- Posts tagged Central America
- Explore Central America on posterous
Mountain Song
* * *
We sprinted through the Miami airport to make our connection because the customs queue through which we had been processed from Costa Rica was a bogged-down mess. Once we were finally on the plane to Atlanta, my excitement was making it difficult for me to write—the fragmented thoughts, scattered words and jumbled feelings exploding onto the page in an incoherent mish-mash of joy and impatience. A friend of ours, Jerry, had made the trip with us, as had our priest from Chattanooga. It was the first time I’d been around either of them for as long as a week and I’d grown fond of Jerry’s voice, the inflections that made his southern drawl so friendly had a lyrical charm that only a down-home boy could convey. He and I had laughed for days about the fact that when Jim sent the Padre to the hardware store to buy rope, he’d asked for ropa, which garnered him nothing. The clerk obviously couldn’t understand why he was intent on purchasing clothing when they didn’t sell garments there!
Once home, I managed to capture a few days to myself because Jim was off on a business trip. Sam slept beside me as I journaled the first morning—all fours up in the air, a snoring mass of golden-hued hair. As I stroked his belly, it occurred to me that the value of home was truly priceless. Storms had roared through the night before, trailing in their wake a shooting star. In another mood, I might have taken that as a sign of promise but I was weary and bereft. My goal for the day was to let go of my gaunt frame of mind so I could enjoy the atmosphere in which I was luxuriating as Bridal Veil Falls sang over my shoulder in an earthly percussive arrangement of smattering water against unyielding boulders. A dove’s contented coo reproached me for having any feelings other than gratitude given that I was finally tranquilly at home. I’d been pouring words into my personal journal, which had helped to clear my head somewhat—there was something about spilling the quandary of my life onto its pages that always made room for a modicum of ease. The sun, which had made a personal call as it rose above the fog-choked valley, was casting long shadows on my writer’s notebook and causing the point of my pen where it met the page to gleam.
I was made for this quiet, this solitude, this calm, and I reveled in the fact that Jim’s trip had given me the time to myself, which I believed would help me sort through the mess we’d made of things. As I sat there wondering what changes we could undertake that would help us right our wrongs, the wind rode up the mountain, whistling like the engine of a speeding train. It was then that I noticed it was happily marking time on the porch, its rhythm moving the rocking chair as it took a breather. I loved the idea that the undulant currents wanted to take a respite, and the fact that they had chosen my deck as a hangout delighted me to no end.
Questions as to the quality of my writing were surfacing—the realization dawning that when it was rushed my work lacked the vivacity of the material created during times of complete absorption. Had my work reached the level at which I should be so concerned with publishability? I wondered. I longed for more time for revision, but I had also seen that the process was not always my friend; that the flesh of my poetry was too tender to be ripped apart and expected to heal without exhibiting scars. Was I a skilled enough practitioner to prescribe the proper ointment for the treatment of these lesions?
This question was a quirky one because I wasn’t inclined to write what would be considered “publishable” work anyway. I simply didn’t see myself creating the type of poetic constructs I saw in most of the magazines I read because I felt the work I came across in the mainstream press lacked a certain narrative beauty I wanted to achieve. And yet, I had to admit that I wrote for the approval of others because. “It’s impossible for me to give myself the very thing that I need to feel accomplished: an appreciation from a source other than myself,” I wrote that morning. How vulgar this looked in black and white! I thought; yet, vulgar as it was, wasn’t this the truth for every writer? Even if a writer was unaware of the fact that he or she needed this give-and-take, I bet there were none among us who didn’t crave attention for what he or she produced.
I finished my coffee as these thoughts reached an unresolved end, stilling my mind to focus on the sun as it broke through the cloudbank. The scene was hyper illuminated as she infused the towering billows that fanned out like a long ball-gown with her verve. How glorious would it feel for the upper reaches of your hair to burn—a filmy, shimmering cotton, torn, singed and arranged in a glittery display? I wondered. As I stared into the blazing harshness, a hawk skirted past, dipping just below our rock outcropping as silent as night. I picked up the book I’d chosen to read, watching as the attentive raptor made several circles above the falls. As I caressed the tattered cover of Strains from a Dulcimore, a book of poems by Emma Bell Miles, the hawk keened twice and then dove earthward.
I thought the moment was remarkably serendipitous, as Miles had once ambled along this very bluff gathering inspiration for her writing, her watercolors and her sketches. Had she also marveled at the quality of the light, the hawks, the waterfall as she traipsed through the woods so long ago? Her world—in the 1890s—was one of a densely forested mountaintop sprinkled only with the occasional cabin, a far cry from present-day Walden’s Ridge with its pricey real estate and busy streets.
Her other published works included The Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, but it was her poems that moved me, and I felt grateful to have had the time to sit with them as the sun climbed ever higher in the sky, setting the yellowed surface of the worn pages I flipped through aglow:
Mountain Song
Sing me another song tonight—
Tell me a story, Love—
A queer old dear old dreamy tale
Of gulch and cliff and cove;
A song of wimpling waters where
The trout’s white bellies gleam;
A story scrolled against dark pines
In wood-smoke blue as dream.
Sing me a song, low, elfin-sad,
That mountain-folk know well;
Tell me a tale of candle-light
In cabins where they dwell.
For O my heart has ached to these
Ere love began to be,
And you, Dear, are but part of this,
The life you lent to me.
-Emma Bell Miles
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
The Puzzle of My Life
It’s remarkable how quickly #LetsBlogOff comes around and the topic today is “Where do you get your ideas for creating what you do…Do you have a favorite writing table or a quiet corner in your house or apartment?” My ideas have varied birthing points but rest in only one repository—my writer’s notebook—which carries them forward, keeping them safe and alive until I’m ready to use them in projects such as this memoir. I’ve been in the hospital for a week—heading home today I hope—and I’ve filled page after page with sensory perceptions about my time here that I know I will use somehow somewhere. My Lucille Ball-esque run-in with the ice/filtered water machine is likely the only thing you won’t be seeing recorded anywhere amongst my copious notes (a girl’s gotta reserve some dignity!). To see how other #LetsBlogOff participants glean their creative ideas, click here for a full list.
The Puzzle of My Life
We were back in Siquirres. The morning had dawned rainy, the tip-tap of large drops drumming the tin roof making me so drowsy I slept longer than I should have. When the other noises of life finally penetrated my consciousness, it was the birdsong that capped all the other sounds. It was, in fact, always difficult to ignore in surround sound but I had to admit on that particular morning there was a difference—suddenly, the twittering of the birds seemed positive, quite a turnabout for me given how negative I had been of late.
I was far from proud of that and I wished I could learn to be different but I was having a tough time making an altered attitude stick. “Maybe it is time for me to grow up,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook, which was normally sturdy but was so damp it had become pliable—flexible to the point of disintegration. Was it possible that the environment here would help me to become strong if I could learn how to be more flexible or would I fall apart as quickly as this pressed cardboard book I’d grown so dependent upon?
Kimberly and Gertrude were taking the bus to Siquirres so they could have lunch with me, a break from the grind that I celebrated. I would give Kimberly the Barbie Coloring Book and Crayons I brought her. Little did I know as I placed them on the table in the kitchen they were bringing me gifts that would mean much more to me than the silly nothings I had brought from the states. Mrs. Green had sent me a wooden calendar. I was moved and humbled by its exquisite craftsmanship and the beauty of its presentation. She had made it, which meant all the more, and this level of generosity was so in keeping with the deep respect the people continued to show me.
Having news of her made me remember how close Gus and Mr. Green seemed. They would sit for hours on the porch talking about the most inane things, and every chance I had, I would light like a fly on the wall to listen in on their musings as I crouched in the corner of the porch. I learned that Mr. Green gleaned most of his medical inclinations, for which he was touted, from his wife. She was always recommending this treatment or that one, such as a “prescription” for Marcie, who had a sore throat. Mrs. Green insisted that she mix banana vinegar with black pepper, heat the mixture, and gargle it.
One day one of our volunteers had asked Mr. Green if he could think of anything he didn’t have that he might want. He thought for a long time, his ample lips pulsing as he rubbed the knob of his chin, then finally answered, “It would be money. I have everything else.” I was sitting with him one afternoon when a harmless crazy man, well known around town for his antics, passed by. He had a yellow ball cap socked on his head sideways, the bill pointing to the right making him look far younger than he was. Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” was blaring from the house across the street and he began dancing to it—quite well actually. When the song trailed off, he opened his mouth wide, looking side to side to see if anyone was admiring him, then held his hands up in the air, fingers splayed, as if to say, “Hold your applause!” Mr. Green and I laughed until we were doubled over in pain.
The rain had finally stopped and the sun was shining brightly. This was the tropics I remembered: sultry to the point of suffocating. The mosquitoes had multiplied greatly from the abundant moisture and I was battling a swarm of them when I bumped into Philip Wheaton on the way back from breakfast. A jack-of-all-trades who prided himself in the breadth of his skills, he had visited the job site several times, and was now helping with some of the new church’s paperwork. He typed with one hand flying and the other resting on the edge of the typewriter—his shoulders moving back and forth with the rhythm of his characters as they indented the paper in fuzzy black blobs.
He was tall and loosely jointed. Not too well groomed, yet not dirty. It was as if he’d been haphazardly put together and I marveled at his thin sideburns extending almost to his mouth. They angled off to a point as they reached for his lips, little more than skinny triangles of graying hair. His eyebrows were barely there, but the hair that did remain was wiry and unruly. He had a great deal of personality in his eyes, especially when he smiled. His great receding hairline was combed back, lending his sideburns more prominence and giving him the appearance of a scrooge or some other Dickensian character. I pegged him as rangy as he ambled along on spidery legs. He was almost hyper about his work, or extremely intent at the very least. As he talked about this project or that project, his brown eyes danced in his wide, creased face.
I was terribly homesick, was missing Sam so much I ached with it. I had brought a jigsaw puzzle to work and it had helped me to pass the time, but as I worked it, I thought of how simple it seemed to put together piece-by-piece compared to the puzzle of my life. I looked around the large front room with its alternating dark and light wood floorboards, walls made from the same, strong dark wood plentiful in Costa Rica—some of which had been painted yellow. In that moment of observation, I felt more isolated than I could bear but I couldn’t let the longing hold: the feeling was far too melancholy. I stood so quickly the chair crashed to the floor behind me, then headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. I felt ever more alien in the sparsely equipped room with its tiny refrigerator and petite stove, which were dwarfed by a huge porcelain sink spouting only cold running water.
I gulped down the water as I sunk into a chair covered in faded Naugahyde—the once bright pink, caramel and pert green flowers on the upholstery long faded to pastels. There was a tan mat woven from rushes under a tiny coffee table draped with a bright, though very dirty, linen shawl, which had been stitched with a decorative motive in silk threads. The furniture was straight and hard, and I sat on the clammy unforgiving upholstery thinking how relieved I was that I’d be heading home to greater comfort the day before my 31st birthday. I’d been trying to think of a way to sum things up as far as life in Siquirres was concerned and I’d hit upon the theme that life vibrated: music, birdsong, weather, the vivacity with which everyone spoke—everything vibrated. I might have given the idea “life vibrates” more power if my thoughts hadn’t been as dry and cracked as the dustbowl. There was no spark for the jungle, only the excitement of going home.
As I approached 31, I made the commitment to myself to try and rebuild whatever it was that was broken in me—not remake it as it had been but to refashion it into something stronger and real. God help me do it right this time, I thought as I packed and let the thrill of the fact that the next day I would be “home, sweet home,” fill me with hope.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Yes, Man!
I had stayed in Siquirres for the day, and my head was pulsing from the dampness, the moisture-laden air making every noise more intense. There was a great deal of sound in the outpost town. A bell clanged at the Catholic church as the priest chanted into a microphone, the words reverberating inside the big, domed concrete block building then echoing out into the streets. Roosters crowed and the train engine thrummed as the cars clanked into each other, jerking as the slack was eaten by motion. The furniture maker next door running his lathe paused, letting it sputter noisily until he was ready to make it sing again when it happily devoured the wood he fed it. Dogs barked and squealed as large diesel trucks coughed on the highway, then throbbed as the drivers employed their Jake brakes to slow down. A motorcycle fired and a baby cried simultaneously, the twin sounds creating a high-pitched drone.
When the woman next door sneezed, it sounded as though she was in the room with me—that’s how little noise the wire mesh covering the windows held back. As I listened, I felt so absorbed that I transcended the noisemakers to become the noise: I wasn’t the furniture-maker but the whine of the lathe. I wasn’t the priest or the microphone, but the chant. I became the woman’s sneeze, then, as her hands moved from her face to the dishes she was washing, I was the sloshing of the water rendering her hands raw. I wondered if her skin was as rough as the palms of the elderly black man’s who had shaken my hand the day before. His fingers had felt as though he had laminated them and then roughened the plastic coating with sandpaper. He’d said to me, “Good to see you, yes, man!” The minute he turned away, I was met with the surprise of my life. Barney trundled up with a bouquet of flowers and a basket filled to the brim with chili peppers and limes.
He handed me the gifts so self-consciously that my heart melted, an intimate moment that held only for a fraction of a second because the weather upped the ante on its terrible mood and gushed water, sending us both running for shelter. We stood beneath a tarp that Jim had strung between two trees and I struggled to think how I could recapture the mood so I could express my gratitude for his gift but he sensed my earnestness and pulled his poncho over his head, tossing back a goodbye and slipping away. As he sloshed through the thick mud toward home, I watched as he passed a pregnant dog drinking from the gutter—the filthy water rushing under her lapping tongue. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction and I stood there regretting that I hadn’t been able to tell him how much his gesture had meant to me.
I couldn’t begin to guess how many inches of rain had fallen in two days’ time. I simply knew it was significant because my clothes were so soggy they were beginning to sour. Lying on the bed in the mornings was unfriendly because the sheets were so damp they might as well have been pulled right from the washing machine. This was difficult for me and I hated myself for it. I kept thinking that surely there was some way for me to find the strength to gracefully deal with all of the challenges I faced, but good-humored acceptance continued to allude me.
After a brief respite of sunshine at midday, the sky scowled and the thunder rumbled yet again—threatening from a distance and growing louder with each chant. The ocean must have been aiming to free itself from its contents because water came in great torrents that obliterated everything from sight. I unpacked the goodies that Barney had given me and realized I was growing a bit more accustomed to life in a country where sweet limes were bitter and they called avocadoes pears. I would always remember mornings that dawned with jungle noises and the smoky smell of a fire lit by the furniture maker next door as he burned the sawdust from the previous day’s work—neither of which I’d ever experienced in my life until I had landed on a coastal plain where moss dripped like an old man’s beard from misshapen trees.
We were preparing to head home and I felt happy that I’d spent some time working on the material for “Mornings at Lakeshore” because we would be moving into a house perched on a beautiful bluff overlooking the northern edge of Chattanooga. I’d be floating far above a bend in the Tennessee River rather than steeped in the lake setting that had inspired the writing. My new world would be a levitating one that I imagined would bring its own fascinations, the newness of which I hoped would make up for my loss of the lushness of living on the water.
I watched Jim fuss with the building as he prepared to leave the job site unattended—his expression as earnest as a mom preparing to send her child off to the first day of school. I understood his passion for what he was doing but I felt the eggshells I’d been dancing around on were becoming slicker and more dangerous as the viscous of the slimy whites thickened every time I made a pass over the crumbled mess. At what point did the tiptoeing stop making sense? I wondered. At what point did I say screw it and set my heels firmly on the ground?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! By the way, did you know it's #WriterWednesday on Twitter? Yep!
Slack from Hunger
With the man’s help, we finally found our way to Guapiles, which had a well-appointed clinic—by Costa Rican standards—that served the workers of the town’s banana processing plant (to use the word loosely). I sat with Barney as the clinicians examined Jenks, who winced as they tried to pull histee shirt up over his uninjured arm. When they attempted to lift it over his head, disturbing his busted arm, he yelled, “Cut the damn thing off!” Even after his outburst, they were so frugal they were reluctant to damage the cement-stained shirt. Jenks grabbed the scissors from a nurse and clipped the bottom edge, holding the gashed fabric up to her. She grabbed it from him and finally ripped it from his body. The next insult awaiting him was at the end of a trek to the facility’s interior courtyard, where they splashed the construction muck from his upper body with rainwater from the roof that had collected in a barrel.
I could tell by the grimace on his ashen face that he was feeling beset, understandable given that the level of medical care he was accustomed to receiving was so superior to this, and it must have made him feel all the more uncomfortable in his weakened state of mind that conditions were so unsanitary by our standards. Needless to say, he was over it by the time he’d been given a sedative and had a cast covering most of his arm. The episode really shook me up and I couldn’t sleep that night for reliving the nightmare of seeing his twisted body on the rock-strewn dirt, not knowing until he stirred if he was dead or alive.
The next day, Barney had a grand time telling Jim his rendition of our road trip. The inevitable disclaimer—“I don’t know the word in Spanish” was followed by, “I’ve been here so long, I’ve forgotten my English!”— peppering his repertoire to the point that it was comical. He was a small man—all of about 5’5”—with a protruding stomach that pillowed above the sagging waistband of the same pair of baggy jeans he always wore. The frayed pants were perpetually sliding down what was left of his naturally narrow hips and butt, which had become gaunt from years of inactivity. The only way he managed to keep them up was a continual cinching of a ratty leather belt threaded through the two existing loops on the waistband. The action was repeated so often it was as if he had a tick of sorts or was participating in a bizarre modern dance sequence during which his hand reached for the belt and flung the end of it in the air at waist level. He’d snap his arm straight and then lower it to his side exactly the same way each time, as if the dance’s end required the formality of an Olympic dismount.
He claimed that his body was ravaged not by alcohol but by the “action” he saw in Vietnam, which was unlikely. I knew this because once when he was particularly intoxicated he had admitted to me that his supply ship had never been anywhere near warfare and that he’d been a cook, not a soldier. His face was rugged and pocked with sores, and I’d never seen him when he was clean. His head was covered in a furry pate of hair, which wasn’t long but was never perfectly shaven. His mouth was drawn in from missing teeth—frozen in a sort of perpetual circle—which meant his words came out in mumbles even before they were slurred from drinking.
His eyes were large and hooded, and he would stand with his hands on his thin hips, staring off with his lids closing slowly as if he were dropping into a trance. After a few seconds of swaying, he would jerk back to reality and immediately begin to prattle on about nothing even if someone else had the floor. At first I thought he just talked to hear himself speak but I later realized it must have been the only thing keeping him awake.
He had a filthy mouth and was indignant about almost everything, including race relations. He’d been born in Birmingham and had been in Alabama his entire life until he had “sailed off to war.” The small jungle village he had decided to claim as his new home allowed him to stay backwards by the sheer fact that he could barely communicate with anyone. It was clear that he stayed because he knew he would be left to his own devises as he drank, ranting and raving his way through his waning years.
The environment supported his hostility by fostering the old prejudices because no one there cared what he thought about the ancient state of affairs in a faraway country. Though he was so insultingly verbose, I tried to look beneath his diatribes and I found that he wasn’t a cut-and-dried hater. One of the clues was his relationship with his dog Girl because he cared for as well as anyone I’d ever seen nurture a pet. He was always talking to her as she limped along beside him, wagging her chewed-up tail at the sound of her name.
Another way I recognized heart in him was through his adoration of Jim. He called him Mr. Jim and would go to the ends of the earth and back for him. He was continually asking him questions about things and I watched one day as he queried why we were using the catheads we’d brought from the states on the ends of the protruding rebar. As Jim explained, his gaze followed his pointing finger to the top row of blocks and it was as if he was receiving the equivalent of the ten commandments, so great was the look of hero worship in his eyes. He followed along as closely as his Guaro-addled brain would allow, scratching his head as his puckered lips to mouth some of Jim’s words a few beats behind. “Well, I’ll be,” he said when Jim paused to see if he understood what he’d said. “Did you hear that, Girl? We got fancy stuff here in our little town thanks to Mr. Jim, don’t we?”
I’d seen Jim bring this out in people before but it was exaggerated in Barney, who seemed to have a desperate need to believe in something, and Jim seemed to be that “something” in spades. I think he loved his dog so much because she gave him unconditional love, and I suspected he’d never had anything close to that, which had left him starved for it. The only thing that made sense regarding his oversized Jim adoration was that he saw in him the kind of man he’d longed to be but had given up on when he had sunk into an alcoholic fog. He wasn’t so unlike that beaten-down dog that roamed the Pocoran streets—skin and bones and hungry eyes, all gone slack from hunger—though Barney’s starvation was emotional rather than physical.
I heard M Scott Peck’s words echoing in my head: “We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” I’d not understood this when I’d treated the sick dog’s condition as a problem to be solved rather than letting the mystery of life play itself out at the animal’s expense. Why did this have to be so hard? I wondered. At what point had the mystery gone out of Barney’s life, and how in the world could I get mine back?
I certainly didn’t want to end up carrying around as much pain as Barney did but it sure felt as if that’s where I was heading if I couldn’t get a handle on myself. “Problems do not go away,” Peck wrote. “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
Could it really be that I was experiencing some of the most splendid moments of my life? What a strange concept that seemed given the confusion that reigned inside my head and my heart! I was riddled with unhappiness and was lugging a heavy load of grief from feeling so unfulfilled. The idea that, in hindsight, this discomfort would shine a light on my finest hours seemed far-fetched and foreign to me.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. To see other bright minds exploring the question "What are you carrying? [Everybody goes through life and picks up stuff as he or she goes. It’s pretty much part of what makes us, us. But what is this stuff? Or in the terms of this week’s Blog Off, what are you carrying? Is it cherished mementos from your life and times or is it the scars and hurts of disappointment and missed goals? All of us carry with ourselves the trappings and scraps of the lives we’ve led.]" click here for the full list of #LetsBlogOff superstars!
See Her Way Into Daylight
We’d been mostly catching rides from people as we traveled between towns, and more times than not we suffered through vehicles like Donald’s. I wasn’t a car snob by any stretch of the imagination—the ugly brown-gold Vega I had in high school proof that I’d drive anything—but I did feel that penny-wise/pound-foolish treatment of a piece of transportation was just plain silly (Okay, I know that love affairs between guys and their cars are legendary but this is an altogether different subject!). If a vehicle was meant for getting one from point A to point B, shouldn’t it do so in a modicum of comfort and dependability regardless of its appearance? Apparently not in life according to Donald, who had recently had his truck repainted—a bright red color with a giant yellow and black zigzagging stripe taking over its body so grandly that the paintjob screamed, “My next life will be lived in Las Vegas!” In order to afford the makeover, he’d ignored the lack of padding in the seats, which meant the body took a beating careening along the bumpy roads. He had also ignored the engine that coughed and the clutch that stuck so unmercifully that the stick shift beneath the floorboard must have been worn down to the thickness of a swizzle stick. We were basically riding along in a very pretty tin can with a passenger-side door that would only open from the inside, and a driver’s side window that would not roll down. I suppose it won’t surprise you that he was gushingly proud of his ride!
As I contemplated what to do with my writing, the only other person around was a local laborer Jim had hired who spoke only Spanish. He had a bitter expression stamped on his face that made me slightly afraid of him so I ignored him as I massaged the material, hoping he would give me the same courtesy. Staring at the page with my scrawling handwriting on it, something occurred to me that I should have realized before but had not: I had a tendency toward personification in my writing. The notes I’d made in Panama City Beach were proof: “The sky presents a checkerboard this morning. Sections of dark and light march from the ocean as if a known pattern had been predetermined. Maybe there was a director just offshore, giving each parcel of sky its dancing orders so that the segments would prance and twirl in pretty order. This is the type of day I long to have tucked into my routine—a day when everything feels moist and beautiful; a day when I can sit on the sofa and read, and no one will think ill of me. The ocean knows how to escape the jouncing mental activity of life: she whispers it every day—her breathy foam cascading, the chorus one of dark and light, of wetness, of persistence, of murmuring hypnotic laziness. She sings to me that it’s okay. I want to sing back but I have no idea what to say.”
As I scratched out words and jotted ideas into the margins of the overly messy sheets of paper, I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I didn’t think much of it until I heard Jim yell, “No!” as forcefully as he could. He jumped out of the truck so quickly I wondered if he’d remembered to put it into park. I followed his angry gaze and saw why he was so upset. The man he’d left laying block was sawing off the rebar that was protruding from the top block at the edge of a window opening. I guess it was the first time the laborer had seen rebar and he didn’t realize that if the stabilizing steel wasn’t running through the heart of the blocks, a strong earthquake could tumble them like they were children’s toys. Jim stood there with his arms akimbo, shaking his head while the man kept on sawing. Since no one within shouting distance spoke Spanish but the laborer, there was no way for Jim to get it across to him that he shouldn’t be removing the rebar. Yelling “no,” which he understood perfectly, mattered not for whatever reason as the spiteful man defiantly moved his blade rhythmically across the metal, each grating pass causing Jim to wince.
With the laborer’s ineptitude, Jim’s mood turned dark so I tried to stay out of his way. I did so that evening by losing myself in revisiting “Mornings at Lakeshore”—the series I’d started and then abandoned. I figured the writing would help me to feel closer to home and maybe—just maybe—at some point would gel into a collection of poems. But even if all I gained were a couple of hours for pleasing explorations, it would have been time well spent.
I sat at the kitchen table of our jungle house, positioning my notebook to catch as much light as I could from the bare bulb hanging from its socket in the ceiling, and remembered home where there was beauty at the edge of a vibrant lake:
• Her eyes sparkled yesterday like a satin dress of brilliant blue. She peeked at me from between the rooftops as I climbed the hill, her sunny sheen illuminating everything around her like a dazzling smile. She is dark now, as it is too early for her to show herself. The streetlights twinkle on her surface as if hinting at the glittering eyes she will use to see her way into daylight…
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
A Steady View of Heaven
His name was Barney and my take on him was a ne’er-do-well, ex-pat American who had landed in the Costa Rican jungle, tasted the Guaro and decided he had no reason to ever leave. He had signs of a heart but so little patience for connection that he seemed incapable of opening himself to nurturing of any kind, especially with the parishioners in Pocora who were so excited about having their own church they were effusive in their thanksgivings. The Jamaican and West Indian women were especially unrestrained, leaving Barney no choice but to shake his head, grumble and retreat to his hut to protect himself from any goodness that might have accidentally spilled over on him!
He must have been terrified of emoting because he’d freeze when the women approached the clearing where the foundation of the church had been poured. Hesitating like a confused child, he would watch with horror as they made their way around the jobsite hugging everyone. Their voluptuous bodies and strong, meaty arms seemed made for enveloping others and it was a bit shocking to suddenly be wrapped in a mountain of an embrace but Barney seemed to take it especially hard. As they would draw closer to him, he would take a few steps back and pause before breaking into a stumbling run that led him into the jungle and out of empathy’s way before they could embrace him.
The only time he seemed comfortable in his own skin was when he stood around telling Jim bawdy stories about his military days. I watched as he laughed at his own tale one day, wondering why being hugged and touched by these women, which was nourishing to me, would bother him so much. They were so sincere, and the kindness of their attentions knew no racial, cultural, national, or class boundaries. In fact, if I had believed in the pearly gates, I would have wanted the greeting I received when I arrived to feel similar to these great, fleshy arms opening to welcome me. Since I’d never had a steady view of heaven and its master—an outlook that had become even more clouded during my time in the mission field—I celebrated the fact that having these magnificent women enfolding me was reward enough for my desire to live life with integrity.
I wondered if the matriarchs of the little village were aware that I had a battle raging inside me as they wrapped their arms around me. I was craving home so acutely it physically hurt. More often that not I had to talk myself up from moroseness when I awakened each morning by vowing to do one small thing to make things better just to get myself out of bed. On the successful days, I felt relief. During the less than stellar ones, a sinking feeling ruled while the battle consuming my energy wore on. I was actually succeeding when a painful turning point occurred one day and the veneer of bravado I’d managed to wrap myself in was ripped away.
It happened while we were eating lunch in the cantina in Pocora. I saw a sight that sent me into the deepest grief—a dog so starved it trembled, the sagging skin on its body quivering as it hung slack over its bony frame. It was skittering around sniffing for crumbs on the ground as I looked at it in horror. I glanced at Jim and declared I was going to feed it. He frowned at me, though he didn’t argue knowing that I had a stubborn streak about things that touched me so deeply. I rushed to the meat market nearby and bought some raw hamburger, which I place on the ground near the skittish dog. Tears were running down my face as I watched it inhale the meat. I felt better even with everyone sitting in the café laughing at me, but only for a moment because that’s how quickly I realized that unless I was going to feed it regularly I’d only prolonged the agony of its life rather than really helping it. This was a lesson I’d have torture me many times as I ached to make things better in the challenged places I found myself inhabiting.
The poor dog’s comparison to my Lhasa Apso, Samurai, was extreme. Sam was my surrogate child and I pampered him to no end when I was with him. As a dog lover and owner, I knew how helpless they could become once they were made dependent upon human beings. I couldn’t understand a culture that cared nothing for other creatures needing their support. A dark splinter invaded my heart that day and it stayed there festering as I tried make sense of what I was seeing.
Church held no solace for me as the words cascading from the lips of the ordained seemed empty, almost as rote as the Nicene Creed we mouthed every Sunday. There were divine moments but they were always of the mundane variety. The Sunday after I’d tried to help the ailing dog, a half a dozen ladies sat in front of us in church—some petite and shrunken, others ample and buxom. Each one had on a perfectly combed black wig—their heads a rising and falling row of curls framing the napes of chocolaty necks. As I sat there studying their heads, I noticed how they suddenly leaned in the same direction, their heads tilted at exactly the same angle simultaneously. I looked to the front of the church where the lay reader, a tiny black man with glasses turned askew on his small face, was tilting his head sideways in an attempt to read the Epistle. I looked back at the ladies in front of me and had to press my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. It was then I realized I was leaning, too. The lay reader had the entire congregation tilting their heads as they watched him crane his neck into the slant of his lenses.
A visiting priest, Charlie, was preaching that day—his sermon about offering weaknesses up to God so that his power could be made perfect within each one of us leaving me feeling less than inspired. “When you are in a time of weakness, that is when his power is best used,” he proclaimed. If only it were this easy, I thought to myself as I looked down at my hands gripping the prayer book in my lap. Was offering my weaknesses up to some ephemeral deity really the best tack to take as I suffered through my struggles, or was M. Scott Peck right when he wrote, “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization…This means we give away our power to that entity…In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.”
Had I been able to grasp the depth of his meaning, I would have seen that taking my own power would have been the best piece of advice I’d ever received but I wasn’t ready. Maybe if I could go backwards from the end, everything would start to make sense! I thought. If only that were possible!
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in the phenomenon called #LetsBlogOff. To see the rest of the witty repartee taking place on other food-for-thought blogs, click here for the menu.
A Real Place in the World
In the piece, Weber stated, “The stories in Rock Springs…are populated by characters who are mostly down and out, natives of a remote region that simply doesn’t offer them enough. It’s a class of people familiar to readers of current fiction. But unlike those in, say, the early stories of Raymond Carver, whose work set the tone for many of the new writers of the 1980’s, Ford’s characters rarely yield to despair or defeat. They actively seek the high-minded solace that’s available in self-knowledge, in the future, in love.
“The individual’s struggle for transcendence is an old literary theme, of course. But in the narrow mainstream of contemporary American fiction, it’s absence has been well-noted—and by an increasing number of critics missed—particularly in the spreading influence of the so-called ‘minimalists.’ According to many literary observers, short-story writers like Carver, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel, by virtue of their many imitators, have spawned what has become a dominant fashion in American writing.
“The perceived minimalist formula is marked by a technical expertise resonating primarily in the service of characters so burdened by powerlessness, diffidence or anomie that their engagement with the world around them is superficial or oblique. Their often introspective revelations tend to reinforce this sense of isolation…Ford is onto something new…providing American fiction with the theme that life is serious, rather than life is trivial or that life is very grim. That there are issues in this life worth trying to clarify.
“Raymond Carver, who is Ford’s close friend, is unequivocal. ‘Sentence for sentence,’ he says, ‘Richard is the best writer at work in this country today [1988].’ Ford says, ‘I really think that human beings accommodating themselves to a landscape, to a place, is natively dramatic, that that in itself is potentially the stuff of literature.’”
This made me think of the people I’d been meeting in Costa Rica and how dramatic life felt to me just by the sheer fact that the people there were responding to such a fierce environment. Ford went on to say, “The stories didn’t exhaust all the things I care about, the things that move me to write…The other books are novels, and in writing them, I exhausted everything which is, in a way, my own private definition of a novel. I try to exhaust my own interest in a place. Then I’ll just move on, write about someplace else where I kind of notice again how people accommodate themselves to where they live. That accounts for the kinds of things I write.”
The article made me want to read his work so I put Rock Springs at the top of my book-buying list. One of the main reasons I was anxious to see how his writing style unfurled itself on the page was this statement by Weber: “Ford’s sentences are raggedly lyrical, an eclectic music equally capable of the elegant, vaulting language that seeks to encompass an ambiguity and the brisk simplicity of vernacular speech…Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the stories in Rock Springs is a climactic explication. In his most trenchant passages, Ford launches an almost essayistic probe of human yearning and the stories resonate finally with the conviction that his characters have a real place in the world, however strained.”
Ford tells Weber, “What I write is fiction. What I do is imagine a place and call it a name.” Weber asks Ford about his relationship between the place on the map and the place on the page. “Me,” he answered. “It’s just me. There is a place, and there is an impulse to write, and I am the only important meditative there. Which is not to single out my own importance, just my responsibility.”
I sat for a while, staring out at the deepening blue of the water as the day waned, feeling envious of someone who could talk so confidently about writing, the writing life and his responsibility within it. I wanted to rest in that hallowed place so badly I could taste it but the writing I was doing was paltry and stunted. Would that ever change? I wondered.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Ineffectual Torture
He was ever on the lookout for ways to assuage his loss from letting go of the lion’s share of his power in the business he had worked his entire adult life to build and I cringed when he announced that he wanted to be behind the controls of the plane more often as we traveled the southeast U.S. He renewed his pilot’s license and decided the perfect time to get back in the cockpit was a trip to the beach. I dared not say aloud that the prospect made me want to faint, because he would have seen it as weakness on my part. He banked the plane hard to steer us on course as we left Chattanooga’s airspace and we found ourselves butting heads with a cold front that had screamed through town during the early morning hours. I trusted him in most things, of course, but my veins were coursing with fear as he flipped buttons and pulled knobs, the dropping and rising motion that happened almost simultaneously making me feel oddly giddy and absolutely terrified.
We skirted the weather system until we’d cleared south Alabama, and it looked as though God had been doing some deep spring-cleaning, using foamy carpet cleaner on the sky as far as the eye could see. I was running metaphors through my mind to take the focus off my queasy stomach, which Jim—seeing the panic on my face—assured me was unwarranted nerves. I calmed myself by deciding then and there that I had nothing to lose but my life, and if it came to that it was likely to happen fairly quickly so prolonging the torture by imagining what would come to pass if we were pitched onto the land, broken and burning, was an exercise in stupidity.
We made it to Panama City just fine, and the ocean, as it always had, lulled me into peace. I agreed wholeheartedly with the notion that the sound and the motion was womblike. A gull careened overhead as I lounged on the deck, looking as if it had absolutely no control from its internal cockpit. Trust is a funny thing for a bird in brisk winds! I thought as I sat there wondering how many of them actually crashed—to think that none of them ever did was silly, wasn’t it?
A massive fire was burning miles away down the beach and the winds were turning it into a Hades-sized blowtorch. The smoke was being carried away by the upper-level winds, creating a shelf atop the billowing plume that intercepted the sun during the early afternoon, masking its power. By early evening, the smoke stretched far out to sea as we sat at the water’s edge, our chairs sinking into the sand with each wave that lapped beneath us. I admired the metallic sheen of the ocean, which was mirror-like until a rolling crest foamed and tumbled ashore, washing its own image out to sea.
During my morning journaling sessions, I was working on descriptions of experiences I’d had in Costa Rica. I was trying to describe a scene I saw in Limon in which a harelip and an elderly man sat on a dark porch talking. There were no chairs under their behinds—just bare concrete, the hardness of which did little to dampen their merriment. It was as if they had no clue their accommodations were spare; the old man must have been particularly witty because he continually drew laughter from the gaping mouth of the other man. I wanted to study his deformity but I didn’t dare stare at him because it would have been beyond rude. I made do with a few furtive glances, marveling at the fact that he could so unselfconsciously express glee. I wanted to capture the animated beauty of his face, which completely negated the imperfection of his crimped lip. There was something about his dignity that felt almost holy to me.
Early on in our Limon days, I’d met the sweetest man named Mr. Green at St. Mark’s. I thought about how there were so many people I’d come to know only by their last names, as decorum didn’t permit being on a first-name basis for quite some time. He had tutored me on my diet as we sat in the parish hall in Limon at a dinner held by the local Episcopal Church Women during our last trip to Limon. “It is best to eat only hard foods,” he said, just about the time I took the first bite of my sandwich, “they cause less wind in the belly.” I thanked him and told him I would definitely remember that as he pushed his chair back, already canvassing the long row of tables to see who was nearby.
I watched as he visited with most of the other people in the room, flirting ever-so-slightly with the women who would giggle like they were teenagers when he’d tell a joke or inquire after their well being. The sun was filtering through the window as he leaned over the table to chat with another man I’d seen at church functions, though we’d never been introduced. The light striking his dark skin created a silvery gray glow on the backs of his hands, which looked as tough as tanned leather.
On our way back to San Jose the next day, I had studied the landscape to see if I could push myself to better descriptions than I had been recording. It was the time of year when certain giant trees were blooming orange, their lost petals creating a smattering of confetti on the ground. Some fields that would normally have been a lush grassy green were speckled with resplendent orange light, the sun infusing the fallen blossoms with effervescing color as they lived their last decaying hours so exuberantly. What a paradox of life and death irrevocably intertwined! I thought.fields as And how lucky were the cattle grazing in those fields as they nibbled beauty! Many of the stocky animals had guardian angels on their backs—regal white birds holding vigil to nab the errant insects attempting to light on their burly mobile kitchens.
As we drew closer to the mountains, I noticed a number of trees carrying dense vines on their beefy outstretched arms, which made them appear as if they were draped in cloaks of velvety green. They towered over the other trees as if holding court—telling their charges how to behave with their grand, sweeping gestures that were dripping with finery. One particularly statuesque tree wore vines across its very top in an umbrella shape. It was almost as if it had been crowned the king of the copse it found itself gazing down upon. It brought to mind how the strongest, tallest specimen in any given situation could quickly turn into the most vulnerable when mighty winds blew through.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Falling Through Space
I drove past the place I’d lived before I met Jim and the door was open. For a second, it seemed as if it were open in exactly the same way I would have left it, an eerie sensation that made me wonder if it had remained ajar during the several years I’d been gone—gaping foolishly as if awaiting my return. I had the rare weekend to work on poetry but I was frustrated and completely stuck. “Can I hold the steering wheel, Daddy?” I wrote just above an entry that noted a group of farmers had gone to St. Louis for a singles convention! The idea of a dating service for farmers seemed such an oddity to me but they were lonely people when they were single, too, right?
Getting nowhere in my feeble attempts to hit upon something interesting to work creatively, I decided to crawl into bed with Ellen Gilchrist’s journal Falling Through Space. I noted the next morning how her descriptions of the people in her life and her reactions to them were so rich. As I flipped through my writer’s notebook, it occurred to me that I avoided writing about people beyond their physical characteristics. I realized then that going further—into the emotional realm—frightened me.
I’d published a Lent/Easter poem in “The Messenger,” our church newsletter, which I’d been writing and editing for a while. I had lunch with my mom the week after it was out and she told me how much she liked it. When she called it scripture, I realized she was holding me in much higher regard than I deserved. She was struggling with her relationship with my sister and she asked if she could talk about it that day. Mama, her mother, who had joined us, chimed in, “It’s like shit, Joyce; the more you stir it, the more it stinks.” I had just told Mama that she looked like an Easter egg in her pale pink and peppermint green blazer and matching earrings. So much for ladylike decorum! I thought, deciding then and there that she would be the perfect character for me to muck around with because she was about as complex a spiteful personality as they come.
I dug into this task as I was flying to Los Angeles to meet with NBC, the only account I had been maintaining from my business days because it was so lucrative. I spent the first several hours of the flight making notes about Anne, as she had been named—though I’d never called her anything but Mama. “How did this young person with her flapper charms turn into such a bitter, crass woman?” I wrote, a question I left open-ended as I ran out of steam about the time we flew over the Grand Canyon. I’d never noticed how the gigantic impression had scooped itself out of the flat plateaus surrounding it, its edges seemingly filled with myriad fingering nerve endings. The adjacent farmland reminded me of a quirky linoleum floor: perfectly cut squares in parts and frayed edges in others. The lakes winked at me like scattered moons, and I wondered if the wayward orb had ever been tempted to unleash itself from its heavenly tether and lie down in one of those verdant squares of what appeared from such a great height to be the softest green. It would have had the sense, of course, to avoid the stubby beards of those rectangles that had gone fallow from lack of nourishment—tan and drab, they had their part in the scheme of things but who’d want to rest within such prickliness?
When I touched down in L.A., I was reminded that it was and ever will be a concrete monster, though the thrill of pulling into Century Plaza in a chauffeured car was something I didn’t take for granted. The first round of meetings went well and with the initial negotiations behind me, I retreated to a plush chair on the balcony of my hotel room in the early evening, the railing so high I had to sit on the arm of the chair to sneak a view of the sprawling city. The next morning, preparing for round two, I lounged on the terrace with breakfast, feeling as if I could languish there all day had I been allowed. It was the first time I’d write that happiness had nothing to do with my surroundings. Instead, contentment had everything to do with having quiet, plenty of paper, a pen and something in mind to explore.
In that moment, I realized what a change this was for me as I had been blaming my misery during my Costa Rican experiences on the place itself. Was I really to come to terms with this in one of the most crowded cities on earth? I wondered. It was not surprising that I had hit upon the fact that I was craving solitude perched above a concrete jungle filled with smog, traffic and a tumult of people. What did surprise me was that such a place inspired me to see so clearly that it wasn’t the lush jungle of Costa Rica that threw me; it was the chaos inherent in how Jim expected me to live while we were there. “I work much better when my mind can stroll into a setting of peaceful non-resistance,” I wrote. “I enjoy aloneness. Does this mean I’m really becoming a writer? Does it mean I’ll have to leave this life I’ve been trying so desperately to accept in order to be myself in the most authentic meaning of the word?”
I felt pensive as I flew back east, the landscape blurring and coming into focus as I struggled with these questions. Far below, the rivulets of water running from the dusty hills through a great gorge had bleached the barren land to a ghostly shade of bisque in a fanned pattern like a bird’s tail when it unfolds. From the higher reaches, the water had cascaded in narrower streams, making markings similar to that of worn, cracked leather that had been scorched by intense heat. I counted nine different shades of earth framed by my airplane window, and one mountain looked as though it had developed a bad case of varicose veins.
I rifled through my writer’s notebook as if I could find clues as to where the trajectory of my desire to write at all costs would lead me. I’d been thinking about the children of Costa Rica a great deal since we’d finished the last project, how they were in the happiest times of their lives as kids and wondering where their adulthood would leave them. Would they look back on the sun-dappled days of running naked across the scrubby lawns with nostalgia when they were left languishing in unquenchable heat as adults who were trying to scrape by on almost nothing? What story could I tell that would shine a light on those who never had an opportunity to actualize the kind of dreams I valued? Wasn’t this arrogant? I asked yet again. Who’s to say my marker of what was valuable would have been of any interest or merit to them?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
And with thy spirit...
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The U.S. has just sent light infantry troops into Honduras.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It seems the Sandinistas crossed the border and fighting broke out between these rebels and the Contras, whose camps are scattered along the border inside Honduras.
“Pray for peace. Pray for the safety of the young service men traveling to Honduras.”
[Jesus takes up his cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Noreaga has yet to resign and there’s no chance for peace in Panama as long as he’s in control. More unrest today as doctors and nurses at the major hospital in Panama City threw rocks at soldiers because they will not be paid this week.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
It appears that the President of Honduras has asked President Reagan for a show of muscle. Troops will be based 125 miles from the fighting. No democratic government in the world will be refused military aid against communist aggression.
[Jesus is striped of his garments.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
The skirmishes increased on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Men on Nightline argued; called each other liars. Who’s right, Ted?
[Jesus is nailed to the cross.]
Government policy. Amen.
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I’m a chaplain in the armed forces; we’ll definitely be in Panama soon. They’re killing our country with drugs. I bet we’ll also have to get to Mexico before the drug traffic stops.”
[Jesus dies on the cross.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Father says, “I don’t usually have a homily before the service but I’d like to introduce our program for later. Fifteen years ago, I took my first mission trip abroad…a child died in my arms. He had worms and if you know nothing about worms, they take over the body to the point that they crowd into the esophagus and the child chokes to death.”
[The body of Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother.]
“Holy god, holy and mighty, holy immortal one, have mercy upon us.”
Manuel Noreaga squints from the television and asks, “You want a revolution?”
“Save us and keep us, we humbly beseech you, O Lord.”
“The peace of the Lord be always with you.”
“And with thy spirit.”
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
[The image at the top of this post is one of the Stations of the Cross created by the incredibly talented artist and architect Alberto Alfonso, who is one of four architects featured in my book Four Florida Moderns, which W.W. Norton & Company published last year.]
