An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
After I wrote the first four novels, after I’d committed to this one, after the years of writing and revising, authenticity edits and developmental edits, after proofreading and proofreading again. After I finally decide it’s perfect [it isn’t], there is the next step. Next I submit to agents or small presses who will look at unagented novels. That does not go well for my book.
The world might be better once we’re mostly gone.
Suppose I decide to self-publish? It was always an option. The publishers who would do so much of the work in design and promotion were well out of my budget. Eventually I found a printer who works with small presses and decided to trust them. Books are out and in the mail, with 50 of 100 gone. The process took a while.
We don’t know for certain who composed The Odyssey, which is generally and perhaps inaccurately ascribed to a single bard, Homer in the 8th century BCE. Most modern experts, including Emily Wilson in her otherwise excellent introduction to her recent translation, routinely comment that one person could not possibly have memorized the entire epic poem. Most assume one person could not have written those two book-length epic poems much less remember them. They suggest that both The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed over a period of time with adjustment and additions by several or many people.
Not necessarily so. The human capacity for memorization is astounding.
This vase from the British Museum (c. 480–470 BCE) was decorated during Athen’s classic age three centuries after the story of Odysseus was known and eight centuries after at least some of the events described may have occurred in ancient times.
Something happened. I’d made a big decision, a big one, without even noticing. I’d made a hard turn into something that felt wonderful, and before I even knew it was happening, it happened!
This isn’t this morning. It isn’t yesterday when we experienced thousands of lightening strikes. This is the beginning of April.
I withdrew submissions and decided I was done with writing contests. I have dozens of stories and poems and essays published in literary journals. Why was I still submitting. (It’s more than a word, submitting.)
My birthday is two months from next Friday. I will be 74, the age my grandmother and also her elder daughter died. When my mom turned 80, I teased her that she hadn’t expected to live that long. She laughed and said it was true.
Gary and I walked four miles this morning, meandering to Hug Point beach. That parking lot is still closed, which means the beach there has been pretty clean for most of the last year. What you see in my hand are shards of hard plastic from illegal fireworks last week. Yes, the pieces are every bit as sharp as they look. Had I trod on one in the sand, I’d have cut my foot. We mostly ignore the cardboard debris, but we pick up and dispose of the plastic remains and the nasty plugs of spent explosives. We have to be home for the 4th of July to ensure someone doesn’t burn our house down. This year was not the worst, but aerial explosions were right in front of our home and one tourist accidentally sent his rockets not up but across the sand. Fortunately, the tide was well out and nothing hit us, but do we enjoy the toxic and illegal display? Not so much.Continue reading →
June is ridiculously busy, which is not something I can say about most months. Most months my busy is entirely self-inflicted. I read, sew, knit, run, post online. Scrub floors. Gary and I drive to Portland and home from Portland, we walk across the city or walk five miles north on the beach. [We did this recently. Once. Ten miles round trip. Probably not again.]
This is the hollow in sandstone facing the ocean that I call “The Little Altar.” Usually by this time of year there is a circle of green algae on the back. This year, there are three green penguins. Can you see them? Two looking south, a youngster flapping and pointed north? (And yes, there is a Big Altar a few feet north. No penguins.)Continue reading →
My goal was to post once a week on Fridays. I had posted randomly, sometimes a few times in a week, sometimes a few times in a month. It seemed to me that reliability should count for something. Mostly often, I plan ahead; sometimes I write a post at the last minute. Like today.
I can’t tell you how often I have seen bald eagles depicted with their white heads but with brown tails. Adult bald eagles have white tails—clear in this image of one of the local flying away from a carcass on shore. Our eagles rarely kill. They are not ambitious birds that will approach a dying animal, but I’ve seen a single crow drive an eagle away from a dying seagull. We’re particularly fond of crows in our house.Continue reading →
I have a cold and our building fire alarm woke me just after 4am this morning. I would have liked sleeping a bit longer. But since I was up and a neighbor sent me a link to his father’s obituary, I looked up my father’s obituary and found my grandfather’s obit and naturalization paper (I was 8 when he died, which explains why I have so few memories of him) and my great grandmother’s obit from 1918 in the Daily Astorian. He was 75; she was 60. My other great grandmother, Rosetha [Stiles] Pride was 90 when she died. The last time I tried searching for family, I didn’t get far. Now, if I cared to, it seems I could easily trace my entire family. Instead, I’m looking forward.
Brown pelicans have been around but not in numbers at the moment. We saw a thousand gulls onshore a few weeks ago. Yesterday morning the local black oystercatchers brought out their kids, and we saw a tiny shorebird that I couldn’t identify. We’ve seen whimbrels off and on. The bald eagles have flown overhead and a few buzzards down in Falcon Cove the other day. Osprey, Cooper’s hawk, crows, and ravens, finches, robins, starlings, sparrows, the native banded tail pigeons and the invasive Eurasian doves.
It’s hard to write about my recent decision without being depressing or sounding depressed. I’m coming to terms. A much more talented friend declared they were done writing, but they still write. A longtime friend sold their loom. Other friends purchased century plots. Someone moved into a retirement home that also offers assisted living. Planning ahead. My husband and I bought our little condo in a Portland neighborhood where we can walk everywhere, a place with view of sky, an elevator building with no requirement to climb stairs, a place where grocery stores are walking-distance and groceries can be delivered, where local restaurants are across the street and around the corner, and we talk to people in the building. Life goes on; sometimes differently. This is our next life.
Six months ago, Gary and I stopped drinking altogether. Gary tells people who ask that he stopped because I asked him to as a birthday present. Okay. Maybe. It saves money, spares us hangovers, and mostly preserves our minds. We would deal with the pile of diapers, the alcove deep in gin bottles, and the damage—the work cleaning up the mess in our rental ADU had only just begun. For years, Gary talked to our longtime tenant most every day, sometimes for an hour or more. He’d been afraid the man would kill someone or at least himself driving drunk. Fortunately, he survived. We finished the repairs and improvements right at the beginning of last month.
Three black oystercatchers (only two visible at lower right)—the parents who nest nearby, and this year’s juvenile has flown out of the frame. They are my favorite bird.
Yesterday, we disagreed about how far to walk before heading out for the day. I said four miles, Gary lobbied for two. We were a few hundred yards out when the hail began. If we’d waited ten or fifteen minutes, we wouldn’t have been wet by the time we scampered home!
I’m running a mile every other day now. Not easily, but I’m making quicker progress than I had any right to hope for. I started with a challenging half mile on the April Fool’s Day—yes, a joke on myself and also the anniversary of my first run decades ago. I’m starting from scratch—no condition at all. Last year, I injured my feet doing very long planks, and then again while on my hands and knees working on that rental. Gary pruned (butchered) the escalonia in order to give the new tenants a broader and clear view of the ocean. Apparently, they don’t look west and hadn’t noticed. sigh I’ve been walking daily but had been injured out for most of a year. At my age, “coming back” is not a given.
The other morning there was only the gale wind and a little rain. Tuesday, there was a “dust devil” in the sand just up shore from where we walked. We walked about four miles, all the way to the waterfall just south of Hug Point. The rain started right then and poured all the way home, right into our face with a full gale. A dead owl, we think, lay in the tideline, head naked, short and dark hooked beak, dark flight feathers well over 12″ long, barred tail. By the time we got home, we were soaked and cold, had oatmeal for breakfast, curry for dinner, and went to bed early. But this morning I managed my planned 1-mile run. Best I can tell, I’m managing miles in under 12 minutes, which is not bad considering everything. My realistic goal is a 5k run by August. My “secret hope” is to do the Bridge Crossing in October again. That’s a 10k, 6.2 miles, and usually bad weather, but I’ve done it several times. At least Gary I expect to do the Zoo walk/run in Portland on Thanksgiving—that ranges from a 5k to 6k, with no warning in advance of distance—and we can walk as much of it as we choose. I ran it last fall.
In the mean time, Gary is playing his guitar as I began writing this post on Wednesday morning. That alone could make me cry. It’s been too long, his fingers sore and cracked, but he rested after our soaking walk, and maybe he’s back. He’s taken each one out and tuned it, played a bit. He says his guitars are “not in bad shape. I don’t see any bad things.”
The focal fabric of my next quilt, “Otherland II”. This is a hand-dyed “batik” and I’ve studied on it for a couple of decades, maybe, trying to decide how to cut it. It’s just so gorgeous on its own. Last month, I thought I’d cut triangles—a design I’ll save—because this will zigzag.
.
It’s a rare fabric, not stenciled or printed, but with both color and resist hand applied—spaced and dripped—and similar in process to the fabric in the quilt top waiting for quilting in my closet. I hope to be able to have this new quilt and the earlier “Otherland I”, below, machine quilted this summer.
Shown in progress. The center of “Motherland I” is done but only the lower portion of the wide border—with fabrics laid out for top and sides of the border. All the batiks used here are atypical. The background fabric in the center panel in not actually “batik” but another more hands-on technique. This top is complete and waiting with the backing fabric for me to spare the money to have it quilted.
In other news, I have chosen a press for self-publishing my novel. No money for it at the moment since it all went on repairs, but in the fall, perhaps. I am thinking of my birthday in October. A friend has given me notes on my ghost story, so there’s that to work on.
In the first episode of the new series, Scarpetta, a scene from “28 years earlier” (1996?) had “The House of the Rising Sun” playing. Good cover. Gary would know the group, the guitarist, and the guitar the lead guitarist was playing*, but I’m not so knowledgeable. Absolutely everyone performed that song in the 1960s, mostly men and boys. I sang it too, when I was playing guitar and singing, because it has—what?—3 chords, 4? The fingerpicking is simple too, though I don’t remember any of that now. There’s a violin on the wall in that show, and I have to say that people do put instruments on the wall. It’s a show-off thing to do. But no one who really loves their guitar or violin or gold flute, leaves it out, not even to show it off. Displaying your instrument is about yourself.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about those days, about guitar lessons and singing. Candy Mack taught me to play “The House of the Rising Sun” out of The Joan Baez Songbook. When my mother heard it, she insisted it made more sense for a woman to sing it. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl…” works best, I’ve always thought. Men change the words to make it work.
Everything comes with a story. Every porcelain ornament, every basket, and everything hidden inside—pieces gathered, gifted, and made. That’s my two-headed dragon in the middle of the top shelf. The stories only matter to me, but I’ll admit that basket-weaving is one craft I’ve never tried.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 