Ken McAlpine's Blog: The Hesitant Blogger, page 5
July 9, 2013
Midwest readers/three free copies
Hi Wonderful Readers:)
I hope everyone is having a great summer. I would very much like to reach out to readers in the Midwest. With that in mind, I'd like to offer a free copy of my new novel "Together We Jump" to the first three kind Midwestern folks to respond.
Thanks to you all for your love of books:)
One lucky writer, Ken
I hope everyone is having a great summer. I would very much like to reach out to readers in the Midwest. With that in mind, I'd like to offer a free copy of my new novel "Together We Jump" to the first three kind Midwestern folks to respond.
Thanks to you all for your love of books:)
One lucky writer, Ken
May 24, 2013
No Place Like Home
They are lovely, the two trees in the gloaming. On this almost summer evening, the sun is setting. The world is soft pastels. This turns the two trees darker, delineating them so I can almost pick out individual branches from five miles away. The two trees are clearly visible from many places in my hometown because they sit together and alone atop a hill, two lovely sentinels on an undeveloped swath of land.
This alone makes me happy. But there is something else about the trees that makes my heart lift. They are a reminder of something important to all of us.
If you live in Ventura you know these trees. We call them Two Trees. We are a simple town without pretention. Many towns – probably every town, if you know the town well enough – have an icon. The world bursts with iconic landmarks. They are usually quite grand. Paris has The Eiffel Tower. New York has the Statue of Liberty. Sydney, the Opera House. Boston has Fenway Park.
These are nice icons, but I prefer the small ones. The ones that dissolve as the sun sets.
They are interesting, our Two Trees (I capitalize them because while they are only two trees among the world’s many, they are important to us). Some say they were planted as a beacon for seagoing ships, to aid captains in making Ventura landfall. I have been told that on certain sailing charts you can still find the Hill of the Trees, marking Ventura. I like this story. Ships have romance, and in this day and age of Google Earth the thought of scanning the horizon for two trees has a certain charm.
The Trees’ real story is interesting too. In 1898 Joseph Sexton, a horticulturist of note, planted 13 Blue Gum Eucalyptus saplings atop the hill. It’s said he did this for the best of reasons; because he thought they would look nice. Mr. Sexton had an eye for beauty. He had good sense too. He hired his neighbor Owen Marron to do the planting and subsequent caretaking. In 1898 it was a hellish business hauling water, by horseback and burro, up the steep hillside. Mr. Marron’s substantial efforts saw the trees survive for five years. Then a wildfire burned eight of them to the ground.
Nature is fickle and indiscriminate. Man can just be imbecilic. Five trees remained atop the hill until Halloween pranksters cut three trees down. A citizens group replaced the three trees. Eventually others came along and again cut three of the five trees down, proving that that there is indeed a gene for the IQ of pudding.
Two Trees has also narrowly escaped fires on several occasions. In 2005 our town watched as an inferno blazed over the ridgeline toward the trees (and our town), black smoke and hypnotizing flame filling the day and night sky. Firefighters again performed the miracle they do. Five years later a group of teens, hiking from a local park to Two Trees, found a lighter on the ground. Someone decided to see if it worked. It did. In the teens’ defense, they called 911. Again firefighters saved our Trees.
Our Two Trees are survivors. They are also part of the fabric of our town. One year, for their senior prank, the seniors at Ventura High School moved an entire classroom of desks up to Two Trees. One must salute such creativity.
People are drawn to our Two Trees. They have a hypnotic quality, a far-reaching siren call not normal for simple Blue Gums. Once, after the Trees again skirted fiery disaster, our local paper printed a letter from a woman immensely relieved that the Trees were still there. “I scan the horizon so avidly that my eyes are nearly popping out of their sockets until I finally sight my favorite view: Two Tree Hill. I would have mourned their loss,” the woman wrote from her home in Florida.
Technically, our Two Trees aren’t really our Two Trees. The hill on which they sit is privately owned by the Dabney-Lloyd Corporation. There are “No Trespassing” signs and barbed wire, which many blithely ignore. On Yelp, purveyor of all things opinion, trail users note, “To get to the top you have to cross a "no trespassing" sign, so beware to the worry warts”, and “just go under the barbed wire and you are on your way.” Proving that everyone has a facebook page, our Two Trees regularly post entries welcoming people up (“Happy Valentines day! If you have no one to celebrate with, remember, we're always here for you.”). I wonder if both trees collaborate on the posts and if their internet access is better up there.
Not all visitors are respectful. I am told there is often trash at the base of Trees (and along the trail) and that visitors have carved their names in the bark of the Trees. What possesses some people to claim things for their own I don’t know, but I believe it has something to do with pudding.
It is true the view from atop the hill where the two eucalyptus sprout from the hardscrabble earth is stunning, but the last time I enjoyed it was roughly 1987. I would very much like to hike up and enjoy the view again. Sometimes people ask me to go with them. But in the end I always decline because I would not feel right walking up unless I allowed you to walk through my backyard, and I don’t want to do that because you would see how lax I am with yard work. Plus I am afraid the pudding people will carve their names in our empty planter.
But I still enjoy the Trees very, very much. I see them every day and they make me smile every time. It’s not just the way they look, romantic (it is Two Trees) sentinels back-dropped by all manner of skies, and a sign that our town stills see the wisdom of undeveloped hillsides. It’s what they mean.
Technically the Trees are not mine, any more than the Eiffel Tower belongs to the Parisienne. But when it comes to life, technicality should be swiftly discarded. In my mind the Trees are mine. And each time I see them they whisper the same thing to me. If your town has an icon – and I’m betting it does – you understand.
This is your home. This is where you belong.
This alone makes me happy. But there is something else about the trees that makes my heart lift. They are a reminder of something important to all of us.
If you live in Ventura you know these trees. We call them Two Trees. We are a simple town without pretention. Many towns – probably every town, if you know the town well enough – have an icon. The world bursts with iconic landmarks. They are usually quite grand. Paris has The Eiffel Tower. New York has the Statue of Liberty. Sydney, the Opera House. Boston has Fenway Park.
These are nice icons, but I prefer the small ones. The ones that dissolve as the sun sets.
They are interesting, our Two Trees (I capitalize them because while they are only two trees among the world’s many, they are important to us). Some say they were planted as a beacon for seagoing ships, to aid captains in making Ventura landfall. I have been told that on certain sailing charts you can still find the Hill of the Trees, marking Ventura. I like this story. Ships have romance, and in this day and age of Google Earth the thought of scanning the horizon for two trees has a certain charm.
The Trees’ real story is interesting too. In 1898 Joseph Sexton, a horticulturist of note, planted 13 Blue Gum Eucalyptus saplings atop the hill. It’s said he did this for the best of reasons; because he thought they would look nice. Mr. Sexton had an eye for beauty. He had good sense too. He hired his neighbor Owen Marron to do the planting and subsequent caretaking. In 1898 it was a hellish business hauling water, by horseback and burro, up the steep hillside. Mr. Marron’s substantial efforts saw the trees survive for five years. Then a wildfire burned eight of them to the ground.
Nature is fickle and indiscriminate. Man can just be imbecilic. Five trees remained atop the hill until Halloween pranksters cut three trees down. A citizens group replaced the three trees. Eventually others came along and again cut three of the five trees down, proving that that there is indeed a gene for the IQ of pudding.
Two Trees has also narrowly escaped fires on several occasions. In 2005 our town watched as an inferno blazed over the ridgeline toward the trees (and our town), black smoke and hypnotizing flame filling the day and night sky. Firefighters again performed the miracle they do. Five years later a group of teens, hiking from a local park to Two Trees, found a lighter on the ground. Someone decided to see if it worked. It did. In the teens’ defense, they called 911. Again firefighters saved our Trees.
Our Two Trees are survivors. They are also part of the fabric of our town. One year, for their senior prank, the seniors at Ventura High School moved an entire classroom of desks up to Two Trees. One must salute such creativity.
People are drawn to our Two Trees. They have a hypnotic quality, a far-reaching siren call not normal for simple Blue Gums. Once, after the Trees again skirted fiery disaster, our local paper printed a letter from a woman immensely relieved that the Trees were still there. “I scan the horizon so avidly that my eyes are nearly popping out of their sockets until I finally sight my favorite view: Two Tree Hill. I would have mourned their loss,” the woman wrote from her home in Florida.
Technically, our Two Trees aren’t really our Two Trees. The hill on which they sit is privately owned by the Dabney-Lloyd Corporation. There are “No Trespassing” signs and barbed wire, which many blithely ignore. On Yelp, purveyor of all things opinion, trail users note, “To get to the top you have to cross a "no trespassing" sign, so beware to the worry warts”, and “just go under the barbed wire and you are on your way.” Proving that everyone has a facebook page, our Two Trees regularly post entries welcoming people up (“Happy Valentines day! If you have no one to celebrate with, remember, we're always here for you.”). I wonder if both trees collaborate on the posts and if their internet access is better up there.
Not all visitors are respectful. I am told there is often trash at the base of Trees (and along the trail) and that visitors have carved their names in the bark of the Trees. What possesses some people to claim things for their own I don’t know, but I believe it has something to do with pudding.
It is true the view from atop the hill where the two eucalyptus sprout from the hardscrabble earth is stunning, but the last time I enjoyed it was roughly 1987. I would very much like to hike up and enjoy the view again. Sometimes people ask me to go with them. But in the end I always decline because I would not feel right walking up unless I allowed you to walk through my backyard, and I don’t want to do that because you would see how lax I am with yard work. Plus I am afraid the pudding people will carve their names in our empty planter.
But I still enjoy the Trees very, very much. I see them every day and they make me smile every time. It’s not just the way they look, romantic (it is Two Trees) sentinels back-dropped by all manner of skies, and a sign that our town stills see the wisdom of undeveloped hillsides. It’s what they mean.
Technically the Trees are not mine, any more than the Eiffel Tower belongs to the Parisienne. But when it comes to life, technicality should be swiftly discarded. In my mind the Trees are mine. And each time I see them they whisper the same thing to me. If your town has an icon – and I’m betting it does – you understand.
This is your home. This is where you belong.
May 15, 2013
Handprints No Longer Small
Hi Wonderful Readers:
I write a weekly column out here in Southern California (kcet.org/westiseden). With kids growing up and graduation on the doorstoop, I wrote this column -- perhaps something any parent could have written.
HANDPRINTS NO LONGER SMALL
In these graduating times, cause for celebration and remembering: smeary handprints won't forever stay messy or small.
We are driving to preschool. Puffy white clouds roll about in a Southern California sky. He is two weeks into his first year at preschool.
"Oh man," he says. "I want to go to preschool forever."
Today is his last day of preschool. We hold hands briefly before he breaks away to do a little spinning dance. When he finishes, he regards me.
"Do you know why I like preschool, Dad?"
I can think of countless answers, but I know he already has one.
"Why?"
"Because they don't make me take a nap."
Today is his first day of kindergarten. Before going off to her teaching job, his lovely mother has picked out a handsome outfit and packed a yummy lunch. She's also taped a sweet note and a Dennis the Menace cartoon to his Winnie the Pooh backpack. In the cartoon Dennis is on the swings at the playground. Leaning over his shoulder he says to another boy, I just play part-time. My real job is going to kindergarten.
When I wake him, he looks bigger.
"Are you getting bigger?" I ask. "I told you not to get bigger."
He hops out of bed.
"I forgot," he says.
He is in second grade. Sometimes we still walk to school holding hands, but more often he is very busy bending to examine curious items and pocket pretty much all of them so that we may find them in the washing machine later.
We are not holding hands when he regards me somberly.
"Dad? Can I go to a close college so I can stay with you guys?"
Today is his last day of elementary school. They hold a Maypole dance; everyone performing an intricate over and under dance of ribbons and laughter that was impossible five years ago. I walk home with a neighbor whose daughter was also part of the Maypole graduation. This neighbor, he is always joking. Today he is not joking. Today he looks at me and says, "You know how you never think about things ending? But it all comes to an end. There's a last time they'll ride on your knee but you don't know it then. A lot of things happen like that."
Today is the first day of middle school. During middle school he has decided he will bike to school with his friends, but on the first day I drive him. We pass his elementary school on the way. In the gauzy early morning sunshine kids play on the playground.
He is silent for a moment and then he says, "Look at all the little kids."
As we near the middle school the sidewalks are packed with students. Some of the girls don't look like middle schoolers at all. He is sitting in the backseat. When I glance in the rear view mirror he is bug-eyed.
Today is the first day of high school. When I drop him off at school he looks back for only the required second. I work at home, my office walls plastered with mementos. Very unprofessional, but they are far more important to me than work. On this day when I get home a small handprint outlined with a few messily glued seashells catches my eye. Beneath the hand print is a poem many parents know. It speaks of frustration and smeared handprints on the furniture and walls and fingers that won't stay either messy or small. The words of the poem are fading away.
I stand there far longer than I should.
In thirty eight school days he graduates. Not that any high school senior -- here in Ventura or across the country -- is counting. Last night while he was upstairs in the shower his beautiful mother turned to me. Her hands were shaking just a little. I knew this because she was holding a plate and I was trying to figure if I would have time to snatch it out of the air.
"Remember how he always liked to be held?" she asked. "I miss that closeness."
We both smiled half smiles.
Today at school he heard from the college he wants to go to. Regarding phone conversations or texts, he does not prattle on. Between classes he sent a text.
I got in.
The college is close to us, but we know he will not be staying with us.
I write a weekly column out here in Southern California (kcet.org/westiseden). With kids growing up and graduation on the doorstoop, I wrote this column -- perhaps something any parent could have written.
HANDPRINTS NO LONGER SMALL
In these graduating times, cause for celebration and remembering: smeary handprints won't forever stay messy or small.
We are driving to preschool. Puffy white clouds roll about in a Southern California sky. He is two weeks into his first year at preschool.
"Oh man," he says. "I want to go to preschool forever."
Today is his last day of preschool. We hold hands briefly before he breaks away to do a little spinning dance. When he finishes, he regards me.
"Do you know why I like preschool, Dad?"
I can think of countless answers, but I know he already has one.
"Why?"
"Because they don't make me take a nap."
Today is his first day of kindergarten. Before going off to her teaching job, his lovely mother has picked out a handsome outfit and packed a yummy lunch. She's also taped a sweet note and a Dennis the Menace cartoon to his Winnie the Pooh backpack. In the cartoon Dennis is on the swings at the playground. Leaning over his shoulder he says to another boy, I just play part-time. My real job is going to kindergarten.
When I wake him, he looks bigger.
"Are you getting bigger?" I ask. "I told you not to get bigger."
He hops out of bed.
"I forgot," he says.
He is in second grade. Sometimes we still walk to school holding hands, but more often he is very busy bending to examine curious items and pocket pretty much all of them so that we may find them in the washing machine later.
We are not holding hands when he regards me somberly.
"Dad? Can I go to a close college so I can stay with you guys?"
Today is his last day of elementary school. They hold a Maypole dance; everyone performing an intricate over and under dance of ribbons and laughter that was impossible five years ago. I walk home with a neighbor whose daughter was also part of the Maypole graduation. This neighbor, he is always joking. Today he is not joking. Today he looks at me and says, "You know how you never think about things ending? But it all comes to an end. There's a last time they'll ride on your knee but you don't know it then. A lot of things happen like that."
Today is the first day of middle school. During middle school he has decided he will bike to school with his friends, but on the first day I drive him. We pass his elementary school on the way. In the gauzy early morning sunshine kids play on the playground.
He is silent for a moment and then he says, "Look at all the little kids."
As we near the middle school the sidewalks are packed with students. Some of the girls don't look like middle schoolers at all. He is sitting in the backseat. When I glance in the rear view mirror he is bug-eyed.
Today is the first day of high school. When I drop him off at school he looks back for only the required second. I work at home, my office walls plastered with mementos. Very unprofessional, but they are far more important to me than work. On this day when I get home a small handprint outlined with a few messily glued seashells catches my eye. Beneath the hand print is a poem many parents know. It speaks of frustration and smeared handprints on the furniture and walls and fingers that won't stay either messy or small. The words of the poem are fading away.
I stand there far longer than I should.
In thirty eight school days he graduates. Not that any high school senior -- here in Ventura or across the country -- is counting. Last night while he was upstairs in the shower his beautiful mother turned to me. Her hands were shaking just a little. I knew this because she was holding a plate and I was trying to figure if I would have time to snatch it out of the air.
"Remember how he always liked to be held?" she asked. "I miss that closeness."
We both smiled half smiles.
Today at school he heard from the college he wants to go to. Regarding phone conversations or texts, he does not prattle on. Between classes he sent a text.
I got in.
The college is close to us, but we know he will not be staying with us.
March 26, 2013
A new book, some nice reviews
Hi Fellow Readers:
I have a new novel coming out in the next two weeks. It's called "Together We Jump" and I'm pretty excited about it. We sent out advance copies and received several nice reviews, including one from the prestigious Los Angeles Review. Although beauty, in the end, is in the eye of the reader, the Los Angeles Review kindly said “McAlpine’s use of language and plot made every page turn … the eerily realistic plot and dialogue only attests to the writer’s skills.” I’m starting up a giveaway on March 30 (ten copies) so maybe you can be the judge for free. Otherwise, the novel will be available soon from all the online retailers.
Thank you for reading books.
All the best, Ken
I have a new novel coming out in the next two weeks. It's called "Together We Jump" and I'm pretty excited about it. We sent out advance copies and received several nice reviews, including one from the prestigious Los Angeles Review. Although beauty, in the end, is in the eye of the reader, the Los Angeles Review kindly said “McAlpine’s use of language and plot made every page turn … the eerily realistic plot and dialogue only attests to the writer’s skills.” I’m starting up a giveaway on March 30 (ten copies) so maybe you can be the judge for free. Otherwise, the novel will be available soon from all the online retailers.
Thank you for reading books.
All the best, Ken
November 15, 2012
Quiet Service and Qualities that Matter
In this cacophonous age when almost everyone is shouting to be noticed, quiet speaks loudly. Quiet also reigns in the cemeteries here in Ventura County and across the country where Veteran’s Day was just celebrated, although such an occasion, and the men and women we recognize, should not be relegated to one day.
I know they aren’t, because we all know veterans. Sometimes we encounter them in chance fashion. Sometimes they are family. I have been lucky to meet my share of both. And almost always they remind me of traits that are important to remember, character not missing in our self-trumpeting times, but simply running quietly beneath the surface, serving to make our world a better place.
Just last week I met a World War 2 veteran. We met in a bookstore. Leon Cooper is short and stooped with a shock of gray hair and a peppy leprechaun’s manner. Leon served in the Pacific.
When I thanked him for serving our country, his eyebrows bounced and he cackled.
“I had lots of help,” he said.
Leon is feeble. He was giving a talk at the book store, discussing several books, fiction and non-fiction, he has written about his war experiences. When it came time to talk the bookstore owner had to help him step up on to the podium, raised slightly higher than a curb, after which Leon leaned a tad shakily into the microphone and gave a mischievous grin.
“My legs aren’t so good, but my mind still works,” he said.
Leon’s frailty should not blind you to the fact he fought in six of the Pacific’s most hellish battles, starting with Tarawa and ending with Iwo Jima. As you might imagine, he had his share of difficult moments. He viewed this simply. “I told myself, ‘This is what you’ve been dealt, deal with it’,” he said. Leon speaks his mind now, and on mistimed occasion he spoke his mind then. One remark to a superior officer earned him thirty days confinement in his quarters. “It was great,” he said. “All I did was eat, sleep and read.”
Leon spoke of his war experiences, many of them horrible, in a light-hearted manner. His face hardened only once, just before we parted.
“I was mad at everything when I got out,” he said. “They called it shell shock. They didn’t know what to do back then, all of us home and wandering around loose. They call it post traumatic something now.” He paused. I thought he was searching for the last part of the definition, but I did not give it to him. I have learned that, when it comes to veterans, it pays to stay quiet. Finally Leon nodded, answer at hand. “I was in a number of battles. A needless waste of human lives and treasures.”
When I was sure he was finished – I knew this because he cocked his head boyishly and looked at me as if I was a prize salamander he might consider jarring -- I told him how much I had enjoyed listening to him.
“Get it while you can,” he crowed in a barker’s voice. “There aren’t many of us left,” and with a last eyebrow bob he minced away.
My Uncle Jim was cut from similar cloth. I’m not going to give his last name because Uncle Jim was a private man. I will tell you that Uncle Jim was a soldier and that Leon reminded me of him, two men of similar age, possessed of humility, acceptance, a quiet manner and, at times, a wicked sense of humor. Some say their generation was different, but I don’t think this is so.
Uncle Jim was such a private man that for most of his life he shared little to nothing of his war experiences. For years he sat quietly while all about him everyone else did all the talking. When I was a boy our family would often drive up to visit Uncle Jim and Aunt Margaret in their small upstate New York town, joining other family for the town’s July 4th celebration. At the end of three days, Uncle Jim might have said as many words.
I loved those Fourth of July celebrations. They were something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a small town that sits beside a lake and celebrates our country’s independence with pancake breakfasts and modest fireworks and an old fashioned parade. But Uncle Jim didn’t always enjoy it. One year the town leaders asked him to be in the parade; he was, after all, a decorated war veteran. As you know by now Uncle Jim was not inclined to take center stage, but he agreed (I suspect there was some family prodding). He was assigned a car to ride in and the parade organizers festooned it with balloons. When Uncle Jim saw the balloons he became more agitated than I had ever seen him. He refused to ride in the parade and he refused to give a reason. That evening, fireworks exploding over the dark lake, he sat with, and walled off from, his family.
The years passed and Uncle Jim grew old. He began to talk. A lot, at least for him. Still he rarely talked about war. But bits and pieces crept out. I received a letter, eight typed pages: above the first page was the simple title “My Life”. The pages were typed by his daughter who wisely thought he should write down a few things about his life, and wisely recognized that Uncle Jim’s penmanship was atrocious. Almost all eight pages were about war because much of Uncle Jim’s life was occupied with war. He was the son of an army officer. He graduated from West Point. He was a career Army officer. He went first to Korea, then to Vietnam. Much to his surprise, he rose to the rank of Colonel.
Regarding his experiences in Korea, he wrote simply of the snow and the cold and the long marches and the Chinese everywhere. He wrote about one battle. The recounting was matter of fact. A fellow platoon leader, under heavy fire from the Chinese, retreated from high ground. Uncle Jim decided the high ground needed to be retaken. He turned to the men behind him. Follow me, he said and up the hill he went with no idea if anyone would follow. On the typewritten page in front of me I see the reason for his decision. I don’t know why I volunteered to go up there and see if I could help out?
The account of the battle itself is short. Uncle Jim did not prattle on when speaking and his writing is the same. They retook the hill. There was shooting. Men died. Air support arrived. The battle turned and so did the Chinese. Eleven days later Uncle Jim was decorated for his actions. He wrote, I was decorated with the DSC for my actions on the 13th. The men who were with me reported that I had done things I do not remember doing.
The DSC is the Distinguished Service Cross.
Not long ago Uncle Jim visited us again in Ventura. He was in his mid-eighties. He was growing shorter and more stooped by the year and he walked slowly with a cane, though this did not stop him from getting in his car once a year and driving across the country alone to visit. He had become far more social, so while he was visiting I made a point of taking him places, where often, with no help from me, he met people. They just came up to him. He had an odd magnetic quality. Perhaps they saw beneath the surface.
One afternoon we went to Tony’s Pizzaria, little more than a shack just back from the beach but some of the best pizza you’ll find. By this stage of his life Uncle Jim existed mostly on coffee, but he ate pizza to keep me company. We were eating quietly when the owner came out and sat down at our picnic table. He introduced himself as Johnny.
“I saw your medal,” he said.
Johnny had been a soldier and so he recognized the small fragment of the Distinguished Service Cross affixed to Uncle Jim’s worn jacket. The two men talked of mud, and rain, and sleepless nights and soldiers who simply disappeared in an unholy burst. Johnny was Italian and outgoing. He did most of the talking but Uncle Jim volunteered information when he was asked, and so I heard stories I had never heard before and I gained an added appreciation for men and women who can experience things most of us cannot imagine and then return to life and discuss them over pizza on a sunny afternoon.
I won’t tell you the specifics. Their conversation was a private matter between them. But I will tell you what Johnny said to me after Uncle Jim rose and began shuffling off to the car.
Grasping my arm Johnny said, “I knew he was a soldier before I saw the pin.”
I thanked Johnny for sitting with us. I could tell Uncle Jim had enjoyed the conversation, although I knew it had tired him.
“It was my pleasure,” Johnny said. “He is a soldier and a gentleman. There aren’t many of his kind left.”
There are of course, for World War 2 gave way to Korea, and Korea to Vietnam, and Vietnam to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and men and women quietly served in them all.
Uncle Jim passed away three months ago.
He was buried at West Point with full military honors, more fanfare than he would have liked.
I know they aren’t, because we all know veterans. Sometimes we encounter them in chance fashion. Sometimes they are family. I have been lucky to meet my share of both. And almost always they remind me of traits that are important to remember, character not missing in our self-trumpeting times, but simply running quietly beneath the surface, serving to make our world a better place.
Just last week I met a World War 2 veteran. We met in a bookstore. Leon Cooper is short and stooped with a shock of gray hair and a peppy leprechaun’s manner. Leon served in the Pacific.
When I thanked him for serving our country, his eyebrows bounced and he cackled.
“I had lots of help,” he said.
Leon is feeble. He was giving a talk at the book store, discussing several books, fiction and non-fiction, he has written about his war experiences. When it came time to talk the bookstore owner had to help him step up on to the podium, raised slightly higher than a curb, after which Leon leaned a tad shakily into the microphone and gave a mischievous grin.
“My legs aren’t so good, but my mind still works,” he said.
Leon’s frailty should not blind you to the fact he fought in six of the Pacific’s most hellish battles, starting with Tarawa and ending with Iwo Jima. As you might imagine, he had his share of difficult moments. He viewed this simply. “I told myself, ‘This is what you’ve been dealt, deal with it’,” he said. Leon speaks his mind now, and on mistimed occasion he spoke his mind then. One remark to a superior officer earned him thirty days confinement in his quarters. “It was great,” he said. “All I did was eat, sleep and read.”
Leon spoke of his war experiences, many of them horrible, in a light-hearted manner. His face hardened only once, just before we parted.
“I was mad at everything when I got out,” he said. “They called it shell shock. They didn’t know what to do back then, all of us home and wandering around loose. They call it post traumatic something now.” He paused. I thought he was searching for the last part of the definition, but I did not give it to him. I have learned that, when it comes to veterans, it pays to stay quiet. Finally Leon nodded, answer at hand. “I was in a number of battles. A needless waste of human lives and treasures.”
When I was sure he was finished – I knew this because he cocked his head boyishly and looked at me as if I was a prize salamander he might consider jarring -- I told him how much I had enjoyed listening to him.
“Get it while you can,” he crowed in a barker’s voice. “There aren’t many of us left,” and with a last eyebrow bob he minced away.
My Uncle Jim was cut from similar cloth. I’m not going to give his last name because Uncle Jim was a private man. I will tell you that Uncle Jim was a soldier and that Leon reminded me of him, two men of similar age, possessed of humility, acceptance, a quiet manner and, at times, a wicked sense of humor. Some say their generation was different, but I don’t think this is so.
Uncle Jim was such a private man that for most of his life he shared little to nothing of his war experiences. For years he sat quietly while all about him everyone else did all the talking. When I was a boy our family would often drive up to visit Uncle Jim and Aunt Margaret in their small upstate New York town, joining other family for the town’s July 4th celebration. At the end of three days, Uncle Jim might have said as many words.
I loved those Fourth of July celebrations. They were something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a small town that sits beside a lake and celebrates our country’s independence with pancake breakfasts and modest fireworks and an old fashioned parade. But Uncle Jim didn’t always enjoy it. One year the town leaders asked him to be in the parade; he was, after all, a decorated war veteran. As you know by now Uncle Jim was not inclined to take center stage, but he agreed (I suspect there was some family prodding). He was assigned a car to ride in and the parade organizers festooned it with balloons. When Uncle Jim saw the balloons he became more agitated than I had ever seen him. He refused to ride in the parade and he refused to give a reason. That evening, fireworks exploding over the dark lake, he sat with, and walled off from, his family.
The years passed and Uncle Jim grew old. He began to talk. A lot, at least for him. Still he rarely talked about war. But bits and pieces crept out. I received a letter, eight typed pages: above the first page was the simple title “My Life”. The pages were typed by his daughter who wisely thought he should write down a few things about his life, and wisely recognized that Uncle Jim’s penmanship was atrocious. Almost all eight pages were about war because much of Uncle Jim’s life was occupied with war. He was the son of an army officer. He graduated from West Point. He was a career Army officer. He went first to Korea, then to Vietnam. Much to his surprise, he rose to the rank of Colonel.
Regarding his experiences in Korea, he wrote simply of the snow and the cold and the long marches and the Chinese everywhere. He wrote about one battle. The recounting was matter of fact. A fellow platoon leader, under heavy fire from the Chinese, retreated from high ground. Uncle Jim decided the high ground needed to be retaken. He turned to the men behind him. Follow me, he said and up the hill he went with no idea if anyone would follow. On the typewritten page in front of me I see the reason for his decision. I don’t know why I volunteered to go up there and see if I could help out?
The account of the battle itself is short. Uncle Jim did not prattle on when speaking and his writing is the same. They retook the hill. There was shooting. Men died. Air support arrived. The battle turned and so did the Chinese. Eleven days later Uncle Jim was decorated for his actions. He wrote, I was decorated with the DSC for my actions on the 13th. The men who were with me reported that I had done things I do not remember doing.
The DSC is the Distinguished Service Cross.
Not long ago Uncle Jim visited us again in Ventura. He was in his mid-eighties. He was growing shorter and more stooped by the year and he walked slowly with a cane, though this did not stop him from getting in his car once a year and driving across the country alone to visit. He had become far more social, so while he was visiting I made a point of taking him places, where often, with no help from me, he met people. They just came up to him. He had an odd magnetic quality. Perhaps they saw beneath the surface.
One afternoon we went to Tony’s Pizzaria, little more than a shack just back from the beach but some of the best pizza you’ll find. By this stage of his life Uncle Jim existed mostly on coffee, but he ate pizza to keep me company. We were eating quietly when the owner came out and sat down at our picnic table. He introduced himself as Johnny.
“I saw your medal,” he said.
Johnny had been a soldier and so he recognized the small fragment of the Distinguished Service Cross affixed to Uncle Jim’s worn jacket. The two men talked of mud, and rain, and sleepless nights and soldiers who simply disappeared in an unholy burst. Johnny was Italian and outgoing. He did most of the talking but Uncle Jim volunteered information when he was asked, and so I heard stories I had never heard before and I gained an added appreciation for men and women who can experience things most of us cannot imagine and then return to life and discuss them over pizza on a sunny afternoon.
I won’t tell you the specifics. Their conversation was a private matter between them. But I will tell you what Johnny said to me after Uncle Jim rose and began shuffling off to the car.
Grasping my arm Johnny said, “I knew he was a soldier before I saw the pin.”
I thanked Johnny for sitting with us. I could tell Uncle Jim had enjoyed the conversation, although I knew it had tired him.
“It was my pleasure,” Johnny said. “He is a soldier and a gentleman. There aren’t many of his kind left.”
There are of course, for World War 2 gave way to Korea, and Korea to Vietnam, and Vietnam to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and men and women quietly served in them all.
Uncle Jim passed away three months ago.
He was buried at West Point with full military honors, more fanfare than he would have liked.
October 17, 2012
Cancer, Procrastination and Hope’s Bucket List
Recently I met a woman. She was friendly and pleasant, with a warm smile. I listened to her closely when she spoke. I did this, in part, to return the favor. She had listened closely, and even asked questions, during the book talk I had just given.
“I want to go away and see things,” she told me.
Many people say this sort of thing. Not so many have Stage 3 cancer. She had a bucket list, she said. Ambling around the country, going nowhere in particular, was on it.
As a travel writer, and someone with a talent for getting lost, I have considerable experience with aimless ambling. Wittingly and unwittingly, I have seen my share of back alleys and back roads. Partly because she was so obviously sincere in her desire to travel, partly because talking with people with cancer produces in me a sort of hyper enthusiasm, as if a loopy smile and a lot of hand waving can wipe the disease away, I prattled on and on about the joys of travel. The chance to find hidden corners. The chance to meet people. The chance to see the sunrise in an unfamiliar place. The chance for so many chances. Here I may have paused.
She listened quietly through my babble. When I finished she said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The woman’s name is Hope.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here in Ventura County there are events everywhere. An open house at the new Rolling Oaks Radiology Women's Imaging Center in Thousand Oaks. A “Relay for Life” event on the track at Camarillo High School, honoring cancer survivors and raising money to fight the disease. A cancer symposium, "Surviving and Thriving", at the Ventura Beach Marriott. Another symposium, "How to Cheat, Treat and Beat Breast Cancer", at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. On the first day of October our local paper the Ventura County Star printed the day’s edition in pink.
If I was a newspaper journalist I would have written this column at the beginning of the month. But I’m not. I’m writing this at the end of the month, hoping it carries into November and maybe on. Cancer will carry on. Procrastination too.
I don’t know if Hope has breast cancer. She didn’t say. She might have breast cancer, she might not. Sadly, there are many cancer options.
I may have been frenetically enthusiastic in my delivery, but I told my new friend Hope the truth. The greatest joy of travel is the people you meet. Travel has seen me to breathtaking places and moments -- lightning forking over the snowy Andes, mantas swooping through blue Hawaiian waters, evening shadows purpling the Grand Canyon’s deeps – but even these moments pale in comparison with the people I’ve met. They have surprised me. They have bewitched me. They have welcomed me into their towns, and sometimes their homes. Sometimes they have cheated me, or stolen from me or just been rude and cold. People come in many packages. But most of the people have been good, and many of them have given me a gift, a little piece of them I will carry with me forever. Lessons in living.
Once, kayaking off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, I met a man named David. It was Thanksgiving and brutally cold, a hard, damp wind producing an uncountable army of whitecaps on Pamlico Sound. When I met David, he was bobbing at the mouth of Ocracoke’s tiny harbor. I saw him before he saw me. His head was down, consulting the navigational chart spread across the deck of his kayak. He had a compass too.
It is bad form to paddle silently past the only other kayaker for miles.
“Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said.
It was, in a frozen, gray, victory-at-sea fashion.
David’s head came up slowly, as if reluctant to leave the chart. He appeared to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell, as only a small portion of his face emerged from the bubble-wrap of protective gear. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit, and perhaps a bluish complexion.
David looked at me like the idiot I was.
“It’s a little cold,” he said.
We bobbed in the water, the wind beating between us, and exchanged pleasantries. David had come to Ocracoke for the long Thanksgiving weekend.
He didn’t smile as we talked, but his tone was amiable. I had drifted close enough to see that he had a small plastic orb affixed to the shoulder of his jacket. Technologically speaking, it resembled one of those Christmas snow globes, only instead of swirling snowflakes, it contained a winking light.
His eyes followed mine. “GPS,” he said. “I’m one of those people who like to plan.”
David asked where I was from, and when I told him California, he said his wife’s family lived in California. “My wife died about a year and a half ago,” he said. “Of cancer.”
The wind whistled.
“I was just paddling in a sluice back there,” David said, more to himself than me. “There were herons and egrets. It probably goes back two miles. I was paddling back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.’”
I paddled to David’s sluice, a ribbon of gin clear water little more than paddle-length wide in most places, snaking into the interior of the island. I floated over its mirror surface to the whisper of marsh grass. Out of the wind it was warm. Birds sang, and egrets, snow-white and silent, swooped low, dropping below the grass line to their own secrets.
David was right, it was beautiful, but now, ten years later, it is David I remember, bobbing quietly beneath the marled sky, a meticulous man who couldn’t plan for everything.
“You know, she loved to kayak,” he said. “She really wanted to come here, but we just kept putting it off.”
You don’t have to travel far to meet people with cancer or bucket lists. I met Hope ten minutes from home. I’m glad I did.
Before we parted Hope gave me another warm smile, but there was something harder in her eyes.
“I mean it,” she said. “I’m really going to do this.”
If Hope reads this, I hope she doesn’t mind that I wrote about her. But I hope she doesn’t read it. I hope she’s miles from the internet, sitting on a weathered dock in the Florida Keys, watching baitfish ripple the surface as the sun rises.
By then it probably won’t be October. Not that it matters. Any month is as good for cancer as it is for following through on a bucket list.
“I want to go away and see things,” she told me.
Many people say this sort of thing. Not so many have Stage 3 cancer. She had a bucket list, she said. Ambling around the country, going nowhere in particular, was on it.
As a travel writer, and someone with a talent for getting lost, I have considerable experience with aimless ambling. Wittingly and unwittingly, I have seen my share of back alleys and back roads. Partly because she was so obviously sincere in her desire to travel, partly because talking with people with cancer produces in me a sort of hyper enthusiasm, as if a loopy smile and a lot of hand waving can wipe the disease away, I prattled on and on about the joys of travel. The chance to find hidden corners. The chance to meet people. The chance to see the sunrise in an unfamiliar place. The chance for so many chances. Here I may have paused.
She listened quietly through my babble. When I finished she said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The woman’s name is Hope.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here in Ventura County there are events everywhere. An open house at the new Rolling Oaks Radiology Women's Imaging Center in Thousand Oaks. A “Relay for Life” event on the track at Camarillo High School, honoring cancer survivors and raising money to fight the disease. A cancer symposium, "Surviving and Thriving", at the Ventura Beach Marriott. Another symposium, "How to Cheat, Treat and Beat Breast Cancer", at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. On the first day of October our local paper the Ventura County Star printed the day’s edition in pink.
If I was a newspaper journalist I would have written this column at the beginning of the month. But I’m not. I’m writing this at the end of the month, hoping it carries into November and maybe on. Cancer will carry on. Procrastination too.
I don’t know if Hope has breast cancer. She didn’t say. She might have breast cancer, she might not. Sadly, there are many cancer options.
I may have been frenetically enthusiastic in my delivery, but I told my new friend Hope the truth. The greatest joy of travel is the people you meet. Travel has seen me to breathtaking places and moments -- lightning forking over the snowy Andes, mantas swooping through blue Hawaiian waters, evening shadows purpling the Grand Canyon’s deeps – but even these moments pale in comparison with the people I’ve met. They have surprised me. They have bewitched me. They have welcomed me into their towns, and sometimes their homes. Sometimes they have cheated me, or stolen from me or just been rude and cold. People come in many packages. But most of the people have been good, and many of them have given me a gift, a little piece of them I will carry with me forever. Lessons in living.
Once, kayaking off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, I met a man named David. It was Thanksgiving and brutally cold, a hard, damp wind producing an uncountable army of whitecaps on Pamlico Sound. When I met David, he was bobbing at the mouth of Ocracoke’s tiny harbor. I saw him before he saw me. His head was down, consulting the navigational chart spread across the deck of his kayak. He had a compass too.
It is bad form to paddle silently past the only other kayaker for miles.
“Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said.
It was, in a frozen, gray, victory-at-sea fashion.
David’s head came up slowly, as if reluctant to leave the chart. He appeared to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell, as only a small portion of his face emerged from the bubble-wrap of protective gear. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit, and perhaps a bluish complexion.
David looked at me like the idiot I was.
“It’s a little cold,” he said.
We bobbed in the water, the wind beating between us, and exchanged pleasantries. David had come to Ocracoke for the long Thanksgiving weekend.
He didn’t smile as we talked, but his tone was amiable. I had drifted close enough to see that he had a small plastic orb affixed to the shoulder of his jacket. Technologically speaking, it resembled one of those Christmas snow globes, only instead of swirling snowflakes, it contained a winking light.
His eyes followed mine. “GPS,” he said. “I’m one of those people who like to plan.”
David asked where I was from, and when I told him California, he said his wife’s family lived in California. “My wife died about a year and a half ago,” he said. “Of cancer.”
The wind whistled.
“I was just paddling in a sluice back there,” David said, more to himself than me. “There were herons and egrets. It probably goes back two miles. I was paddling back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.’”
I paddled to David’s sluice, a ribbon of gin clear water little more than paddle-length wide in most places, snaking into the interior of the island. I floated over its mirror surface to the whisper of marsh grass. Out of the wind it was warm. Birds sang, and egrets, snow-white and silent, swooped low, dropping below the grass line to their own secrets.
David was right, it was beautiful, but now, ten years later, it is David I remember, bobbing quietly beneath the marled sky, a meticulous man who couldn’t plan for everything.
“You know, she loved to kayak,” he said. “She really wanted to come here, but we just kept putting it off.”
You don’t have to travel far to meet people with cancer or bucket lists. I met Hope ten minutes from home. I’m glad I did.
Before we parted Hope gave me another warm smile, but there was something harder in her eyes.
“I mean it,” she said. “I’m really going to do this.”
If Hope reads this, I hope she doesn’t mind that I wrote about her. But I hope she doesn’t read it. I hope she’s miles from the internet, sitting on a weathered dock in the Florida Keys, watching baitfish ripple the surface as the sun rises.
By then it probably won’t be October. Not that it matters. Any month is as good for cancer as it is for following through on a bucket list.
October 4, 2012
A Lion of Literature – and Life
It is a pity to be so superficial, especially regarding a literary icon, but one of the things I remember most about my first encounter with Ray Bradbury was the man’s hair. The first time I saw him speak was in Oxnard some 25 year ago. He was electric. The crowd was transfixed, bewitched, beguiled and stunned. He laughed. He shouted. He raised his hands to the fluorescent lighting. His passions ran far and wide, although apparently they did not include a comb. His snow white hair ran in every direction too, as if, immediately before arriving, he had flunked an electrical re-wiring final. He may have actually been electric.
Bradbury, who sadly (but maybe not for him – new and greater adventures await!) passed away this past June at 91, is back in the news again, which is definitely a good thing because the author of, most famously, “Fahrenheit 451”, reminds us of how we might live.
He is in the news because Ventura filmmaker and artist Michael O’Kelly has made the documentary film called “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”. The full-length feature film covers Bradbury’s remarkable creative career and, equally exciting, offers a personal look at a charming, witty and wholly unique man. O’Kelly, a personal friend of Bradbury’s, made the film for all the right reasons. “I wanted to make a film that would inspire other people, especially kids, to read and write,” he told a reporter. “The message is if you don’t read and write, it’s very hard to think. If you can’t think clearly, it’s hard to find who you are and how you fit into the world.” I should also mention that the November 11th screening at the Century 10 Theater in downtown Ventura is a pre-release benefit for, among other good causes, local libraries. Ray Bradbury loved libraries. I can already see him waving his hands (tickets are available at the Ventura Visitors & Convention Bureau, 420 East Santa Clara Street or from www.venturafilmsociety.com).
Ray Bradbury waved his hands a lot. I know this because I saw him speak numerous times. He slowed down as he grew old, but in his younger days, standing somewhere in the vicinity of the speaker’s dais (the rest of him didn’t stay still either), he exhorted and waved his hands about as if conducting some madcap symphony only he could hear. On one unforgettable occasion he waved his hands right in my face, dispensing advice that became one of the pillars of my own life.
But this column is about a greater man. Ray Bradbury was the author of “Fahrenheit 451”, yes. He also (take a deep breath) wrote “The Martian Chronicles” and “The Illustrated Man”, penned episodes for “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Moby Dick”, wrote plays, headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles, consulted on the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the original exhibit housed in Epcot’s Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World and read poetry every day. The man had creative ADHD and forty-eight hours in his day.
I provide this resume because I am hoping you might pass this column on to your kids, or maybe read it to them – or if you don’t have kids, find some -- and there’s a chance they don’t know who Ray Bradbury is, in the same way young people don’t know the Beatles or how to ride in a car and look at the scenery. I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s just that nowadays things move very, very fast – faster, possibly, than even Ray Bradbury could have imagined – and in that rapid passing, priceless things dissipate in the vapor trail.
Ray Bradbury wrote lots of great stories, and if they haven’t already, your kids should read some of them. His mind, like his hair, went everywhere. What if? Why? Why the hell not? A keen observation, a twist and a turn, and stories leapt from his mind to the page. Once, infuriated by a fashion shoot he saw in Harper’s Bazaar in which emaciated runway models posed and postured in front of poor natives in a Puerto Rican backstreet, he whipped off “Sun and Shadow”, the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins a Bazaar photographer’s afternoon by sidling into every picture and dropping his pants. How fun is that?
But Ray Bradbury also dispensed an equal amount of wonderful advice. About writing, yes, but just as often, about life. For Bradbury the two were inextricably intertwined. Self-consciousness, he said, is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all. Read poetry every day of your life (If your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him, he fetchingly wrote). Run. Seize your time. Stuff your senses with it, touch it, smell it, taste it. That we are alive is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it is awarded us.
Wise counsel, every word, and Bradbury had tons more, making it difficult to pick a favorite, but not for me.
Be a child of one’s time.
When your kids start reading Ray Bradbury, perhaps they should start with this. It’s taken from one of my favorite Bradbury books, called “Zen in the Art of Writing”; no surprise now, a book of writing advice that seamlessly transfers to life.
By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor… When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.
Ray Bradbury got up and bolted. He plunged smack dab into the wellspring of life. I don’t have to close my eyes to see him away from the podium, hopping about like a flea at the gates of a boarding kennel.
It was after that first talk-cum-jitterbug that Ray Bradbury waved his hands in my face. I was a young reporter for a weekly newspaper in Ventura, sent to cover Bradbury’s talk. With an ink stain blossoming in one pant pocket where a pen had exploded and a shirt I had obviously ironed by hand I was lucky just to get in. Compounding my luck, someone in charge of the event took pity on me. When the talk was over and Bradbury finished speaking with the knot of admirers who rushed the stage, this kind man signaled to him.
And then Ray Bradbury was moving through the crowd to talk to me, and my heart was doing back flips while my tongue affixed itself gummily to the roof of my mouth. When Bradbury’s eyes found me he didn’t look right through me, he looked right into me. In the last instant before he pulled up barely a nose length away, I remember thinking, ‘What does this man have to teach me?’, a queer thought in retrospect as I would later find out that Bradbury was likely thinking the same thing. He was curious about everyone, even dumbstruck reporters who would never ever appear in a fashion shoot in Harper’s Bazaar.
Since it was clear I was not going to speak, he did.
“Well young man, obviously you’re a writer.” I think he glanced at my pocket, but I’m not sure. “Good for you.”
I knew I should ask him what his next project was – a short story, a new book, lunch with Ronald Reagan -- I was a newspaper reporter after all, a slave to breaking news. But I also knew how long he had been pinned against the stage by his admirers and I saw how his eyes, though kind, went to the exit. There was something else in his eyes too. In that nervous instant I couldn’t quite grasp it, although I know what it is now
“If you had one word of advice, what would it be?”
His eyes left the exit. They fixed on mine and he smiled at me as if we had just both received the first one-way ticket to Mars.
“One word?” he asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Follow your dreams with delightful passion,” he said, waving his hands, “like a child,” and then he was gone, his hair nearly dusting both sides of the door jamb.
On November 11th I will stand in line to see “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”, my heart racing. I will seize it, breath it, stuff my senses with it, embrace it with passion.
Chronologically I am not so young anymore. But thanks in part to Ray Bradbury, the calendar no longer matters to me.
Bradbury, who sadly (but maybe not for him – new and greater adventures await!) passed away this past June at 91, is back in the news again, which is definitely a good thing because the author of, most famously, “Fahrenheit 451”, reminds us of how we might live.
He is in the news because Ventura filmmaker and artist Michael O’Kelly has made the documentary film called “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”. The full-length feature film covers Bradbury’s remarkable creative career and, equally exciting, offers a personal look at a charming, witty and wholly unique man. O’Kelly, a personal friend of Bradbury’s, made the film for all the right reasons. “I wanted to make a film that would inspire other people, especially kids, to read and write,” he told a reporter. “The message is if you don’t read and write, it’s very hard to think. If you can’t think clearly, it’s hard to find who you are and how you fit into the world.” I should also mention that the November 11th screening at the Century 10 Theater in downtown Ventura is a pre-release benefit for, among other good causes, local libraries. Ray Bradbury loved libraries. I can already see him waving his hands (tickets are available at the Ventura Visitors & Convention Bureau, 420 East Santa Clara Street or from www.venturafilmsociety.com).
Ray Bradbury waved his hands a lot. I know this because I saw him speak numerous times. He slowed down as he grew old, but in his younger days, standing somewhere in the vicinity of the speaker’s dais (the rest of him didn’t stay still either), he exhorted and waved his hands about as if conducting some madcap symphony only he could hear. On one unforgettable occasion he waved his hands right in my face, dispensing advice that became one of the pillars of my own life.
But this column is about a greater man. Ray Bradbury was the author of “Fahrenheit 451”, yes. He also (take a deep breath) wrote “The Martian Chronicles” and “The Illustrated Man”, penned episodes for “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Moby Dick”, wrote plays, headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles, consulted on the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the original exhibit housed in Epcot’s Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World and read poetry every day. The man had creative ADHD and forty-eight hours in his day.
I provide this resume because I am hoping you might pass this column on to your kids, or maybe read it to them – or if you don’t have kids, find some -- and there’s a chance they don’t know who Ray Bradbury is, in the same way young people don’t know the Beatles or how to ride in a car and look at the scenery. I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s just that nowadays things move very, very fast – faster, possibly, than even Ray Bradbury could have imagined – and in that rapid passing, priceless things dissipate in the vapor trail.
Ray Bradbury wrote lots of great stories, and if they haven’t already, your kids should read some of them. His mind, like his hair, went everywhere. What if? Why? Why the hell not? A keen observation, a twist and a turn, and stories leapt from his mind to the page. Once, infuriated by a fashion shoot he saw in Harper’s Bazaar in which emaciated runway models posed and postured in front of poor natives in a Puerto Rican backstreet, he whipped off “Sun and Shadow”, the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins a Bazaar photographer’s afternoon by sidling into every picture and dropping his pants. How fun is that?
But Ray Bradbury also dispensed an equal amount of wonderful advice. About writing, yes, but just as often, about life. For Bradbury the two were inextricably intertwined. Self-consciousness, he said, is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all. Read poetry every day of your life (If your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him, he fetchingly wrote). Run. Seize your time. Stuff your senses with it, touch it, smell it, taste it. That we are alive is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it is awarded us.
Wise counsel, every word, and Bradbury had tons more, making it difficult to pick a favorite, but not for me.
Be a child of one’s time.
When your kids start reading Ray Bradbury, perhaps they should start with this. It’s taken from one of my favorite Bradbury books, called “Zen in the Art of Writing”; no surprise now, a book of writing advice that seamlessly transfers to life.
By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor… When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.
Ray Bradbury got up and bolted. He plunged smack dab into the wellspring of life. I don’t have to close my eyes to see him away from the podium, hopping about like a flea at the gates of a boarding kennel.
It was after that first talk-cum-jitterbug that Ray Bradbury waved his hands in my face. I was a young reporter for a weekly newspaper in Ventura, sent to cover Bradbury’s talk. With an ink stain blossoming in one pant pocket where a pen had exploded and a shirt I had obviously ironed by hand I was lucky just to get in. Compounding my luck, someone in charge of the event took pity on me. When the talk was over and Bradbury finished speaking with the knot of admirers who rushed the stage, this kind man signaled to him.
And then Ray Bradbury was moving through the crowd to talk to me, and my heart was doing back flips while my tongue affixed itself gummily to the roof of my mouth. When Bradbury’s eyes found me he didn’t look right through me, he looked right into me. In the last instant before he pulled up barely a nose length away, I remember thinking, ‘What does this man have to teach me?’, a queer thought in retrospect as I would later find out that Bradbury was likely thinking the same thing. He was curious about everyone, even dumbstruck reporters who would never ever appear in a fashion shoot in Harper’s Bazaar.
Since it was clear I was not going to speak, he did.
“Well young man, obviously you’re a writer.” I think he glanced at my pocket, but I’m not sure. “Good for you.”
I knew I should ask him what his next project was – a short story, a new book, lunch with Ronald Reagan -- I was a newspaper reporter after all, a slave to breaking news. But I also knew how long he had been pinned against the stage by his admirers and I saw how his eyes, though kind, went to the exit. There was something else in his eyes too. In that nervous instant I couldn’t quite grasp it, although I know what it is now
“If you had one word of advice, what would it be?”
His eyes left the exit. They fixed on mine and he smiled at me as if we had just both received the first one-way ticket to Mars.
“One word?” he asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Follow your dreams with delightful passion,” he said, waving his hands, “like a child,” and then he was gone, his hair nearly dusting both sides of the door jamb.
On November 11th I will stand in line to see “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”, my heart racing. I will seize it, breath it, stuff my senses with it, embrace it with passion.
Chronologically I am not so young anymore. But thanks in part to Ray Bradbury, the calendar no longer matters to me.
September 12, 2012
Believe in Magic (and forget the naysayers)
Hi Wonderful Readers:
As I send this our oldest son, who appears in the essay below, is out in the living room packing up his things for his second year of college. Believe they will grow up, believe they will move on. And, maybe if we’ve done our job, they’ll continue to believe too…
BELIEVE (and forget the naysayers)
We are standing at the edge of a dock looking out at the harbor. The water is still as ice, mirroring the reflection of pelicans sweeping a gray sky. Just off our toes, small rivulets of oil eddy. A soggy tatter of whole wheat bread floats just beyond this sheen, skewered by a paper clip bent into a hook and tethered to a makeshift fishing pole.
Adults are long past the day when they would root about in a backyard or the woods, searching for just the right equipment. They won’t rummage patiently through drawers, fingers working through jumbled messes until they find scotch tape, string and just the right paper. But a five-year-old will. First Cullen found a bamboo stick. Tongue working the corners of his mouth, he cut, then taped, one by one, tiny paper eyelets along the length of the pole. Carefully he ran the string through the eyelets, and then tied a paper clip to the end. None of this meticulous preparation brings us any closer to catching a fish, but a five-year-old also patiently ignores the naysayers too. Off we drove, fishing pole, bucket and bag of bread in hand.
Standing on the dock, line drooping into the water, we have already made many decisions. We have decided there is little chance of a sperm whale taking the bread (The water is too shallow). We have decided that if it does, it will probably take the pole too, along with the rest of the dock. We have decided we will keep what we catch in our bucket, and then catch a second fish so it will have a friend. When the bucket brims, we’ll tip it back into the harbor so the fish can go home.
We talk about different things, Cullen and I. How deep pelicans dive. What fun it is to swim. Why the Valentine’s Day hearts he is making for school have arrows through them.
After thirty minutes, all that’s in our bucket is a strand of kelp. It doesn’t matter to me. I am enjoying this game for what it is. But one of us is here for fish.
Cullen speaks to the water.
“It would be okay if I just caught a little fish.”
Plumbing the reservoir of my fishing knowledge, I suggest a slight change in technique.
“Instead of letting the bread just float, try pulling it across the water,” I say.
“Make it fly?”
“Pull gently.”
I see the seagulls watching us. In short order the bread may very well fly.
“Maybe we should just try fishing from the other end of the dock,” Cullen says, but he stays where he is, pulling the bread in and tossing it back out.
“It would be okay if we caught a really, really small fish,” he says.
We wait for a nibble. We wait some more. The sky turns purple. The dock lights flick on. The first chill of night touches our faces. The breeze is picking up. The guy wires of the sailboats chime.
“Maybe we should go,” says Cullen.
In the near dark I can still see the hopeful way he looks at me.
“No,” I say. “We should keep trying.”
I wait for the hug I deserve, but Cullen ignores me. He crouches quickly, and peers into the water. The fishing pole is statue still.
“Dad,” he hisses.
I crouch beside him. I see nothing. The water is murky and the falling darkness isn’t helping.
“What?”
At first I think he hasn’t heard me. I start to speak, but the child has become the father.
“Shhhhhh. Wait.”
I do. I wait until my knees are killing me. I wait until I know it’s time to go home. Enough charades. It’s time for practical things like baths and dinner.
A small finger extends cautiously.
“Here it comes,” says Cullen. “Look.”
In all my years of poking around this harbor, I’ve never seen a bat ray. This one soars just beneath the bread, the edges of its wings lifting and rippling like curtains in a breeze.
“Flying,” says Cullen.
The bat ray makes two more slow passes beneath our dissipating clump of bread before turning away.
Cullen stands.
“Yep,” he says certainly and winds up the string.
I empty the kelp from bucket. I would say I’m sorry we didn’t catch anything, but I know it doesn’t matter to either of us.
We clatter up the dock ramp and stand beneath the blue halo of a dock light.
Cullen takes my hand. He looks up into the light.
“An iceberg,” he says.
I have learned this lesson before. I will, no doubt, have to learn it again. Adults are as slow as they are ploddingly practical. But right now, in this moment, the wall separating reality and possibility lays in happy ruins at our feet.
A dark string of pelicans glides past.
“Pterodactyls,” I say.
“Yes,” says Cullen.
As I send this our oldest son, who appears in the essay below, is out in the living room packing up his things for his second year of college. Believe they will grow up, believe they will move on. And, maybe if we’ve done our job, they’ll continue to believe too…
BELIEVE (and forget the naysayers)
We are standing at the edge of a dock looking out at the harbor. The water is still as ice, mirroring the reflection of pelicans sweeping a gray sky. Just off our toes, small rivulets of oil eddy. A soggy tatter of whole wheat bread floats just beyond this sheen, skewered by a paper clip bent into a hook and tethered to a makeshift fishing pole.
Adults are long past the day when they would root about in a backyard or the woods, searching for just the right equipment. They won’t rummage patiently through drawers, fingers working through jumbled messes until they find scotch tape, string and just the right paper. But a five-year-old will. First Cullen found a bamboo stick. Tongue working the corners of his mouth, he cut, then taped, one by one, tiny paper eyelets along the length of the pole. Carefully he ran the string through the eyelets, and then tied a paper clip to the end. None of this meticulous preparation brings us any closer to catching a fish, but a five-year-old also patiently ignores the naysayers too. Off we drove, fishing pole, bucket and bag of bread in hand.
Standing on the dock, line drooping into the water, we have already made many decisions. We have decided there is little chance of a sperm whale taking the bread (The water is too shallow). We have decided that if it does, it will probably take the pole too, along with the rest of the dock. We have decided we will keep what we catch in our bucket, and then catch a second fish so it will have a friend. When the bucket brims, we’ll tip it back into the harbor so the fish can go home.
We talk about different things, Cullen and I. How deep pelicans dive. What fun it is to swim. Why the Valentine’s Day hearts he is making for school have arrows through them.
After thirty minutes, all that’s in our bucket is a strand of kelp. It doesn’t matter to me. I am enjoying this game for what it is. But one of us is here for fish.
Cullen speaks to the water.
“It would be okay if I just caught a little fish.”
Plumbing the reservoir of my fishing knowledge, I suggest a slight change in technique.
“Instead of letting the bread just float, try pulling it across the water,” I say.
“Make it fly?”
“Pull gently.”
I see the seagulls watching us. In short order the bread may very well fly.
“Maybe we should just try fishing from the other end of the dock,” Cullen says, but he stays where he is, pulling the bread in and tossing it back out.
“It would be okay if we caught a really, really small fish,” he says.
We wait for a nibble. We wait some more. The sky turns purple. The dock lights flick on. The first chill of night touches our faces. The breeze is picking up. The guy wires of the sailboats chime.
“Maybe we should go,” says Cullen.
In the near dark I can still see the hopeful way he looks at me.
“No,” I say. “We should keep trying.”
I wait for the hug I deserve, but Cullen ignores me. He crouches quickly, and peers into the water. The fishing pole is statue still.
“Dad,” he hisses.
I crouch beside him. I see nothing. The water is murky and the falling darkness isn’t helping.
“What?”
At first I think he hasn’t heard me. I start to speak, but the child has become the father.
“Shhhhhh. Wait.”
I do. I wait until my knees are killing me. I wait until I know it’s time to go home. Enough charades. It’s time for practical things like baths and dinner.
A small finger extends cautiously.
“Here it comes,” says Cullen. “Look.”
In all my years of poking around this harbor, I’ve never seen a bat ray. This one soars just beneath the bread, the edges of its wings lifting and rippling like curtains in a breeze.
“Flying,” says Cullen.
The bat ray makes two more slow passes beneath our dissipating clump of bread before turning away.
Cullen stands.
“Yep,” he says certainly and winds up the string.
I empty the kelp from bucket. I would say I’m sorry we didn’t catch anything, but I know it doesn’t matter to either of us.
We clatter up the dock ramp and stand beneath the blue halo of a dock light.
Cullen takes my hand. He looks up into the light.
“An iceberg,” he says.
I have learned this lesson before. I will, no doubt, have to learn it again. Adults are as slow as they are ploddingly practical. But right now, in this moment, the wall separating reality and possibility lays in happy ruins at our feet.
A dark string of pelicans glides past.
“Pterodactyls,” I say.
“Yes,” says Cullen.
September 5, 2012
Coming of Age Advice
Hi Friends:
A little piece of advice, not that I'm qualified to give it. This weeks' column for KCET...
Not long ago I received a phone call from a friend whose son was turning eighteen. My friend said that as his son set out in the world (or at least went off to college, where he could stay out all night without repercussion), he would need some words to follow. For his son’s birthday, my friend was asking a few select men to give him their words of advice.
No doubt the astute reader has already seen several glaring holes in this request. For one thing, my friend was not soliciting advice from women, though perhaps he realized that one day his son would get married and this would take care of itself. It is also true that we were all eighteen once, and I distinctly remember what I was interested in eighteen and it did not include advice from fifty-something codgers. I paused for a delicious moment, remembering the paths down which my youthful interests had led me.
“Ken? Are you still there?”
Yes, but it’s a miracle I am and my survival into my twenties and beyond was not due to intellect.
“So,” my friend asked, “are you in?”
Of course, I told him. I’d be happy to jot down some advice, but it wouldn’t be easy. Probably the one thing I am now certain of at fifty-three is that I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice. Could I have until, say, his 30th birthday?
My friend, who is a newspaper editor and accustomed to wheedling writers, demurred. He would need the advice in a week.
After he hung up, I gave myself some advice. This is important, potentially life-changing stuff. My friend’s son would probably keep this advice forever, consulting it on youthful Friday nights before going out and breaking every dictum I gave him, running his callused fingers along its curling yellow edges in the waning years of his own life in bittersweet remembrance. Start writing right now, I advised myself, so that by the end of the week you’ll have something worthy of an eighteenth birthday.
I can only say that when I finally did sit down to pen the following advice, it was not as soon as I hoped but not as late as anyone’s 30th birthday…
Love someone. Love more than someone. This one’s beyond words. But, selling it short, when you love, and are loved in return, you’ll know a joy and satisfaction that’s unimaginable. There are tough times too. But if just the thought of that person brings a smile to your face, the tough times will pass.
Be curious. Life is a wonderful gift. There are amazing things in the very smallest places. Don’t miss them. Don’t become inured to them. Erase the word cynic from your vocabulary. Don’t give a damn if other people see you peeking behind the curtain.
Be respectful of others. They may not look like you, they might not act like you, they may make mistakes and sometimes do the wrong thing like you, but they are just trying to make their way in life like you. Plus sometimes you’ll be surprised how just a little respect and reaching out on your part will come back to you in happy ways. And you can learn so much from those who seem different from you. Treat them with grace.
Listen. Not easy to do, but no one ever learned anything from the sound of their own voice.
Be a good friend. One day you’ll probably have a family and it’s easy to surround yourself with just them. Raising children is one of the most important things you’ll do – if not the most important thing – but don’t forget the friends in your life. They may need you. You may need them. Plus they’re just fun.
Have fun. Don’t get too serious about things. Life really can be short. Life really is a gift. Do ridiculous things. Look ridiculous (but don’t make other people look ridiculous). Be rash. This is it. Enjoy the hell out of it.
Do one thing every day that scares you. I’m stealing this from Eleanor Roosevelt because it’s one of my favorite pieces of advice. You’ll figure out how to apply it.
Do things for others. This will do for you too.
Never stop appreciating. The roof over your head, the freedom to do what you want, a healthy breath, parents who love you.
Be yourself.
That was it. I kept it short. As I said, my friend is a newspaper editor. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to do what he does.
I don’t know if my friend’s son ever read what I wrote. He left town and went off to college, where he is no doubt occupied with plenty of other things he doesn’t want to read. But, if by some miracle this last bit of advice falls into his hands, I hope he takes a minute to think about it.
There’s nothing wrong with advice from others. But it’s your life, and your one chance. The best advice is the honest advice you give yourself.
(originally published by KCET)
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_foc...
A little piece of advice, not that I'm qualified to give it. This weeks' column for KCET...
Not long ago I received a phone call from a friend whose son was turning eighteen. My friend said that as his son set out in the world (or at least went off to college, where he could stay out all night without repercussion), he would need some words to follow. For his son’s birthday, my friend was asking a few select men to give him their words of advice.
No doubt the astute reader has already seen several glaring holes in this request. For one thing, my friend was not soliciting advice from women, though perhaps he realized that one day his son would get married and this would take care of itself. It is also true that we were all eighteen once, and I distinctly remember what I was interested in eighteen and it did not include advice from fifty-something codgers. I paused for a delicious moment, remembering the paths down which my youthful interests had led me.
“Ken? Are you still there?”
Yes, but it’s a miracle I am and my survival into my twenties and beyond was not due to intellect.
“So,” my friend asked, “are you in?”
Of course, I told him. I’d be happy to jot down some advice, but it wouldn’t be easy. Probably the one thing I am now certain of at fifty-three is that I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice. Could I have until, say, his 30th birthday?
My friend, who is a newspaper editor and accustomed to wheedling writers, demurred. He would need the advice in a week.
After he hung up, I gave myself some advice. This is important, potentially life-changing stuff. My friend’s son would probably keep this advice forever, consulting it on youthful Friday nights before going out and breaking every dictum I gave him, running his callused fingers along its curling yellow edges in the waning years of his own life in bittersweet remembrance. Start writing right now, I advised myself, so that by the end of the week you’ll have something worthy of an eighteenth birthday.
I can only say that when I finally did sit down to pen the following advice, it was not as soon as I hoped but not as late as anyone’s 30th birthday…
Love someone. Love more than someone. This one’s beyond words. But, selling it short, when you love, and are loved in return, you’ll know a joy and satisfaction that’s unimaginable. There are tough times too. But if just the thought of that person brings a smile to your face, the tough times will pass.
Be curious. Life is a wonderful gift. There are amazing things in the very smallest places. Don’t miss them. Don’t become inured to them. Erase the word cynic from your vocabulary. Don’t give a damn if other people see you peeking behind the curtain.
Be respectful of others. They may not look like you, they might not act like you, they may make mistakes and sometimes do the wrong thing like you, but they are just trying to make their way in life like you. Plus sometimes you’ll be surprised how just a little respect and reaching out on your part will come back to you in happy ways. And you can learn so much from those who seem different from you. Treat them with grace.
Listen. Not easy to do, but no one ever learned anything from the sound of their own voice.
Be a good friend. One day you’ll probably have a family and it’s easy to surround yourself with just them. Raising children is one of the most important things you’ll do – if not the most important thing – but don’t forget the friends in your life. They may need you. You may need them. Plus they’re just fun.
Have fun. Don’t get too serious about things. Life really can be short. Life really is a gift. Do ridiculous things. Look ridiculous (but don’t make other people look ridiculous). Be rash. This is it. Enjoy the hell out of it.
Do one thing every day that scares you. I’m stealing this from Eleanor Roosevelt because it’s one of my favorite pieces of advice. You’ll figure out how to apply it.
Do things for others. This will do for you too.
Never stop appreciating. The roof over your head, the freedom to do what you want, a healthy breath, parents who love you.
Be yourself.
That was it. I kept it short. As I said, my friend is a newspaper editor. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to do what he does.
I don’t know if my friend’s son ever read what I wrote. He left town and went off to college, where he is no doubt occupied with plenty of other things he doesn’t want to read. But, if by some miracle this last bit of advice falls into his hands, I hope he takes a minute to think about it.
There’s nothing wrong with advice from others. But it’s your life, and your one chance. The best advice is the honest advice you give yourself.
(originally published by KCET)
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_foc...
August 28, 2012
Jaws Misguided (For anyone who has an understandable, but perhaps one-sided, fear of sharks...
Everyone loves a shark story. The other day, as we tucked into hamburgers at a restaurant a stone’s throw from the beach here in Ventura, a friend told me about a shark he had once spotted only a short distance up the coast.
He leaned forward. People always lean forward when they commence a shark story, as if you can test the veracity of the tale by their breath.
“Dude,’ he said. “We were walking on the beach and we saw this sea lion. It was acting kind of weird and then I saw this big fin. The next thing I knew, the sea lion was gone. Just blood in the water.”
He leaned a little closer.
“Right off the beach, dude.”
He bit down on his burger. I couldn’t help but notice how sharp his teeth were.
I would like to report the name of the beach. It’s a scant sea lion toss from a surf spot I frequent, and this would surely cut down on the summer hordes of visiting inlanders who are currently cart-wheeling down the faces of our waves in truly dangerous fashion. But I am leery of purported shark sightings, even from the ketchup-anointed breath of trusted friends. More important still, with due respect to Hollywood a sighting does not constitute an imminent frenzy of attacks from which even helicopters aren’t safe.
Not long after hearing this story, I received an e-mail from my friend Chuck, linking me to several articles about a recent spate of shark activity off Cape Cod where he lives. The first article reported that a man swimming off Truro was bitten on the foot by a great white. The second article reported that a 12-foot white shark was spotted six feet off a Wellfleet Beach. I waited, but no more e-mails came. It is possible my friend Chuck has been snatched from his living room.
A few days after Chuck’s disappearance a young great white was hauled into our very own Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, caught inadvertently by fishermen who brought the 5-foot male in so researchers could tag it. The shark was released, its’ subsequent tracking now part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Project White Shark”, aimed at preserving great whites and educating the public. Neither is an easy feat. As Peter Benchley once wrote, “It’s hard to build a constituency for an animal that may decide to eat you.”
The root of our ribald shark fears, and the essence of most shark stories, is soundly anchored in our fear of being devoured, although, really, the odds of this are quite long. “We’re not just afraid of predators,” wrote Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. “We’re transfixed by them…”
When my friend told his story, it wasn’t the sea lion out there, it was me. I felt the sea lion’s visceral pain. I’d bet you did too. Eaten by a shark. You do not feel the pain of your fellow citizens killed by vending machines that fall on them after being jostled for a soda or a reluctant quarter. Even though they are also more apt to kill us, we do not fear dogs, cats or cars.
Back to Peter Benchley. Those of you who were around in the 1970s recognize Benchley. He wrote a book called Jaws. In 1975 the book became a movie. For many, the ocean was never the same. Benchley’s world changed too. In the ensuing years his fame earned him time with marine biologists, fishermen, divers and other assorted experts on shark behavior. He came to sorely regret he ever wrote Jaws. He had, he said again and again, unfairly demonized sharks. The real demon was elsewhere.
For a long time now I have kept a file of clippings on sharks. Is has become a very thick file; its girth not unlike that of a great white itself (I know, I could scan all these clippings but I like the way old clippings yellow and the food stains are like a trip down memory lane). Sharks on my mind, I returned to my folder. There were articles about shark fishing tournaments, about shark attacks, about shark feeding operations, about an increase in attacks on sea otters and, my personal favorite, an article uncovering a plan by that devious revolutionary Fidel Castro to launch trained killer sharks against the U.S. To check the veracity of this last story I googled Fidel Castro. Indeed he was still alive, although busy working on a book. Having written several books myself, I can tell you he is too busy to train sharks. It is also true that the same issue of this particular periodical featured a story about a 3-breasted woman and a 3-armed man having a 3-legged baby.
Having spent my life around the ocean, I have some small personal experience with sharks too. Once on a surf trip in Indonesia I jumped from a boat and almost landed square on the back of a blacktip reef shark. I have had the good fortune to dive with sharks on numerous occasions. Once. off Beqa Island in Fiji, I watched two female bull sharks, eight feet long and thick as trash barrels. They moved sleepily at first, investigating the floating chunks of tuna, while we divers, appropriately, knelt on the bottom. Finally one of the bulls opted to feed. In a blink, languid nonchalance turned to focused perfection. In less time than it took you to read (and count) these 14 words she devoured a pot roast chunk of tuna with a series of convulsion that would have snapped the spine of a lesser creature. Then she swung easily up into the sun-splashed shallows, pausing for a moment, thick tail still, while the equatorial sun sent ribbons of light wavering along her sides. Outside of each morning when I wake to my wife, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I also know a man who was attacked by a white shark (he survived). It does happen.
No doubt, few things generate more interest than sharks. I’m betting Benchley had files upon files bursting with shark stories. He certainly knew there was no shortage of reportage. Sharks, he once noted, “are the alpha predator in the food chain of news-making events”.
Wherever Benchley got his information, it changed his mind. He became a champion for sharks, although it’s doubtful as many people read his book Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About Sharks and the Sea as devoured Jaws. He turned from fiction to fact. On average, less than a dozen humans are killed by sharks each year. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year by fishermen. There has been a drastic decline in the numbers of nearly every species of shark. At our hands, Benchley’s white shark may ultimately succumb to extinction.
Forget for a moment the far-ranging ecological repercussions of the elimination of an apex predator. Because there’s a farther ranging point still. One of my most treasured possessions is a dog-eared copy of The Outermost House by Henry Beston. In it Beston writes, “We need another wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Personally I believe my friend’s shark story, just as I believe the surfers a mere hundred yards away were perfectly safe.
And if they weren’t, well that is our part as a stitch in the fabric of this world.
(This column appeared in KCET's "Southern California Focus; http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_foc...
He leaned forward. People always lean forward when they commence a shark story, as if you can test the veracity of the tale by their breath.
“Dude,’ he said. “We were walking on the beach and we saw this sea lion. It was acting kind of weird and then I saw this big fin. The next thing I knew, the sea lion was gone. Just blood in the water.”
He leaned a little closer.
“Right off the beach, dude.”
He bit down on his burger. I couldn’t help but notice how sharp his teeth were.
I would like to report the name of the beach. It’s a scant sea lion toss from a surf spot I frequent, and this would surely cut down on the summer hordes of visiting inlanders who are currently cart-wheeling down the faces of our waves in truly dangerous fashion. But I am leery of purported shark sightings, even from the ketchup-anointed breath of trusted friends. More important still, with due respect to Hollywood a sighting does not constitute an imminent frenzy of attacks from which even helicopters aren’t safe.
Not long after hearing this story, I received an e-mail from my friend Chuck, linking me to several articles about a recent spate of shark activity off Cape Cod where he lives. The first article reported that a man swimming off Truro was bitten on the foot by a great white. The second article reported that a 12-foot white shark was spotted six feet off a Wellfleet Beach. I waited, but no more e-mails came. It is possible my friend Chuck has been snatched from his living room.
A few days after Chuck’s disappearance a young great white was hauled into our very own Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, caught inadvertently by fishermen who brought the 5-foot male in so researchers could tag it. The shark was released, its’ subsequent tracking now part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Project White Shark”, aimed at preserving great whites and educating the public. Neither is an easy feat. As Peter Benchley once wrote, “It’s hard to build a constituency for an animal that may decide to eat you.”
The root of our ribald shark fears, and the essence of most shark stories, is soundly anchored in our fear of being devoured, although, really, the odds of this are quite long. “We’re not just afraid of predators,” wrote Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. “We’re transfixed by them…”
When my friend told his story, it wasn’t the sea lion out there, it was me. I felt the sea lion’s visceral pain. I’d bet you did too. Eaten by a shark. You do not feel the pain of your fellow citizens killed by vending machines that fall on them after being jostled for a soda or a reluctant quarter. Even though they are also more apt to kill us, we do not fear dogs, cats or cars.
Back to Peter Benchley. Those of you who were around in the 1970s recognize Benchley. He wrote a book called Jaws. In 1975 the book became a movie. For many, the ocean was never the same. Benchley’s world changed too. In the ensuing years his fame earned him time with marine biologists, fishermen, divers and other assorted experts on shark behavior. He came to sorely regret he ever wrote Jaws. He had, he said again and again, unfairly demonized sharks. The real demon was elsewhere.
For a long time now I have kept a file of clippings on sharks. Is has become a very thick file; its girth not unlike that of a great white itself (I know, I could scan all these clippings but I like the way old clippings yellow and the food stains are like a trip down memory lane). Sharks on my mind, I returned to my folder. There were articles about shark fishing tournaments, about shark attacks, about shark feeding operations, about an increase in attacks on sea otters and, my personal favorite, an article uncovering a plan by that devious revolutionary Fidel Castro to launch trained killer sharks against the U.S. To check the veracity of this last story I googled Fidel Castro. Indeed he was still alive, although busy working on a book. Having written several books myself, I can tell you he is too busy to train sharks. It is also true that the same issue of this particular periodical featured a story about a 3-breasted woman and a 3-armed man having a 3-legged baby.
Having spent my life around the ocean, I have some small personal experience with sharks too. Once on a surf trip in Indonesia I jumped from a boat and almost landed square on the back of a blacktip reef shark. I have had the good fortune to dive with sharks on numerous occasions. Once. off Beqa Island in Fiji, I watched two female bull sharks, eight feet long and thick as trash barrels. They moved sleepily at first, investigating the floating chunks of tuna, while we divers, appropriately, knelt on the bottom. Finally one of the bulls opted to feed. In a blink, languid nonchalance turned to focused perfection. In less time than it took you to read (and count) these 14 words she devoured a pot roast chunk of tuna with a series of convulsion that would have snapped the spine of a lesser creature. Then she swung easily up into the sun-splashed shallows, pausing for a moment, thick tail still, while the equatorial sun sent ribbons of light wavering along her sides. Outside of each morning when I wake to my wife, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I also know a man who was attacked by a white shark (he survived). It does happen.
No doubt, few things generate more interest than sharks. I’m betting Benchley had files upon files bursting with shark stories. He certainly knew there was no shortage of reportage. Sharks, he once noted, “are the alpha predator in the food chain of news-making events”.
Wherever Benchley got his information, it changed his mind. He became a champion for sharks, although it’s doubtful as many people read his book Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About Sharks and the Sea as devoured Jaws. He turned from fiction to fact. On average, less than a dozen humans are killed by sharks each year. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year by fishermen. There has been a drastic decline in the numbers of nearly every species of shark. At our hands, Benchley’s white shark may ultimately succumb to extinction.
Forget for a moment the far-ranging ecological repercussions of the elimination of an apex predator. Because there’s a farther ranging point still. One of my most treasured possessions is a dog-eared copy of The Outermost House by Henry Beston. In it Beston writes, “We need another wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Personally I believe my friend’s shark story, just as I believe the surfers a mere hundred yards away were perfectly safe.
And if they weren’t, well that is our part as a stitch in the fabric of this world.
(This column appeared in KCET's "Southern California Focus; http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_foc...
