As I type, the night zombie is in the street screaming to no one: “Keep your opinions to yourself!” It is 6:35am and as he turns a corner, two blocks away now, the voice fades to where I can no longer make out his words. At least in the city, the dogs are mostly leashed.
Roses, submission, knitting, and Scottish Deerhounds in the park.
I knew this was coming because the editor had contacted me, but it was still a surprise. I had been working so hard on the novel that when Gary brought me the mail, I wondered why I’d gotten two copies of the OEJ. My essay about “Best Teaching Moments” was chosen to appear first in the Oregon English Journal right after the Editor’s Note. I began by confessing that my greatest moments teaching were those in which I was among those learning. It’s true.
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I have always dreamed in color, brilliant skies and water and greens. I might be flying on the back of a horse or flying as that horse. My bad dreams are typical: unprepared for something like a test (grades 1-12), a class (university), teaching (standing before students and teaching something I know almost nothing about). For many years I dreamt of running into a friend who committed suicide—so glad to see him and laughing, then screaming and crying. But the good dreams, my favorite dreams are about flying over wild land.
Memory. Change. This post isn’t about dreaming; it’s about landscape.
Continue readingOn my run this morning I thought about how, as a teenager, I used to plan my life. Alone or partnered? With or without children? Horses? Goats? I was still dreaming of five acres and independence in college when I completed a sustainable living plan for a Botany class using a book by that title as a reference. [Five Acres and Independence by Maurice Grenville Kains, 1935]
I was younger than the young woman pictured below, but she must also have dreams of where her life might take her. Life will probably surprise her.
It might have been a very young Ruby who used to say: “Doing?” as in “What are you doing?”
Knitting, reading, and revising and submitting two stories and four poems. And working on the novel. You remember that? The book? I meant to take a break from the novel, slow down, get some rest, but it’s almost as hard to stop as it was to get moving so fast last month!
Gary doesn’t want to walk up hill to the rose garden this morning, especially with bears. (Probably just one black bear, but three sightings so far in Forest Park… not anywhere near the area we walk.) Climate change seems to be foremost in the news everywhere in the world but in our country. Recent heat here suggests this may have to change. Reading, writing, walking, and admiring trees.
Gary is filling the gap in his woodpile he so carefully straightened and vacuumed. He used to object if I called our cords of firewood “his” but no more. He has never allowed anyone to help him cut, clean, stack, or rearrange that pile. Photos follow.
This post began, the idea of it, last month when I was supposed to be working on the novel. I left a stub and then folded the post away.
I cannot believe it took me so long to actually look up the hardness of glass. It took Duck-Duck-Go all of two minutes to find everything I wanted to know.
When we search the beach, aside from agates and the odd diabetic needle or florescent tube, or the wonderful and rare fishing float, what we are really looking for is sea glass. I have wondered if glass floats more easily than stone, is its specific gravity is lower? Is it lighter and softer and that’s why glass is rare? It wears away?
When I was teaching high school English, I kept a Bible and the Qur’an on my shelves. I had the American stories collected by Erdoes and Ortiz. (Most of my books were free to borrow and generally came back, but that book and the side-by-side original Spanish and English translations of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had to be replaced again and again.) I had many novels, books of poetry, collections of short stories, literary journals, nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, realism, traditional and modern stories. I urged my students to be respectful of what is called “myth” because that word has become pejorative. Myths are most often the sacred stories of other cultures. Have respect.
My own book is not a myth, not sacred, magical, nonfiction, poetry, or even published. But it is done.
Yes, there will be further drafts, editing, revision, new words, passages cut, rewritten, moved. I may have crossed a line with Nadya’s or Amani’s story. Just for the next hours, let me say it is done. Just for today.
And if you or someone you know might be willing to help me make the story better, please let me know. [See below.]
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Even if you never took Art History, you might recognize this mural, a fresco in an ancient city on the Island of Crete. They put it on the cover of a recent translation of The Odyssey, which is a story about people living in a different part of the Mediterranean Sea and at least seven or eight hundred years later in history… which shows how much publishers care about accuracy, but never mind for now.
I want to brag about my progress in NaNo, but first I want to carp a bit about assumptions made any people who should know better.
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 