Author: djgourdoux

Summer Solstice

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Sky blue and cloudless and enormous,
endless fields stretch out to the horizon,
a thin and distant green line.
Everything infinite and unending
yet small against the sky.

The sun never goes down,
this day never ends.
There is no yesterday
and are no tomorrows.
This day is forever.

I am nine years old.
Daylight runs through my veins
and seeps out my pores.
Blades of grass between my toes.
Sunlight on my face.
I, too, am infinite and unending,
and small and minute.
I have swallowed the sun.

Spelling Bee

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Getting called out of my 7th grade classroom to report to the Principal’s office wasn’t that unusual of an event for me. What made this particular occasion different were the other kids that were selected to join me. They were four of the smartest and best behaved kids in the room and, of course, they were all girls. I honestly had no clue why we were called out of class.

It turned out that we were the top five finishers in a test to determine who would represent our classroom in the middle school finals of the spelling bee. Then we had a little spell off for the classroom championship, conducted by the school’s vice principal, right there in the office. No one was more surprised than I was when I won. And trust me; anyone who knew me was surprised, too.

I was a notorious screw up in my junior high years, blessed with a rare combination of immaturity and laziness. Most of my academic energies were concentrated on coming up with new and original excuses for not turning my homework in (I lost count of how many times I claimed that papers fell out of my notebooks and into sewer grates on my way to school – there was also the dog we never owned that had an insatiable appetite for paper, and was eventually the victim, along with a science worksheet, of an apparent alien abduction. That one didn’t go over very well). So my winning anything except more detention time was big news.

A couple of weeks later they pulled me out of class again, this time to the school cafeteria, where I was to compete against all of the other sixth, seventh and eighth grade classroom winners in the school finals. All told, there were about 20 contestants. All of the other kids were very smart, good students, brainiacs, who, unlike me, had actually studied for the event. I might have studied, too, had I been paying attention when someone must have told me about it, but I had no clue – but then again, I probably wouldn’t have studied even if I’d known about it. But it was an hour or two out of my normal class work, which I was all in favor of.

Well, in the crowning achievement of my academic career, I managed to finish 4th in the event. I wish I could say that it was a life changing moment; that inspired by my performance I buckled down and became an honors student, and I realized all of my untapped potential, but nothing of the sort occurred. I was the all-American screw up, blessed with talent, brains and opportunity, and I was spoiled and stupid enough to squander it all.

The other night I watched the national Spelling Bee finals on ESPN. These kids are incredible, breaking down impossible words that I’d never heard of, knowing not only how to spell them but where their origin comes from, and what a syllable might mean in that original language. I can’t remember what word eventually tripped me up in 7th grade, but I can guarantee it wasn’t anything close to what these kids were breezing through.

Being the white American male that I am, I couldn’t help but take note of the fact that the eight finalists were all of Asian descent. I thought for a moment about what that meant, and the answer quickly came back to me: not a damn thing. They’re all Americans, and thank God, with intelligence like that, we’re so lucky to have them. There’s no way looking at them you can tell if they’re first generation Americans, or if their families have been here for decades, but that makes no difference, either.

I was so impressed by these kids, with their unique personalities and their incredible grace under immense pressure and their sportsmanship and class. I really enjoyed the shots of their families, the nervous and proud parents and siblings. Many of the contestants had lofty dreams of what they’d grow up to be, and they all seemed achievable.

Short features showed the contestants at home with their friends and families, and they were just kids, smiling and laughing, just like my kids did at that age, just like I did, and it struck me, this is America at its best, where kids can still be kids, where they are loved and nurtured by family, and where they can dream, and where there is still a chance their dreams will come true, no matter where they’re from, how long they’ve been here, or what the color of their skin is.

For those of us who grew up taking everything this amazing country offers for granted, watching these kids was a great reminder that this has always been our dream, and that as long as there is an America, it always will be.

What’s New

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So what’s new with me?

First of all, for my latest contribution to the 2nd First Look site, I not only wrote about the great Wisconsin writer Michael Perry, I got to interview him!  Check it out here:

http://www.2ndfirstlook.com/2013/05/michael-perry.html

He was very kind and gracious, and it was a thrill having a conversation, even if by e-mail, with a legitimate big time, New York Times bestselling author.  It was like, as I put it in one of my correspondences with him, playing catch with Robin Yount.

Second, I posted a while back that I was attending the Writer’s Institute conference in Madison in April, and pitching my novel Ojibway Valley to a couple of big-time, New York City literary agents.  Well, the conference was great, with informative sessions that were professionally presented.   Even better was the chance, for three plus days, to hang out with fellow writers.  I enjoyed meeting each and every one I met, whether it was in the hallways between sessions or in the hotel bar.   It was great to commiserate with so many others who have been bitten by the writing bug and are trying to get their work out there.  I met people working in every conceivable genre, from romance to fantasy to hard-core pulp fiction.  The common denominator shared by all was a love of the process and the need to express something about themselves, and the exhilarating and addictive joy of creating.

The conference also featured the launch of the inaugural issue of the new literary journal, “The Midwest Prairie Review,” featuring a short story of mine, “A Leg Up.”  I was very proud to be included in what turned out to be a high quality publication.  The issue is only available in print for now; at some point, they may make it available on the web.  If that happens, I’ll include the link on this site.

As for the pitches with the agents, they seemed to go okay.  I had only eight minutes with each agent.  One asked for the entire manuscript and a detailed synopsis, the other asked for the first 50 pages.  I sent them out the week of April 17th, but I’m not holding my breath.   Even though I honestly think it’s a pretty good book (it has its faults, which I try not to dwell on), I’m expecting rejection.  Both agents said to give them about eight weeks to respond one way or another, so we’re about half way through that period.  In the meantime, I’m hard at work on my second novel, and enjoying the process of writing it immensely.   My first one will probably remain unpublished, and my second one will more than likely meet the same fate, but I’m at the point that I’m okay with that.  I’ve fallen in love with the process of creating longer works of fiction, and any disappointment brought about by rejection letters cannot dampen the joy of watching these little worlds I create come to life.   I know that they might not be the greatest things ever written, but I also know that they are me at that moment, and I know that the more I write, the better I get.

I was so busy with my new novel that I missed the 2nd anniversary of this site.  I’m so focused on my novels that I don’t find as much time for drivel lately, so there have been fewer posts (51 in year two compared to 77 in year one).   Most have been consistently mediocre, but of the 51, there have been a few that I still like:

Time After Time:  Written on the occasion of my wonderful daughter’s graduation from high school.  She is what she’s always been: an amazing human being.

July 4th:  A brief excerpt that I ended up cutting from my first novel, because it just didn’t fit – but I still like this one.

Prophecies:   A short fiction that shows some skills developing

Accomplishment:  Only because one of my recent literary heroes, Patricia Ann McNair, author of the brilliant The Temple of Air, read this and commented on it.  I’m not worthy …

If Al Pacino Was My Dentist:  The title says it all.

Melting Diamonds and the Great Blue Bus in the Sky:  I wrote this about four years ago, but I still like it.  I was thrilled when Conrad Stonkey’s granddaughter wrote to me that she’d read it; that I got the characterization of Conrad right was an added bonus.

In these pieces, I can find something of value, something that shows some development, some hope.  Of course, there are also pieces like The Year of the Dishonest Corn Chip that reveal the arrested adolescent that I remain most of the time.  To summarize, on balance, I remain unbalanced.

Everything is Right There

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(I’ve been so head down working on my new novel that I completely missed the 2nd birthday of Drivel by Dave … so with nothing else prepared, here’s an excerpt that I wrote tonight)

It was about 11:30 when I walked home, through the back yards.  The night was dark and cool.  There was a hint of impending autumn in the air, even as the night choir of crickets sang its ode to summer.

I found the far end of our backyard and stopped for a moment and looked at the house I grew up in.   A light was on in the kitchen, I couldn’t tell if anyone was still awake or if they’d left it on for my benefit.  The curtains over the sink were drawn, casting a yellow glow to the window.   The grass was long and already damp with night dew.  I’ll mow it tomorrow, I thought, just like I mowed it so many times growing up.  It was the same back yard, the same grass, the same dew, the same house, the same yellow glowing kitchen window. It was all so familiar.  It was all the same as it’d been all those years growing up, but standing there, gazing into my past, I knew that inside was the present, and in the present, inside that house, my father, who’d always been so strong, so funny and so formidable, lay dying, a hollow shell of his past self.  It occurred to me that in all probability the next time I gazed upon that same scene my father would be gone, and at some point after that, my mother would be gone, too.

I started across the back yard, walking to the back porch, and I thought of all we’d been through together, the three of us, in this house, in this town.  Orchard Depot was a small town, but for all those years growing up, it was the universe, where life dwelled and where death was felt.  It’d always been a presence, death had, first as little more than a rumor, then as a nightmare in the form of an eyeless corpse in a corn field, and now as an inescapable and unavoidable reality. And if it was big enough to house both life and death, it was big enough to encapsulate all of time and memory, too, and I looked at our little house in our little town and realized everything that is and ever was is right there, behind the yellow kitchen window.

A Reminder

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In July of 1977, just a couple of months shy of my nineteenth birthday, I left my home in southeastern Wisconsin and took a job in the Norco Windows factory in the tiny town of Hawkins, Wisconsin.  On my first day, I wore my Emerson, Lake and Palmer t-shirt.  At the time, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, a progressive rock band famous for their twenty minute songs fusing classical music with rock and for Carl Palmer’s rotating drum set, was all the rage with teenage middle class boys living in the suburbia of the Milwaukee to Chicago corridor.  As I was shown to the department I’d be working in, I was disappointed to find that all of my new co-workers were middle to near retirement aged men to whom “Karn Evil 9” would surely be nothing but unpleasant noise.   Finally, I was relieved when I was introduced to George, a guy my own age.  He looked at my shirt and said, “Emerson, Lake and Palmer – who are they, a country band?”   It was my reverse “you’re not in Kansas anymore” moment.

Back then, going on 36 years ago now, before the internet and the information revolution, northern Wisconsin was truly an isolated place, with limited and delayed access to mass culture.   It would make it there, eventually, long after it’d been consumed and watered down by the coasts and the metropolises in between.   In this age before DVDs and even VCRs, movies would show up in the small town theatres about six to nine months after they finished their run in the cities.  Unless you ventured down to the college town of Eau Claire, the only music available was in the small album or eight track bins of the local Holiday gas station, with room only for the biggest country and top 40 acts.  Television was whatever fuzzy network feeds you could get through rabbit eared antennas.  Radio was mainly A.M. and country and Casey Kasem and top 40.  There was no way of knowing that the punk rock revolution was even occurring –we’d never heard of the Sex Pistols.   The closest thing was “Roxanne” by the Police, which was dismissed as this weird song on the juke box in the 211 Club.  When the disco craze erupted, a backwoods version of Studio 54 finally opened in I think 1979, and its dance floor was soon filled with farm boys and factory girls stomping to the pulsating rhythms of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees.  John Travolta it was not.  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Now days, technology has opened up access to the culture to everyone.  That’s a good thing.  You can stream radio stations from New York City over a cell phone (for the first year and a half I worked at Norco, my apartment didn’t even have a phone).   Movies and books and music are available over the internet, only a download away.  The barriers of time and distance have been broken down.

But there’s been a price to pay for all this progress.  As mass culture explodes, local culture becomes a casualty, collateral damage.  You see it along the interstate off-ramps, in the proliferation of the same fast food restaurants.  You see it on the main streets of small towns, where Wal Mart super stores have replaced the local ma and pa hardware stores and the local co-ops or grocery stores.  You see it in the aging eyes of the farmers, the few who are hanging on to family farms that have been abandoned by their children, and in the many who now work for corporate mega farms.  You see it even in the shrinking numbers in the rural and the neighborhood taverns and bars, once the places where people connected with one another.  It’s as if in the process of opening up the world, we’ve closed off our neighbors.

It’s no wonder we’ve become more politically divided.  Why get to know that guy next door, he’s probably a redneck tea partier, when I can find all the liberal friends I want on social media.  There’s plenty of information to support whatever politics we subscribe to, left or right, and we assume it’s accurate if it reinforces how we view the world.

Then something like the Boston bombings occur, and we remember that we are connected.   The one consistent thing about these acts of terror is the way that individuals and communities react.  When the bombs went off, people ran in, towards the chaos and the debris, in an almost instinctive and primal reaction to the naked face of evil.  For a moment, there weren’t any tea partiers or 99 percenters, there were just innocent people.  And it didn’t take long to add up the numbers and come to the conclusion that there were a whole lot more good people than evil.   It’s the same reaction we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hooks shootings, and in the first days after 9/11.

I’m sure that it won’t take long for the cynical and disingenuous from both sides to twist and manipulate Boston to shape their own agenda, and in time we’ll come to view the events of last week through our usual ideological lenses.    But as we sit here tweeting on our blogs and liking this post and disliking that post, we need to remember that computers don’t bleed and that social media doesn’t heal.  Neighbors, real flesh and blood and breathing people, still matter.

Dead End Street

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There are the late nights, after long days or nights working or returning exhausted from a long trip, when the street light marking the turn off onto my dead end road comes into view, and it’s always the warmest light in the world.   Beneath its glow I turn onto my street, and in a minute I’m home.

I’ve lived in the same house on the same dead end street since November 1, 1984.  That’s going on 29 years now.  In that time, among other things, I’ve completed a career in I.T., raised my children, gained about 40 pounds, and lost most of my hair.   I’ve done the math, and just driving to and home from the various jobs I’ve had over that time, I’ve driven down that same dead end street to my driveway over 14,000 times.   Add in another 30,000 to 40,000 times running to town to get groceries or running kids to softball or basketball practice or whatever, and I’ve pounded the same narrow half mile or so of pavement in excess of 50,000 times.   I know the road’s imperfections, its nooks and crannies, its bumps and manhole covers, so well that I could probably drive it with my eyes closed.  I know where the little valleys in the pavement are, and where, after a rain, the deepest puddles form.  For years, if I had one or more of my kids with me, I’d always accelerate through them, making as big a splash as I could.

I had endless routines I’d use to entertain my kids with when driving them down the street.   One of my favorites was, years before talking GPS devices or Suri or whatever her name is, I had Hank the engine man.  Hank was a small man who lived in the engine of my 1989 Ford F150 pickup truck, and whenever we embarked on a trip, as we pulled out of the driveway, I’d ask Hank for a systems report.  I’d say, “Hank, how’s the oil pressure,” and Hank, forever loyal and faithful, would answer, in his high pitched voice “Oil pressure is fine and steady.”    I remember one time, I hurt Hank’s feelings when I yelled at him for failing to report that there was a puddle just past our driveway, and normally cheerful, Hank turned sad and depressed when I asked him, “Hank, what’s the fuel level?”

He answered glumly, “um, it’s not bad, I guess.”

“Do we have enough gas to get to Milwaukee?”

“What do I know?” he replied.  “Apparently I don’t know what a puddle is.”

My kids thought it was funny when I had to apologize to Hank for hurting his feelings.

The years passed and my kids grew up and the laughs my routines used to draw turned into impatient sighs and rolling eyes, and I realized that I performed them as much for my own entertainment as theirs’.   Whatever, they were fun while they lasted, and they were part of the universe that a family creates.  The center of that universe is the house the family calls home, and for the past 29 years, the pathway to home has been our little dead end street.

Now, when the kids come back to visit, they approach that same streetlight, and I hope it is just as warm a sight for them as it’s been for me all these years.  I hope they breathe the same sigh of contented relief and, no matter what stresses or worries occupy their minds, for the stretch of that dead end street to our driveway, they melt away.

They’re home.

 

Pitch Count

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Next weekend I’ll be attending the annual Writer’s Institute conference in Madison.  I’m looking forward to going, to meeting new people and learning more about the craft and trade of being a writer.  It will also serve as the occasion to launch the first edition of the new annual literary journal, “The Midwest Prairie Review,” which is going to include a short story I submitted, “A Leg Up.”  I am looking forward to seeing the finished publication, and, of course, seeing my work in print.

The most highly anticipated part of the conference promises to be the live pitch sessions with literary agents.  I have signed up for sessions with two agents to try and get representation for my first novel, Ojibway Valley.  The sessions are eight minute one on ones where the author pitches his or her work.  It’s a rare opportunity to have face to face contact with the people whose job it is to wade through thousands of anonymous query letters.

I’m very proud of Ojibway Valley, but I’m also realistic.   I know the odds are stacked against me.  While I think it’s a good book, when I look at it now, I tend to only see the things that I could have done better, and I assume that’s what the agents will see.  Still, I’m preparing what I’ll say, and trying to summarize the book into short and concise statements that reflect what it’s about and why it’d sell enough copies for a big publishing house to take it in.

I’m nervous about these scheduled sessions.  I really want to go the traditional route, have an agent who hooks me up with an editor and finds a publishing house and gets the book out.  I have no illusions about it ever being a best seller or making millions of dollars off of it.  I’d be thrilled if it was just published and looked professional and if a handful or readers got a hold of it and found something worthwhile inside.    I suppose the self publish or e-publishing paths are options worth pursuing, and something I may look into eventually, but first I’d like to give the traditional route a try.

I’m nervous for a number of reasons, chief among them being that I hope to have my work validated and see my dream of having a published novel come true.  Adding to the pressure and the stress is my instance of Parkinson’s Disease, which, among other things, impacts my speech and my handwriting.    With only eight minutes to make my case, it’s going to be imperative that I communicate efficiently, that I am clear and concise, and I want to make a good impression.   Typically, the more stress I am under, the worse my speech is, and I stutter and stammer and slur my words.  So I have to decide, do I tell the agent up front about my condition, and waste valuable time discussing my condition, or do I just start my pitch, and risk sounding like a babbling moron?  Hopefully, stress won’t initiate the tremors it sometimes does, and I won’t be shaking or jerking about too much.

It’s awkward enough going to these conferences anyway, because one of the things Parkinson’s has taken from me is my handwriting.  I never had good handwriting, but now it is completely illegible.  If I don’t have my laptop with me (my phone has texting capabilities, but with my unsteady fingers, I do not) I can’t jot down a phone number or add an item to a grocery list.  This means while at a conference, I have to lug my laptop with me to take notes or engage in writing exercises.  It can become clumsy at times, and another thing I have to think about when I am in my pitch sessions – do I bring my laptop with me?  It seems rather impersonal in a one on one meeting to open up a computer and start typing.

Parkinson’s is the elephant on the table.  It’s the reason I’m home all day, the reason I left my job as a manager in I.T. two years ago.  It’s the reason I’m writing now – it’s how I fill my time, and as long as my fingers can work a keyboard and a mouse, it’s how I’ll spend my remaining time.  Writing’s been my attempt to make the best of a bad situation, to fill my time with purpose and meaning.  The thing is, I don’t know how much time I still have left.   I’ve read stories of other authors taking as long as twelve years to get their prize winning novels published – I don’t know if I can wait that long.  So it adds an element of desperation to my work.

I don’t have a bucket list.  I just don’t see the point.  I’m happy as long as I have my family and my writing.  When I started writing Ojibway Valley, I was just beginning to transition from memoir writing to fiction writing.  Now, I’m addicted to writing fiction.  I’m about 40% through my second novel, and everyday I’m learning more about how to create fictional characters and situations, the different ways  to tell a story.

I dream of having my work, particularly my novels, published some day.  I’ll do whatever I can to make that happen.  In the meantime, while I wait for someone to publish my first novel, I’ll finish my second novel.  When that’s done, I’ll start my third, and I’ll continue until, to paraphrase the National Rifle Association, they have to pry my keyboard from my stiff and rigid fingers.

 

My G-G-G-Generation

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Last night while out to dinner, someone my age said that the generation entering the workplace these days has to be the “most selfish generation ever.”

Oh, really.

Before I respond, some perspective.   Let’s take a look at recent U.S. history. These are generally accepted dates and terms used in defining post 20th century generations.

Born 1900 to 1924: G.I. Generation
Born 1925 to 1945: Silent Generation (my parents generation)
Born 1946 to 1964: Baby Boomers (my generation)
Born 1965 to 1979: Generation “X”
Born 1980 to 2000: “Millenials” (my children’s generation)

It takes a while for a generation to grow up and exert its influence on the world. Let’s say a generation’s sphere of influence occurs 30 years after its start date to 50 years after its end date. This, of course, means there are periods of overlap where two generations dominate the culture. A timeline of influence might look something like this:

  •                 G.I. Generation:   1930-1974
  •                 Silent Generation:   1955-1995
  •                 Baby Boom:              1976-2014
  •                 Generation X:          1995-2029
  •                 Millenials:                2010-2050

What this shows us is that the Baby Boomers, my generation’s, time is rapidly winding down, and we are approaching the middle of Generation X’s sphere of influence. The Millenials, the supposedly selfish generation, are just beginning to have their influence felt.

So to understand where we are, we need to look at where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

The G.I. generation endured the great depression and won World War Two, built the strongest economy and highest standard of living in the history of the world, initiated civil rights reforms, and saw the U.S. rise to become the undisputed world power. Pretty damned impressive!

The Silent Generation saw advances in science, medicine and technology, advancement of civil rights, victory in the cold war as the U.S.S.R. collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. Not as impressive as the previous generation, but still, not bad!

As a result of the work and sacrifices of the G.I. and Silent Generations, U.S. Baby Boomers were born into the most prosperous time in human history. We had every advantage that our parents never had. And what happens to children who get everything they want? That’s right, they get spoiled. And boy, oh, boy, no generation has ever wanted and got more than us Baby Boomers.

We started out okay. In the sixties, raised on the promise of the American dream our parents had worked so hard to realize, we reacted strongly when we saw that dream corrupted. The civil rights and anti Vietnam War movements fused idealism with action, and through a violent and turbulent decade, the young baby boomers truly changed the world.

But somewhere along the way, spoiled children with short attention spans that we are, we grew tired, and decided that it was more important that we have everything we felt we were entitled to, which, it turns out, was everything. We had to have the new house in the suburbs, we had to have luxury or sports cars in the driveways, we had to have every toy imaginable, we had to have the prestigious career, we had to have the best of everything.

This lust for things bled into Generation X, too, and soon they were joining us in racking up obscene credit card debts and mortgages. In our need for more and more things, we plunged deeper and deeper into personal and national debt, we turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the destruction of the environment and the burning of the atmosphere. We gave away whatever power we still had to our corporate masters, and hung on to every crumb they left behind as they deserted our shores and replaced us with slave and child labor. We bailed out the banks that were screwing us, and we turned a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Wall Street and oil executives. We elected disingenuous and corrupt corporate puppets as our leaders, and waved the flag and cheered when they lead us into illegal and unfunded wars. All so we could make a quick buck, have that nice house, and drive that forty grand S.U.V.

Now, the next generation, the Millennials, my children, are left to clean up the mess my drunken sailor of a generation has left them with. They enter their time crushed by debt, in a worldwide economic crisis, teetering on the edge of environmental collapse, with limited access to effective health care.

Our parents left us the estate and we got drunk and burned it down.

We took the cake with open fists and stuffed our gaping mouths and bloated bellies, leaving nothing but crumbs for the next generation.

Boy, are they selfish.

Spring

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It’s eleven degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the ground is mostly white with snow cover.  On my way to my garage, I have to navigate deadly patches of ice.

According to the calendar, it’s officially spring now.

Spring is cruel, at least in the beginning, because we all know what it promises and what it’ll eventually deliver.  Winter is long and cold and becomes an affliction, also known as cabin fever, and in the first warm days of spring we feel that fever breaking, only to fall victim to one last cold snap or heavy snow.  Slow though it might be in arriving, spring will eventually come.

Around here, in the southeast corner of Wisconsin, spring announces itself with water.   First it’s the snow melt, then the ice from the lakes, and finally the rains in April and May that put the final coat of green paint on the season.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite discoveries each year would be the day in early spring when a thaw came, and walking home from school, whether it was the old grade school off of State Street, or the middle school on the south side of town, or even the high school on highway 45 on the north side, following newly created rivers of melting snow water.  I have never outgrown my love of moving water.  The great thing about those days was that they were always unexpected but annual surprises, the time every year that the flat, boring town that had been stifled by the cold for so long suddenly warmed up and transformed, the streets that had been gray and dead now alive and flowing.  I’d drop something, usually a stick, at the headwaters of these new, great and temporary rivers, and follow its voyage to its unexplored destination.

The water that accumulates and pools in swamps and eddies gives birth to enormous quantities of wild life, from the dreaded hatching of vast armies of mosquitoes to the schools of tadpoles that so enthralled me when I was little.  A couple of years ago, on my property in northwestern Wisconsin, I discovered in the stray backwaters deposited by the swelling and contraction of the Chippewa River, hundreds of the little green guys swimming about, and I was just as captivated as I was when I was little, although these days I am more aware of the fact that just a percentage of them will make it to full grown frog-ness, as any number of predators is also captivated by their presence for altogether more practical reasons.

In my property up north, in the woods near the river, in early to mid spring, the forest floor becomes covered with white and blue wild flowers.  They last for a couple of weeks, a brief honeymoon period until the rest of the forest floor reignites into green thickness and overtakes them.

Spring is brilliant blue skies and whitsummere clouds, but it is also the ominous black rumbling skies of thunderstorms that move in from the west and bring hard rains that pound the hard and unyielding ground into the soft and fertile soil from which sustenance sprouts and grows.

Spring is a great time for wildlife viewing.  The supply of fresh water and the rebirth of vegetation provide an all you can eat buffet for a variety of species.  In the early spring, after a typical winter of snow and cold, as the snow melts, more deer can be seen than any other time of year.  In late winter, with food scarce and their defenses down, deer will herd up; obeying there’s a safety in numbers logic.  When the snow first melts, you can see what’s left of these herds in fields and meadows, picking through the holes in the snow for the best of the still brown and faded grasses.  Often times you can find large numbers of them out even in the middle of the day, so hungry that they could care less if they are watched.

There is a wide variety of species that awakes from hibernation in the spring.   Most notorious of these is, of course, in the northern part of the state, the black bear.  Bears are always to be respected, but especially in the spring, when they are hungry and their body weight is down from their long slumber, and when sows have young cubs to raise.  Over the past several years, near my cabin, we’ve had countless sightings.  Once, about five or six years ago,  on a spring day as I was walking down the dirt road in front of my cabin, I saw a bear get up from  about twenty yards from me and run off.  I didn’t think much of it until, after running about another twenty yards the bear changed direction and started running to the north, parallel to me.  At the long driveway of the property next to mine, it abruptly turned, and started running straight towards me.  Standing there with nothing between me and an adult bear running straight towards me was an unnerving sight.  It got to about fifteen yards away from me when I raised my arms and said “hoo hoo,” the first words that popped in my brain, my survival instincts apparently having been instructed that impersonating an owl is the best defense against a charging bear.  Much to my amazement, upon hearing my eloquent plea, the bear hit the brakes, its front paws digging in the dirt, and turned around and kicked it into high gear, running away from me at a speed I never imagined such a large animal could achieve.  It’s a good thing, too, because if the “hoo hoo”  hadn’t worked, all that would have been left for me to do was to soil myself.   Then I heard some noise in the woods to my left, on the other side of the road, and the best guess I could give is that my bear was a mother with cubs on the other side of the road, and I had gotten between them, the most dangerous place to be.  When the mother ran at me, she was trying to scare me (and trust me, she succeeded), my “hoo-hoo” calling her bluff.   This is all theory, though, as I didn’t stick around to fully investigate the sounds to my left and confirm that they were made by cubs.  Instead I made my way back to my cabin as quickly as my overweight, out of shape, rubber boots wearing body was capable of.

The best part of spring comes later, when you least expect it.  I remember sharing this observation with my dad a few years ago, and he agreed, he knew exactly what I meant.  Every year, there’s a sunny morning , in either late April or May, that the sky is a heartbreaking vivid shade of blue, and I become aware that seemingly overnight the world has transformed into a symphony of lush greens, the trees having leafed out, while the musical chatter of songbirds plays in the background.  It’s rebirth and renewal, it’s awakening, it’s life.   It always comes as a surprise, and it always takes my breath away.

On this cold first day of spring, with everything frozen and bare, I think of that day and what a wonderful thing it is that the world can still surprise and amaze me.    However long spring takes, the wait is always worth it.

A Slippery and Sloppy Slope

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

(Enjoy these short short stories for what they are – evidence that I have completely run out of ideas for posts)

A Ripping Good Time

Shortly after the table saw accident, Rip wrapped his ripped fingers around the sandwich wrap that had been wrapped in Reynolds wrap.  Rap played on Rip’s radio.  Rip gripped the wrap with his ripped fingers tight in the night and thought about the cruise he was scheduled to take.  Rip had never been on a trip on a ship, and it frightened him.   Rip was out to prove that he wasn’t lazy like people thought he was – Rip’s bum rep was a bum rap.   Others were hip to Rip’s trip on a ship, and through loose lips helped Rip come to grips with his fear of trips on ships.

 A Ham on Turkey

Experts determined that the antique cushioned footstool was Turkish in origin, from the 1300s, making it an Ottoman ottoman. Its owner was a man named Otto who was a direct descendent of Osman and was therefore an Ottoman man named Otto. The incident with the Ottoman man named Otto and his Ottoman ottoman and the axe was an accident, and while the axe may have left an indent in the Ottoman ottoman, the Ottoman man named Otto was cleared of any wrongdoing when it was determined that not only was the axe incident accidental, in the grand scheme of things the axe accident was incidental and thus not that important. Incidentally, this is the first known accidental use of an axe by an Ottoman man named Otto against an Ottoman ottoman on record, either accidental or intentional.

March Madness

Indiana was preparing to play Oklahoma in the NCAA tourney.  The two teams were so equal in talent that Victor had trouble predicting the victor. He grew impatient in his anticipation and called his aunt Faye, a lactose intolerant patient who the staff at Victory Memorial had lost patience with.  “Aunt Faye, it’s you’re nephew, Victor.  Who’s your pick for the victor between the Hoosiers and the Sooners?”  Faye said, “Do I understand, Victor, that you can’t pick a victor without knowing what your aunt Faye may say?  I and my fellow patients advise patience, you’ll know who your victor, Hoosiers or Sooners, is sooner than you realize.”   Victor replied, “I need to pick a victor sooner than Faye may say.  Though my aunt is a patient, the anticipation of who will be the victor is more than Victor’s patience can bear.”  At that point the nurses had become intolerant of Faye’s lactose intolerance.  It wasn’t just Faye, they’d lost patience with two other patients, too, dismissing their symptoms before dismissing them from the hospital.  Victory Memorial then developed a bad reputation as an institution with no patience for patients, and became known as an inhospitable hospital.

You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Norway

It was autumn. The Vikings were preparing to depart for America.  “Leif has to leave before the fall leaves fall,” Eric’s son said of Leif Erickson.

“If Eric’s son wants to leave with Leif Erickson,” an elderly elder replied, “then Eric’s Son and Leif Erickson will both have to wait until when Sven intends to leave.” Sven was the project planner in charge of planning the project.  All that had been provided so far was projections of when Sven projected the project to start.

“The ships need to be repaired first,” Sven replied.  “We have to wait for the parts before we can depart.  Not only is the date we depart dependent upon the parts, but we can’t forecast the date we arrive until we know the date the parts arrive.”

“Have the parts suppliers supplied us with the part of the plan when the parts are supplied to us?”  In other words, do we know when the parts suppliers will supply us with the parts?”  The elderly elder asked.

“I don’t know when the parts suppliers will depart with our parts,” Sven replied, “so I don’t know when we’ll install the parts the parts suppliers will supply us with, so I don’t know when we’ll depart.  Once the suppliers arrive with the parts, not only will we be able to determine when we depart, but the arrival of the supplies will supply us with what we need for an arrival date.”

“I just want to know,” Eric’s son said, “will Leif Erickson be able to leave in the fall, before the leaves fall?”

“Leave that to Leif Erickson, Eric’s son,” the elderly elder replied.