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Saturday, August, 1968

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It’s strange sometimes, the things you remember.  I know that in my fifty plus years on the planet there have been any number of life-changing events that I’ve completely forgotten about, and still others that are murky at best.  At the same time, there are also random snippets of innocuous day to day and seemingly unexceptional moments that remain vividly etched in my memory forever, moments that I can recall with perfect clarity whenever I want.

It was a Saturday in August of 1968.  I was nine years old.  The television in the living room was on, channel four, the major league baseball “Game of the Week” on NBC, with Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek doing  play by play. The Detroit Tigers were playing the Baltimore Orioles.   I was watching.  I remember Don Wert, third baseman for the Tigers, hitting a home run.

My dad was home, wearing a plain white t-shirt, cleaning the garage.  I don’t know where everybody else was.  I just remember being by myself in the living room and every now and then going out to the garage and “helping” my dad.   I remember he was in an especially good mood, and I remember at one point he had the garden hose out and was rinsing down the garage floor.  I’d come out, hang around with him for a while, and then I’d go back in and watch the game for a while.  And I remember being keenly aware of how happy I was, I didn’t understand why, but I felt completely free and good and happy, with baseball on television and my dad in the garage.

That’s about it – I wish I could tell you that something exciting happened.  I wish I could even tell you who won the baseball game.

But there is one thing I can add – it remains what it’s always been, one of my favorite memories of all.  I’ve often wondered why, with no definitive explanation, but I think it has to do with the vividness the memory presents itself to me.  I see my dad how he looked back then, with what hair he had on his head still dark, his face unwrinkled.  I see that the television was our old black and white console in the living room.  I see the grey cement floor of the clean and empty garage, I see the dust rise from my dad’s sweeping with the big push broom, then later the water spraying out of the hose.  I see my dad smiling that contented home on a Saturday afternoon smile.   And I remember feeling free, free to watch baseball or hang out with my dad, two of my favorite things to do.

That’s all it is – just an ordinary moment in an ordinary day in an ordinary life.  And I think that’s why I love the memory so much.  What makes it feel so extraordinary is that my dad was with me, home from work on a Saturday afternoon.  I had no concept then that our Saturday afternoons together were finite.  I had no concept of aging and death and time and space.  I was nine years old, and all I understood was baseball and my dad, and on that Saturday afternoon in August of 1968, they were everything.

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.

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.

Fear and Hatred and Profits

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(I wrote this in reaction to something I saw posted on Facebook yesterday that said essentially “bad people do bad things, there’s nothing we can do.”   I’ve debated posting it here until I finally said fuck it)

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searching for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?

–  Nick Lowe

Friday, December 14, 2012:  The world is unrecognizable.

Maybe those Mayan calendars predicting the end of the world were right after all. When insanity rains over innocence, the structure of the world starts to fall apart, and everything we know to be true and real and important is torn.   The world isn’t the world anymore.   It’s beginning to look more like Hell every day.

No place is safe.  We’ve had shootings in temples, grocery stores, movie theatres and, just in the past few days, shopping malls and elementary schools.  Think about that for a moment – temples and elementary schools.  Places of worship and learning.   Grocery stores and shopping malls.  Centers of sustenance and commerce.   These are elemental components of any civilized society.  They may have been home to violence in other countries, but in the United States?

What’s to be done?  There will be much debate in the coming days.  Do we banish all guns forever?  Or do we arm everybody?  Nobody knows the answer.

Maybe a place to begin is to start recognizing each other as neighbors, as fellow human beings, and start treating each other as such.   What we are seeing is the result of the intense fear and resentment and selfishness that is pounded into us day after day.   How many sick people are out there with serious mental illness going untreated?   How many needless guns are out on the street for people to “protect” themselves from those evil people with different colored skin who are just waiting to hurt them?

The problem is money.   The NRA doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the second amendment or protecting people’s rights.   That’s all a sham – the NRA is manufacturing fear so gun companies can manufacture more guns.   And it’s working spectacularly well.

The same is true of the people looking to cut “entitlements.”  They aren’t concerned about leaving our children with crippling debt.  That’s a sham, too.  They’re working for the health care industry, trying to eliminate Social Security and Medicare so that private companies can take them over.   The result of this will be an even larger number of the already expanding population of people with mental illness falling through the cracks, not getting the treatment they need.

This is a volatile combination that is brewing.   More mentally ill people and more guns on the street.  More fear and divisiveness being stirred up.  More anger and confusion and chaos.   More money being made.   And more rhetoric and resentment.  It’s all festering, right beneath the surface, and it’s spreading like cancer.

It’s ironic that the same people who so fervently go on and on about the rights of the unborn are the ones shrugging their shoulders today, saying “bad people do bad things, there’s nothing you can do.”  Today 20 innocent children were slaughtered.  They were between five and ten years old.   Any society that can’t protect five to ten year old children is a miserable failure.  And I don’t care what anybody says, the right of five to ten year old children to live a fear free life and not be gunned down in cold blood is infinitely more important than the right to hunt deer or to cower to manufactured fear behind the barrel of a handgun.  I’m not saying get rid of guns, I’m saying lets’ bring a little honesty and perspective to the debate.   And these children, who are loved by parents and siblings and grandparents, who’ve just started developing friendships and passions and experiencing joy and wonder, who have so much potential, are more important than those unborn fetuses we hear so much about.  If you want to be pro-life, that’s fine, but be consistent – be pro-life for those who are already living as well as those yet to be born.

We are told to hate welfare recipients because they are cheating us.  We are told to hate immigrants because they will take our jobs.  We are told to hate people with different colored skin because they want to hurt us and take our things.  We are told to hate people with different religious beliefs because they want to blow us up and make us worship their gods.  We are even told to hate people who work for us, teachers and cops and prison guards, because they are getting better benefits than we are.  Then we scratch our heads and wonder, why all the senseless violence?

Are we really that fucking stupid?

Prodigal Son

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Someday I’ll come back and they’ll be there again, the rolling fields and the small patches of woods, the corn and hayfields, whispering in the midday breeze under a fat sun in a cloudless sky.  They’ll return, and so will my youth, and I’ll run through the tall grass just because I can.  My lungs will fill with the warm afternoon air I push through, and I’ll run until I collapse in the cool shade of one of those big oaks just south of the railroad tracks. I’ll close my eyes and when I open them I’ll be dizzy from the fresh air in my lungs.   The green of the treetops will swirl with the deep blue of the sky into a kaleidoscope that twirls and spins to the rhythm of my throbbing heart.  After a while I’ll climb up on the tracks and follow them into town, past the empty backyards, the smell of freshly mown grass in my nostrils as I walk past and on to the grain elevator and feed mill.   Then I’ll be downtown, standing on the tracks in the middle of Main Street, looking south at the storefronts.  Everything will be the way it used to be; even the bank will be in that big old granite and marble building.    The Ben Franklin store, the pharmacy, the bakery, the café, the grocery store, they’ll all be how they used to be.

I’ll follow the tracks to the old train depot, and it’ll be open again, like it was when I was small, and I’ll step in and sit in the waiting area, brightly lit through big windows by the afternoon sun, dust dancing in the streams of light.  After a while, in the distance, I’ll hear the rhythmic hum of my train coming, getting closer and louder, then I’ll hear the clanging of the crossing bells on Main Street as it pulls up to  the station.   An unattended door will open and I’ll climb up and board the empty and ancient passenger car.  I’ll take a seat on one of the wooden benches next to a window.   As I sit there, the train will start to move, and I’ll wonder where it’s going to take me.  All I’ll know is that it’s not going to heaven, because heaven will be out my window, fading and vanishing.

God’s Birthday

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A late October day
a morning thick with frost
Alone on a country road
dead leaves scattered and tossed
While walking in the bright early morn
beneath a blue and cloudless sky
past the dead and dry and uncut corn
I heard a baby cry
then a crow announced it
plain and forlorn
that God Himself had just been born
 
He had just been born
all shiny and new
somewhere in the woods
hidden from my view
and his naked body glistened
bathed in the morning dew
and the trees bent in deference
to the western winds that blew
 
Who’ll take care of him
when the chill wind blows
when the night gets dark
in the cold December snows
Who’ll protect him
from the known and unknown
He’s just a baby
in a world as hard as stone
He’s all being and He’s all powerful
and He’s all alone
 
Who’ll stand and watch guard for
the priests and prophets and the worst
of the saints and the martyrs
the blessed and the cursed
with their sin and their faith
and their bibles and prayers
and their unquenchable taste
for his blood and flesh and hair
 
Now every year when I find myself
under the late October sky
I walk down that country lane
and I listen for his cry
but I hear nothing
in the air cold and gray
Then the clouds pass by
and the sun lights the day
and the cold wind sighs
that it’s God’s birthday

He Took a Shining to Shining

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In 1939, with the Nazi occupation of Poland imminent, Leopold Stowski, the brilliant and famous chemist, tried to flee to the United States, but the U.S. had recently enacted strict immigration laws, taking in only individuals who could claim physical or economic hardship.  Fearful for his life and desperate to get out, Stowski  posed as a crippled polio victim, confined to a wheelchair, and assumed the identity  Joseph Paski.   Friends at the State department helped him produce the required documentation, and soon Stowski was on a steamer to New York as Paski.

Once in New York, life was difficult for a crippled immigrant, and times were hard.  The only work he could find was shining shoes in the street.  Never the less, thankful for having saved his life, he enthusiastically embraced his situation, and went about shining shoes with great zeal.   As the days went by, he found that, after a good rain, he was shining the same shoes he had just shined before it rained.   The commercial shoe polishes he was using didn’t hold up to moisture.   Being the brilliant chemist he was, he went to work, in his dingy one room apartment, and soon he was able to invent a shoe polish that was completely resistant to moisture, and, in fact, came out of the rain shinier than before.  He quickly patented the invention, and sold the technology to the U.S. military.  Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, attributed a great deal of the success of the Normandy Beach landing to the polish, saying “Without the worry of our combat boots losing their luster on the amphibious landing, our soldiers were able to focus on the task at hand and ultimately triumph.  The whole nation owes the inventor of this substance a great deal of gratitude.”  So it was that the crippled polish immigrant Joseph Paski  became rich and famous, the inventor of what was now known as the “Polish Polish.”

Paski was suddenly wealthy and a national hero.   He moved into a palatial estate in Hollywood, his secret still undiscovered.  No one had ever seen him out of his wheelchair.   Then, one day, the FBI received an anonymous tip that Paski was really Stowski, and was in fact a fraud.  This taped conversation from the FBI archives shows agents Ham and Cheese discussing the tip while undercover at the local Tastee Freeze:

HAM:   So Paski isn’t really Paski?

CHEESE:  That’s right, Paski is Stowski.

HAM:  Pask is Stowski?

CHEESE:   You got it.

HAM:  And he’s not really a cripple?

CHEESE:  Nope, that’s all an act.  He’s a fraud, he’s not valid.

HAM:  He’s not valid?

CHEESE:  Nope, he’s invalid.

HAM:  So he’s an invalid invalid.

CHEESE:  That’s right.

HAM:   Then we’d better arrest him.  Make sure he gets his just desserts.  Done with your ice cream?

CHEESE:  Yeah, but I’m still hungry.  Do they sell lunch here?

HAM:  No lunch, just desserts.

Time went on and Ham and Cheese moved in on Paski, monitoring his every move, giving him no breathing room, on his back night and day.   The stress was wearing Paski down, until one very hot day, while visiting the circus, he turned to the men and asked, “Why you no leave Paski alone?   Why must you be so pesky to Paski?  What are your names, anyway?”

“We’re federal agents Sam Ham and Jack Cheese,” Cheese replied.

“Sam Ham?”  Paski asked.

“That’s right,” Cheese replied.

“And Jack Cheese?”

“That’s enough,” Ham interrupted.  “It’ll do no good to pepper Jack Cheese with questions.”

Paski couldn’t take the stress and lashed out.  “I’m so sick of you two, I can’t stand it.  It’s always with one of you on each side of me.  It’s as if I was in a Ham and Cheese sandwich.  Please, leave me to my Polish Polish.”

“We will, if you confess that you aren’t really crippled, that you are in fact an invalid invalid, and that you aren’t Paski, you are Stowski, we’ll try and go light on you.”  Cheese said.

Ham, who suffered from a nervous stomach, asked to be excused.

“Why?” Cheese asked.

“It’s so hot here at the circus,” he said, sweat pouring off his brow.

“You do look like you’re baked, Ham,” Cheese observed.

“I am.  In tents, the heat gets really intense, and my stomach feels just like that time on the flight to Chicago.”

“You mean when you …”

“That’s right, “ Ham replied.  “ Like that time I flew with the flu.”

Cheese excused Ham, but Ham fainted.  Cheese grabbed him, and Paski got out of his wheelchair and helped him lean Ham against the wall.

“Thanks,” Cheese said, then said, “hey wait a minute.  You helped me lean Ham.”

“Yes, so whatski?”  Paski was standing next to Ham.

“You’re out of your wheelchair!   You are an invalid invalid!”

“Oh,” Paski said, realizing the jig was up.

Paski was arrested, and the story became big news.   The press grilled Ham and Cheese.  Paski was exposed to be Stowski, and his reputation was ruined, his fortunes squandered.  He was no longer a national hero.  In the lowest depths of shame, he went to Niagara Falls, intent on jumping over and ending his own life.  Once he got there, though, he was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the rock formations and was unable to go through with it.

You might say that it was the gorgeous gorges that saved the invalid invalid, the inventor of the polish polish.

Dream Sequence

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We were born to dream, with galaxies in our eyes, the broad and endless universe confined within.

Long before we met, we were in love, and we dreamed we’d find each other.  That was the first dream to come true.

Then we tied our hearts and souls together until they became so intertwined and tangled up that the beginning of one was indistinguishable from the end of the other.   Stronger than two ever were, we dreamed as one, dreams fueled by our love.

We were married, young and broke, the times hard and bleak.  We dreamed that I’d finish my classes and get a good job.  

We dreamed we’d buy a house with a couple of acres in the country.

We dreamed of having children.

We dreamed of our children growing up happy and healthy.      

We dreamed of growing old together.

As each dream was realized, the knots we’d tied ourselves into have strengthened and our love has deepened.    We’re not kids anymore, and we’ve been around the block.  We know how to dream.  We know that we have plenty of dreams left.  And we know how to make them come true.  Long after our time here is done, we’ll still be together, still dreaming. 

No matter how unlikely the odds have been, and no matter how many of our dreams come true, one thing remains  – you’ve been the dream that all the other dreams have been based upon.  You’ll always be my dream, and even though you came true years ago, I still dream of you, and every morning when I wake up next to you, my deepest and most profound dream has been realized.