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
In the UK, what we call private schools are called “public schools,” and they cost many thousands to attend. In the US, a private education can cost four times what a public college education costs, even more than Harvard costs, in tuition and fees. When people complain about failing public schools, it’s well to consider that you get what you pay for. It’s well to look at what wealthy people have tried to convince the rest of us about public education. The insistence over the past fifty years that public education is failing is a self-fulfilling prophecy promoted by wealthy people who feel have no stake in quality education for other people’s children. The rest of us do have a stake, because we care about our children, and maybe we should care about all children as future citizens. I won’t pretend the issues are simple.
Yes, a rainbow right down onto Castle Rock, and just the other day. We could see both ends, north and south.
This is not my day to post, but today, just now, a frighting event.
That is a young bull Roosevelt elk on the sand, what is called locally a spike because he has his first antlers. The orange object to person’s left (your right) is a bucket belonging to the woman. The elk is interested in that bucket. Whether she was aware of it or not, she challenged that elk. The person is texting and taking photos. Do I need to explain that getting this close to an elk, even one that is on the low end of 700 to 1100 pounds, is what we would call “dangerous.” Stupid comes to mind.Continue reading →
Years ago, as a “starving student” who worked every hour I could get, I also participated in psychology experiments that paid volunteers. I only did the safe ones, the sitting-in-a-sound-proof-room and repeating back numbers sort of experiment. I had thought I might major in Psych but Behaviorism was big, and behaviorists were very big on animal experiments and generalizing behaviors of animals in a lab to judge human behavior. I saw flaws in their logic. But I took classes and paid attention.
Winter finally arrived with temperatures in the high 30s. It was 37° on our walk yesterday. We’ve learned from our experience that our 4-mile morning walk leads to a better night’s sleep.Continue reading →
If you’ve been reading my blog or my Facebook page, you might know that we have been restoring our rental, a duplex attached to our home. It’s just off the beach at the end of a dead end street, and the only long-term rental that I know of locally.
Just now we’ve been at work on the downstairs unit. Renting long term makes it possible for us to afford to care for the property and pay taxes. It’s why my grandfather first constructed the building in the mid-1930s. My family had a summer house then, dating back to 1911. We’d hoped to replace our dysfunctional garage door this year and take a few days on a vacation, but life had other plans.
This is probably 1954 before my brother was born, and Castle Rock behind me is 0.6 nautical miles offshore. My mother spent all her summers here and my grandfather retired here in the 1940s. Some of my earliest memories are from this place and Gary and I have lived here full time since 1979.
The scenario I detailed in class was based on a true story. It happened in the last century in a city back east. Baltimore, maybe. Brooklyn?
A walk to the park. Daphne blooming outside the Washington Park Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon..
A single mother has kept her sick child at home for three days. The little boy has the flu with a fever and coughing and listlessness. She’s fed him soup and crackers, whatever he would swallow and could keep down. He seems a little better this morning, the fever has dropped, but is not well enough to go to school. She has no one she can call to watch her child, but her boss has warned her that if she fails to come in today, she will be fired. Maybe he’s had to cover for her and is desperate for time with his own family or maybe he’s being a heartless jerk. I don’t know about that.
Mom sleeps on the couch in their one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up apartment. It’s payday and the rent is due. She can’t afford to lose her job, so she tucks her son into bed, warns him to stay in his room. She’s left him water and juice and crackers—all she has in her kitchen until she’s paid and can get to the store. The child seems sleepy enough to stay put. She rests her hand on his forehead and tells him she loves him. “You be good.”
Mom goes to work. She will run home at lunch to check on her boy.
I began writing fiction in 1990 as a result of a week-long summer class for teachers teaching writing. I had three art degrees and had taught art at an elite prep school but had been hired to teach English and Yearbook at the local public high school. On paper I was not remotely qualified for that position teaching English. The department chair urged me to apply because I’d subbed for her and she said i was better read that she was.
Over that long-ago summer of 1990 I prepared by passing the NTE exam, which granted me certification and taking graduate classes in English, writing, and computers. A writing-for-teachers class with Sandra Dorr offered assignments we might then use with our students. I did go on to use what Sandy suggested. Also, at the end of that intensive week, I went home and wrote my first short story, “Baptism.” Eventually, that story was published in Stringtown. I was teaching English part time to high school juniors and made it my policy from the beginning to write everything I asked my students to write. I stood by that policy for the next 25 years, despite a colleague telling me it was “ridiculous.” I’ve been a strong writer since I was a girl, but essays and poetry, not stories. That changed.
The gulls often rest onshore near Asbury Creek just up the beach from us. I don’t know why there were a thousand or more the other day. We are careful not to disturb them.
In the 1990s I began writing with a student over the summer. We met weekly to share progress and intended to each write a novella. But before mid-summer, it was clear we were writing full length novels. Hers was better than mine, and today Rebecca Olson is a tenured professor with many publications including two books. I am proud that two other former students have MFA degrees.
This might look like a snowy scene, but it’s just a fiddled forest photo.
Four months ago today, our longtime tenant totaled his car. We were grateful he didn’t die, that he didn’t kill anyone else.
Yesterday I ran my mile and worked on our rental. We have reached the point in our work on this little apartment where “repairs” can be called done. Our son helped empty the trash into trucks and two dumpsters, a neighbor took aload in his pick-up for recycling, Gary stuff our Subaru with stuff for Good Will, we’ve scoured and scrubbed and repairs dents and holes, and a good contractor replaced the ruined woodwork. We’re now “renovating” and the apartment is no longer his. Gary cut back the hedge to restore some of the ocean view—our tenant never looked. Everything needed painting, the floors replaced, cabinets cleaned, stripped, and restored. Much of that is done too. The rusty kitchen cupboard latches needed more time to soak before I can scrub and reuse them, but yesterday I stained the drawer fronts, put a second coat on six cupboard doors and the south door, and worked on one side of the ancient 5-panel door that we hope to mount on a slider for a new bathroom door.
Does anyone remember when “Shabby Chic” was all the rage? Like it or not, out of fashion or not, I couldn’t scrape it all off. I am choosing to leave one side of the future bathroom door with all its four or five paint layers, flaking and alligatored. Back when it was popular, you could purchase a topcoat to deliberately alligator paint, because it was the style. I’m preserving the texture on one side of the door, making it smooth as butter with several coats of varnish. [I really I would use a favorite oil finish that I used on most of our floors. It’s seriously toxic and the last time I put on a coat, I geared up with full breathing mask and swore it was the very last time.] I will paint the other side of the door, which is in better shape because it was never exposed to the weather. That side will be “Chantilly Lace,” a barely tinted white I’m using for trim throughout.
Today is not a running day, but we will likely get a walk this cold morning. I have a Zoom later in the afternoon with a recent MFA grad I’ve been partnered with to mentor and offer support. Gary wants to run errands this morning and I should probably buy more paint, though I’ve done my best to use up what we already had. I have cabinet hinges and latches to clean and the kitchen drawers and one side of that shabby door to varnish. Four coats with a light sanding between coats 3 and four, I think. Maybe five coats. Six? It seems there will never be an end to the painting; much of the trim still needs a second coat. Some tidying is in order. We can’t afford to replace the kitchen counters
I will cook spinach with feta cheese this afternoon or maybe just toasted cheese sandwiches. I will rest and think about other projects I neglect. I’m rewatching The West Wing series, slowly. I’ll sit in my corner of the sofa after lunch. To say this old series “holds up” doesn’t do justice to this reminder about how government is supposed to work. At my left under the west window is a small plastic tub with an unfinished project, balls of yarn and the body of a sweater I began knitting for myself in 2024. That half-finished sweater waits for me to figure out the neckline. It’s striped in several fine handspun and hand-dyed 2-ply yarns held with a fine mohair/silk blend. It will be a pretty pullover, light and warm. Assuming I ever finish it.
The weather has finally turned cold with our first frost.
I am reading a wonderful novel, Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from the original French by Hildegarde Serle. The main character is Violette, a strong woman doing the best she can, and building a reliable and peaceful life on the edge of a cemetery where she is the keeper. Violette lies, and I suspected this lie. It’s the way we do lie and suspect lies about particular things, lying even to ourselves. I’m halfway through the novel and now I know.
In Zoom writing groups I hear poetry and memoirs detailing people’s terrible childhoods. I think sometimes we all had terrible childhoods. Violette was fostered, and that is almost always terrible. Our culture doesn’t seem to know how to love and properly respect children we didn’t birth. I say that, and yet I know of a former student who has done just that—spent her adult years caring for and raising a child she didn’t birth, a determined and generous woman giving a decent life to a boy-now-man. I would read her story about finding purpose in that, finding meaning while rescuing someone. I told Gary last night that I was tired of stories about love gone wrong, about abuse and excuses, about people hurting the one they love. Love should be what we have, I said.
I could write a memoir about the abuse I suffered as a child, mental illness in our family, guilt and grief, misunderstandings and trauma, and about worry—so much worry that leads to nothing. Disappointment. I write here about cleaning up the messy lives of other people while making messy mistakes in my own life. So much suffering. That unfinished sweater.
There is also the view from our west-facing windows. Every day we are here at the beach, I watch the swells build and break, and each day I look for a small something to accomplish. In the kitchen downstairs, there is a fresh loaf of sandwich bread baked last night and waiting to be sliced. I have been gratefully married to a man for fifty-two years this coming August, and he brings me coffee in bed each morning. I could ignore my aching hands, the morning headache, fluctuating blood pressure, the failures and errors and worry of all the rest. I could focus on joy. I can choose to let joy win.
I never claimed to be “blocked.” You know that word, right? It’s a term familiar even to many people, even those not devoting their days to being writers. Visiting my MFA Residency as an alum this past week, I am reminded there are several ways of being “blocked” as a writer. I’ve denied it until now, but yeah, I’ve been blocked. I have experienced at least three kinds of blockage: not writing much is rare for me and usually just means I’m resting and doing other creative work; writing badly, something that’s absolutely useless but at least it shows on the page‚oh, yes; and writing something I can’t let go of but keep fussing over and fiddling without getting anywhere. That last is where I am now. The most recent novel is done and however eager I might be to continue working on it, it’s time to set it gently aside.
I imagine the Parks Department is trying to figure out what to do here. Last Saturday, we walked to the headland a little over a mile north of our home, then around that headland and the next headland, and all the way to Hug Point beach. If we’d waited another hour for the tide to be fully out, we could probably have reached Hug Point proper. Instead, we were curious about what exactly had closed the parking lot for this popular park. The broken railing you see in the photo was washed away last winter. It’s worse now. The Parks Department probably tried to fix it because you can see fresh wood, but a few months ago, they blocked off the entire parking lot. We are accustomed to seeing the steep lot packed to overflowing in summer and pretty much year around in good weather. But most of last year, the descent was scary. We assume someone was injured trying to get around those broken stairs. We saw people both giving up and working their way around all last summer and into the fall before the lot was barricaded and the weather and tide shortened our walk north. We wonder when this mess will be repaired but expect the Parks Department is waiting for late spring and lower high tides.Continue reading →
Hello, readers. I wrote the post below before Good was murdered. Good was murdered. I have read the articles, the defense by MAGA, the responses from newspapers around the world by reporters who watched all the videos, and comments from all sides. It is not a capital offense to slowly drive away from someone—even if those someones were police officers, which they weren’t. Not even then is it okay to shoot someone three times in the head… and people bragging about it? This isn’t my country, the country founded on the ideals of respecting every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But here, what I was worried about before:
A couple of things: I am reading Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen, and this morning I found Allison K. Williams’s post “There Is No Closure: Stop Organizing and Start Writing” was in my feed on Tuesday. Despite a rich life deeply engaged in literature or because of that, Allison K. Williams wants closure with her writing.
They connected in my experience.
When I was a girl these large green anemones [Anthopleura xanthogrammica, or the giant green anemone] were far less common that the smaller mauve-violet ones. Today they are everywhere.Continue reading →
