Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 11

Turds. . .

—From CB—

I had been uprooting weeds from the far reaches of our half-acre. Yesterday, after reporting to my wife my nasty encounter with brambles, which I did survive, I mentioned my discovery of turds.

“Some creature is leaving its turds,” I said. “Maybe the coons are back.” We were plagued by raccoons for some time, but they’d gotten a better offer.

She suggested that perhaps it wasn’t turds. It may have been catfood that went bad and rather than put it in the garbage where it would smell, she had dumped it on the pre-Raphaelite edges of our property. (Some friend had thus described the raggedy enchantments of our backyard greenery.)

“So if it’s kind of a lightish brown and not so much turd-shaped as just in a pile, it’s catfood and not a turd.”

“It’s a turd.”

I then launched into a long disquisition on my qualifications for knowing a turd as a turd. I had seen countless turds from multiple species over the course of my life, not excluding my own. I had matured in the years before the signs commanding you to pick up your dog’s exhaust. I held a Stanford Ph.D.

“He who cannot recognize a turd for what it is—if it looks like a turd, is shaped like a turd, smells like a turd—is not qualified to vote next November.”

At last we came to the conclusion that the piles out back were likely what I said they were.

Over the course of our sixty-one years together, we’ve faced many disagreements. They’ve sometimes resulted in grim faces or in shouts, tears, broken china, and once a jar of honey smashed on the wall. We’re not lacking in irrational moments. And yet we seem to have mellowed. Our turd exchange was rife with jokes and laughter.

This wasn’t due to the triviality of the subject. It’s a truism that the greatest battles are fought over the most trivial subjects, as witness academic politics. If you can shrink world issues down to the most trite (yet deeply symbolic) spat, you have the makings of Armageddon.

In our marriage, at least, we’ve generally learned to recognize what’s at stake. In this case, it doesn’t matter if it’s spoiled catfood or turds—you don’t want to step in it. On the national stage—just as ragged and weedy as our backyard—we must keep this in mind as Turd Rapids reaches its crest.

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Woolworm. . .

—From EF—

Our two cats are brother littermates, but about the only thing they have in common is both have four feet and a tail. Garfy (Garfunkel) is a solid, nearly-portly shorthair with a great fondness for naps. Shadow is a speedy longhair with a magnificent tail and one mission in life: to get out the front door. They are house cats, except for the occasional escape, because we live on a very busy country road used by a whole lot of people who drive way too fast. We prefer that our cats not become two-dimensional.

I’ve developed a strategy that looks silly as hell, but usually works. I have an old canvas tote bag with long looped handles, and I’ve put an empty wine bottle in the bottom to give it heft and weight. I call it the “cat plow.” If I’m going out, I turn around with my butt toward the door, stoop over and hang the bag in front of me with its bottom at floor level and keep it in position to block his path. I then scuttle out the door backwards, hunched over and waggling the bag menacingly. Did I mention that this looks silly? Coming in is not as comical, because at least I’m faced forward.

However, this is a vulnerable strategy if CB and I are both trying to get through the door, and it’s specially dicey if he’s carrying something. This Sunday he was behind me with the beach picnic basket and Shadow was extra-determined because I’d been gone for several hours. Zip, out he went.

This is a recent problem, and there have been at least three escapes in the last month. At first, it was enough for me to sit on the front steps rattling the treat jar. Later, Shadow (who is obsessed with eating kitty grass or lettuce or ANYTHING green) was much more interested in the big ferns than treats, and if I moved slowly and quietly I could get within striking distance of the nape of his neck. By now, though, he’d had enough experience of zipping under the porch deck and down alongside the house to the back yard to know that the outside world, all of it, was what he cared about more than anything else. Poor baby, I feel so sorry for his confinement, but my heart would break if something happened to him.

This time I sat on the front steps for nearly an hour, intermittently meowing and calling his name. I only cried once. The cat’s name, Shadow, is partly because he’s a black-smoke tabby, but mostly because he’s almost neurotically bonded to me and wants to be wherever I am. I kept telling myself that eventually he’d come back where he could keep an eye on me, and the challenge would be getting close enough to grab him. I’d only have one chance, and if I missed he’d be off like a shot.

Here he comes. He’s gone all the way around the house and come back through the garden. Now he’s on a patch of warm powdery Sebastopol dirt, left bare and smooth from my putting in a little garden fence to deter the occasional deer, and it is clearly tempting him to lie down and roll around. I suddenly know what to do. “Shadow, you wanna be a Woolworm?” That’s what I call him when he does that cat-thing of lying down in a massive stretch that makes him appear to be two yards long. Being a Woolworm is an invitation to a belly-rub. Sure enough, he flops on his side, stretches way out and flaunts his ginger-colored belly. He’s so intent on the pleasure of Woolworming and getting a belly-rub that he doesn’t put two and two together, and after he gets his belly-rub he’s securely nestled in my arms. Back in the house I fill up the cat-food dishes before collapsing on the couch in a shivering heap. Saved by the Woolworm. This time.

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The Sixties. . .

—From CB—

A Facebook post brought forth comments about the achievements or absurdities of the Sixties. I wrote this in response (with a few edits and additions):

True in part, everything that’s said, as is true for any blanket judgment on any span in history, especially any span when “revolution” was in the air: the 1790’s in France, much of Europe in 1848, the teens and early Twenties in Russia, 1989 in Eastern Europe, etc. Always, huge expectations, massive failures, and radically different judgments from those who survived the slam-dances of those times.

For myself, I’d have signed onto any negative estimates of the Sixties more in the Sixties than I do now. The media darlings—the civil rights struggles, Yippies, the Summer of Love, the peace movement (though we were part of it), etc.—were not a significant part of my world. On the other hand, the period changed the course of my life.

In my world, theatre, the time saw an enormous impulse toward the creation of socially-engaged “ensembles,” and our own versions of that, Theatre X and then The Independent Eye, pulled us out of an academic career into the next 50 years—writing, touring in 38 states, performing for every kind of group, from Off-Broadway to church basements and prisons, and many collaborations. Did we change the world? Not noticeably, but perhaps for specific people.

As with communes, some of those ensembles went belly-up quickly, some lasted for decades, some “matured” into the Establishment, some few still exist with unchanged essentials. Some centered around a guru, others were founded (and often foundered) on a consensus process—a little-understood dynamic, too often devolving into lowest-common-denominator or loudest-voice-wins. But the impulse toward connection, collaboration, and personal stake in the work was profound.

Amazingly, our processes worked well when the issues were creative, less well in business meetings. When we left our first ensemble five years later, we were only two, but we’d learned something about collaboration. Forty-plus years later, we haven’t changed the world, but we fancy we’ve left our campsite cleaner than we found it.

I’ve seen the struggle of groups to hold it together in the face of changing times that come from age or mortality or economics or popular taste. I see my own gropings for an audience for what I write, and I’m seeing the death, one by one, of my colleagues and friends.

But for me, the lessons emerging from the Sixties are (a) work as if you’ll succeed, (b) know that you probably won’t, (c) celebrate the tiny triumphs, and (d) always question the impulse to romanticize yourself.

I suspect that early tribal hunting parties didn’t always come back with their quarry. They went out again and again, learning from their mistakes, and knowing that “Well, fuck, some day we’re all gonna die.” They finally came back the makings of mammoth stew and celebrated all night. Next morning came the realization: “Goddamn, next week we’ll have to go out again. Quick, woman, learn to raise turnips.”

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Interchange. . .

—From EF—

On the way home from the ocean, we got into an interchange that wasn’t so much a disagreement as an experiment in again having a conversation where we don’t subscribe to the same beliefs. Usually I go a certain distance into these and then roll over, paws in the air, and say I quit. I don’t like tussles. I know from experience that we won’t agree.

This time was actually different, and I didn’t roll over, I just did my best to describe why we were clearly on different sides and think why that might be. For once, I felt better about it.

I’m at a loss about what the inciting thing was, but I do remember that ascribing “motive” to action was basic. We really don’t agree on this, never have, and I started to explore why this might be.

What I came to see is that the way the two of us grew up is essentially different. He was a very wanted pregnancy, a difficult birth, and lived with his single mom in a span of horrendous poverty after his dad deserted. She never failed to let him know that he was the light of her life, and that they shared how difficult that could be.

I was a “bought” adoption by an affluent couple ill-suited to parenthood, and I was always told how lucky I was, and how much love and gratitude should be paid. I never formed a core of identity, only a debt.

So our homeward interchange started toward my putting my paws in the air, and then deflected toward how a person’s essential core affects an honest discussion. I think I learned a lot.

There are theories that compare upbringing by a “nurturing mother” versus “disciplinarian father.” My dad was actually the more nurturing parent, but he wasn’t there much, and my mom’s punitive and often abusive role was what formed me. I learned early on that I didn’t have a voice.

We are in a crucial and very dangerous stage of tumultuous politics, which seem to me like a hardening into antagonistic tribes, trending ever closer into condoning violence. Is there anything to be gained by looking into what hurts, what’s a scar from a painful rearing? And if we did see it, what would make a diffrerence?

I know that it made a huge difference to me in my teens to suddenly discover that there were other people like me, that I wasn’t a bizarre loner. It was a temporary high and didn’t keep me from sliding down and down and down into the miasma of lies and desperate illicit acts that I thought might keep my head above water. But when I came face to face with failure and then my mate’s absolute love, my old false carapace had to shatter, and it did.

I was far down, way far down, and I did change. Bit by bit, slowly, painfully, but it happened. Why can’t that happen with our wounded polity? As an irrepressible force I was blessed with an immovable object in a dance of creation. I think it is up to all of us to bond together in a dance that looks like more fun than the dance of death.

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—FROM CB—I write. It’s pointless, I know. I’d surely be s...

—FROM CB—

I write. It’s pointless, I know. I’d surely be serving a higher purpose by breeding goats or juggling live gerbils. But I get up in the morning and write.

I guess if you start it in high school, you’re stuck. I remember writing a poem and feeling despair that it was the best thing I’d ever write. It had to do with crickets. I remember writing a comic sketch for a high school variety show, and amazing, we got laughs. I recall writing a stage play based on a Kafka story; after writing 30 pages of stupidity I gave it up.

And I have clear visions of my senior year English teacher telling me after class, “Conrad, I know how much you want to be a writer, but I don’t think it’s right for you.” To which I said, “Well, Mrs. Coad, I don’t want to be a writer, I want to be an actor.” To which she said, “What a shame, you have such talent.”

I started writing plays as a stage director—translations for production, but they became more and more adaptations. When we broke away from academia to start a theatre ensemble, somebody had to write the stuff, and that was mostly me. I’d written maybe 20 shows before thinking of myself as a writer.

That came when I wrote a play that was selected for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Suddenly I was a “playwright.” With a dual career. For our own company, I wrote the stuff that made us a living on tour; for other theatres, I wrote plays that gave us sudden bursts of royalties and vilification. And I shared the billing with my mate: nothing went out until we were both fully satisfied.

For many, many years. Now age and the Covid plague have blitzed the touring, and our play agent died. The last ten years, we’ve turned to fiction—ten novels, many short stories—with miniscule sales. We’ve never established a recognizable “voice,” certainly no fixed genre: the story becomes the story it wants to be.

For the first time, we’re writing separately, though we edit each other mercilessly—Liz writing memoir, I flash fiction (very short stuff). I realize this has always been a calling: for our own performance, we’ve always had a show of short sketches in rep (maybe 250 over the years), and I once wrote a radio series of 65 90-second dramas. One chapbook is out there (14 stories), another imminent (25 stories), and a third chugging up the hill of I-think-I-can.

I ask myself often, why do I write? I might as well ask why I breathe, given the long-range prospects of that hapless endeavor: at some point you stop. I guess I write because i’m a writer.

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The Power of Charlie. . .

—From EF—

Conrad and I have a routine of watching a movie at home every Friday and Saturday. We have a modestly-large Roku screen and a membership in Criterion, so the options are opulent. Sometimes I pick a film, but usually I’m lazy and leave it to him. We’ve developed the habit of often watching a string of works by the same director, or the work of a favorite actor. This weekend we did one of each, and fell in a pit.

I remembered loving “Boyhood,” a Richard Linklater film, and we recently saw his “Before” trilogy—three films done at ten-year intervals with the same partnered characters. I was intrigued at his suggestion that we see two of his earlier films, “Suburbia” and “Slacker.” “Suburbia” gave me a bellyache last week and this week “Slacker” topped that.

That was Friday night. Thursday we’d gotten a Bogart letch and watched an extra movie: “The Harder They Fall.” I found it brilliant and profoundly disturbing. It didn’t help that I knew it was Bogart’s last film, and that he was already dying of cancer. Then “Slacker” put me into a coma. When Saturday came, Conrad suggested that we go ahead and watch a third movie, and proposed Chaplin’s “City Lights.” We’d seen it four or five times before, because you do that with Chaplin, or at least we do. It was exactly what we needed.

Do you know this film? It’s a 1931 silent, bust-a-gut funny and unabashedly romantic. Charlie’s Tramp character encounters a beautiful young blind flower-seller, and circumstances make her think he’s a wealthy toff. He manages to visit her often, never betraying who and what he is, and eventually he gets her the money that rescues her from eviction, pays for a medical miracle that restores her sight, and gives her a nest egg to establish a successful flower shop. He doesn’t know the results of his gift, because he got the money from an actual toff who had adopted him as a best friend, but only when drunk. Sober, he doesn’t know him. The money is reported as theft, and the Tramp goes to jail.

It’s the ending that makes this movie a blessing. When the Tramp has done his time, he goes back to the girl’s street-selling location and doesn’t find her. Her new shop is nearby, and he spots her through the front window and is struck motionless by seeing her again. She sees him from inside, is charmed by having made a “conquest” in the form of this completely dilapidated wretch, and comes out to offer him a flower—the gesture she made long ago when they first met.

What would have been merely a predictably sentimental happy ending is transformed in the final minute. First, the long, still, silent time given to her recognition that this is her “toff” savior—punctuated by her one word, “You?” Then the closeup on his face, as he realizes that she knows. What he does in that silence, if it could be bottled and given like a vaccine, could restore our wounded sanity. Truly. Incandescent joy is rare and healing.      

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Birds Falling. . .

—From CB—

For this week’s blog, I decided to post a story from my chapbook of flash fiction, FLASHES & FLOATERS: 14 FICTIONS. It’s only 649 words long. The chapbook is available at www.DamnedFool.com.

BIRDS FALLING

We had just come back from vacation, I, my wife Kelly and the kids, who didn’t mind missing school—a week down to San Diego to visit friends who were having a rocky time—when the birds began to fall.

They fell mostly at night, very soft plops. You could hear it if you stopped breathing. Then in the morning, nothing. Maybe the homeless eat’em, I joked, and Josh laughed, my son. We thought it must just be local.

That was in May, same time that Kelly was diagnosed and she had to go in for treatments. I drove her back and forth. Once I ran a red light, but I said I was taking my wife for treatments and he didn’t write me up.

Time went on. It was in the papers now, national news, but like biohazards or climate change, it was just one of those things. It upset Kelly a lot. She cared less about herself and more about the birds.

There was all kinds of crazy news. Some blamed the current Administration. A respected dentist cited the prophecy of Isaiah. Pundits recounted evidence of vegan involvement. Intimations of fascist plots gained traction. Choose your truth.

Now they started falling at sun-up, and they’d hit like little cherry bombs. I recalled when my friend Artie, third grade, stuck a firecracker under his sleeping cat. Some people got hit really bad, so they kept the kids off the playgrounds.

I didn’t pay lots of attention, though it was big news when the last Golden Eagle dropped at a shopping mall in Missoula. Our National Bird was kaput. There were calls for investigation, but Kelly was in the last stages.

Next week past the eagle thing, she died, and they nailed me for running a light. I wasn’t thinking.

At the funeral, my niece Jennifer, who’s four, babbled about the birds, and my sister Sandra told her, “Never mind the birds, you should be sad about Aunt Kelly. The birds, they’re like dinosaurs or the Indians, they were nice but they’re gone. In the Bible it says, All things must pass. So shut up with the birds.” Jennifer cried harder, so Sandra said, “You know, maybe there’s birds on the moon or in Outer Space.” But Jennifer cried and the preacher looked over. I can’t remember Sandra ever crying. Maybe she wanted to. Maybe she would some day.

After a month or so, it was still a risk to go out. Now they fell harder, those that were left, exploding like tiny grenades, blowing holes in the roofs of cars. I sat in the house as if stuck in Limbo with nothing to read. Some days came like waterfalls in a rush, others seeped in like syrup over pancakes. I said those things to Sandra when we went out to dinner, and she grinned. Nuff said about Sandra.

They say that all things pass. One morning in August, maybe, the birds began rising up into daylight with their shrill. I’d sit on the porch staring into the sky, hoping for something to touch and smell. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was only listening.

Birds criss-crossed the skies. Sometimes they coalesced into patterns, spelling out words as the sun moved into an autumn slant. This was a time of hope.

School started. The children learned of the Ice Age, and how it passed, how the tribes moved into new valleys and made drawings in caves of the wonders they dreamed. The children still had nightmares, but they heard the new birds at dawn and forgot all the monsters. I even imagined a time when birds would cross across in abundance, having known countless extinctions and taken them all in stride.

I remembered Kelly. Her lips.

Dirty Deeds. . .

—From EF—

I just finished a job I’ve been putting off for way too long. I get like that with some tasks. It may be big and complicated or a runty little thing, like this one was, but if it falls into the deeply-nuts part of my mind it becomes (a) toxic and (b) nearly impossible. I had several of these things nagging me, and CB sensibly said, well, write them down, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you get started. It worked.

We’ve been in this house for 22 years, so the old water-softening system has been chugging along for way longer than that. A tree man came to do a job for us last year, did his thing, and before leaving pointed to a huge scraggly tree at the side of the house. “You got a water softener?” Yup. “Where does the backwash go?” Into a hose that disappears underground at the side of the house. “Well, looks like you’re killing that tree there.” Holy crap.

I needed to cut into the drain hose before it went underground and connect it to a longer drain that went well past the trees, and I had to give it a path that was consistently downhill. That meant a lot of digging and ivy-clearing, but eventually I got the job done. Whaling away with pitchfork and shovel and throwing dirt around felt good, and it made me think of the earlier big dirt-jobs I got handed with this house.

We moved in in 2000, and before long found that the combination of downhill water run-off and a huge network of gopher tunnels had resulted in a lot of dirt migrating to the space under the house. I’m small enough to wriggle through one of the openings that give access, and when I took a powerful light down there I realized that a whole lot of dirt was going to have to go somewhere else. I had a new job. I called it mole duty.

I hauled old shelving boards down there and laid them end-to-end to make a track to the opening, and used old restaurant bus-bins as containers to fill and push. When I had three full bins I’d bang on the floor for Conrad to come get the dirt and give me empty bins. We wound up with a dirt-pile the size of a Buick in the far corner of the back yard, and the dirt underneath the house was clear and level. People said, “Wasn’t that yucky?” Well, no, it was cool and sandy and didn’t have much of a spider population. I didn’t have enough space to get all the way up on hands and knees, but I became very good at elbow-and-belly-wriggling. I got to know the house from the ground up, literally.

The other big dirt-job came about seven years later when the septic man said our leach-lines were clogged and not draining properly. I called around to find out who deals with stuff like that and discovered two things. Roto-rooter people are notorious for making things worse by punching through the walls of the leach-pipes, and going for full-bore excavation costs tens of thousands of dollars. One very nice guy I talked to offered to come take a look, no cost, and he gave me some clues about what we might be able to do ourselves.

I went to the county’s records of our property and found some old pencil-scribbled papers with a sorta-kinda idea where the D-box was—the big drain from the septic tank goes into a square cement box that distributes the flow to the two fifty-foot leach lines. The scribble made it look like it was about three feet down. I did my geometry, translated the scribble to the geography of the front yard, and CB and I started to dig. Three feet—nothing. Four feet—nothing. We hadn’t put a lot of thought into the diameter of our pit because it wasn’t going to be very deep, but by the time we hit concrete it was five feet down and I was the only one who fit in the hole. I’d actually done all the last part of the digging myself, using a special little sharp spade with a very short handle. Once I found the D-box lid and pried it up, I realized that this was going to be my own very private work-space, me and my fifty-foot snake.

I’d called my under-house job “mole duty,” and this became “muskrat duty.” I’d do it for two hours at a time, and it went on for weeks and weeks. The leach pipes were filled with tangled gobs of little roots and clotted mud, and it would sometimes take more that an hour of pushing and cranking the snake to get something loose enough to haul back out. The first time I got a good big hairy one I called it a muskrat.

All the time I was doing muskrat duty the toilets were off-limits, for obvious reasons. We coped. (You don’t want to know.) When my snake made it all the way to the ends of the leach-lines, no more muskrats, we whooped and hollered and flushed madly in celebration.

Actually, I found that I like dirty work.      

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Arrgh!. . .

—From CB—

For the past week, I’ve been flat on my back. Symptoms: occasional mild chills, medium fever, major fatigue. We’ve been regularly testing for Covid, entirely negative. Looking up symptoms of regular flu, it’s some matches, some not. I can say only one thing: it’s the first time I’ve ever felt OLD.

What does that mean? I creep about the house, careful of my balance. I have no urge to write, or rather, I have the urge but it all seems hopeless. Political posts on Facebook seem an exercise in Mad Hatterdom, an aimless spate of flinging about the muffins and teacups meaningfully.

Nothing wants doing, yet the number of things to be done is mountainous. Simply thinking about writing instructions for the vast array of crap and art I’ll pass on to my kids is something that quickly sends me back to the living-room couch for a cat to lie on.

Of course I have my mate to nurse & nurture me, hugging the gloom out periodically and pick up the chores I normally do, so it’s not entirely negative.

It may just be post-partum depression after finishing a novel. It may be dither, writing a vast number of flash fictions but not knowing what to do with them‑given that my saleability is somewhat less than Samuel Beckett or almost anyone else. It may be that I’ve just finished reading Kafka’s COMPLETE STORIES AND PARABLES, and starting another huge novel by William Gaddis. It may be that I see the weeds on our half-acre growing much faster than I can weed. Or it may be that I’m old—I’m 80 for chrissake.

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Some years ago, I wrote a short story, based on a childhood experience. And it came to mind again. Its end:

“So the first time I ever told this story, it was at a party, we were talking about guilt, and this woman said, ‘Well, you didn’t kill anybody, after all.’ No, I’ve always been shy about stuff like that. And at times I’ve said that I saw my stepfather die, but that’s not strictly true: I saw him start to die. Then I ran to get help and didn’t, then stood out on the step until I got too cold. And then I must have gone indoors and found my mom. And grew up, to some degree.

“Maybe that’s what dying is like. You’re out on the porch looking in. You’re there but it isn’t you. The one on the daybed’s not even related to you. You’re somebody else, you’re a little kid who’s confused. You run to get help, but you’re scared to knock. You can’t really say what you need. Then you go back home and it’s buzzing with strangers, so you stand on the steps, very cold, you shiver, like in the privy, feeling dumb and gutless and lost. And you wait for your mother to find you.”

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Critique. . .

—From CB—

A friend replied to a FB post that I was perpetually critical of others’ comments on issues without venturing to post my own ideas. That’s probably true. As for example: In regard to the current Supreme Court, I feel that proposals to impeach several justices or to pack the court are utterly futile and will ultimately turn progressives against the current Administration for “doing nothing,” and while I agree that something should be done, I have no idea what. The fact is that I’m as critical of my own ideas as I am of others’.

I do feel that a great deal of what passes for political dialogue is at worst posturing and at best howls of rage. I tend to vote straight Democrat though surely aware of the party’s shortcomings. I prefer the lesser of two evils rather than the greater of two evils.

And quite true: I avoid confrontation. Until about the time I was in fifth grade, I was in a lot of fistfights. I rarely came out on top. Worse, I rarely remembered what started it. There followed a lifetime of acting and writing for the stage, which confronted me daily with the immense complexity of human behavior. In the pieces that moved me most strongly, the political statement was an impossible dialectic. The characters who most appealed to me were those for whom I felt an equal measure of empathy and revulsion. I could only “take a stand” at the expense of my notion of hydra-headed truth.

Yet I can see that critiques of others’ efforts can have the same depressing effect as posts that urge utter despair or claim America has a record of evil unique in human history—kind of reverse spin on “American exceptionalism.” Better, many would feel, to drive your car into the swamp than just to sit in the parking lot.

Bottom line is that I don’t know what I’ll do till I do it. I think the criticism is just, but I doubt I’ll ever learn to play the piano or some other desirable things. Probably the best I can do is to give more thought to the practical implications of whatever I say out loud and, with that voice in mind, to choose to say it or not.

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