RELATIVE

November 10, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

This young seagull was peeping for its parent, but that adult flew away.

When my husband was young, sometimes he would sit on the back steps in a parched Arizona payday waiting for his dad to get home with groceries. Another family of four children was left alone for the weekend that turned into a week or maybe two. The woman who told me about her childhood was not sure, only that even the mustard was scraped out of the jar by the time Child Services showed up.

My own childhood was not so deprived. I went without dental care and my mother mixed powdered milk and when I first tasted a real butter pat, it was like candy to me. In kindergarten, I had two skirts and three short-sleeved Orlon sweaters. For Easter, I had a new cotton dress. It is odd the things you remember. But we were never hungry, and my father’s mother and aunt had enough money put by that it was safe to assume we could borrow money if things got desperate, which they did on occasion.

This is to say, I was not raised poor. Raised poor is hunger and no one to turn to who is better off. “Poor” is so bad that we make up euphemisms like “economically challenged” or my students say a person is “not very rich.” No, poor is not having enough money to pay bills even though you live cheap. Poor is embarrassed because even when everyone in the household is working hard to earn money, money is still “tight” and bills are sometimes late. Poor is being blamed in our country.

And that isn’t fair. Innumerable studies show the sort of income necessary to pay for housing in different parts of the country. Recent studies are equally clear that poor children almost never receive the quality of education wealthier parents give their children. Their health care isn’t as good. What they suffer damage in childhood that their ability to improve their lives, quite permanently.

The truth is that wages have not kept up with inflation—they have been falling behind for decades. Telling someone that if they want to earn money, they should get a better job is like telling a person waiting in a wheelchair to run to the head of the line, like telling the five year old to reach something down from the top shelf, like asking someone who is starving in a third world country: “Well, for heaven’s sake, go to the store and buy some food!”

Sometimes we simply fail to pay attention.

Poverty is lousy circumstance, not a character defect.

I am reading Adrienne Rich’s essays in her new collection, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. Rich was a force of nature, a woman who found compassion for others when she granted it to herself. She reminds me that compassion is necessary, that affluence is not a free pass to righteousness, that everyone faces difficulties in life and it’s a good thing to remember that sorrow and trouble come to each of us.

Here is the first poem I ever read of hers:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/39836802?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Thoughts from Adrienne Rich

I believe that poetry is asking us to consider the quality of life. And it is reflecting on what makes it possible for us to continue as human. Under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, shallowness, that we endure.

Even when I was very young, I was reading poetry, looking for what it could tell me about how to live. For me, poetry has never, ever been just an escape from the world, an escape from history.

I think in this poem, what I am talking about is the choice that we can make, to move deeper into things, or simply to live worthily, maintain your attitudes, hold your position, even die bravely, but not to see what might have been seen. Not to grasp what might have been grasped. And that is a choice, for us all, whether in poetry or in life.

Our country has many truths, but certainly one of them has to be that this was never a democracy. That this was a hope of democracy, an enormous, an enormous hope for true democracy, and that it failed many people from the outset and it’s failing more people now.

I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued, but meaningless. Feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will. Feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and their interests is by the gun. I’m afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate.

I think that poetry speaks beyond that, to something different. And that’s why it can bring those parts of us together, that are both in dread, and which have the surviving sense of a possible happiness, and a possible collectivity, a possible community, a loss of isolation.

These reflections are excerpted from an interview Bill Moyers did with Adrienne Rich in 1995 as part of The Language of Life series. Rich died in 2012 at the age of 82. You can read the transcript of her entire interview with Bill in our archive and read more of her poems at Poetry Foundation website.

FOOD for the HOLIDAYS

November 9, 2018November 9, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

When Gary and I were in college at the University of Washington, Starbucks was a brand new store at the old Public Market, Pike Place. We did not drink coffee, but I shopped in Starbucks for spices and chocolate at the original store, and then later at University Village, at their second store. Spice and herbs were put up in little sealed plastic packets kept in gallon jars. Those jars filled a wall of shelves. The chocolate was broken into fist-sized chunks from ten kilo blocks imported from Europe. All the coffee was roasted locally.

Italian delis in the Market stored candied citron, lemon, and orange peel in enormous glass jars. These fruits were nothing like the gumdrop candied fruit found then and now in chain grocery stores. The lemons were the peel of half a lemon, with a bittersweet bite of lemon. I used these candied fruits and others when I baked our wedding cake in 1974 from a traditional 100-year-old fruitcake wedding cake recipe (white cakes were called “Bride’s Cake” back in the day). I found all the ingredients I needed at the Market.

By the time we’d moved to Oregon (a return home for me), we began drinking coffee, starting with instant. However, once we tried Starbucks, we could not drink anything else. For a time, we received coffee each Friday that had been roasted the day before in Seattle. Then the new CEO took over the company, and everything changed. Coffee was roasted not in NW Seattle but some other part of the country and we never enjoyed fresh-roasted beans in quite the same way again. For a time our coffee orders were the envy of our neighbors.

We also used to order from an Oakland, California deli-style food store when our boys were young. I ordered, actually, it was on me. In the late fall I went through their lengthy catalogue, searching for unusual food items like pappadams and pomegranate molasses. It was a holiday tradition, at least in my mind, to place a big order of unfamiliar foods, spices and sauces and lovely pasta. The large box would arrive and I would unpack all those wonderful and strange foods. Food for Christmas.

The import food store I ordered from in the 80s was established in 1897, but these days all they deliver is sandwiches. I don’t remember when it became impossible to order foods from Ratto’s (the 90s, or later?) but somewhere along the way, we lost that habit.

Everything is available on Amazon now. And that is not the same somehow.

This year I found a small company selling the brand of imported tarragon mustard we like best and a lot of other good things. Yesterday, a big box arrived.

Some of the items from that box will be gifts—the tiny marzipan fruits are something I would have loved as a child—but two bottles of the mustard went straight onto my pantry shelf. Pasta went into my cracker and bread drawer, because even though I like making pasta from scratch, the striped bow ties were just too sweet not to order. Orange flower and rose water put up in glass bottles. The sweet olive oil Ines Rosales Tortas are crispy wafers that make a luscious breakfast with goat cheese and fresh raspberries—my favorite since I discovered the combination in Ashland when I was there for a Shakespeare workshop.

It might have been Thoreau or Emerson who said the only proper gifts were food and flowers—items that were useful and consumable, implying no obligation other than being edible and beautiful. We do not need things, but these packages of food are marvelous and entertaining. We will eat them and they will be gone.

[A nice detail is that everything was packed in paper, ruffle-cut waste kraft paper—you can see it off to the right in the photo above.]

LETTING THINGS GO

November 8, 2018November 8, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

My grandmother’s desk.

My step grandmother gave a mandolin to Gary many years ago. He had the instrument cleaned and repaired but then nearly sold it after she died because somehow an essential family connection had slipped by him unnoticed. When I explained it had belonged to Genevieve’s father, he took it out again and held it. “Then it stays.” He also has a guitar made the year I was born. I like to think that is one reason he treasures it, but it’s the tone. I know it’s the pure, lovely tone that earns it a place in our home.

A friend chided me on Facebook: “NEVER get rid of musical instruments.”

The note was in response to my post of Gary with his Guy Fawkes bonfire and my words: “Gary is on the phone lamenting every single splendid guitar he ever let get away (not to mention the awful ones he laughs over), in his entire life. It is a painful litany and one I have listened to too many times.” The bonfire was of attic refuse from ten and twenty years. I told him about never getting rid of instruments. Gary says, “I get that.” Books, too, I was told should never be allowed to go.

There is a part of me that completely agrees. Books and music and art are essential and precious. Ridding oneself of such things suggests we do not want them, and that is almost never the case. We want it all.

We never want to “get rid of” musical instruments or books.

Sometimes we choose to let go.

Over recent years, I have given away or sold hundreds, perhaps even a thousand books. I just counted twenty-eight bookcases in our home, some as wide as six feet, others just two. Some are six feet high, some just three. There are thousands of books in our house. None are kept in the attic anymore, and only a few dozen are stacked on the floor behind the couch upstairs. I am not allowed to discuss Gary’s instruments in details, but he has “several.” I have books I walked down to the bookshop in Aurora Village to buy when I was twelve, and books I finished reading last month. We have no free local library, so most of the books I read were purchased used, often from Powell’s Book Store in Portland. I no longer keep books if I do not love them.

My husband and I, as I have explained in earlier posts, are engaged in Swedish Death Cleansing, a pragmatic approach to discarding and giving possessions we do not need.

I sort through my clothing. I love clothes, always have, and I know I have too many hanging in my closet, not to mention the tub of genuinely vintage things I have held onto since high school and college. I give things away to charity. I cannot keep it all.

Recently, I went through my jewelry box. I pulled out family pieces for my daughters-in-law. I set aside pieces for my granddaughters. And I gave a box of jewelry to my son to sell on Ebay. We offered many things to family first. People, in case you have not noticed, no one wants the family furniture or china or sterling either. You jewelry is costume or old fashioned or both and no one wants it. If he or anyone liked something, I said to keep it. The money will pay for a new roof next year, or at least a tiny corner of a roof.

Sometimes possessions accomplish more negative than merely taking up space. I gave away my enameling kiln, sold boxes of yarn for a fraction of what they cost me. I was not using them, and their existence in our home felt like a reproach, a lack of industry. And honestly, industrious is pretty much my middle name. I let things go to relieve guilt for not having made more of them.

And sometimes we have had no choice but to sell.

Decades ago, Gary sold his amp because his dad was out of work and could not afford to pay bills. In college we sold our entire collection of Maxfield Parrish prints. We did not mean to “get rid” of them, we needed money to buy bread and pay tuition.

Sometimes by choice, but always the result of some sort of need.

These days, stacks of books everywhere in our house meant I could not find the one I wanted amidst the dozens or hundreds I would never open again. I still have thousands of books on shelves.

Guitars and books have left us because we were not using or reading them. Sometimes Gary traded up for a better guitar. He could not afford to keep every one he ever owned, and we would not have had space to store them. And there is no one to love them when we are gone. If we are not enjoying them, they simply take up space.

Not everyone is experiencing this, I understand that. We could have left our attic stuffed, and I could expand my clothing to fill every closet in the house. But we have sorted attics for others who passed and did not want to leave that task for our family. Our family does not have room for even the stuff we love best, much less the stuff we are indifferent to.

There is an entire social network, an industry of sorts, devoted to reminding us again and again that we are not our possessions, that this gathering of objects is an inadequate substitute for gathering of the self, for questioning and self-awareness. Humility.

My husband and I took stock after dealing with the deaths and possessions of relatives. Our lives were cluttered and if the clutter was not useful to us nor interesting to our family and friends, I still believe it is for the best to let it go to someone who cares.

We do not rid ourselves, we let go.

NOT BOX

November 7, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

The “Not Box” made from a single narrow board in 1974.

I felt the cold coming on Monday night. I tried to convince myself it was nerves. It is my first real sickness since I retired.

On the 7th of July, I put money down on a desk that I had been saving for since the year before. On the 7th of November, they finally came and picked up the desk that had sat unused for three weeks. It was not what I wanted, not what I ordered. Wood this shop calls “Western Walnut” is sourced on my coast and every example on their website shows wild, dark chocolate, purply grain. Deep. Rich. I showed the salesman exactly what I wanted. What I received was a beautiful desk of milk straight grain like milk chocolate teak. It about broke my heart. (It will look fine in some trendy mid-century modern house—I’ve no doubt it will sell once it’s on display in their shop.) They tried to make it good, but not hard enough. I am sorry for this very expensive lesson learned, $620 at least to ship it here and back, and yes, I am expected to pay both ways. If they try to bill me for restocking too, I suppose I will shriek.

Wood grain and color is variable, unreliable, as I know from experience. The appearance of rough cut hardwood lumber can be deceptive. Picture cedar fence board—that is the surface, splintery and dull—and wetting the wood gives a hint of its finish color. The only way to be sure is to plane it smooth.

In college I went down to the Seattle warehouses to sort through rough hardwood boards. Stacks leaning against the wall and into racks in rows. I found a single rough maple board that would reveal tiny knots, a pattern called birdseye maple. The “eyes” are tiny knots, and such boards are generally sliced thin and used as veneer. Constructing even a small object out of solid birdseye seems a little wasteful, but it’s what I did in college. I ran it through the planner to find the pattern and then designed and built an object to use every scrap of one small, narrow rough board. I made a “Not-Box”, a single drawer in a box with a stripe of black ebony, a precious strip of black wood, also purchased rough and planed to 1/8th inch. I have the leftover ebony, barely two inches wide and a foot long, still flat and true, smooth and hard as glass after all these years. I think, sometimes, of make=ing something of it. I could score lines and create a ruler.

I bought walnut too, back in those woodshop days, choosing boards in the rough and no certainty about how it will look until I’d run it through the hog. A family friend gave me a fourteen foot “English brown oak” board he’d had nailed to the inside of his workshop for decades. In 1974, my friend and I ran it through the planer in the University of Washington shop. “I want to show you what we did,” said the patient shop foreman who was teaching us how to use tools. There were chips all over the cutting edges. He had never seen oak do that to a planer, what teak can do without using carbide steel. Later my son would use some of that wood to fashion a guitar in high school.

I made a walnut triptych frame for cloisonné enamel and an ash bench which I have never used. My joints were never perfect. Wood is not forgiving of error. Even metal can be reworked, and I was raising sterling from a flat disk into a tall, narrow vessel at the same time I was making mistakes I could not correct in wood.

I know about wood.

This morning I feel better, though I was lying in bed when they picked up that desk yesterday. (The careful men scarred the walls carrying it up and scarred it again going down, but our narrow staircase has seen worse. I will repaint.) I had not left the house since the previous morning. Our granddaughter does not know how to talk on the phone. I have managed over 12k words for NaNo, thought I think I wrote only 149 words yesterday. I have not been knitting or weaving or piecing, and only a little reading. I have slept. I have avoided the news. It is not good enough.

This morning I feel better. My throat is not so sore and I can breathe through my nose. Better, not well. Gary wants me to stay home today. He tries to take care of me, but the Senior Research Papers are due tomorrow, so I will head to school early this afternoon, just in case.

Gulls are running across the roof.

I might get a walk today. A light run used to be my cure for a cold.

THE PLANS

November 1, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

My first panettone.

Last night I started the dough for panettone. This morning I mixed the dough and set it to rise, and that’s when the trouble started.

An hour before they went into the oven, Gary had plans. “Bring your breakfast and I will hold things up. You don’t even have to touch it. Just say yes or no,” he said.

My husband was determined this past summer to empty our attic, the spaces north and south behind the knee wall. He was entirely successful. The spaces are empty, the roof only barely leaking, and most of the contents given away. Most.

What is left? A stack of “old” good stuff for our son to sell on Ebay and a dozen or so cardboard bankers boxes with “school stuff” I will never use again. There was also a fair-sized cardboard box with rolls of plans and prints of plans and my original plans drawn on translucent paper. There had been another box of these, or perhaps two boxes. I thought I’d rescued all the architectural plans I needed or wanted to keep, but then he unrolled plans for a house I’d forgotten I designed. I remembered it only vaguely from those years I was designing additions to coastal dwellings and entire houses.

There were many more than I recalled: homes and home additions in Gearhart, Little Beach, Tolovana Park, Cannon Beach, Arch Cape, and Falcon Cove. This began in 1983 when I was a new mother with preschool children when our tenant asked if I could make an architectural model. I said, Of course, though I had never done anything of the sort before. My model was the wrong scale and clumsy, but it satisfied the homeowner who was leery of a roofline redesigned to meet a local covenant. She was pleased enough to ask me to design the interior, with the architect’s blessing. He was glad to be shut of this difficult client.

That first project led to work for several homeowners, architects, contractors, and myself too over the next ten or twelve years. I designed and supervised the building of my brother’s home and my mother’s. Neither paid me, and I missed work to complete them, but sacrifice is expected of daughters. I tiled the entry, kitchen backsplash, and the tub surround, floor and wall of Mom’s house. I had to quit my job to get it all done, but she was hysterical most of that time. The contractor went far, far over budget. (It would be years before I understood how little that contractor cared about honest billing.)

The houses I am most fond of were the Buckley House in Tolovana Park and my mother’s house on Jefferson Street in the Presidential Streets of Cannon Beach. I have not passed any of these houses other than my mother’s, which is painful since the new owners remodeled all the charm out of it. I loved that house, and I cannot bear to look at how they ruined it. Mom always promised to leave it to me, but she sold it instead because she liked having cash. It is a sad memory. Perhaps that was what my mother meant when she told me the day she died that she had been cruel to me?

I stopped drawing plans once I was a full time teacher, which paid less, but gave me a steady income and work I enjoyed a great deal. I always thought I would design one more home, from scratch and just for Gary and me, but alas.

In any event, I had forgotten how many projects I completed. The one I live in is good and well, though I find that I changed it from my drawings as we built. The plans tell an interesting story and there a great deal more, what we refer to in the family as “The Big Mess.” That is no fun at all, still a mess in our minds.

The attic is no longer any sort of mess. The atrium, where Gary staged his sorting of attic stuff, is also no longer any sort of mess either with just the two neat stacks destined to leave us permanently. In the house, there are still four original Thonet bentwood chairs labeled 1907, purchased in 1968, when I was in high school. They want recaning and free to a new home. Anyone?

Today, I have begun National Novel Writing Month with 1404 words (so far), somewhat under my goal. And I am supposed to complete knitting the first sleeve for Ruby’s birthday sweater. And really, I would like to curl up with hot chocolate and a slice of panettone.

I made two loaves in pans I had, not proper panettone paper pans, and substituted regular for instant yeast and other things. It was still wonderful!

PREPARATION

October 31, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

The rain is finally here, and the tide sweeps up over sand that has been dry for months. The last time we drove over the coast range, vine maples were turning scarlet and purple.

It is only October for one more day and I have been receiving weekday recommendations for holiday preparations from Apartment Therapy. I do not live in an apartment, and the therapy offered is useful to me mostly for the photographs. (I am one of those people who almost never reads magazines, not even the captions. I only admire the photographs. Now, between Pinterest and the library, I don’t buy magazines. It is a financial savings like quitting smoking, except I never smoked.)

The weekday emails have advised me to make a gift-giving list, purchase just one holiday gift, organize my holiday card strategy. Mostly I have found myself one step ahead in planning and preparation. Nevertheless, I enjoy the reminders. My favorite so far is “Do an act of kindness on Day 4. I sent a card to someone who was recently unkind to me. This was intended both as kindness and as a way of reconnecting with a person I care about.

DAY 8:

Book an appointment or service you need for the holidays.

Think about that thing you always put off or forget until late in the season, when all the good appointment times are taken or—gasp!—your favorite provider is all booked up through New Year’s Day. Today, call them up or fire up the app and make the appointment.

Nothing came immediately to mind.

If nothing immediately comes to mind, here are some services that might jog your memory. If you read something and your gut screams out, “oh RIGHT,” that might be the task for you today.

haircuts or color
eyebrow grooming
manicures and pedicures
spray tan
facial and spa services

The list goes on quite a bit further, including pet care, house cleaning, travel, and professional photographs. But I got stuck on the first five that concern personal grooming.

I have not had my hair cut since the mid-60s. The last time I put color on my hair was a few years ago when I was playing with purple. Mostly I was fortunate in my eyebrows, which used to be quite dark and well-shaped. They are now going gray, and I cannot be bothered. I have never had a manicure or pedicure and every time I consider the process, I remember that I really do not enjoy strangers touching my body in an intimate way, and I think about nail fungus (which I dod not have and do not want). Spray tan reminds me of the person in the White House, so that’s out. Facial and spa? My skin might thank me, but it seems a waste of money.

The man whose admiration I care about, the only man I feel any need to impress, is easily impressed. Frankly, he is the only man I am interested in. Lucky, yes.

[Next month, though I have not even used mascara or lip gloss in a while, this may change. Hanging around with teenagers tends to make me feel dowdy. A little color?]

Thinking over all of this had me reviewing what my holiday preparation actually look like. I buy gifts all year long, I plan gift wrapping, which is the most onerous task of the holidays. We mail only a few gifts. I design cards (though so few people send them anymore that some of the fun is lost). I bake and decorate the house with lights and ornaments and nutcrackers.

Teaching is not part of my holiday preparation, but my part-time job teaching college writing begins next month. Three weeks sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and right on top of Hanukkah. (It will be a busy time because I have 33 students on my role and I am scheduled to use a math teacher’s room. At least the desks are flat, though when I went in for a peak I could not find 33 chairs.)

Years ago, we hosted a holiday party on a mid-December Sunday. It was an Open House in the afternoon, usually 2 to 4 so that it was clearly not lunch. We furiously cleaned before the party. I came home after work each day and worked my way down the refreshments list, baking and freezing.

We did not serve alcohol, and that might be the secret to having a pleasant time. I made mushroom pastries and curried filo triangles, fancy cakes with nuts and fruit, a Java cake, cookies, and a dip made with homemade chili relleno and a pound or more of grated cheddar that always disappeared moments after I put it on the serving table. It was not lunch, but people could get a meal out of it.

We invited family, the neighbors and everyone we worked with. Sometimes we had over forty people in the house at once. People stood around and talked and we played the Muppets’ Christmas album or The Anonymous Four. Though I am uncomfortable in social situations, it was not a long party, and a lovely time. Post party clean-up took only a little over and hour. By dinner time the house looked neat and festive and we generally had enough leftovers that I did not have to cook for a couple of days.

[Our first Saluki, during her first Christmas party, peed in the middle of our bed in front of Ted Tallman, who asked, “Does she do that often?” No, never before or since. She disapproved of the crowd.]

One year, my brother and mother (who lived nearby) gave their excuses, did not attend, and we stopped after that. It seemed a lot of trouble with so much preparation and almost no one reciprocated.

It’s been a long time, but I think about those parties still. I miss the preparations! I miss the people!

Maybe it is time to reestablish that tradition. Either that or find a hotel and fly away.

Those parties demanded a lot of planning and cleaning and baking, but I love to bake, and the result was smiling with friends and a week before Christmas, our home was beautiful.

This morning we heard rain and tomorrow is the start of National Novel Writing Month. I will be writing each day, and for the month, if there are any post, they will likely be brief.

‘When something like this happens . . . ‘

October 29, 2018October 29, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Many people are finding it emotionally challenging to watch the news these days. They do not feel connected to events, to politics, to the ebb and flow of our national debate. I understand that.

Just last week I was thinking over my personal experiences with accidental shootings leading to lost use of legs, to murders, and to suicides—yes, plural for each. I have known no one who was killed by a serial killer or terrorist, but people I know have been crippled and murdered, and all were the victims of white men. There is nothing unusual about that. In my country, most murderers and terrorists have been white, male, and Christian, even when the majority of citizens were not.

I love and would trust with my life, most every white male I know personally. They would not harm anyone based on color, religion, or politics. They are joined to one another through their communities and by love and respect.

So then, the past few days.

Things happen. Terrible things happen to everyone. A father commits suicide in the driveway while his daughter desperately beats on the locked car doors and windows to stop him—something similar happened to more than one of my students. A girl slept on the dirt floor of a shed, determined to stay with her homeless mother who was mentally ill and drug-addicted. A father returned from Iraq with no visible wounds but still changed beyond recognition. A student hospitalized, not for the first time, in a mental facility. Mothers and fathers died. A student drowned. Students died in car wrecks. Students killed themselves.

Ask any teacher in a weak moment and they will share their stories.

Then there was the student who slammed a school desk into a wall, the one who threw a chair, a padlock. The ones who did not want me to know what bothered them. The cruel parent, the near fatal overdose, the guilty confession of keeping score of girls, the marks on my board to count off the days without drinking.

I do not know how to adequately respond to cries for help. I have done my best as a mandatory reporter. I have offered comfort, I have listened. I have tried to be what my students needed from me, and often I have failed.

What leadership and decency look like:

“When Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the Squirrel Hill massacre, less than a mile from his own pulpit, he ordered the doors of his synagogue locked,” Franklin Foer writes. “Despite his congregants’ terror that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach. They didn’t pray for their own protection; they prayed for the healing of others.”

A dear friend has just managed to let those of us who were concerned know through social media that she is well, despite hospitalization with a terrible health crisis. She begs people will vote in lieu of flowers.

There is no point trying to avoid the pain. It comes and it comes. We can deny our responsibility or face what comes with compassion and care. The best we can do is take steady, honest steps toward healing our beleaguered nation.

WEATHER GAGE*

October 28, 2018October 28, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

I have begun rereading Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novel series for the third time, this time aloud. I found the jargon and exposition early in Master and Commander hard going aloud, but we have moved on from there to familiarity with some details and absolute acceptance of the rest. My husband laughs at every bit of wit so we are having a fine time and sailing right through. (I began reading three days ago and we are already past three quarters through.) I try to stifle my impulse to explain what will eventually become clear in a next few pages or a few books. O’Brian builds tension and action wonderfully.

(I have spent too many hours in despair and crying of late. Lucky to be alive. Yes. But these are not proud times for my country.)

Perhaps O’Brian is one reason I thought about the wind so specifically during our walk this morning. Yesterday, we walked for two and a half hours, and then about another half hour later on. This morning we meant to have a short walk, but stayed out the better part of an hour, despite the stiff wind. It rained on us yesterday, but we really did not mind. Today over the ocean were blue skies, the moon still showing more than a half even as the time neared nine o’clock. Wind out of the south, gusting and sometimes holding at a light gale.

Dry sand blows over the top of wet sand, sometimes gathering they way snow will, though snow is very rare on our coast. I recall our Sequoyah, an Afghan Hound of considerable strength and sweetness, who did not like the sand piling on his toes when I walked him on a windy beach. He would pick up each forefoot in turn and shake the sand out of it, then dancing on the shore like a dressage horse. (I do miss the dogs painfully.)

We have over the years been possessed of two wind gauges—one belonged to my step-grandmother who left me the house. It was carried away during a great storm while we were in Arizona (with Sequoyah at dog shows, as it happens). The next gauge was also carried away during a storm. We were accustomed to steady winds of 45mph or more, gusts of 65 or even 70mph during an ordinary storm. A really bad wind coming from the west would bow the glass in our ocean-facing windows. It was a disconcerting sight, and the reason I was always grateful to have some sort of curtain or blind to lower against such blows.

We have had no wind gauge at all for years now, and though we can check with Cannon Beach for windspeed, because they are a larger community, we almost never do. We can feel it.

The last really impressive storm was 2 December 2007, the day a window facing the ocean blew out and I fixed in back in and wired it in place as best I could because Gary was still drugged from hernia surgery two days before. We were without power Sunday to Friday. It was dark and wet and boring that time of year with so few hours of daylight and inadequate lanterns.

The local public radio station reminded us every hour on the hour about a tree falling on their roof and never provided a speck of news about our end of the county. (I have never quite forgiven the necessity of driving to Cannon Beach in order to buy a Portland paper in order to find out what was going on.) We were warm enough with our wood stove which I cooked on. I’d made a large casserole of eggplant parmesan and we put thawing strawberries in oatmeal for lovely breakfasts, and experimented with various methods of grinding coffee beans—smashing with hammers and rolling with rolling pins—to fill the french press. It was a challenging week, but not a bad one. Rather fun, to tell the truth, though I was grateful to have hot water again by Friday night.

It was also the year my mother died, the year I graduated from my MFA program,the year our younger son married, and the beginning of the first of my still non-writing periods. I was mourning. I lost all humor from my writing, and my stories often were humorous until then.

And here, the day has worn on while I return to this posting, adding to my story and watching the weather change outside my window. The sky was clear aqua during most of our windy walk, then rain again (it rained last night off and on), and now the pale blue sky is flying overhead again.

O’Brian reminds me how one disappointment or embarrassment can dredge up a range of others long thought put to bed. There was a tide earlier this spring that cast up hundreds of crabs on shore—huge Dungeness crabs, and all male. A knowledgeable friend explained that they were likely scraped up from very deep water where they had lain for some time.

There is work to be done.

I have knitting to attend to and a partial knitting project to unravel and begin again, cards to send my grandchildren, and I am rethinking my plans for National Novel Writing Month. Last year I had intended to work on a series of short stories. I think that might be a good choice for this year. A baker’s dozen, aiming for 60k words, perhaps. So long as I write 50k of new words meant for a single book, I think that will answer.

I have already met my “writing goal” for the year of 100 rejections. Mostly because of 65 agent queries, it easily met that target a couple of weeks ago. I will not order new lamps, but move around the ones I have. I have been trying to send back the darned desk and hope to have it gone within a fortnight (finally!). I rearranged the living room sofa downstairs, shifted the one upstairs, and I will continue desk using a set-up that is imperfect but has done duty.

That is, I am rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (if you know the saying?) and will muddle along. That is often the way when terrible forces are at work destroying the world. The ocean is white with foam from heavy surf, though not so loud at the other morning when it seemed to be deliberately cracking on.

In a day or two, at most, we will begin the next book in this series. When we have read the twenty volumes on my shelves, I will go hunting for number 21.

*Yes, that is the preferred spelling.

ON NOT WRITING

October 27, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

The process is frightening, this writing process. Unlike the performance, the meal, the quilt (I am knitting just now) there is no clear completion. We can only rarely say with any lasting conviction that we are finished writing.

We merely choose to stop at some point.

We live with our writing for such a long time (even if that time is only a pair of years) and there is no precise point where we can stand back and say with confidence: It is done. The work itself makes these demands upon us. It makes us doubt in return for only slivers of certainty. Those slivers, however, those instants when we feel with certainty, however rare, are slender payment for time and purpose. Our book is worth that. At the least, I would like to believe the work is worth this. In any event, I am driven to it and even when I am not writing, I dwell upon that writing process.

I have been down these past few months, not making much headway though determinedly planning to write a novel next month. This next week will be “next month” and I am unsure.

Of course I can write a novel in a month. I can rack up 75k words in four weeks. I have done it more than once. But there is that terrible doubting voice shrieking at me: What is the point? It hammers and whispers and questions and whines, yes but? until I think of setting everything aside.

I have been told often enough that I seem certain, that I appear absolutely confident and sure of my course. Yet, as I was told during a wonderful class on world religions, years ago, faith is a willingness to live with doubt. Why should anyone be surprised to learn than the future does not feel so certain from my side?

When my husband and I decided to have children (we wanted two), it took me a year to become pregnant. There was no reason I should not have conceived immediately. I had taken the pill but that was years before. I was healthy, in good weight. We certainly tried. After a year, and because I had been reading right along, and because friends had struggled to become pregnant, I knew there might never be the planned baby. We might not have children. I accepted that possibility.

During that infertile year, I considered that my husband and I had been happy together for a long time (ten years by then) and should certainly continue to be happy without children, if it came to that. I knew individuals and couple with good lives and no child. I reasoned with myself that we would be fine.

This was not a matter of planning, but of acceptance of the inevitable. It was a matter of dealing with what I could not control.

And then I was pregnant with Alan. I like to say that Ian took three days.

Writing is not childbearing. But in some ways, I feel the connection between birthing a child and a novel. It is true that childbirth could kill me, but I never feared for that. I was in labor three days with our first child, and that pain is no more vivid that the agony I have experienced writing. Both child and book must eventually be allowed to leave.

That is the struggle I feel just now. Our sons are grown and off on their own. We are grateful for phone calls and visits. They will never be so close as they once were, and that is painful at times, but also as it should be. We raised people capable of managing their own lives, not permanent infants but adults now who come to us as equals.

The novel, however, that I am setting aside . . . that remains an infant, remains dependent and with no external life.

We had dinner the other day with the owner/editor of a small press. She urged me to pursue digital publication and build a platform with followers. She also confided that her own digital sales were down from over a hundred to fewer than a dozen a month. I cannot help but feel her advice might have worked a few years ago.

I do not even own a Kindle. A friend self-published without great success. So I have my doubts.

This morning I read a comment to Allison K. Williams at the Brevity blog post:

This is spot on and infinitely encouraging. But “Two years of generating material, two years of dicking around, four years of fallow time where the manuscript reproaches me from my desktop every time I open the laptop, and two years of getting down to business” had me laughing out loud in appreciation and recognition of my own process.

I had a mentor (painting, not writing, but it applies) who told me, when I was complaining about not painting as much as I thought I should: “you’re still doing the work, even when you’re not working.” After a long dry spell, a friend came back to his work beyond where he’d left it.

There might be something coming next, but I do not yet feel it. I am not writing anything just now, except these lines. Perhaps I am only in a period of rest, The quandary has stopped me cold. As if I had managed birth only to find the baby perfect and perfectly dead.

It is time to allow this novel-child to slip away, and move on.

WHAT IS IT?

October 22, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

Giant cricket? Super grasshopper? It was on the beach this morning! When I asked Gary to put his size 12 foot in the frame for scale, it sidled right over and checked his shoe out. When Gary stepped away, it hopped after him. Yikes!

What?

At least we recognized the thing below as a spider.