Through the Floor (Excerpt)

A once in a lifetime experience--a dangerous accident on a mountain in 2014--left an indelible mark on me and made me question some of my fundamental underpinnings. And I wanted to write about it, explore it. Now the story is in the new edition of Cirque Journal.

Here is an excerpt, from "Through the Floor" telling what happened a few seconds after I decided to give up on snowshoeing in a blizzard:

. . . A few more steps down the east side of the knoll and I reached the firmer snowpack of the trail. I turned right and lengthened my stride, keeping track of thin reddish trail markers jutting up every so often through the whiteness. I wished they were closer together, but I was pretty sure I could stay on the trail. My thoughts shifted indoors—maybe I’d get out my sketch pad, fix a cup of tea.
     Then without warning, I felt a funny yielding. Not just different, wrong. My stomach thought faster than my mind, clenching in alarm. A second later, my left foot was standing on . . . nothing. In disbelieving horror I watched the path in front of me come apart—all slow motion and soft sounds, the surface ripping zigzag, inch by inch ahead. Like the very earth opening to swallow me. Further shocked that I could watch this instead of being overtaken by the blind chaos of a tumbling fall, I thought I must be dreaming. But no, my right foot was still on the ripped edge of the trail even as the snow under my left foot slid outward from under me. Like the moment a person with one foot on the dock and the other on the moving boat realizes she can no longer jump to one or the other. My arms flung out, still clutching poles. Helpless to make any other response I sank, all but my right leg, in exquisite slow motion, remaining surreally upright. Rising into my view was the old trail surface, my right foot still attached to it, while below a crevasse-like cleft appeared, all newness creating itself in perfect pace and tandem with my descent.




For more, Cirque Journal is at http://www.cirquejournal.com/index.php.

Rotten tomatoes?

     I could scarcely believe what Bill was willing to pay for a box of tomatoes that were, by Joe’s Garden’s own labeling, “scratch and dent,” and looked near to being compost. But they made GREAT tomato sauce. We made four batches of Italian simple tomato sauce from them.

Here's how they looked. But when I cut away the bad—there was actual blue mold where a few had cracked open, their think skin unable to contain their ripeness—I sniffed and rarely had to discard, or cut deeper.

 We made some batches chunky, and some we put through the food processor. Some with a somewhat more elaborate Italian recipe, and some with just garlic, salt, basil.


The sauces went into Tupperware or ziplock bags and into the freezer, until we needed a simple spaghetti supper for family from out of town.

That's when we found out just what a success we had. Delicious! Not judging a book by its cover, maybe that goes for tomatoes, too.

Possum in the garage

A sign that the drought here in normally green Northwestern Washington is causing distress:
A shy, never-before-glimpsed possum has braved my freezer defrosting activities to get himself a drink. This is at the very back of our garage, very easy to become a trap for this critter. He must have watched me leave to go back inside the house between sessions of tending the melt, and waddled in to help himself. He was at the puddle on the cement floor when I started back out there again.

I had been out several times carrying my tub of sloshing water and frosty ice, funny-shaped chunks matching the piping, to dump it on parched plants. Never saw him till I surprised him and caused him to scuttle to cover under the car or other garage storage. Who know how long it will be before he makes his possum-slow run for the exit.

Harper Lee didn't write a sequel

Why is "Go Set a Watchman" labeled a sequel, when it is actually the author's developmental work on the same material? While I air my laundry on this warm day, here's another airing.

I’ll tell you what I’m bothered by, and it’s not the two different Atticus Finches in two separate novels. If you have ever tried to write fiction, using material from your own life, you are going to understand this. Recently I read Richard Russo’s "Mohawk." He is the author of "Nobody’s Fool," which was made into a terrific film starring Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy. Going back to read Nobody’s Fool after seeing the movie, I  found it a great piece of work. Well, 95% of it was great—there was one clunker character. So, having discovered a novelist I liked a lot, I went to the library hoping for another home run, and checked out Mohawk, published years before Nobody's Fool, What I found was a rougher handling of the same story—the same material and a similar story, but not gelled into greatness. In Mohawk, unlike the later novel, old women were completely unsympathetic characters, cliche and boring. Murder and mayhem came out of nowhere, the sort that suggested Russo wasn’t confident in his material and felt he needed to juice it up. Ugly versions of abuse and injury that the sensitive among us should be warned about. Except that they weren’t that believable, and didn’t give anything to the reader for the reader’s time. So you wouldn’t call Mohawk a classic. Good writing, but nothing that begs re-quoting, like in In Nobody’s Fool, where, to his landlady's recurrent offer of tea, Sully always says, “Not now, not ever.” A line that is such fun to play with at home, and everyone knows where it comes from.

Clearly, Russo started over, with more love for his characters and stronger threads of humor, to arrive at Nobody’s Fool. I respect the hard work it took to produce Nobody’s Fool all the more for having glimpsed his struggle to write it. In the case of Harper Lee, from the New York Times’s biographical articles and research into the role played by her original editor, Tay Hofoff, it seems Hohoff, a very smart editor, scotched the first version of the story (Go Set a Watchman) because she believed that Harper Lee could make a masterpiece if she tried again with the same material.

So what I’m bothered by is how the marketeers jumped to re-label the old, nearly forgotten manuscript. It’s as though somebody with dollar signs in his eyes said, “What this needs to be taken for, to make the most money, is a sequel. If we label it as a sequel, and we say so authoritatively, citing the grown up Scout’s point of view, then we are home free, because it won’t get questioned in the mainstream. At least not until after we’ve had the Harper-Lee-new-novel sales bump.” Well, look what has happened: those who promote new books have echoed the one word, “sequel,” at the top of whatever they say. Second, they talk about the controversy of the nightmare of a racist Atticus Finch. It’s all so info-tainment.

Harper Lee is a genius, and you can count me among the many who call To Kill a Mockingbird a great American novel, maybe THE great American novel. But her masterpiece did not spill from her pen whole, transcendent, for the ages. Not for years, and not without the insight and pushing of a special editor. Which may unlock a bit of the mystery surrounding genius. It certainly puts to rest any controversy. In the complex mid-century south, racism tormented Harper Lee, and it was only after she fully digested her experience of it that she could go further—not only illustrating it, which sounds like the thrust of Go Set a Watchman, but showing an aspirational and deeper fairness we all have in us. In Mockingbird, she had the race novel she always wanted to write, and even beyond—she encouraged us not to discount anyone, not even Boo Radley.

The past is prologue?

I'm not one to romanticize bygone days. But more and more I'm reading people's stories. Beats the heck out of reading people's rants. One I saw in the Penzey's Spice catalog, of all places, cause me to comment this morning.

A Mr. Ed Hoffman, in his upper eighties, tells of his father's days as a transit driver in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He doesn't say whether it was in the 1920s or 1930s, only that his father's job got him a home loan for his family. "One of the men who rode his streetcar was the president of the South Milwaukee Bank. This man would get on his streetcar and they became friends." The banker saw for himself that this man had a steady job and offered that if he needed a home loan, to come on down to see him.

Imagine that, a banker mixing with regular people, taking the streetcar when that was normal, before the well-off left transit behind for shiny automobiles.

Christmas cookies remembered

Some brain cells don’t die. People think kids don’t discriminate, that they just like sweets. But I still remember the white paper box each of us kids in the youth choir received one year. A generous box of assorted Christmas specialty cookies made in the kitchens of some of the church women. It was more than fifty years ago. I was about eleven.
            I knew nothing about baking, but I somehow knew that these women had put a lot of time and love and skill (sorry, Mom) into these fabulous cookies. Or maybe I thought it was magic. Who knows about memory?  I couldn’t believe this box was for me, just a nobody, a kid! No shortcuts, cheats, timesavers or years-old ingredients. Fresh butter. Exotic spices I didn’t know existed—probably cardamom was one.
            I didn’t know who these women were or how to thank them. I still feel embarrassed about that. I shared the minimum at home and then secreted the rest in my room, to dole out to myself for several days, opening the box lid like we did the paper doors on the advent calendars Aunt Eileen sent us from West Germany.
            The calendars and the cookie box each revealed a daily artful surprise, but the brain cells holding this cookie memory long ago got marked “Keep!"

Getting from Why to Yes

Just a few minutes ago Climate Parents reached me with the news that the Senate voted this evening (rather than tomorrow as expected) and defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline.  By one vote. Yes, I know it will be back with the new Congress, and yes, this thing I dearly want to see defeated may well be built after all.

But that's not what is on my mind. One particular part of this fight is. It's a cousin to the accident victim's ageless question, Why Me?

Many groups have worked hard the last, oh, this late at night just guessing two years, using virtually all volunteer hours, and personally the story I loved the most was the uniting of "Cowboys and Indians" in their ride on the capitol. But looking at only Climate Parents for a moment, I can't help but pause at their account of their efforts mobilizing, writing letters, calling, staging sit-ins, and I don't know whether to cheer or cry to think of the hours, the sacrifice of normal evenings, money, weekends, bedtime stories for the children, even sleep that you gotta know is behind their hard work. Why, oh why, is this life-on-hold, all-in push necessary, when we should have less onerous ways of being heard and democratically respected?

So my first reaction to the news of true grassroots effort is I'm sad to think of this human cost, and I want to ask why it is necessary when they are so much in the right. For the sake of this thread of thought, if you think they are wrong, hold that in abeyance for a moment. Because just on the face of it you/we should listen to any citizen reaction where the numbers and commitment and sacrifice are this big, and I'll try to say the same to myself where I think a large group is wrong--listen. Just look at the mismatch: the personal sacrifice on one side of the scrum, and the comfort of fat salaries, bonuses, and corporate resources on the other side. Anyone should be able to see that there is something happening here, even if you don't know what it is (thank you, Bob Dylan).

So then I can't get stuck in sadness for the cost that goes into simple defense of our land (time that could be spent creating new well-being for all). Instead, I notice that people like the Climate Parents who come out of the individual consumer cocoons, and come together on common ground, are finding new energies, new strengths, new friends, brothers and sisters. . .this is changing things, whatever the outcome of the Pipeline battle. Maybe "Bowling Alone" has run its course.

Thank goodness. Getting past the Why is getting us deep into the How. And these people have answered the why and how the same way the eminent and humane business thinker Peter Block has: The Answer to How is Yes. They simply said, yes, we've got to do this.