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Primal Decorum
As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”
I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.
Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared.
As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.
The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.
The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind.
The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day.
I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.
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This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.
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A #LetsBlogOff Redux on The Road to Promise
It's time for another #LetsBlogOff brouhaha and the subject we are to address today is "what makes a good story?" I think that identifying what constitutes a satisfying read for each of us is such a subjective thing that it's impossible to define the art-form with sweeping statements. I attempt to practice the craft here weekly (usually for #WriterWednesday) as I reveal bite-sized pieces of this memoir I'm determined to write and publish in book-form. Today I celebrate my 63rd post with this #TravelTuesday trip to the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I received a beautiful gift recently when Rufus, a #LetsBlogOff crony, featured my storytelling efforts on Dog Walk Blog. I'd be interested to know if you agree with his premise that what I am doing is indeed storytelling. Even if you disagree, I'd like to know. To see my fellow blog-off'ers' contributions, click here: you will be well rewarded! And now, without further adieu, this week's chunk of my journey along The Road to Promise:
Berating the Wind
One night, I drank in the beauty of the full moon’s reflection as it cut a wide golden-silver swath across the lake, zigzagging its way from the other bank to ours. It seemed as if the radiant disk was determined to take a shimmering journey—casting off in the darkness as it searched for a mirror in which to view its visage. I reveled in the fact that from my spot on the deck, the lake seemed to have become the moon’s rippling partner in its quest.
The trip to the mountains had made a tremendous impression on me—it was one of the most spectacular days I’d had in quite some time. The pleasure arose from a combination of things: my good mood, the gorgeous weather, the music filtering through my headphones and my heightened awareness of the things around me. I could remember everything so vividly, especially how the sun had drenched each flash of my memory. It was my companion that day, illuminating things so unforgettably that my drive along the twisting and turning highways of the southern swath of the Appalachians seemed hyper-brilliant.
I’d perched for hours on a high bald and from my position on a blanket spread on the dandelion-strewn grass, I read several quotes by other writers about their families, one of which gave me pause for the poet’s use of the word “isolation.” Yvonne Sapia had written, “Aristotle told us that tragedy begins with the family. Isolation begins with the family. I write about the situations that separate us even though we are one. I also like to write about change, self-discovery and recognition of things. Finding a sense of place. Finding balance.” I thought about Aristotle’s premise as I stared at the statuesque stone tower rising above the hilltop, looking taller than a skyscraper from my prone vantage point. Because the ground wandered down a slope, it appeared as if the monument’s shadow had gone and fallen unceremoniously off the hill.
The dandelions, which glowed iridescent yellow when the sun struck them, bobbed their heads as the wind whipped up the sloping ground. It was as if they were nodding in agreement that they were all the prettier for their luminosity. A bird caught my eye, flying in circles above me as it put on a show—all powder-dusted indigo and white-tipped arcing wings. I sat, completely motionless, and forced myself to stare into more blue than any human could possibly absorb even as my vision swirled and my eyes begged me to close them so they could rest from the sky's intensity. Jim had gone off on his hike, leaving me to read and write. The only other person in sight was a boy who was lazing on the grass halfway down the ridge. Surrounded by the thin air, I thought about how Siler’s Bald seemed very close to the top of the world. The sound of the bees buzzing was so strong in the silence that it was as if they’d been primed with jet fuel and had been given extra power.
The hardwood trees had not yet sprouted green and the last withered leaves of winter clinging to their limbs were chattering along with the sere grasses skirting the edges of the field as the wind buffeted any exposed expanse it could find. Looking off into the distance where the mountains fell off to meet the valleys, it seemed certain that were I to put a finger on the seam between them, I would find a pulsing, a velvety green vein more alive than the one that snaked beneath the pale skin on the inside of my wrist.
I was writing in my writer’s notebook about how frightened I had been at one point on the trail when I’d had to traverse a skinny path with steep drop-offs on either side of my feet. I had steeled myself for the ten steps in front of me and had kept my eyes focused straight ahead. It was at that moment that we walked through a cloud. I looked to the sky as it was drifting around me and it seemed to be flying at a precarious speed into the clear air beyond my grasp. I was giddy as it rushed by, and I wondered if birds felt this same excitement when they were skimming along through a puff of fluffy moisture. I’d never thought of clouds as fun but having penetrated one, I’d found an altogether new appreciation for the whimsical side of what amounted to atmospheric vapor.
The sun was hot in the little clearing where I’d spread my blanket and I was contemplating moving closer to a scrim of gnarled and twisted trees weathered by an excessive exposure to sun, wind and rain when a girl came traipsing from the shade they created. She was on her way to Clingman’s Dome and she sat to rest for a bit, telling me that the trees would not be greening because a beetle was killing them. A blight had taken out all the Chestnut trees several years earlier, she said, lamenting that there were fewer canopies left during the summer months that ever before because the trees were garnering so many enemies.
I was anxious to get back to my reverie so when she heaved herself from the ground, the twisted branch with its splintered ends she was using for a walking stick making an indention in the moist earth, I smiled politely and returned to my sky-gazing. The only thing marring the beautiful day was the incessant intrusion of bugs as they repeatedly made Kamikaze dives at me. It was as if every insect in the world had decided to spend the day sightseeing just as I was. I wondered if there was a published itinerary somewhere entitled “Best Bug Spots of 1988” with a ping on a map that let them know this was the place to be on this particular afternoon. Maybe it was written in the star patterns at night and we humans weren’t privy to the language that would allow us to decode the map.
On the drive in, we’d seen first a bear and then a fox, each of them going about whatever it is that wild animals do, which due to their proximity to the road likely meant avoiding getting run down by automobiles. I was hoping nothing that intimidating would show up while I was lazing in the sun contemplating the razorback ridges with all their conifers gone. I was heartened that at least the trees were thinning only on the peaks, proof being that I’d spent almost an hour walking through the hollows on our way to the top of the ridge, feeling swallowed by great clusters of pines and firs that were breathing a chilly muskiness down my neck. I’d shivered more than once at the dense life-force they exuded, the experience reminding me that I’d always favored tree-lined streets to open expanses because they seemed so much friendlier with their protection from full-on sunlight. “If all the trees disappeared, the world would become disagreeable indeed,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook from my perch on high. “When will we humans begin to take this seriously?”
Seeking a better vantage point, I had moved to a large, flat stone, which seemed so ample it could have been a throne. As the sun moved away from the bald with the waning of the afternoon, I noticed that the seat, which was cupping me so generously, grew cooler and damper than when it had been warmed by stronger light. As I studied the scenery splaying before me, it seemed clear to me that when the mountains were formed in this part of the world, it was as if they had awakened to their new surroundings, yawned and stretched their arms to find their rippling muscles forever frozen in a sinewy display.
Because there were absolutely no “people” noises—such an oddity in the dizzy rush of a world I normally experienced—I’d begun to notice natural sounds, such as the groans emitted by the nearby trees. One in particular was decidedly fussy as the wind had its way with its contorted form. It was the saddest of them by far, one side of its leafless profile covered in thick green lichen. I wondered in that moment what the forest must think of the noises we humans make. I mimicked the tree’s sound as closely as I could and was surprised to hear an immediate echo. I said the word “tree” aloud in the best tree-like voice I could muster but it said nothing back. Hoping that it would repeat my word was too much to ask, of course, because it would certainly have wanted to wait until I’d left this patch of near-wilderness before it spoke of the name I’d given it to its gnarled cronies.
Just as I noticed that my hiking boot was perilously close to injuring a clump of tiny purple bluettes extending their faces from beneath the stone’s base, Jim ambled up—satisfied that he’d conquered another strip of the Appalachian Trail, or, as he likely saw it, had put another notch in his hiking belt. We headed back to the car and as I was about to turn a bend at the crest of a nearby ridge, I was startled when I heard the unmistakable sound of applause. I rounded the corner to see a bank of rhododendron bushes slapping their thick leaves. Suddenly I was flanked by two steep walls of them, and the sound they were making was delicious. We exited the ravine just as a cloud lifted its thumbprint from the mountain and I noticed there was a pattern to the twitching the wind inspired.
As I waited for Jim to unlock the car doors, I celebrated the beauty in which I’d been steeped that day, thinking of Henry David Thoreau’s statement, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” I had certainly felt magnetism during my time on Siler’s Bald and it was my turn to applaud nature for entertaining me so thoroughly that day.
During our drive home, I revisited Sapia’s musings, especially her desire to explore “situations that separate us, even though we are one”—there was a time when we were one with nature; a time when “finding a sense of place” would not have been an articulated issue because we were “of a place” simply by being in (and staying in) that place. My life had become such a frantic ebb and flow of movement that I had no idea where “my place” would have been. Isn’t that what makes me feel so off balance so much of the time? I wondered. We were two months away from beginning a new project in Costa Rica and I thought of the prospect with trepidation. How in the world would I find my balance with that challenge looming before me? I asked myself silently, not daring to voice my consternation aloud as the light leaked from the evening sky and we slid silently westward toward home.
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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.
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The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod
Follow the Leader
One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: “Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won’t answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.” I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!
I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera’s book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?” I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.
With Kudera’s questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who’d taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first “game” involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line.
Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. “I’ll betcha $60 that I can!” The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, “I’ll betcha $50 million that you can’t jump that.” They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.
He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to “make it.” He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, “That was no good!” The little guy countered, “What? It is so; it’s exactly the way you did it across the street!”
“That was over there,” the mean kid responded. “This is over here and over here it doesn’t count if you touch the stick!” The little girl yelled, “You owe him $50 million!” The dejection on the smallest boy’s face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was “Follow the Leader” and you’ve likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard.
The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn’t stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup.
What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was “Follow the Leader,” each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called “crash position” and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy’s name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid’s name. They must have raided both their father’s garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash.
I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer’s notebook and thought about how Michael’s psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn’t have even thought about had I not read “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” one of the chapters in Kundera’s book. “Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation,” he said. “Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length.” This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative life.
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A list of posts by my #LetsBlogOff cohorts in crime can be found here.
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.]
Passages
As we headed back home, we entered the Delta concourse to slip into the Crown Room when we narrowly missed being flattened by a sweating, puffing, sprinting crowd of TV camera crews shouting questions at a jostled inner core of men as they moved swiftly along the concourse. The tallest guy in the very front of the brouhaha caught my attention because he seemed so normal in his appearance to be taking part in such a cacophony. His bland expression was complemented by his navy jacket, khaki pants, white shirt (pinpoint cotton, of course), and yellow- and navy-striped tie—the uniform, you might say. It was Jim who recognized him and the other men surrounding the object of the reporters’ fascination as FBI agents. The celebrity, if you could call him that, was a man in a short-sleeved shirt. That was about the only detail I was able to see in the few moments they rushed him past because he was bent over in an effort to keep the cameras from capturing his visage.
The way his arms were twisted behind his back in handcuffs and the fact that the men who flanked him gripped his arms just above the elbow made it appear as if he were being dragged along. Likely because I had more time to study him, it was the man in front who surfaced when I recalled the episode. The blaring lights of the cameras sparked on his silver framed glasses and cast a glow on his face. He looked proud in some way, a smirk rather than a smile touching his thin lips. I wrote everything I could remember about the scene while sitting in the Crown Room that day as Jim watched the hearings deciding Robert Bork’s Supreme-Court fate. Later I would scribble below the entry, “The criminal suspect killed the publisher. All of his life buried alive—first by manuscripts, then by dirt,” though I have no idea where I found the information or who that publisher was. It was the only time in my life I’d come so close to a murderer, or at least the only time I was aware of the fact that I had.
Our layover was long and the Bork proceedings bored me to tears so I pulled Sidney Sheldon’s Windmills of the Gods from my valise. I had only read a few pages when an unusual entourage spilled through the doorway. A very old gentleman with fine white hair and quarter-sized age spots on his face near his receding hairline was being pushed into the room in a wheelchair. His straw-colored woven hat—pushed to the back of his head—had a red and blue band that evoked well-heeled aristocrats retreating to the West Indies for the islands’ balmy breezes during the great fervor of colonization. As he stared at his bird-like legs, the silver-handled cane he held in his wrinkled hands quivered. He was followed by two policemen in full khaki uniforms who were carrying guns and radios, and a lady with a thick briefcase flanked by several men in dark blue pinstripe suits. The men seemed to be very protective of the gentleman—guarding the hallway when he went to the restroom and respectfully stepping aside when he was pushed back into the hallway.
The woman poured him a glass of tomato juice, which he took in his trembling hand. She held it for a beat after his fingers encircled the cup, releasing it only when a nod of his frail head signaled he could handle it on his own. I spied the entourage as often as I could without being obvious while I wove my way through Sheldon’s plot twists. As we boarded the plane for home, I thought about how his tale of espionage was the perfect echo for the day’s airport adventures. Could it be true that I would actually be home within a few hours? I wondered as I fastened the seat belt and leaned my head against the seat back, a feeling of deep relief coursing through me.
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Finité!
I had stayed at the center that day to read and write, retreating to our bedroom as quickly as was polite to do so. Sitting cross-legged on the bed with my notebook on my lap, I charged myself with the task of recording an episode that had taken place the evening before while Jim and I stood outside the center talking with Bishop Wilson. The event shined a spotlight on two dogs living in a scrubby yard across the street from the center, which was nothing more than a weed-pocked parcel of ground sliced in half by a slack clothesline that perpetually sagged under the weight of ragged sheets and towels. The dogs spent most days lounging in the heat and humidity, roaming around only when the sun trudged west enough to move the one ever dwindling, already scant patch of shade they could find. As we talked with the Bishop, a third dog trotted up to the edge of their yard, sniffing at an empty candy wrapper tossed onto the dirt. Being territorial animals, the pair charged it without a second’s hesitation.
The fight was vicious, and after what seemed like ages of snarling, lunging and biting, the third dog went on its way, shaking its head as it loped off, a spurt of blood flying from one of its floppy ears. One of the neighbor dogs seemed unscathed; the other limped back to the scrim of shade, whining as it went. It eased its rear-end onto the dirt near the foundation of the small house and licked the gashed leg it had favored in a rhythmic motion that went on as long as we stood there and probably into the night.
Like these canines, the people in Costa Rica, who were some of the humblest I’d ever met, lived with the persistent threat of cruelty. Disaster could (and did) strike so blatantly without warning but, unlike the scrappy dog nursing his wound, they withstood whatever challenged them with great equanimity. It struck me that evening that their serenity was the perfect paradox to the brutal natural world surrounding them.
After we’d said goodbye to the Bishop, my stomach still in knots from the dog fight, Jim and I walked to Mares, one of the better restaurants in town. It was a place we frequented and I was actually growing accustomed to the taste of spaghetti made with cilantro, much to my surprise. As I was twirling the noodles around my fork, Jim motioned to Armando, the waiter, to alert him that there was a roach on the table a few feet away from ours. Armando casually approached, flipped it into the floor with his towel and stepped on it. With a flourish, he turned to us and said, “Finité!”
Though the bug was one of the biggest I’d seen, I’d spied a larger one a few days earlier in the store where I normally bought orange muffins for breakfast. It was so huge that it reminded me of one of those trucks the owners would jack sky high—fitting it with monstrous hydraulic shocks and tires the size of giant boulders that would churn far below the wheel wells. Though this rally roach had appalled me as it flitted between the muffins in the case, I felt I had to give it credit for its uniqueness because it was the first jacked-up insect I’d ever seen. I left without the muffins that day. If the Zeus of roaches had brazenly braved the case in daylight, what else had been waltzing between the baked goods the night before? I wondered. That was one answer I was happy to leave unimagined.
With my musings about the canine battle for supremacy and our run-in with the roach safely on the page, I leaned my head against the concrete block wall above the bed and celebrated that we were about to head home. I felt excited that I’d once again be surrounded by neatness and order rather than dirt and a long procession of gigantic insects that gave the word menace a whole new meaning.
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Drip, Drip, Drip...
Violent storms were a common occurrence—such a different feel to the weather than we’d experienced during our first trip as we built the church in Germania. The thunder would rumble and lighting would incessantly rend the inkiness of the sky as it zigzagged from cloud to ground to cloud at night. I wasn’t as nervous about Mother Nature’s angry displays as I would have been were we staying in one of the slapped-together clapboard buildings we’d been able to find for lodgings before. The center was solidly built of brick and it had windows that closed to help fend off the reverberating noise growing louder as the storms intensified deep into the night.
The security had helped me to relax, and early during our stay Jim and I were less at odds for a change. I’d been praying we would find some middle ground on which to stand and it worked until I tried to discuss how long we would continue the work that was testing me to my very core. I broached the question yet again one night as we walked from a dinner at St. Mark’s. “I understand this is hard for you, but I believe we are doing the right thing,” he answered, his taut lips giving away his frustration. “I’m not sure how long we’ll continue so I wish you could just relax and pitch in when I need you.”
I hung on, holding back my emotions, because I felt I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if I’d lost him. All the while I wondered how I would keep my sanity if the work stretched on for years. One day I’d begged off from my duties as the delivery service to stay at the center and read. As I journaled about my conundrum, I cursed the commode in the bathroom next to our room, which ran incessantly. Its gurgling accompanied the continual staccato made by the shower head—drip, drip, drip. Was this trickling sonata similar to the water torture the Chinese are said to have perfected? I wondered. Tap, tap, tap, the water teased…
As my mind half-heartedly kept pace with the dribble, I wrote, “Each trip we take here shunts me from the life I live in the states to a life I don’t live in Costa Rica, and each transition is squeezing the vitality from me, drop by precious drop. Maybe the bathroom’s melody is the perfect soundtrack for the movie they’ll make about my tragic story someday!” It was a joke, of course—who’d want to make a film about such a spoiled human being incapable of giving herself over to God’s work? Seeking a way out of my downward spiral, I pulled the book about poetic forms from the stack on the bedside table with the idea of turning my past scribbles into structured ideas that I could hone when I had a more stable world in which to write. I made absolutely no headway because each entry I reviewed sounded trite, overly meager or far too depressing. I imagined someone reading these sad missives recoiling because the exercise was akin to being forced to drink an excess of espresso coffee—cup after bitter cup in quick succession.
By the time the sun was ducking below the horizon, I grew weary of the negativity of it all, retreating to fiction to escape my melodramatic grudge with the life I was living. The novel I’d chosen—Sally Bauman’s Destiny—had the perfect level of intrigue from the start. I had been lugging the impressively sized hardback with me as I zipped between Limon and Zent, tossing it onto the seat of the truck so many times I’d nearly broken the spine. I was happy to finally be delving into the plotline, glad to be in Edouard’s head rather than in my own.
When my eyes grew weary in the darkening room, I put the book aside and wondered what my friends at home were doing, words that suddenly felt so foreign and concepts that felt so far away. My truce with Jim had dissipated in a mere week’s time. My writer’s notebook served as a witness to how awful it had become: “I laid in bed a long time this morning; frustration was my sheet. You expect better of me, do you? That’s just it: everyone always expects better of me.”
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On the Outside Looking In
Gertrude, or Gertrudis as he called her, was a trim woman with the heart of a young girl (she's shown in the photo above with her granddaughter Kimberly). She had a high-pitched, singsong voice that would rise even higher with any revelation—and most conversations, regardless how mundane they turned out to be, were revelations to Gertrude. She would look at the person she was speaking with and say, “That’s right?”—the last syllable ending in a squeak. The same statement without the question mark was her stock answer to any question that came her way: “That’s right!” she would insist, the tail of the response falling toward an adamant flatness.
Gus had an aquarium that he liked to talk about but didn’t like to clean. On our way from the market one morning, we passed a local shop that sold aquarium supplies. He admired a new model that was double the size of his, which they had just received and were displaying in the window. I asked him if it was expensive. He opened his eyes wide and said, “Oh, yes!” with a Carib-like lilt that made his voice rise and fall in rhythmically strong waves when he talked.
“Having an aquarium is a proud ting,” he remarked.
“Why?” I asked, feeling sorry for the lone creature inside his fish version of hell because the poor thing had to choke its way through an algae-infested green muck to swim around.
“When we are on the outside looking in—seeing the fish struggling to survive—it makes it easier to keep going out here,” he explained. “When you have one fish, it just swims around lonely like we do if we are alone; that’s why I want a second fish someday.” This declaration didn’t bode well for another unlucky vertebrate who might be plopped into the goop of Gus’ tank at some point.
Like many of the descendents of the immigrants from the West Indies who had settled in Costa Rica, Gus and Gertrude were diminutive. Gus kept his nappy hair cut short, while Gertrude’s was always molded into an orderly arrangement of rolls she created with bobby pins and then combed out. They had a fair amount of gold in their teeth, which glinted in the sunlight as they sat on the front porch of the center in metal folding chairs laughing at each other’s jokes.
While Gus was the stoic, philosophical one, Gertrude was filled with devil-may-care liveliness. When she was a girl, a wild pig had charged her and she loved to tell the story. As she prepared to recite the anecdote, she stood straight as a rod and then slowly leaned over so she could push her bottom out. She’d pause; then wiggle her butt before dissolving into a fit of giggles that would go on for several minutes. She sometimes had to start three or four times before she could straighten her expression and say, “Grrump, Grrump!” That’s all she could manage before she collapsed onto her chair, the laughter taking over. Once she composed herself, she would raise her head from the arms folded on her lap, shake it from side to side, and say, “Aye, yai, yai; I was so scairt of it!”
Kimberly, who called Gertude Gita, was always after her to reenact the event. She would say, “Tell the pig story, Gita; pleaaaassse!” Kimberly’s accent was somewhere between a Jamaican-like English and Spanish, and her hair was always artfully done with rows of ringlet curls tied with ribbons or fastened with rubber bands fitted with adornments. She insisted that these accessories always matched her school uniform or whatever outfit she was wearing. Were she living in a place that had what we have come to call fashion consciousness, she’d be considered a clotheshorse!
The F-150 that Jim had shipped to San Jose was finally ours and it made a big difference in the efficiency with which the project took shape. The old truck’s dented and scratched doors emblazoned with the faded logos of his construction company groaned when opened and sounded like firecrackers exploding under tin cans when slammed shut. With the freedom the vehicle brought us, I was on the road more than ever, gathering supplies that kept the jobsite buzzing.
This meant my time for reading was brief because it was nearly impossible to concentrate with so many interruptions. Writing anything coherent was even more impossible. I’d begin an entry in my notebook only to be summoned for another road trip. A full section of these pages would have convinced any medical professional that I had suddenly acquired A.D.D. What could I do other than snap it shut—my last thought left open-ended—and toss it into my canvas bag? After all, this was my contribution to the project for now. Each time I acquiesced, I would file away the hope that I’d manage a full entry before the blazing sun left the tropics for its circuitous journey to places I could only imagine.
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I'd Cared Too Much
Since my epiphany on the airplane during our trip from California, I’d been doing a bit better at protecting some time for writing. I’d finished and submitted a poem, my first attempt at publication, to Byline Magazine. It was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s book of poems I’d found in St. Augustine.
Upon Reading “The Complete Poems of Ernest Hemingway”I sat in Northgate Burger King
with Ernest Hemingway;
washed in concentration,
shades of “oily weather” gray.
Complete Poems this book claims.
I wish I could agree.
They’ve resurrected his every word?
Not one thought scrambled free?
Wasn’t there a phrase, perhaps,
from his repertoire deleted?
I’d like to think just one
unbound sentence floated,
incompleted,
to piles of crumpled paper
liberated by revision.
The scratchings of his pencil
sent it flying from submission.
I’d like to think his wastebasket
was full from time to time
of pieces of young Hemingway’s
attempts to make words rhyme.I’d barely managed to finish the poem before we were on the road again, and our last stop in Atlanta to run the Peachtree Road Race brought the flurry of social activity to a halt as we prepared to return to Costa Rica. Jim went on a quick trip to San Jose because he’d shipped one of the company’s beat-up F-150 pickup trucks there so we’d have our own vehicle. It took me two of the four days he was gone to settle into the modicum of quiet his absence brought to life. I spent the mornings finishing May Sarton’s book, which I’d put aside during the crazy travel time because it was difficult to read about her dropping into the quiet of her writing life when I had few opportunities to do the same. Not that I wanted to see another writer suffer, but her struggle showed me there was someone else in the world that felt as deeply as I did, and this soothed me. “Cracking open the inner world again, writing even a couple of pages threw me back into depression…How to summon the vitality needed?” she wrote in mid September. How many times had I asked myself that very question?By early October, she declared, “Once more poetry is for me the soul-making tool. Perhaps I am learning at last to let go, and that is what this resurgence of poetry is all about.” In her next entry—made the next day—she lamented, “It has been stupidly difficult to let go, but that is what has been needed. I had allowed myself to get overanxious, clutching at what seemed sure to pass, and clutching is the surest way to murder love, as if it were a kitten, not to be squeezed so hard, or a flower to fade in a tight hand…It’s a real break-through. I have not written in sonnet form for a long time, but at every major crisis in my life when I reach a point of clarification, where pain is transcended by the quality of the experience itself, sonnets come.” I continued to read about and study poetic forms, making notes in my writer’s notebook about the poets I’d been reading. I studied the structure of the sonnet and felt it was far beyond my ability. I made notes about other poets’ preferences. “Frost was given to quatrains, couplets, and other set forms, not inventing new measures,” I wrote, though unfortunately I didn’t record where I’d read it. Quotes like these are wedged between my fumbling attempts to turn my own ideas into poetry: …The chimneys impale
a night-washed sky,
forcing themselves
on the velvet darkness.
They are symbols
I cannot touch;
the laughter gone,
I’d cared too much… 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!
