Ajax Minor's Blog, page 3

A Not Poem

So we will continue to post poems and short stories. The following is another whimsical work:

A NOT POEM

                        Harper Lee penned:

                        ‘the senseless beauty of sunrise’

                        Can it cook a breakfast of Happiness?

                        Berliner said: ‘Wonder is not

                        Happiness but its own reward’

                        Does a rose gold sunrise prise

                        Wonder or Happiness from

                        The heart?

                        Does it matter?

                        Either way an imperfect exchange.

                        There’s a trick!

PHOTO BY TOBY HOOS

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“i married a butterfly”: a short story

During this stressful time reading can often be a true pleasure. So rather than write about ‘heavier’ topics I plan to republish some poems and short stories, as well as publish a few new ones. ‘I Married a Butterfly’ has appeared here before but for those of you who haven’t read it I’m reprising. It is loopy, as is most of my fiction. Yes, the main character does marry a butterfly! For those of you who are unaquainted with my fiction think Neil Gaiman: “American Gods’.

If you enjoy the story I will be following up with the sequel, ‘Betelgeuse’. And if you really like it, find out what ever happened to Butterfly and Kornsilk in Book 3 of The Ur Legend, ‘Kutuzov’s Dream’.

Be well and stay safe.

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Quarantined? Write a poem

The past week has been both challenging and sad. Challenging to those of us still healthy and sad for those stricken with Covid19. I had planned before the pandemic to fire up the Blog again and write about two possibly prescient themes in The Girl from Ipanema, Book 2 of The Ur Legend: a global climate catastrophe and the resulting breakup of the United States. But I felt a better choice would be to publish one of my poems. As I’ve said before, though the novel is my preferred medium I believe it’s important for any writer to explore other genres to perfect their craft. So find here a whimsical poem. And if are looking for something to do while ‘Sheltering in Place’, write one yourself!

… a Drop of Rain Must Fall

What if I could concentrate

On a single drop of rain

And miss the storm?

Collapse my field of view

Close the lens of my mind’s eye

To a pinhole

Would I fall in?

Break the clear, elastic surface

Of that raindrop

Then float around inside

On my back

Staring out at large faces

Broadly convex

Staring back

Would they fall in

As well?

We could throw

A party!

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Grief and Art: the business of living

Grief is perhaps the most brutal of emotions. Not because it is more intense than others. Certainly fear can be more immediately overwhelming. But Grief is a chronic state. It is a response to Loss. Not simply the loss of a wallet, or a set of keys, but something irreplaceable and irretrievable. The object of that Loss is usually, though not always, the death of a living and loved soul. While anger, as an example, is
explosive, Grief is implosive. It digs its nails into your very surroundings, the air you breathe, then into your skin and pulls every scrap of being to a point in your core that is the seat of your self. It is a reaction to tragedy that is ripping in its intensity. It crams the self into a space so dense that you cannot help but be sucked in. The question then becomes, can you crawl out? The answer is yes. But it will draw on all of your emotional and intellectual resources. It will make you reach back and grope for strength in your personal history. It will challenge you and reshape your
beliefs about the world and about yourself.
My wife, Linda, and I, after ten futile years, were within ten days of giving birth to a daughter. Then catastrophe struck.

The noun ‘catastrophe’ does not say too much, it says too little. Our daughter Katherine suffered a birth
accident that left her cortically blind and deaf, wracked with seizures from hightone low-tone cerebral palsy and unable to suck or swallow. Dependent for nourishment on a small plastic tube inserted into her stomach. Oh we’d wanted very much to raise a child. But the deep Grief was not for our loss of a child, but her loss of the opportunity to paint her story onto the canvas of life.

Katherine died at the age of seven months. The spaces that filled her brain, left by tissue that had been starved of oxygen and had died, filled with dense spinal fluid and simply became more than her brainstem, seat of the autonomic functions, could
bear. Her heart just stopped. But ours did not. We had to live. But how? First was to find an answer to the question ‘why?’ For us we found an answer in the words of an ancient Asian sage, Lao-Tse:
‘Nature does not play favorites. She regards her creations without sentimentality.’
Others seek comfort in God, some unfortunately in drugs and alcohol. But there is no good answer to the question, ‘why?’, and Linda and I had to get in synch emotionally. Grieving is differential. Highs, if
there are any, usually are just a brief respite; and lows rarely are coincident in time. People grieve, as people walk, at their own pace. Linda sat up every night while Katie was alive and poured her heart and her guts out in a flood of tears. I had simply been ‘dad’. But after Katherine died it was time for me to start to comb through the catastrophe for some meaning. Linda was ahead of me and because of love she waited patiently for me to catch up. Understand, the pain never goes away completely. Ever. But our stoic view has helped us. That and, surprisingly, black
humor. Some of us need bluebirds and some of us like blackbirds, I guess.

Linda and I had taken Katie to a school for blind children in Denver, infant to pre-school. Since
she was so terribly compromised, the therapy there and at home probably did us more good than it did her. We massaged her tortured muscles and sat in a dark room while colored lights blinked away on a little device.

Then, after Katie died, Linda took her considerable financial skills from a career on Wall Street and poured them into the school, the Anchor Center for the Blind. I’d like to think her effort, over fifteen years, did some good. I, instead, had a flash of inspiration. I decided to write a story. The short story became a long novel that eventually became a series of novels, The Ur Legend. I gave my daughter a life in them that she’d been robbed of. Of course, they were fantasy, so I could actually give her life on the page. That’s the beauty of fantasy. One can fashion make-believe and make it believable.

So the question becomes, can art be a balm for Grief and if so how? There are countless instances of art dealing with the subject of grief. Sculpture: the Pieta and a mother’s outpouring of not only grief but also love into the dead body of her son, in a gesture of pure ‘agape’, unconditional love. Plays: Trojan Women by Euripedes, exploring the grief of women who have lost sons, husbands and their home; Grief in bitter resignation. Books: the Mockingjay series, Grief transformed into action. And Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Grief shaped by love. Poetry: Galway Kinnel’s ‘Neverland’, Grief expressed as helplessness.

An English teacher of mine in high school wisely noted that there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of a work of literature, or of any work of art, for that matter, because there is the artist’s intent and the inferences made by the audience. Both are valid.
In my art, my books, Grief was softened joy. The joy of fashioning a life out of words. I am still astounded, when I read certain passages of Sun Valley Moon Mountains, what a special person ‘my daughter’ Ur is. And I am even more moved by her as a young woman in The Girl from Ipanema. I write with an old fashioned fountain pen because it moves effortlessly across the paper, never tiring my hand, as my mind pours out thoughts that are soaked in ink as the nib glides across the page.

But what of my audience? What’s in it for them? As much as I have wanted to create another life for Katie, I’ve also tried to show people, especially those who can empathize with our Grief, that there is an other way of viewing the tragedy as a function of a universe that is not malevolent, nor even cold, but simply a universe that ‘is’. The ‘why?’ of it all need not be an instrument of torture.

So my advice to those who are members of our grisly club is to stop asking ‘why?’, because there is no satisfying answer but to pick up a brush and some paints and a canvas, or a piece of chalk, or a lump of clay, or a pen. Or open an Excel spreadsheet, as Linda did. As Achilles said to Priam, who came seeking the body of his son, Hector, in the Iliad, “we…old man must eat”, for the living, as much as they grieve their loss, must still get on with the business of living.

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Kobe bryant, dressing the dead and grief: ‘let it be’

A couple of articles and editorials were printed in The New York Times this month on Grieving. An editorial by Sian Beilock, President of Barnard College, ‘No Right Way to Mourn’, was particularly insightful concerning society’s attitudes toward the death of public figures and those whom we may know casually or simply ‘know of’. She was, rightly, adamantly opposed to (not surprising in this age of social media) the ‘public shaming’ that went on after Kobe Bryant died. She expressed frustration with those who criticized others for the way in which they handled the tragedy; for example some thought all public events that day, such as the Grammys, should have been cancelled, or LeBron James should have posted sooner. She also wrote about the tragic murder of a Barnard freshman, Tess Majors, which had affected the entire campus. There is no place for shaming concerning a public figure, unless the action being criticised is disrespectful. Even then there exist today different definitions of respect. So think before you speak or write.

For those who may have only known about Ms Majors death or known of her, many felt uncomfortable about the question as to how to live their daily lives in the aftermath of the tragedy. My wife, who is the Ethicist in the family, as Kate is in Sun Valley Moon Mountains, coined an acronym: PES. Proximity of Empathic Sensitivity. Basically, the closer we are to the tragedy the more it hurts. Obvious in a way, but if that little psychological algorithm did not exist we would all go mad over every death. But as King Priam of Troy said to Achilles who mourned for his friend Patroclus, “eat, for that is the business of the living.” We have to try to live our lives and let time heal.

Sian Beilock said: “Everyone responds to death differently…”. True enough, as is the corollary that every single death is unique to each person in the response they have. One might mourn the loss of their mom in a different way than they mourn their dad. This is a point that, again, is made in Sun Valley Moon Mountains. Jaq and Kate lost Ur, as Linda and I lost Katie. But our paths to healing were different. Linda, and Kate, mourned while their daughters lived. I only began to grieve deeply after Katie died. This is something that is important to be recognized. One person may be having a ‘good day’ while the other is not. ‘Out of phase’ would be the term in physics. Surprisingly we both reached the same answer to the question of ‘why’. You can read more about this in my earlier Blog post, ‘God, Grief and the Tao te Ching’. Even then some people were upset with our conclusion. ‘We didn’t believe in Heaven’? ‘We didn’t believe God took her because he needed her?’ No and NO. My advice, as was Dr Beilock’s, is to “Let it Be” and allow people to find their own way of explaining a tragic death and responding to it.

On a lighter note, ‘iPhone at the Deathbed’, by Penelope Green looked at the changing customs in America surrounding death and the recently departed. Dressing the dead in their favorite togs, taking pictures of the dead to share online and having ‘wakes’ in private as opposed to funeral homes was discussed. BTW, did you know where the terms, ‘living room’ and ‘funeral parlor’ came from? Well, what we call living rooms used to be called parlors until about 1910 when embalming became more common. So the ‘parlor’ became a ‘room for the living’ and funeral homes were tagged with the moniker ‘parlor’. And photographing the dead and the dead with the still living was not uncommon in the 19th century.

Customs evolve but death is always waiting for each and every one of us. Linda and I found ‘black humor’, which would horrify some, a balm. Do it your own way and ‘Let it Be’ when it comes to everyone else.

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wanda and the winged sea serpent: a fantasy

Today is a special day. Our daughter, Katie, would have been 28. As you may know by now, I wrote a Fantasy trilogy, ‘The Ur Legend’, to give her a life she never got to live. And last week was a special week on the Monterey Peninsula. We hosted the ATT Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The weather was glorious and not typical of the ‘Bing Crosby Clambake’, which has featured rain, wind, sleet and even snow one year! Special congratulations to Nick Taylor who led wire to wire and put one in the win column for Canada, our neighbor to the North.

So I’ve decided to reprise a short story of mine about a Little girl, Wanda, Golf and a Winged Sea Serpent. I hope you enjoy it! Just click the link in the previous sentence.

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robbed in Elko : red town blues

Elko, NV is the Go-To for my wife, Linda, and me when we travel from the Monterey Peninsula in Central Cali to Ketchum, ID. I wrote extensively about our Fly-fishing adventures in Sun Valley in October 2018. You can search my Blog site, at ajaxminor.com, for more links under Idaho.

But first let me introduce myself, since I know Elko but you don’t know me. I’m an author. I write Fantasy under the name Ajax Minor. We lost our daughter to a birth accident in 1992 and my series, ‘The Ur Legend’, was a chance for me to give Katherine the life she never got to live.

I love Elko. My mouth begins to water about fifty miles East of Winnemuca. Linda and I have eaten at a number of restaurants in Elko but Luciano’s is our favorite. We lived in Brooklyn in the ’70s and ’80s, so we know good Italian grub and Luciano’s has the goods.

About two weeks ago we were making our second road trip in as many months to Ketchum to fish and ski. We rolled into town about 7 PM and had a great meal. And we met some terrific people while hanging at the bar for our table to be set. Nobody seemed to care when I told them we were from the People’s Republic of California. We even swapped a few stories about Sun Valley. One resident loved the snowmobiling north of Ketchum. We Nordic ski nearby at Galena. Red state Blue state recreation I guess.

After dinner we checked in at our hotel. I ‘drug’ the bags up to our room and parked the car. Next morning I saw that the back hatch was open a smidge. Had I forgotten to lock the car? Had a hacker accessed our vehicle with a nasty program? It made no difference, as I realized we’d been robbed when I saw contents of the glovebox on the floor.

We were lucky. I had brought in my laptop and both of our suitcases. We still had both sets of skis, ski boots and our fishing vests, waders and boots. But our ski bags, with long underwear, our helmets and gloves were gone. Not cheap to replace that day in Ketchum but not a disaster. We had also been carrying a satchel with four bottles of wine for the friends with whom we were staying and a bottle of my favorite scotch for our guide buddy, Scott Schnebly, owner of Lost River Outfitters in Ketchum and the best damned fisherman I’ve ever seen throw line.

This is where Red state Blue state prejudice crept in. The thieves stole the wine and left the scotch! In Elko, NV. Reddest town in Nevada maybe. Hell, Trump visited Elko in 2018! I’d have thought they would have stolen the scotch whiskey. And then I mused that they probably saw a BMW SUV with Cali plates and figured they’d show us a thing or two. Damned if we hadn’t lived in Cali for six years after moving from Colorado and had never had a thing stolen. And we get robbed in Elko!

This Red/Blue divide is relevant to my books since the USA breaks up into small republics in Book 2 of my series, The Girl from Ipanema. The immediate cause is an ecological catastrophe. A deep freeze! But you’ll have to read the book to figure that one out.

Anyway I cursed myself over the loss and then was thankful since it could have been way worse. And then I thought about the nice folks I met at Luciano’s. If we’d started talking politics we probably wouldn’t have agreed on much but we were still just people and Americans at that.

A week later our warm and fuzzies for Elko were reignited when we stopped on our way back to report the incident (we’d tried calling the police the morning I discovered the robbery but a message said the number on the website was not a working number; someone should look into that). Officer Kyle Jones met us at the station and we filed a report. He was affable and thoroughly professional. I mentioned Luciano’s and he admitted it was one of his favorites. I promised to buy him a beer if we ran into each other on our next visit.

And we will stop in Elko, as always, the next time we travel to Idaho. Seems as if there are good people and bad ones just about anywhere.

One last note. Officer Jones said there is, surprisingly he thought, a homeless problem in Elko. We know about that as we’ve seen the tent cities, modern day ‘Hoovervilles’, in Oakland. All Linda and I hoped was that it was someone who was cold and homeless who robbed us and that they made good use of the long underwear, socks and gloves.

See you soon!

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‘Uncut Gems,’ Indian joe AND Gambling: a movie review

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of ‘Last Christmas‘ starring Emilia Clarke. Now I’d like to share some thoughts on ‘Uncut Gems’. What’s going on here? Why the movie reviews suddenly? I’d only written one other, a year or so ago, of the flick ‘Wonder Woman’.

I always make it a point to write essays about subjects that have some connection to my stories. ‘Last Christmas’ was about Second Chances, which is the point of my entire Fantasy series, ‘The Ur Legend’. I gave our daughter, Katie, a Second Chance to live the life that she had been denied.

‘Uncut Gems’ is about addiction. Specifically, gambling addiction. It’s not as pervasive, it seems, nor as widely discussed, as addiction to alcohol or drugs or sex. The character ‘Indian Joe’ in the ‘Ur Legend’ series is addicted to betting on sports, just like Howard Ratner in the movie. Thus the connection of the movie to my series. QED.

But Joe is not Howard. Poor, screwed up, whacked out Howard. Joe after all is a god. Then why does Joe gamble on sports? If he is a special being shouldn’t he be omniscient? Well, cards and other games hold no real interest for him since they deal in very well defined probabilities. Those he can predict. But because ‘free will’ is allowed in the universes he ‘creates’, he is blind to the outcomes of athletic contests.

Another connection is to the character of Jaq’s grandfather, Louie, mentioned only briefly in Sun Valley Moon Mountains. This is where it gets really interesting and why Howard, and Adam Sandler’s brilliant portrayal, grabbed me right by the throat. My paternal granddad Louis was an addict. He was also from Baghdad, which is where the motif of ancient Sumer, in southern Iraq, comes from in the Ur series.

I am all too familiar with the horror of alcoholism, as it has crippled people on both sides of my family. I don’t believe there is an addiction that is as pervasive in its effects, both in society and within each family. But gambling can be as destructive, though without the obvious behavioral expression.

My Grandpa Louie was a very kind and gentle man. He rarely drank and was never abusive. But gambling shredded his success in business. In the 1920’s he was known as the Banana King of Bridgeport Connecticut. He then moved to my hometown Danbury and started a group of small grocery stores that was a forerunner of a modern supermarket chain. But Grandpa played cards. He would go to New York City and play high stakes pinochle. Pinochle? Yup. He would play for 36 hours straight and then come home to Danbury to crash for 24. Meanwhile my Grandmother Katherine was holding down the shop. In the 30’s he would regularly make or lose a grand. Lot of money in those days. Of course he lost more often than he won. Shocker, huh? Finally he got so deep into the mob that he was told to pay up in 30 days or take a swim in the East River with a brand new pair of cement overshoes! No kidding. Gambling can be as destructive to your health as Booze.

So Gramps was forced to sell all but one building, with his store at street level and their apartment on the second story. While he gave up the card games he would still drop by Yonkers Raceway to play the harness ponies on his trips to the Apple.

Dostoevsky wrote a novella, The Gambler, about his own addiction to roulette. The fascinating detail was that it wasn’t the high of winning that grabbed his main character, but the pain of losing. One might call it a form of masochism. Gamblers are like Sisyphus, always rolling the rock to the top of the hill, only to have it slide right back down again. And again, and again…

My paternal grandfather was Sisyphian, as was Howard Ratner. No spoilers but it was obvious that Howard would never take his chips and walk away. Ever.

The film and Sandler’s portrayal are exhausting, at times confusing but always riveting. So if you want to get into a Gambler’s head, and experience vicariously what they experience, check it out.

One last comment about writing a movie review. It’s about as far away, stylistically, from Fantasy as writing gets. But as I’ve noted before, writers should experiment with all forms of literary expression, regardless of where their real talent lies: novel, short story, poetry, whatever. Each genre has something to offer in its instruction. The essay is just another way of making use of and honing skills.

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The Rose Gallagher Mysteries: a review

The distinguishing feature of Ms Lindsey’s writing is her ability to weave the emotional and intellectual connections between and among characters. It is, I think, a technique I have identified as the primary driver of plot in my own Ur Legend series.

The two wonderful, salient aspects of her Mysteries are her ability to draw a terrific arc for Rose’s character and their setting in ‘Gilded Age’ New York City. The latter is refreshing, much as was the World War I context of the film ‘Wonder Woman’. The author also makes use of historical figures that add to the magic of the stories. This is particularly true of Book 2, ‘The Golden Grave’, where we meet Teddy Roosevelt and Nikola Tesla.

To paraphrase, “You can take the writer out of Fantasy but you can’t take Fantasy out of the writer.” I’ve written in my Blogs about why I write Fantasy. Of the ‘Not-High’ variety. Think Philip Pullman or Neil Gaiman. I didn’t choose Fantasy, it chose me. Just as Vanilla ice cream chose me. Erin Lindsey’s wonderful first series, ‘Bloodbound’, was a different kind of High Fantasy (think Tolkien or Game of Thrones’ with no Dragons or Elves). While Ms Lindsey has switched genres (less common I believe for writers than for those in the visual arts), she has been true to her inner muse by having Rose become involved with the Pinkerton Agency’s Paranormal Branch.

As ‘Murder on Millionaire’s Row’ is her first mystery, it is more uneven than ‘Golden Grave’. I’m not going to introduce any Spoilers or summarize the plot, but suffice it to say that the denouement is a bit over the top madcap. There are Ghosts. Nuff said. However, it is a very cool story and all of the characters are compelling. Rose Gallagher’s arc is so riveting that I couldn’t wait for ‘Golden Grave’.

‘Golden Grave’ did not disappoint. Rose, as a rookie Pinkerton agent, begins the difficult process of navigating two distinct worlds: that of her lower class upbringing and the high society of her boss and heartthrob Thomas Wiltshire. And Mr Roosevelt. The author carefully scripts Rose’s development including all of the missteps and pitfalls of straddling two worlds. It is a gripping study in character development.

So buy or download the series and you will be disappointed only by the wait for Book 3.

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Oh! Tannenbaum?!: A christmas eve story

Sun Valley Moon Mountains takes place at Christmas. But it is not a Christmas story. Not exactly. And the eponymous Jesus Christ makes an appearance! Read the story about the strange Christmas tree Father Nicholas Marduk Beele sent to Kate and Jaq, Oh! Tannenbaum?!

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