And Now It’s 2020

August of 2020. Yesterday’s newscaster made the comment that 84 days remain before Election Day. Politics, yuck! Politics, WTF? Does it say something to voyeurs of random blog sites that after six years of absolute silence from the keyboardist slamming out these words, I almost immediately mention an area of life I know diddly-squat about and, yet, more than I ever (if I lived a thousand x a thousand lifetimes) wanted to know? To illustrate how little I watched the news or anything regarding political events, I swear to all the gods ever mentioned anywhere at anytime that I never once watched or listened to a speech by the former president of the United States, Barrack Obama, until after he had been replaced by Donald Trump’s electoral college win in 2016.

At the time of the win I thought, Wow, people really don’t care for Hilary even one little bit. Here’s what I knew about Donald Trump. My late husband (d. 1988) subscribed to and read Forbes and Inc. and Money magazines.  My late husband did not read articles aloud to me from these various financial offerings of Whose made it big, How they got there, How you can get there too — except on rare occasions. Occasions, for instance, when Donald Trump was mentioned. Then he would read aloud the amount of money (millions) given to him by his father and the soon-to-follow bankruptcy incurred by the son, and the next millions-of-dollars put into the son’s account and the next bankruptcy incurred, and so on. Al Doiron, the aforementioned late husband, was one who invested in the United States by giving the police action/war in Vietnam the lower part of a leg when he served in the USMC, then, after returning home and acclimating to a prosthetic limb, invested in books and courses of study to obtain a degree in Civil Engineering from Cal Poly, Pomona, California, after which he “civil engineered” for day work and read financial magazines and all sorts of books on how to succeed in real estate, how to become a millionaire within a few years, how to sail a catamaran, how to build a log house, etc.

Here’s the point, Al worked at becoming a financial success and succeeded, at least as far as his shortened life allowed. I remember his bitter laughter when he read articles in the financial mags about Donald Trump’s many failures. Mind you, Al died in 1988 from pulmonary thrombosis, a common cause of death among amputees. The history I’m laying down in these lines is way, way previous to Donald Trump’s electoral college win. And I’m laying it down as an underlayment to my astonishment over Donald (the laughable loser as far as Al was concerned) Trump seated in the oval office. But, you give a guy a break, right? Cable news, whether right wing conservative or left wing whatever, was so biased in either direction that it made my head spin. I watched C-Span (it was boring). After the fact, I watched YouTube videos of Donald Trump “on the stump” and listened to his speeches without the interference of news commentators. I did not like what I heard. Name calling wasn’t something my parents allowed. Donald Trump was a bad-mannered man-boy. I watched briefings at the White House. I watched Trump’s interactions with representatives from a Florida High School that got shot to pieces. I watched the NRA squelch any leanings the bad-mannered man/boy might have had toward the tiniest bit of gun licensing or control. I was stunned (and continue to be) daily by his stupidity. Then Covid-19 came along. That was six or seven months ago. It’s a global pandemic.

You can’t know it out there, any of you who may have continued to read to this point, but a longish hesitation ensued a moment ago. The hesitation was not exactly a light-bulb moment, a sudden flash of insight wherein an “Ah Ha!” escaped my lips. It was more like standing outside at the edge of the bluff overlooking the ocean and an upwards draft of salt-cooled air played with the draped looseness of whatever I wore. Al’s bitter laughter in the eighties over Trump’s squandering of riches was/is my bitter laughter in the 20’s over Trump’s squandering of our nation. It’s not a company he bankrupts. It’s a people. Sadly, he doesn’t do it alone. The senate apparently backs him. Whoa! and listen to me, an old woman who knows next to nothing about politics and what they involve. Except, except to say I truly wish some of them would grow a spine and some moral character and kick this A-one loser out of the White House. Companies fire CEO’s don’t they? Isn’t it time? Hasn’t this country lost enough?

And Now It’s 2014

The truth is I have too many blogs! Here a blog, there a blog, everywhere a blog-blog and the writing is often “password protected” or “private” because either the work isn’t ready for “public” viewing or it’s too ready and hopes for an eventual placement with an outside publishing venue have made me wary of cyber-self-publication.

The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights finally made it into a publisher’s hands (Water Street Press). Due out sometime this year, this cross-genre novel has long been the source of all the frustrations and joys a parent endures as they watch and guide their offspring to maturity. It’s yet to be seen how she (the book) makes it in the real world. Fingers crossed she won’t stumble.

I came across a hard copy of the first draft of The Editor while moving out of my Cottonwood home in the fall of 2013. It was inside a five-inch deep cardboard box. The box was under an antique (meaning “rusty”) five-gallon tin that I’d used as an end table to support a lamp. (I tend to stack odd pieces of junk to create makeshift furniture in the same [or a similar] way I tend to stack overwrought sentences to create burdensome paragraphs.) My first attempt at novel writing, The Editor is complete in that it moves from beginning to end — and incomplete because the draft is only a first. Irene went through seven drafts and could’ve gone through several more if not for an agent who loved her as she was following draft number seven. I’ve no idea the number of drafts The Editor may need before she’s let loose on the world.

Susan Parker Says To Say Hello is a mystery novel in progress. Perhaps three-quarters complete, it’s a mystery that began as a collaborative effort with two other writers in the mid-nineties.  Abandoned by my colleagues, Susan Parker became a project of mine some years ago only to be abandoned, in turn, by me. But recently a friend asked me to submit writing samples to a writing group she belongs to in Orange County, California, and I sent a link to Susan Parker’s password-protected site. Who knows? Maybe Susan’s “Hello” will echo along the Ste. Joan Hotel corridors once again …

Then there’s the science fiction novel in progress: The Dalan Chronicles. It’s the novel I revisit when I want to have fun with a bunch of folks with the ability to “pytorate” and dwell within the living bodies of various residents of a place called Rumor, Wyoming.

Oh, and lest I forget, there’s another novel in progress called A Little Day Music with a totally negative and acid-tongued protagonist whose antagonists are the incredibly unlucky people who know her as “mother” and “grandmother”.

In the realm of non-fiction I’ve helped a few friends with their memoirs and recently started work on the compilation of what may turn out to be an “epistolary” memoir by revisiting close to 200 letters by and between my late husband, friends, family and me in 1966-67. Al and I married six weeks before he shipped out, a Marine Corps grunt, to Vietnam. His tour of duty was thirteen months. The letters reveal what it was to be stationed at the DMZ, what it was to be waiting for his safe return home, what children we were back then.

Poetry? Not so much in the last year or so.

Now, where shall I go today? Which old friend (or enemy) in what story shall I drop in on?

And Now It’s 2012

March 26, 2012.  The last line of the last time I posted asked when I might post again, how many years?  I can proudly say, only one.  Plus several months, nine to be exact.  It’s not like the time allowed gestation and growth of some great short or even long story’s birth.  Nor have I continued with any of my great starts on novel-length works.  Nor have I written any poetry — well, a couple here and there in the span of twenty-one months, but hardly one a day as I once spewed forth.

What’s up with that?

I am involved with some rewrites on the memoir of a friend and I’ve gotta say that spark is the only thing burning in my writing life.  Working out flow and tension and segues and such bring back the adventure, frustration, and delight I once found when writing.  Not that I do it well.  The thing is I do it, dress for battle in warm shawl and run head-on at the passive was’s and were’s and same-structured sentences, swinging out gerunds left and right.

I have moved two and half times since 2010.  I have fallen in and out of love.  I have planted a yucca and red petunias and watched pods of dolphins move northward along shore.  I have turned sixty-five and gained ten pounds and a new granddaughter.  Now.  She’s something to brag about, my Lulu.

If the words were just here, in my head, at my fingertips to say all I could, I would.  toodles..

.

And Now It’s 2010

Not just 2010, but July 8, 2010.  How can more than a year have passed since the last time I added a line to this blog?  And does it matter how?  No, I don’t think so.  But I’ll ramble a bit all the same.

In September of 2008 I left northern California on a cross-country road trip that ended, quite suddenly, with the signing of a lease in Baja California.  Since then, I’ve moved twice — once from the casita in Villa Floresta to the big party house on the hill above Popotla; and a second time from the house on the hill to the nice smaller house near Rosarito centro.  All the while I’ve been writing.  A lot of poetry, a lot of memoir, a lot of drafts on the Irene novel.  Also began a new novel and ran up around 200 pages.  Then, returned to the 2008 start-up of a sci-fi fun piece Maggie, Lavonne and I had many laughs with back in ’08.

[I wonder how many years will pass before I return to this blog again?]

Focus : What I had I Lost

I am unable, utterly unable, to focus for long on any one project.  My first start-to-finish novel, The Editor, is in the rewrite pile of starts and stops.  The opening chapter sucks, big time, and every time I try to fix it, make it better, it somehow gets worse.  My first collaborative attempt at a mystery, a novel about 3/4 finished, one abandoned by all and recently picked up again by me IS my current focus.  My earlier “current focus” of the last month or so, the Chronicles of Irene, a true-life influenced novel, is on a back burner while I try to figure out why it fails to interest me.  I know it’s not the story — the woman lived an amazing life, if short, and abruptly ended.  So it must be the writing.  Do all writers bore themselves so absolutely at some point with what they once considered “compelling prose”?  Let me think.  Oh yes.  I have two other novels or novellas underway.  One a sci-fi murder mystery that works from pre-world history into modern day and back again . . . And another that is a collection of loosely connected short stories and under the head The Six Degrees Stories.  Most of the Six Degrees are now on the blog www.labelitcrime.wordpress.com and most of my attempts to focus on Irene are at www.itcouldabeen.wordpresss.com  As for memoir — oh my, I just haven’t been going there, except by way of poetry, at all lately.  I post poems at my blog www.lynndoiron.wordpress.com  Obviously, I am scattered in writing, all over the place . . . This note is just to say: I know.

Bottom Feeder

 “Always,” he screamed at me. “She always calls me about a body when I’m trying to eat dinner!”

I paused, holding the battered appetizer I’d lifted to taste – the perfection of deep-fry timing at the best Japanese restaurant Rumor, Wyoming has to offer — there, inches from my lips.  Beyond this perfection, his pig-red, puffing face meets my paused glance.  To respond or to bite?  This is the question considered. 

I bite the tempura shrimp in half and lower the tail away to use like a conductor’s baton, shake it with some ferocity over stemmed chardonnay and screw my head around to snap back in a nod that says Ab-soh-LUTE-ly!

“If only she had your heart, your sensibilities,” he mewls, complexion faded to a near-normal fleshy pink.

I pout my lips as if to say, Now Charles, she’s your wife and you picked her out, all on your ownsome, from a whole fleet of Wanna-Be-Mrs.-Charles-Hueter’s all docked at the Hueter Mortuary and Funeral Services Franchise Corporate Offices; I finger-feed him the next shrimp.  He takes it off at the tail, right at my fingertips, his breathing moist on my knuckles.

Without saying a word, I will maneuver this big fish into my boat.  His wife is already a “body” – they just don’t know; no one knows the notches I have on my creel.  Or how often I’ve slipped through the nets of the system.  (A wink will do wonders! And a pout has more clout than words.  Ask me!  I have tales . . . Sh-h-h – not here.)

Watching for Whales Out of Season

From a turnout, Loretta watched the ocean.  Water, water, everywhere. Even when her sight detected no movement, she knew they had tides, oceans did, not to mention currents.  They had a circularity of motions.  Just like her blood, how it left the heart one way and came back another.  Her womb might be empty, the incision stapled shut behind her stillborn child, but that didn’t mean squat. 

Phantom motions still curled inside her.

How rollers below hit the shore in roaring white foam was a mystery – might be rocks or divine sand.  Footing was precarious but she leaned out, nonetheless

Blast Blocks Sun — 100 word story

                       

Late Cretaceous Period Bio-Moment: He was nameless then.  So was she.  And the island where they browsed was green and wide.  Some raptors had been bullying, causing neighbors grief, but for them, for him and her and the egg they shared the care of – life was more than good.

When Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra trembled continents, she looked up and found him looking her way with concern.  They both looked toward their egg; it was safe.  Then, ash blocked out the sun for centuries. 

Museums coldly label them as Iguanodon-A, Iguanodon-B.  Egg – not yet found.

The Wife of the Romanian

She stares at the stool where he is supposed to sit, at the gray sunlight’s slant on the yellow stool, yellow guitar, the bad yellow of light on wood when screened through cracked sunscreening film, a gray shadow effect that’s been flaking off small triangles to leave bright holes for pure sun to spangle through, cast straws of light into the neon-lit shop she owns with her sister.  Her sister who is both a saint and a slut—a saint at confession and kneeled next to her girl for prayers, a slut in the kitchen, a whore with the janitor, the yeast, anything that holds, inside, the ability to rise. 

Two suits wait outside Rhonda’s bakery and one of them has pressed his forehead to the film-covered glass door and cupped his hand so October sun won’t interfere with his view inside.  He is the one who pecks on the glass, points to his watch, knocks again.  He is the bran muffin suit and behind him is the croissant man and while she is nodding them through the door with no word of apology for her shop door unopened at 6:50 a.m. she spots the sleek secretaries rounding the corner in sports tennis shoes and caminas shawled over silk or faux silk or cotton; the saggy skin just above her elbows chills in the doorway opened out on October’s crisp mood.  She fills white paper sacks with orders and fills cups with coffee, lattes and cappuccinos, keeps the smudges and prints polished from her counter as shop regulars come and go.  By eight, the glass cases are two-thirds empty, the line to her counter is three-thirds empty, and only one of her five tables is occupied by two elderly lovers who will be in the same chairs near the front window until she turns the sign over again at two and waits with her back leaned into the opened door, woody hands cupping opposed elbows of arms crossed over, holding herself in and together at the end as at the beginning.The lovers are good tippers and pretend she is not there while they sit and sometimes let their knuckles touch or the knuckles of one rest close to the wrist bone of the other or slide one foot so the instep of one crepe-soled sandal anchors alongside the length of a Capezio boot like dissimilar boats tied off side by side that tip one way and then the other with swells and calms in their table talk.  The tables are small and glass-topped, napkins coarse linen and sunflower yellow to match the single silk sunflower stuck in a narrow milk-glass vase, and through the glass table top the boats of their feet rest on the shop-narrow sea of black and white squares.  The squares are linoleum and from the front door stack out toward the stainless steel counter in points like a harlequin costume.  Her doe-eyed sister had installed the peel and stick tiles, had put real sunflowers in the bud vases, bringing them in five at a time the moment one showed a loosening petal, fed them with clean water, kept the tables sparkling, the napkins in perfect rectangular folds.  This sister she curses now, curses her doe eyes, how a doe ruts with any buck. 

Rhonda replaced the real flowers with silk two days before Michael left for Romania to attend his mother’s funeral.  But not the stool, she did not replace the stool, and not the guitar, and not him, not yet.

At 9:55 the lovers examine the napkin-lined basket for crumbs. The scones had been orange-raisin and they know that sometimes a last white raisin can be found in the folds of yellow. The fingers of one retrieves this last treat and deposits it on the tongue of the other. There are no smiles between them, only slight nods, as their chairs slide back and strap purses lodge on their shoulders, and another nod from one, the taller one, to the baker who stands bracing the door open as they pass through and out under October’s sun, old feet in old shoes crossing the calm asphalt to cruise the shaded far side of the block where the boy in a khaki green apron sells fresh sunflowers and Peruvian lilies by the bunch.

Rhonda has turned the deadbolt and the sign, has moved through the angled straws of pure light to the vacant stool and yellow guitar. In less than an hour the guitar will be brown again, blonde brown, and the sun pouring through the tears in the film will cease to pour but only glimmer there a little bit through each hole, each triangular shape of lost film. She thinks that perhaps by the time she is a very old woman of fifty the little holes will have overtaken the window, that there will be more light than protection from light. Or perhaps she will have to be ancient, near sixty, before all the sunscreen flakes off to this point. One heel is on a rung of the stool and she sits calm and still, slumped around his guitar, cheek pressing its shoulder, arms hugging its waist, wrists crossing, woody hands hung loose as wings without the will to fly.

By 5 a.m. she is straightening her back, a tin of cranberry scones held between hand mitts, no salt on her face from tears she did not bother about when he failed to return as his itinerary stated he would, no expression at all, not from her approval of the perfected aroma rising from the tin, not from the glass cases already three-quarters full of what she had formed of dust and binders, lemon zests and poppyseeds, yeasts, cinnamons, slivered almonds, crushed pecans, crescents of guitar-colored cashews.

She is straightening up and squaring herself, facing the open oven, mechanically moving to store the tin on a tall, chrome rack of open shelves when she blinks to an exterior sound.

No one knocks on the front window this early; this early the air outside is the same gray as the cracked film; this early the sun is still moving from ending one horizon before it can open another; this early the wall of dim gray is hardly a step up from the harlequin darks on her shop floor and she does not turn to the door but deposits the tin of scones on the rack, retrieves the next from the oven and the next.

The cooling racks and the glass cases full, the face of each yellow silk flower pointed to face the door, her steel counter glimmering under the overhead lights, she waits, avoids the corner with the stool and guitar, studies the wall of dark gradually becoming less dark, gradually allowing the sun to streak thin shafts across the room.

The large pump carafes are full, but she checks them again, tests the flavor of coffee from each. Outside a funnel of air has swept up stray leaves and from inside she thinks at first they may be gray birds playing circular tag above the street; then the movement passes. Except for something caught on the handle of her shop door.

She had already made up her mind the gray birds were not birds but dead leaves and that she will donate the guitar to the local high school’s music department, along with the stool that is only brown and not yellow under the neon lights, and that the something caught on her door is a leaf with a hook stem or part of the twig where the stem attached and this will not do.

She leans for some minutes against the opened door, bracing it open with her back, holding not a leaf but a penciled recipe on a brown paper bag for Mama’s Good Black Bread, had found it tied to the door’s bar handle with a yellow-orange bootlace from one of her husband’s Romanian boots.

Then the suits came, bran-muffin man tapping his watch face as he squeezed by where she leaned against the opened door, and the secretaries came and the boy from the florist’s shop and other early regulars arrived. She wipes down her counter after every exchange.

Later, when the elderly lovers arrive they find the glass door propped open and a wide path of day laid straight from the outside in.  Chords of Verdi’s Autumn make their way past them to loose themselves on street traffic, wind between the cars and pedestrians moving through another October day, crisper than the one before.

Today the lovers sit side by side, watch the guitarist’s plump, unlikely fingers handle the movements, control the strings, lift his wide face to them, his widely spaced blue eyes, begin a smile where a glimpse of gold shows and then vanishes behind thick lips compressed as he begins again, thick neck bent, intent on his fingering.  He does not notice the taller one nod toward his missing bootlace, or the shorter one’s answering shrug; he is thinking about his American wife, who, tomorrow, with luck, or maybe the day after, will serve him a warm slice of good black bread.

The Romanian Horse 1.2

The sixth year his wife replaced real sunflowers with silk replicas and her sister’s name was never spoken between them.  Not even when she shared the same table with them at dinner at their mother’s home where they all wore harness and blinders, except the grandmother, who was beefy and big and retired from toting any carts she chose not to pull. 

He imagined that his tiny mama in Romania was the best friend of this big American grandmother, and when he spoke with his son and daughter, he spoke to them in his Moldovan dialect sometimes and sometimes he spoke to them in English and sometimes a mix of both, but baba was the name he used when he talked of their grandmothers, their American one and the one who lived where the sunflowers bloomed so very far away, and who, during the seventh year, died.

His American wife told him “Go home,” and he touched her face with his calloused fingers, studied the skin where his fingers stayed for a moment, the watery brown tone of her eyes and imagined sunflower centers, multitudes of variations on brown, flecked with gold, flecked with sienna, flecked with the strings of Verdi’s Summer, a vibration of music somewhere, a sounding board that he could not find, had not found, until that single moment peeled away, just at the instant she turned from his touch and said again, “Go home, Michael, Mikail, whoever you are, go home.”

The tiny apartment not much more than a cell where his mama had lived was already occupied by new tenants when Mikhail disembarked from the plane.  They did not allow him inside, but shoved a sack filled with soft things and tied off with a length of cord at the top into his arms, and also a stiff paper box big enough to hold a guitar, heavy enough to hold some typewriters or a sewing machine. 

He stood for a long time, as much as an hour, on the curb of the narrow street below the apartment.  The walls of the buildings ran black with pollution and tall, the sky was a pale slit high overhead but he wasn’t looking up; he was looking at the cobbles paving the road, and he wasn’t seeing the cobbles but the harlequin squares of the floor in his American wife’s bakery shop. 

Before leaving Pittsburg, he had stood for a long time, as much as an hour, in the center of that floor, staring at the black and white points and the stool in the corner, trying to make up his mind whether or not he should bring his guitar with him, whether or not he could, or even should, play for his mama even though she was dead — and had decided he could not take the guitar from its corner. 

Now, in this black and dismal place with a box and a bag of her world, he believed he had made a mistake.

He pawned his prize leather coat, found lodging and menial jobs until he could pay for his mama’s ashes, buy back his coat, and a return ticket for Pittsburgh. 

He had been gone for two months when he boarded the plane in Bucharest to begin his return.  In the deep pocket of his coat he could feel the crumpled brown paper bag he had used to print his mama’s good black bread recipe from Romanian into English, had found the recipe in her strong hand in the heavy box the new occupants had shoved his way, had not wanted, should his checked luggage be lost, for that tangible piece of their past to be gone to him forever or for a day.  He was, perhaps, heavy-hoofed, plodding, but this thing of his mama’s, of his children’s baba, was the one basic good gift he could offer his American wife. 

He would always be the horse; she would never feed from his hand; but they could, he imagined, become something very good, and he liked very much imagining this, and had, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean about three hours after lifting off from Paris, smiled such a smile in his reverie that the gold tooth his wife had replaced that first year caught a ray of light from the window, winked at all who sat near.