and communion. I'm trying not to think about Gonzales, and how he can't recall, and can't recall and can't recall and can't recall. But one needs to acknowledge all this: this, too, is the world.

So I get up from the chair, drop my pen on the last draft, and submit. I stretch out on my back on the slate floor, in the sun. For a quarter hour those beams shine on my winter skin. I turn my face to it, my eyes closed, and the bright gold penetrates my eyelids, so that all I see is bursts of yellow coronas. The heat penetrates my black jogging pants. I stretch out my arms and let the rays warm even the pale white undersides. It's audacious, this unmitigated, healing warmth and light. Perhaps I'm old enough now that the warnings don't matter. For a quarter hour the sun feels perfect, my body soaking it in the way we used to. So this is what it comes down to for an old sensualist: indulging in unambiguous sun, an ancient pleasure, while a wisp of nostalgia lurks, just a few inches away, just a few inches, in the shade.

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

The inimitable Kurt Vonnegut died while I was wrestling with my spring sickness, and, a bit belatedly, I wanted to offer my own small tribute to this American literary genius.

I love his eight premises of Creative Writing 101, in the Intro to Bagombo Snuff Box (he called those early stories
"a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.") Here they are:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will
not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass
of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or
advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the
reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make
love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete
understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few
pages.

I love the earthy concision of these bits of advice. He then says
that Flannery O'Connor was the greatest short story writer of his
generation, and she broke practically every one of his rules but the
first. "Great writers tend to do that," he wrote. RIP, Vonnegut.

Feelin bettah, ain't dead yet

Coming out of a tunnel of spring sickness and grateful to feel human again. It hit both of us at our beautiful bed and breakfast in Bellaire three weeks ago: last good night was that luxurious soak in the jacuzzi and the eucalyptus massage that followed. Oh, sweet Jeezus.

But we paid a price: our smiling pores opened up so big they apparently took in the worst infection of the season, and we were laid up for days (and not in a fun way). The day after the jacuzzi, before we realized how bad off we were going to be, I made my husband drive me up to the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula: I was bound and determined to see the Grand Traverse Lighthouse and have lunch at Boone's in Sutton's Bay. When we got to the lighthouse we both had serious chills and sniffling, and the low point was my poor patient man had to pee in a frigid outhouse.

Things to note: 1. WHY does the gift shop at the lighthouse use plastic bags? Don't they know it takes a thousand years for these suckers to biodegrade -- if ever?

2. WHY does the B&B (otherwise fabulous in all respects) offer Ice Mountain bottled water? Haven't they heard about the water table deterioration, attributed to this company, in their very own neighborhood?

More later. This is just to say I'm back and okay.

The Palmer Method at the Bellaire B&B

OK, so yeah, maybe it was the relaxation of the deep jacuzzi and eucalpytus massages; maybe it was the plush bed and marble fireplace; or maybe the combination of great taste and kindness of our hosts, Jim and Dave. But when the sickness hit, we were so feverish, about the only thing we could manage to do was lie side by side and snuggle.

Then the most marvelous thing: my husband started writing on my back with the eucalpytus oil. Murmuring that he'd studied the Palmer Method of cursive writing from the nuns way back in Brunswick, Maine, he gently sent me missive after missive. Ah, this sweet man knows I love my language.

It's great being old coots in bed. We get to do anything we want, including the Palmer Method. There's one reason to keep cursive alive.

Green Tea with Peace

I meant to write "Green Tea with Peach" but the typo suits the morning. Leaving for a weekend with Ted at a B&B at Bellaire, MI. I've decided, as I wrote in an email to my colleagues/fellow alums of the wonderful Warren Wilson MFA program, that having had my say about Starbucks, it is better to argue over ideas, even truncated ones, even truculently, than to dogpaddle around in banality.

Outrage at Starbucks

I should have known better. I rushed through the Starbucks drive-through (or drive-thru, as they call it) this morning and didn't pay attention to my vente mocha until I got in to school. As I was turning on my computer and going through my mail, I took my first sip. Then I happened to notice the word "Darwinism" on my cup.

I looked more closely. In a quote filling up the side of the cup from "Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of 'The Politically Correct Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,' are these words: "Darwinism's impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism's connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical records. And the record is not pretty."

Bear in mind I was on my way to work at THE UNIVERSITY, where we face ignorance and assaults on the whole notion of science and the validity of evidence, every day of our working lives.

I'm outraged and disheartened that this quote appeared, unwanted, on my Starbucks cup. I immediately called the local Starbucks to complain, and, taking the measure of my heated attitude, she gave me the customer service number (1-800-STARBUCKS). There, I vociferously explained to the young man that I do NOT want to read a quote like this on my coffee cup, and that, more to the point, the use of an excerpt like this, without context, without opportunity for real debate on a very complex issue, is offensive.

He said the quote is part of a plan from Marketing (whom he said would not talk to me) to "stimulate debate." I said this method trivializes the way meaningful discourse occurs. I said that's just what's wrong with the way my students think: they get their supposed "truths" in disembodied bits and pieces: they don't know how to judge. Deprived of context, of background, of actual research and discussion, they remain clueless. I said if Starbucks is really interested in meaningful discourse, they should endow a University chair, or fund a nationwide series of debates.

I didn't want this debate to begin (and end) with my coffee cup. I just wanted a cup of coffee. I should have known. Now back to trying to teach my students how to think, in a world where irresponsible corporate "coffee cup" fallacies are what pass for "stimulating debate." Starbucks should let its stimulation begin and end with coffee.

Mary Helen Blew Me Kisses

Sunday report: At 9 a.m., I rolled out of bed. I pulled on my "Minot Beavers" sweatshirt and old black pants, carefully backed the Honda down the driveway (always an accomplishment when I've just waked up), and cruised down Court. I timed myself just right: there was a train drumming along the tracks between Dort and Averill, but the last car slid by when I was a half block away. (I wish I could say it was a caboose because I love that word, but...it was an ordinary greasy black oilcan. Well, there, I've said caboose anyway) The arms went up just as I got there, so I actually didn't have to brake. And then I got cafes mocha and NYTimes for my next door neighbor Mary Helen and me, enjoying the old Neil Young tunes they were playing. When I got home, I went through Mary Helen's back gate as I always do and I could see her up, padding around the kitchen in her PJs.

I love Mary Helen. Soon after I moved in and my first New Yorker arrived in the mailbox, my mail carrier casually said one day, "Did you know both you and your next door neighbor get the New Yorker?" I don't know if that's legal to say, but I appreciated it. We started comparing notes over the back fence. One glorious Sunday morning that first summer, we caught each other goofing off in our respective backyards. She called over,

Some keep Sunday going to church
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a throne.

Any lapsed preacher's daughter worth her salt knows that Emily Dickinson poem well, and I couldn't believe I had the great luck to have a neighbor who would quote ED over the back fence. I'm terrible at memorizing poems, but I ran inside and pulled the rest of it up on Google and gave it to her on a notecard:

Some keep Sabbath in surplice,
I just wear my wings
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.

God preaches, a noted clergyman,
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of going to heaven at last
I'm going all along.

Anyway, usually, especially in winter, I never go in when I drop off her paper -- just leave the decaf mocha and paper on the table in her sunroom, her two little doggies Nannie and Zooey barking exuberantly. They know me, which is nice. From the kitchen window, Mary Helen blew me kisses. It was raining, and I like that, too. The air smelled great. It was a heavenly Sunday.

Voyeur at the Round House

Every day when I'm in Flint I walk by the round house. It's on a corner lot down by Gilkey Creek, and it looks very odd in this neighborhood of colonials and small Tudors. Its single story is contructed of dark gray brick and has a flat black roof with two cylindrical brick chimneys, each with a conical tophat, poking up from the roof. There's a tall white fence around the back third. Unshapely, monstrous evergreens obscure all its windows, except for the front, next to an attached garage. Whose idea, probably back in the Sixties, was this architectural anomaly? For months it's been obviously uninhabited and overgrown, a hopeless "For Sale" sign up in front. Lately, somebody's at least trying to do something with it: it's been a big mess, trucks coming and going, a huge dumpster in the driveway. I always crane my neck when I stride by, having a big appetite to see inside other people's houses, but it has always been obscured by the dumpster or vehicles, or the curtains were securely pulled shut.

But yesterday, whoa, the round house sat completely open to view. The curtains were gone and the curved driveway was clear, with nobody in sight. So, after looking furtively over my shoulder, I walked right up to the round house and took a good long look.

What a weird place! Totally empty, inside it looks like a set from the Dick Van Dyke show. The one of the brick chimneys visible from the street is connected to a circular fireplace in the center of the living room, which has a carpeted, semicircular "conversation pit" and a step up to a circular carpeted area around and behind the fireplace. The whole thing is strangely set off by white cast iron railings separating the conversation pit from the rest of the room -- as if the residents or guests couldn't be trusted not to fall off the step down. Off to the left is a dark kitchen that looks more like a bar, and on the far side of the circular living room are big glass doors to -- a small, triangular swimming pool! I'd never have guessed it was there from the street.

What's so cool about peering into other people's houses is the way you can start to imagine a whole new life. What if I lived here? What would I be like?

I tried to picture the sensibility behind the round house -- not the hippie part of the Sixties, but rather something related to Hugh Hefner and martinis at 5 p.m. and men in black suits and skinny ties and glamorous women in tight dresses, high heels and beehives. At one point in my young life, that was how I thought sophisticated adults lived: not like my parents, who didn't drink, didn't care about clothes, kept the same couch for 50 years and favored digging homegrown potatoes over anything having to do with, say, New York.

This is a house from StarTrek, a house from the Space Age. Sixties architecture was fun -- so unlike our parents' predictable block structures, buildings like comfort food. It would be hard to get comfortable in the living room of the round house -- and you'd be quite exposed -- like those damn "open plan" schools that never worked.

Now, though, it looks, well, kookie. Some of it even was called, wasn't it, "Googie architecture" ? The round house doesn't quite ascend to that moniker, but getting a chance to peek inside made me smile. I know nothing about the people who lived inside -- whether they smoked Parliaments and had sophisticated cocktail parties or whether the woman of the house made rumaki and donned a skinny black dress. It does seem, in retrospect, as if the Sixties weren't about being comfortable, but about being...daring. It was fun back then. It was fun being young in the Sixties.

But I don't particularly miss the Sixties, except that I sometimes miss having a young body. And while I enjoyed picturing myself skinny dipping in the very private swimming pool at the round house on a hot Flint Sunday, I don't want to live in the round house. I don't particularly want to push the envelope or wear high heels or grip the cast iron railing to keep from falling into the conversation pit. But it's a deliciously taboo pleasure to walk up to somebody else's house, stare right in the windows, and imagine another life.

Meanwhile, A Peaceful Sunday Night

Trying not to stay in the dark place too long. That "a human neckbone at his feet" phrase, those four horrific iambs, became an obsessive mantra yesterday when I was pounding around the neighborhood, trying to walk off the effects of grading 40 freshman papers, and struck by a commentary from Iraq I'd heard earlier on NPR. And I'm so worried about the bees. What are we doing to this beautiful world?

Iraq: The Big Story of the new generation. My husband's two sons, probably immune; my stepson from my first marriage, probably old enough at 37 to escape. My nephew, an electrician, robust and smart -- probably immune. But these young kids whose names and pictures show up every night on the Lehrer News Hour and every Sunday on This Week with Stephanopoulos, damn, my friends, they are children, and most of them are from the small towns of America, as others have aptly noted. Children. And those who don't die -- come home carrying the memory of horror in their hearts. We will have something immense and dark and troubling with us for decades to come. I hope we have enough love to take them in and give them what they need to heal.

But I'd promised myself not to stay in the dark place. Listening to Dylan, "Love and Theft," my favorite cuts "Mississippi" and the sweet "Moonlight." Earlier, I let myself be awash in a gorgeous CD of Tongan music my San Bruno friend Emile Hons passed along a couple of weeks ago -- the soothing harmonies of Kuila -- with dogs barking in the background. Oh, that takes me back to those languid kava parties in 'Osamu's little oval hut of long ago. It makes me feel better to hear these peaceable songs and sip a little wine and relax. Here's to finding pleasure after a dip into the dark places. Here's to music that soothes the savage breast.

Villanelle For An Anniversary of the War

A human neck bone at his feet,
A soldier shudders in the sun.
The bees are dying in the heat.

The country chills in sickly sleet.
In Uruguay Bush rattles guns
A human neckbone at his feet.

A dying woman can't use weed,
the tulips sprouted far too soon.
The bees are dying in the heat.

The northern ice caps melt in sheets.
The oil man digs another hole,
A human neckbone at his feet.

A dying woman can't use weed,
The white bears starve and drift alone.
The bees are dying in the heat.

Can sense survive in these defeats,
when soldiers shudder in the sun
a human neck bone at their feet,
and bees are dying in the heat?

When It Began, A Foreboding Day in New York

Four years of madness. I was at 4Cs in New York City in 2003 when it was all beginning. What have we done?

VERNAL EQUINOX, 2003, New York City

Light and dark are supposed to be equal
but today in the caverns of New York
darkness seems to have the edge.

Across from my thirteenth floor room
CNNS's unlucky strobe flickers in every
office cube. I pull the red drapes shut.

I'm here to give a paper on failure, bad
joke. For airport safety, no laptop: revising
words come hard to the yellow pad. My pen

leaks blue splotches on my hand, blots
the insufficient page. My head's congested
from the half-empty flight, the ride through

Lincoln Tunnel, where guardsmen stood with guns.
In every elevator, tiny TVs report first casualties
while we stand, hypnotized and horrified, waiting

for doors to open. Tanks like buffalo graze
haunted sand, the only green the spooky network
night lights. We get on, we get off, brass doors closing

at our backs. I drink green tea and try to concentrate,
turn to books I brought for comfort: Rilke and
Marquez: "It was inevitable" -- again and again --

"the scent of bitter almonds." Then, a loud crash,
right here in New York. I run to the window, push
open the drapes, my heart a panicky fist. But

below, people walk unfazed, the busy night trade
seemingly unchanged. And then another boom,
and I understand it's thunder -- simply thunder

and a stun of lightning, and then
a deluge of rain, tarnished silver,
heavy and streaking the high windows.


(Thanks to Dunes Review, where this first appeared)

A Winter Gig in Sutton's Bay

In line with my "Pentimento" entry below, here's an old poem of mine, from a time I went up north in winter to do a (rare) Creative Writing in the Schools gig for Duncan Spratt-Moran. The snow was so deep that I had to park on the road, and Duncan and his two daughters met me there with a sled to take my suitcase in, through a snowy path in the woods, to their beautiful house. It was dark and I remember starlight. One of Duncan's daughters, about six or seven at the time, endearingly took my hand to guide me. When we got to the house Duncan served broccoli, tofu and peanut stir fry in front of a big wood stove and the next morning made fresh ground coffee before I went off to meet the kids. It was a wonderful experience and I still remember it fondly. But I was a little homesick, too.


POSTCARD FROM SUTTON'S BAY

Up here it would break your heart to see how
the little cherry trees bend against snow.
My mother said purple is the color of grief.
These white hills cry out longing, longing
and the jagged row trees click and bow.

I miss you and your city eyes, our love
faulty neon where nature's on the lam.
I think these fields love their loneliness,
these chaste hills love themselves, wrapped
in Amish dresses of gray and brown and black.

The snow here is a missionary, too blessed
for my rough boots. At home with you again
I'll love my emptiness. This prim frost bites.

Pentimento on M-10

I don't often go north from Flint in winter. Thursday I did, traveling alone to Ferris State for a conference. Driving those roads gets me melancholy, thinking about my first husband. He spent blue collar summers up there and the scrubby lots and pines in rows and brown rivers all touched his heart and filled his poetry. Used to be the only time I'd go up there was with him, waiting watchfully for the sweet sadness to descend on him around Evart. I loved that part of him. Remembering his love for white birches doesn't go away with the end of marriage, now six years past.

But one lays down new memories, even in old territories, a pentimento. Is that the word? I look it up. Oh, man, yes, that's what I mean. Rooted in the Italian for "repent, " the artist changing his mind, painting over that hand that didn't look right, making the eyes turn another way, reangling the troublesome feet, paint over paint. Regret and trying again.

So, my trip a pentimento. MapQuest took me up 75 to M-10, as usual -- 85 miles an hour easy all the way to that cool rest stop at Clare with the cast iron sculptures and the good bathrooms. But after that, M-10 narrows down to a two-lane and if you've got any sense you take a deep breath, not try to pass every pickup or old Dodge, and just pay attention.

Going west in the late afternoon, I hit ochre sunset slanting off wide fields of snow. The brown this time of year is beautiful, every twig limned and distinct, every hawk feather, it seemed to me, sharply visible in the clear late winter air, shadows of the stone houses and outbuildings extending halfway back to the fenceposts, the stiff remains of cutdown cornstalks elegant contrast to sensuous curves of snow.

Last week when I flew back to Michigan from California, gloomy and resistent to my all-too-familiar Midwest, the view from the air after the Mississippi River was like a reverse Wizard of Oz, stunning change from technicolor to black and white -- or brown and white, really -- a shock of subtraction. But driving into the sunset the other day on the old roads, thinking about a lost marriage and heading toward something new and good, the land seemed rich and textured and full of lovely subtlety again.

Memories of Wendy's Manicure and Al Murray Shoes Make Me Happier in Cold Flint

Cantankerous this Wednesday back in Flint, 14 degrees with two inches of fresh snow on the ground, and I don't find it amusant. The second day of jet lag almost always the worst. So I draw a big deep bubble bath and sink in decadently. Remembering Jim Harrison's recent eminently sensible prescription for what ails ya: a huge porterhouse, a quart of the best bourbon you can afford and a long hot bath, then sleep for a day. But I gotta be at work in an hour. So, wrapped in Ted's big heavy white robe, the most I can get of Ted who's still back in San Pedro, I crank up Sam Cooke belting Change is Gonna Come, and after that, the Overture from the Marriage of Figaro, and after that, Harry Nillson wailing "Down." Aggressive and loud. I'm feeling slightly better, but don't catch me admitting it. Anyway, it's not even 9 a.m. yet.

By the way, Harrison's Returning to Earth is my favorite recent novel. I dig the way his main character dies midway, walking into his own freshly dug grave in Canada, dreaming of ravens and bears. And when I tried to post the cover for a little variety in the paragraph, Safari crashed and I had to start this all over. Must be crow magic in the air.

Anyway, two memories of Pedro warm me this day. There's a Vietnamese manicure place in a little mall off 25th where I always go when I'm there -- they're fast and friendly. I love the sound of the Vietnamese language bubbling around me in that room; to my ear, it's like frogs on a summer night, or water tumbling over rocks, or hens murmuring -- whatever, it's a lovely cacaphony. Wendy, a delicate woman with delicate hands, took on my Ohio paws, which looked huge resting on her table. I asked for the oil manicure and added the paraffin wax, and then she wondered if I'd like a flower on one of the nails. It's not my usual, but I said yes only so that I could watch her create the tiny white flower with four petals and a perfect stem on my left ring finger. Then she glued a tiny jewel in the center, and then she created a corresponding one on the other hand. This doesn't "look like me," but I loved them, and I loved watching her ply her remarkable craft, and they lasted for a week.

The second warming memory had to do with buying shoes. Ted wanted to buy a new pair of New Balance sneakers, and we went to Al Murray Shoes off Western Ave. in Pedro. The service was so great I decided to buy a pair myself. We spent 45 minutes there, the clerk lovingly measuring our feet, leisurely talking to us about our feet (I'm serious -- I've never had any shoe clerk do this) and making suggestions for the best shoes for us. He said my poor aging arches are falling and that can lead to back aches and headaches and all kinds of other malaise -- "The feet," he said passionately, "the feet affect everything." When we put on the shoes he selected, complete with arch-supporting inserts, we walked around the place feeling 20 years younger, floating like angels, while he beamed at us. Then he gave us a good talking to: "you must walk," he said. "Forty-five minutes a day. You must sweat." We nodded compliantly. "You'll feel so much better, and now you have the right shoes for it." I felt so...loved. What a pleasure!

So I'll put on my blissfully good fitting sneakers and stride out into this frigid day.

Pellucid Days in the City of Angels

1. Rains and sea winds last week made the San Gabriel Mountains from our apartment in San Pedro stand out as I'd never seen them. Here's how they looked when Ted caught them Friday. So this is how those mountains might have looked to a tall ship pulling into the harbor 150 years ago.

2. Tuesday: Dinner at Taix and Brahms chamber music at "The" Disney downtown. Ted used his new Onstar for the first time to get us to the restaurant; the voice of a nice young man and his helpful computer helped us make all the right turns. And yes, regardless of politics lurking behind the bar or in the kitchen, Taix DID deliver that anise-flavored Basque drink amer picon for my friend Teddy, who likes it as much as did my stepson Eliot who got me to try it at his wedding in Reno last year. I opted however for a sour gin gimlet. Later, we froze our asses off in the 50-ish LA night, but couldn't turn down a chance to sit on stools at the Pinot Grill outside the Mark Taper Forum for shots of Bushmills before sprinting across the street to The Disney. Fabulous acoustics for a round of Brahms songs, a clarinet quintet, and a piano quintet. But why, for the millions of dollars overbudget that place cost, are the seats so uncomfortable? Might as well be imprisoned in a Northwest Airlines middle seat. REALLY!

More to come.

Celebrate the Sentence Day

Happy March Fourth! Don’t forget to observe my self-declared holiday: National Celebrate the Sentence Day. March Fourth is a sentence, and if you think about its homonym, March forth, it is the only date of the year which works as a sentence outside the numeral structure. Okay, just go with me on this and stop your quibbling.

In Los Angeles, thousands of runners literally are marching forth for the LA Marathon, THE most appropriate day of the year for such valiance. All the rest of us, all around the world, from dawn to dark, are crafting sentences for every conceivable reason: to declare love or war, to buy pomegranates, to negotiate a lease, to call a loved one out to see the hawks in the palm tree, to complain that our feet hurt, to comfort a baby, to support our candidates, to ask for a kiss, to give thanks for a kiss, to mourn the dead.

I celebrate the powerful reassurance of one complete thought put into words. I celebrate the miraculous structure of human language: the stolid march of subject-verb, subject-verb; the riffs and infinite improvisations of sensual adjectives, sonatas of adverbs, the bringing-together of conjunctions, and the spritely prepositions, pointing every which way. I am grateful for how the sentence orders my life experience – a structure that makes it possible for you to read this, wherever you are, and understand a little of what I have to say. I’m grateful for the architecture, varied and elaborate, that helps me capture my experience and visit the life houses of other writers.

I’m thankful for the workhorse sentence; I’m awed by how my human language has given me more joy and gotten me into more mischief than anything else about me. It’s good to be alive on this March Fourth, the day which is a sentence, and to have the words at hand to reflect on being human. I celebrate the boundless majesty and possibility of the sentence. Here’s hoping we use our words, our sentences, to protect the earth and find a route to peace.