after words

Downstairs my crockpot runneth over with fresh salsa from the deli section at our local Holiday Market, almost a pound of lovely slim carrots, half a stalk of celery chopped into coins of taste, onionsonionsonions, some smashed cloves of garlic, a small can of Contadina tomato paste to help thicken and all the chunky chunks of a chuck roast I browned and coated with Montreal Grilling Peppers.  My stairwell smells like heaven and tonight I will feast on this veggie stew/soup/miracle I will have created. 

I am not fond of Holiday Markets.  I used to be, a long time ago, back in the seventies when we first moved to this part of northern California.  I knew all the checkers then.  There can’t have been more than a half dozen.  More men than women I think.  Their faces, their genders even, are gone to me now.  And the building that was the Holiday Market where I bought milk for my babies and Skoal for my man and broccoli for Sunday dinners is now Steve’s A to Z Appliance.  I’ve never met Steve; he’s never met me; his loss, I’d say.

But back then, let’s guesstimate thirty years back, the produce ran along the back of the store and the floors were planks back there and uneven, as I recall.  Sometimes you’d see a lose grape, a green Thompson’s seedless, resting against where the plank seams met, unevenly.  Now, I imagine rows of energy-efficient side-by-side refrigerator/freezers take up that produce area.  I imagine stoves queque up one side and down the other of the cereal and bread aisles.  Where did all the Pillsburys and Gold Medals go? 

 ”A mountain cannot have two tigers” - I read that today on a blog belonging to a Dr. Hsu; it was the article’s title.  The article was about two appointments in Malaysia filling posts for women by women.  But my interest is in the title: A mountain cannot have two tigers.  I would argue that a mountain can have two tigers: one that prowls the upper trails and one who maintains the lower elevations.  I would argue that a fence be built around the circumference of the mountain about one-third of the way up and that some tricky gates be included in the fencing so that other animals on the mountain, but not the tigers, could easily pass back and forth by some code known just to them, but not the tigers.  I would further argue that in a little time the lower tiger would leave the mountain in search of whole mountains wherein he/she could reside and roam at will; and that the upper tiger would, in time, die of old age with no progeny, having spent his/her life fenced off from others of his stripe.  But, to say “A mountain cannot have two tigers” is, I would argue, absurd.

They kept washing my glasses in dreams last night.  And I didn’t know the hands.  I knew them, but didn’t know them, and I think sometimes they may have been mine, but much younger, before I even wore glasses.  But it seems nonsensical to me that the hands were mine; plus they generally were bigger and older, sometimes masculine and sometimes not.  The other dreams last night are lost to me; but the water running from the kitchen tap in a house I haven’t lived in for years and the glasses in the red Italian frames held under the running water and then dried and dried in circular motions with a muslin tea towel–this image kept coming back, like coming back to a touchstone from other night places, the ones I can’t remember, to the ones I can remember.  And I want to know who belonged to the sets of hands taking care of the smudges on my trifocals.  And I want to know what the dream means beyond someone wanting me to have a clearer view of of the world.  And why, when I close my eyes now and think about it, why did the water shooting out of tap look like it was lit from the inside; as if there could have somehow been a tiny floodlight up inside the chrome plumbing to fill the water with a white glow . . . and why do dreams always leave so many questions?

 I am a day back from a 2-week journey and I took 2 days in returning instead of the usual 8 hard hours of driving.  I pulled off the 101 at Avila Beach or one of those beaches before San Luis Obispo and I sat on a bench in a park looking out toward the ocean.  I read a book, The Circus in Winter, by Cathy Day, and watched the water roll from far out.  The last bit of ocean before sky, or sky before ocean, is faded purple.  A quarter inch of faded purple, lined top and bottom with a fine stroke of eggplant.  

From that bench just south of SLO, I sometimes put down the novel by Day and made notes in a palm-sized notebook with a wide elasticized band to keep it shut, the kind of notebook that opened up over the top like a steno pad, the kind I discovered was called a “reporter” style journal from a reporter-style man named Jerry at the memoir workshop the weekend before.  And the notes I made were about the Pacific and where it met the sky and the sky and how bright it was and the sparse grass underfoot and the cluster of houses with perfect yards across the street to the north of where I sat.  It was nine in the morning and the day was fresh and the sun perfect.  This was when I decided to take the Highway 1 coastal route, to take turnouts as often as I chose, to read or watch for whales or draw poor sketches of poppies and telephone wires laden with small birds. 

I think it was Monday then.  I was one hour gone from kids and grandkids in Santa Barbara.  I was more like four hours distant from old friends in Huntington Beach and the great ache I knew they felt because a small shadow of that ache throbbed in me - me, so very far removed.  How difficult, how impossible, how sharp-edged and fragile and blank, so very blank at times they must each feel.  I feel as thin as a slip of Bible paper to even write these words.  It seems dead wrong to chronicle grief - or to try.  Perhaps it’s the habit; I’ve been trying for such a very long time to chronicle my own, now the habit spills over to descriptions of theirs.  But no, I don’t think that’s it at all.  While I hurt for my much loved friends, I feel the absence too and ache for my own sake the loss of a life not known. 

Yesterday I noticed the top step into the loghouse and the names written into concrete and the year, 1981.  The steps, two of them, and the walk are made of creekrun rocks and concrete.  I gathered all the stones from the creek; my neighbor helped.  Julie’s moved away now, and I live in the detached garage — the kind we build with living quarters for old widows.  My son and his family live in the house with the creekrun steps and walk.  Why mention noticing a year written in a step up to a porch attached to a house where I no longer live.  And the names: Al, Lynn, Don, Dani, Aimee, 1981.  No particular reason other than the math: 1981 from 2008 is like, a lot of years to pass up and down those steps, over the names of us.

The other thing, the February 1981 thing I wanted to mention as I noticed it in the Newspaper Archives was that Prince Charles became engaged to Lady Diana on a day in late February of that year.  I never kept up much on Prince and Princess news, and it strikes me as odd that I’d mention them here, even as I’m mentioning them.   But I think it has to do with the castle we built for ourselves back in the late seventies, and the wide cobble walkway and the steps with our names and he was King and I was Queen and the boy was our Prince, and the girls, our Princessesses for a little while back then — for about seven years back then. 

Did I ever know that the lamb named Dolly was produced from tissue taken from an 8-year old ewe’s udder?  I don’t think I did.  When I give thought to where tissue might’ve been taken from, reproductive organs come first to mind, followed closely by brain tissue, but not “udder” which to my farmgirl thinking translates to teat and to breast.  Breasts are magical — on humans and cats and elephants — you name the creature, two-legged or four-, and udders, teats, tits, breasts are the connection that sustains, nourishes.  But a lamb made from udder tissue . . . never entered my mind.

Then, too, I haven’t thought much about Dolly these past eleven years, wouldn’t think about her today except for the Newspaper Archive Perspective on History bit I find in my email.  The blurb that comes with the “bit” mentions the fear of sci-fi cloning becoming a potential reality.  I read that phrase: fear of human cloning, and thought They didn’t need test tubes to do that.  Television, the “boob tube” has done a fine job there.  Newspapers and radio have done their small share, along with magazines — but mostly, mostly TV has made us one great mass of cloned opinions, likes, dislikes, prejudices, biases, and phobias. 

I am a phobic.  Technically, I don’t know for sure what that means and I’ve chosen not to look it up as I post this, but personally I am a phobic in regard to anything and I mean anything presented to me on television.  Fox News could show me a kitten floating down a flood-ravaged Main Street in Somewhere, USA, on a wooden headboard, and I would distrust the information  1.) that a flood had occurred, and 2.) that the kitten was real and not digitized.

How much cloning of sheep and cattle and pigs and chickens and whatever else may be going on in today’s world, I don’t know, haven’t looked and won’t.  Won’t because I have become so fiercely jaded about everything I read and view that I wouldn’t believe the statistics anyway.  How’s the cloning of humans going?  I think they’ve pretty much brought us along to exactly and precisely where they want us to be, “they” being those very few who control what we watch, what we hear, what we read, our perceptions of those few areas we are allowed to have any perception of at all.  Of course, this little bit of journaling comes from a confessed “phobic” so it’s okay to shake your head and mumble nut case as much you want.

<a href=”http://www.newspaperarchive.com/FreePdfViewer.aspx?img=112101887&firstvisit=true&terms=Dolly” >Scientists produce lamb named Dolly using tissue taken from 8-yr. old ewe’s udder.</a>

In 1973 on the twelfth of February 143 prisoners of war began their journey home from Vietnam.  Their release was part of the cease-fire agreement.  But before I came upon that bit of history for the twelfth day of this month, I came upon a heading “The Ponca Quixote” in the Saturday evening Issue of The Lowell Weekly Sun, 1881.

The “Ponca Quixote” refers to a Mr. Dawes who had the audacity to request of the Department of the Interior, headed by a Mr. Shurtz, that the Ponca Tribe be allowed to return to their ancestral homelands.  The reporter for the Lowell Weekly states that the removal of the “comparatively small” tribe was of “little consequence” until “inflated” by Mr. Dawes, the Quixote figure of the headline. 

Okay, so let’s mix this up a little.  In the 1973 article about POW’s coming home, one is mentioned as held behind at a Saigon hospital for medical treatment.  We, the United States Government, didn’t offer medical treatment to the Ponca.  It is true their numbers were comparatively small; they had made the trip before, been moved from fertile ground where they grew maize to unfriendly ground where they could grow nothing, been reduced by one in four by malaria, reduced further, by a third of their former population, by starvation and deprivation and forced marches that left bloody footprints in the snow.

Mr. Dawes, a.k.a. Senator Dawes later in the article, represents the Boston Philanthropists of 1881.  Mr. Shurtz represents the “giant” the Boston Philanthropists have sent (by the gist of the article) a diminutive Quixote to battle.  The “giant” Mr. Shurtz is absolutely correct, I’m sure, that the Ponca chiefs had agreed to the move, had signed papers to be under the protection and care of the U.S.  But I have to ask history, the historical “us” of time, to put ourselves in the situation of those Ponca chiefs.  The land they’d been given as theirs in a treaty the previous century, that same land had been given over now to the Sioux tribes.  The Sioux didn’t much care for the resident Ponca and their maize-growing ways and so they raided them as often as they could and killed them as often as they could.  So, “historical us of time”, if you were one of those Ponca chiefs, wouldn’t you sign papers to protect your remaining “comparatively small” peoples? 

What does this have to do with 143 prisoners of war freed by the victorious North Vietnamese in 1973?  Probably nothing.  I am old and I make connections where other than time being a factor that winds through all things little else does.  Except perhaps to me.  There are wars; prisoners are taken; wars end; prisoners are freed.  But not the Ponca who seemed to have remained prisoners, until they became, in 1966, so inconsequential as to have been written off as a Native American Indian Tribe still in existence. 

I read hints (on a Nebraska Historical internet site) they were coming back; the material was dated; I hope they are.  I hope they have. 

The Newspaper was The Ironwood Daily Globe out of Ironwood, Michigan, and the article was about legislation proposed in Madison, Wisconsin, and the thing that caught my eye  — was the loons.  LOON BILL RAISES DEBATE WITH BOATERS, was how the headline read.  Loons. 

I am Californian and have never seen a loon in the wild.  Never heard one call, although I write of them, use them in lines of poetry or story as if I had some personal knowledge of how they move on the water, how they sound in evening conversations.  Truth is, the closest I’ve come to a loon is in the Fonda movie, the one with Jane and Henry, the one with Katherine Hepburn.  I am tap-dancing here with memory, writing what I can recollect until the movie title, yes, that’s the one, pops into my head.  On Golden Pond is as close as I’ve come to loons on lakes (or large ponds for that matter).

But before I came to the Page One Loon Legislation Story, I had to pick a newspaper to peruse.  (I belong to Newspaper Archives and I had put in today’s date, February 11, but with a year two decades gone — 1988.)  How could I not pick a paper from a city called Ironwood with a newspaper called The Ironwood Daily Globe?  And why this interest in a date two decades gone?  Why not?  I can’t read headlines from two decades out in front, from 2028; and two-thousand-eight headlines make me uneasy – so much gets twisted and bent.  Not that “news” wasn’t twisted and bent twenty years ago.  Truth is, ‘88 was a year of change for me; I just wondered if it was for anyone/anything else.  Curiosity, that’s all.

Back to the loon story:  It was Assembly Bill 816 and applied to the state’s no-wake boating laws on lakes up to 100 acres that have public access.  Lakes up to 50 acres were already covered; Bill 816 would bring another 795 lakes into no-wake territory.  F.B. Kadek of Menomanee Falls said the bill didn’t go far enough, that his favorite 150-acre lake in the northern part of the state used to be filled with loon, and now his fave only had one.   Rosemary Bedame of Genoa City, who lived on a 78-acre lake, said the new bill would put “an undue hardship on young people, citizens, and myself.”

Did Assembly Bill 816 pass?  I don’t know.  Which means I don’t know if that northern lake favorite of Mr. Kadek lost its last loon or if the loons came back; I don’t know if the undue hardship on young people, citizens and Rosemary ever came to pass or if the loon populations on 100 acre lakes continued to fail and fade from the soundscapes of days ending. 

1988, February 11, too soon then, on that day, to know if change was in store for loon lovers or water skiers or both, in Wisconsin.  In California, it was also too early.  February of any year, even this one, is early for knowing outcomes. 

I lived in the loghouse above Cottonwood Creek in 1997; I was back from my CSU years in Sacramento — home again, home again, jiggidly-jig.  But when OJ’s televised media chase went on, interupting basketball playoffs with a white SUV crawling along southern California highways and a plethora (is that the right word to use just here?) of LAPD vehicles giving chase, at an equally ridiculous pace, not to mention the helicopter pursuits with cameramen able to give television viewers (even those viewers trying to watch basketball playoffs) an eagle’s eye view of OJ’s progress — I lived in the condo in Citrus Heights.  There were a number of girls there during the telecast, friends of Aimee, my youngest daughter, friends come down from Cottonwood, up from Santa Barbara, across from the Bay Area.  We were all heading off to Lake Tahoe and a Bachelorette Party for Aimee.  On that day, the basketball play-offs day, not one among us was pleased in the least to have the game reduced to a wee, small, five-inch square on the upper right corner of the TV screen, while OJ and his entourage of law enforcement and media took up not only freeways in southern California, but 95% of the television screen as well.  We were, what’s the best word, peevish about it all.  It was a circus, one repleat with banners hung over freeway walls and bridges, spectators hoo-rahing their idol — GO! O.J. GO! — from rows of lawn chair spectators along the way. 

Not the same at all on the tenth of February ‘97 when the Jury pronounced not guilty.  I was alone in the house, hands in a sink full of dishes.  The news came down from an upstairs television kept on for noise value (sometimes solitude is not all it’s cracked up to be.)  The verdict floated down from that loft area.  I think the dishwater was cold by then.  Maybe there weren’t many suds left to do a proper job.  Maybe all I could see were the greasey spots floating the dirty water.  I don’t honestly remember why I stopped doing whatever I was truly doing and walked out on the back porch and walked down the stairs to the spa and sat on the final step and cried.  I mean cried until my shoulders heaved up and down even when I stopped crying.  I mean crying so that if, if there had been someone to say What’s wrong?  What has upset you to this point? I would not have been able to answer — physically unable to respond, but also at a tremendous loss as to how to put into words just what was lost in that moment, that verdict, that setting free.

2008, February 10

I came across a blog [it's going to lay me low, this blogging business] late yesterday, something like WriteHereWriteNow [will check that out when they send me a first newletter], Scotland based and BBC in the works somehow, and I signed on for their free newsletters and prompts to write a thousand words of Crime Fiction a day.  I don’t know if there’s a prize, have no idea what the prompts will consist of, and have never, ever written any Crime Fiction but, hey, maybe it’s time?

So, on the outside chance that someone stumbles across this post and knows of other blogs or sites with Everything You Ever Need To Know About Writing Crime Fiction And Then Some — could you share the info?  Thanks.