Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 9

West Forest

On Monday morning, the 16th of October, 2017, my third novel, A Dream of Houses, will be available on Kindle.

This is one of the houses I grew up in, and the one I remember most vividly. I had to share a bedroom - and bed - with my little sister, and we didn't really like each other. The windows on the right were ours. My favorite place was the mulberry tree that grew over the fence in the backyard, where I spent hour after hour reading and dreaming and devouring juicy mulberries in season. I spent my teen years in this house, so they were not always happy years. I don't believe a happy teenager does now or ever has existed. Still, there was a front porch swing, and a screened in back porch shaded by a pear tree. There were 8 of us, six kids, and we were quite enough, but we were never a partridge family.

Tags: Peregrinations

How a Novel

gets written. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing today. Not a whole novel, but editing one I’ve already finished. My third. It’s almost ready for its close-up. There are just a very few more lines to double-check. I’ll have it done before close of business tomorrow.

In the meantime, my calendar tells me to write something under the “Prose” tab in The Bookhouse today. But since I haven’t finished reading any books recently, I thought I’d write a little bit about writing. About how I came to actually write my first novel. There was a time – a long, long time – when I didn’t think it possible.

The first and best lesson that it took me far too long to learn is simply that if you write one type-written page a day, in a year you will have 365 of them. And that’s enough for a book. It won’t necessarily be a good book, but you will have written enough to work on, to make it better.

I had no concept of that. I thought that I would need “time to write.” As in, everything is done, every need attended to, and finally I can sit and write – or think about writing. Because writing involves a lot of staring off into space trying to remember the right word or remembering what happened next. More on that in a minute.

The problem with this approach is that everything is never done, and if you are a woman, every need is never attended to and there is never a time to “sit and write.” The first chapters of my first novel were written in stolen time, time when I dreaded being discovered. I couldn’t conceive of the concept of my own time. I was always writing on somebody else’s time.

That novel was The Year of the Crow, and it was begun long years back, when the characters with whom I peopled the novel were living around me every day. I didn’t have a story. I had description and a germ of an idea, and I wrote my descriptions as true to life as I could. I thought of them as a tribute. These were people, I thought, who deserved to be noticed by art. They were, each one of them, characters in search of a story. So was I.

I ran out of story in about the same instant that I ran out of time. As I slipped the chapters into a file folder, I promised myself that I would finish it someday.

There was a breakup, a questionable relationship, and a move across country. There were more relationships and questionable choices, new friends and some good choices, and time marched on, as time is wont to do, until about 20 years later, when one of my questionable choices propelled me into the best choice of all.

I was sitting in a circle of people who had come to pick up their loved ones from rehab. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted him to go elsewhere. But he had nowhere else to go, and when someone you thought you loved for a time gets out of rehab, it was a need to which I thought I had to attend. I was wrong, but to tell the truth I’d probably do the same thing today. Old habits die hard. However, I did have one moment of shining enlightenment. The counselor went around the circle, asking the relatives how they were going to support their addict, and as one after another told how they were going to get more involved with NA or AA or whatever the A, I rebelled. I’d been to those meetings. I wasn’t going back.

So when it came my turn, I told them that actually his addiction bored me to tears and I wasn’t going to spend my life in it with him. I was going to find a writing group. He could do as he liked.

And that’s how I finally finished The Year of the Crow.

I found Writers’ Cramp online, and this brings me to my second best lesson in learning to write at long last. Criticism doesn’t mean you’re bad. It makes you better. I had long assumed the former. I had to learn the latter. The folks at Writers’ Cramp taught me to do that.

I still had in my possession those first few chapters of Crow, and when I reread them there were parts I still liked. Parts that still resonated as exactly what I had wanted to say at the time and still did. Parts that brought old friends to life.

The story, however, had been overtaken by events. It took me another five years to finish the book. I remember thinking, when Obama was elected (which made the political me very happy), that nobody would buy my little dystopian novel now because everything was going to be all right. By 2011, when The Year of the Crow saw daylight, I knew there was still a chance that my book would be relevant. All too relevant. The tide that washed Trump ashore was rising.

And this too I learned. It was only after I wrote The End at the bottom of a page that I realized I was only halfway done. Re-reading the manuscript, the one line that kept running through my head was, “But I don’t think that’s what really happened.” Remember what I said about remembering? That’s when I realized that sometimes writing a work of fiction is about “remembering.” And sometimes you have to finish your book before you begin to remember. I never know how a book is going to end until I’ve gotten there. So it’s only after I get there that previous sections begin to make sense – or to need to make sense. Because now I know what really happened.

One more thing. Writers must be read. Musicians must be heard. Painters must be seen. Writers must be read. I’ve written elsewhere about the problem writers have being read, and this is the gift that Writers’ Cramp provided. They read my work, and they talked about it.

Without them I might never have noticed the little things, like overdone adverbs and how my characters were always “starting” to do things instead of actually doing them. Without them I might never have heard someone tell me that, although a sunrise in the Rockies was not something he could imagine for himself, thanks to me he had seen one. Without them there would have been no first novel.

Or the second. Or the third. Ghosts of the Heart came out in 2013. A Dream of Houses has taken me a little longer, but it will hit Kindle within a couple of weeks now.

I was 63 when Crow came out. I am 74 now. Living proof that it is never too late to keep a promise to yourself.

Tags: Prose

Disaster Porn

Cows! We got cows!

That line alone was worth the price of admission to Twister. That besides the voice recording when I called for movie times that informed me that it was rated “R” for bad weather. My daughter and I have been fans of what we've called Bad Weather movies ever since. The Day After Tomorrow, Volcano (Mt. Wilshire!), 2012. Meteors, hurricanes, floods, snowmageddons, earthquakes, super volcanos. We love them. Corny stories, special effects, and all. I have no excuse for not watching the Sharknado movies, except bad timing. I know they will still be somewhere when I need them.

It was all big fun. Imagining that moment when you realize that the world you know will soon no longer exist. What do you do? How do you cope? Why is it that it’s always only one person who saves the world? You fume and rewrite the movie as it’s running. Why does everybody act so stupid? Because they certainly will? Or maybe there’s another way.

September 2017.

Hurricane Harvey sits for a week on top of an area of Texas the size of some other sizeable state and rains. Rains. Fifty inches of rain in some places. Texans with boats pulled off their own Dunkirk. An illegal immigrant lost his life trying to save some folks. A deputy sheriff lost his trying to get to work because he was needed. People checked on each other. Lots of them probably had guns. They didn’t use them. They saved pets. They got into pool floats and went to help other people. What the hell kind of disaster movie is this?

Hurricane Irma comes up out of the Atlantic, building power on power until it hits tiny islands with a Force 5 fist. The trajectory is splayed out on my TV screen in a yellow balloon that swallows the entire State of Florida. I weep (figuratively speaking) for tiny Barbuda, but I experience a sensation approaching unholy joy at the prospect of Florida being eaten alive.

That’s when I realize that my fascination with real-life Bad Weather movies is bordering on Disaster Porn.

I have issues with Florida, none of which have a damn thing to do with real Florida. They are all to do with the Florida I know from cable news – even the best ones. They’re all about hanging chads and climate change denial. Far right radio talk show hosts and a certain golf club. My tweet one day read, For all of us hoping that Irma destroys Mar-a-lago, we should remember that innocent people – oh, hell with it. Take the damned thing out. Or words to that effect.

I was no longer watching a natural disaster in real time affecting real people. I was watching a Bad Weather Movie, and hoping the bad guys would pay. I was getting off on Disaster Porn.

In my defense, I will say that I am no longer excited by the possibility of Hurricane Jose following in Irma’s footsteps. Yes, I know that tells you that at one time I hoped it would – for no better reason than my own amusement. For my own IRL OMG thrill of a lifetime. You want back to the stone age? How about the Cretaceous? Mwa hahahaha.

But no longer.

Here’s what I actually saw. Highways full of people evacuating in an orderly fashion. No explosions, no gunfights, no fistfights, just families getting to safety as best they could.

A governor for whom I have little respect stepping up in the best way possible, opening shelters, giving information on where and how to get help, assuring people that they could take their pets, leading his state in a thoughtful, intelligent way. I will likely resume my disdain for him if he continues to ignore the warnings of climate change, but I am also reassured that he can and will do what he can to protect his citizens when the need arises.

A Republican office holder who does believe in climate change, laughing out loud when she heard that Scott Pruitt doesn’t want to upset Floridians by mentioning it.

A Facebook friend who hunkered down and survived, house intact, and is now trying to get herself organized to go help others.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

I’m glad that Florida survived. I’m glad that it wasn’t flattened back to the Cretaceous. I hope they learn some lessons for the future – and I hope Texas does too. But whatever. They are both full of people worth saving. Harvey and Irma have reminded me of that.

I can’t swear I won’t succumb to the lure of Disaster Porn again, but maybe I can be better prepared. Maybe a week of Sharknado would get the need for spectacle out of my system, so I can concentrate on the land and critters affected, and wish them out of harm’s way. Maybe I can be a somewhat better person. Maybe.

Our Dunkirk Moment

I never knew that Houston was built on bayous. That it is called the Bayou City. That when the rain came down like jets from a thousand fire hoses, there were so many banks to burst. That’s when Houston began to drown.

But apparently the bayous had created their own salvation – there are lots of boats in Houston. There are lots of boats in all the communities around Houston. Big and little, plastic, wood, aluminum. With and without power. Some of them shaped like swans. Well, these last were pool floats. I heard a midwife got to her patient in one of them.

Watching the people of Houston rescue their own this past week was the brightest light on the national scene that I have witnessed (in bed, with a cough, on my TV), and I felt better just watching it.

It was our very own Dunkirk moment.

But just like Dunkirk, it ain’t over yet. There are years of recovery ahead. Years of paperwork and rebuilding and resettling. Years of discovering the damage done. Years of court cases and political wrangling and lies and damned lies.

There’s no guarantee the outcome will be something better.

But if we need a moment to recollect our belief that something can and should be made better, Houston gave us that brief, shining moment. Our own Dunkirk.

Tags: Politics

Used to be finding the house

Time to go.

The Dream House

We found the dream house, my daughter and I, sometime in January of 2003. It didn’t resemble a dream house at first glance. Didn’t have what House Hunters likes to call “curb appeal.” The front yard was somewhat overgrown behind an ugly chain-link fence. The blue paint was a little shabby, and when I peered into the living room window, it looked dark and forbidding. But while I was doing that, Caroline had gone around the house, and when she returned she dragged me back there with her.

The back yard was huge, surrounded by tall trees – two firs, two maples, a white pine and a cedar, at first glance. There were two storage spaces, one an old playhouse with a tiny fireplace inside. There were three planted circles, one of which turned out to hold a magnolia. But the pièce de résistance, cradled within three arms of the house, was a warm flag-stoned patio, that put me immediately in mind of a scene from My Mother’s House, by Colette. Twin arborvitae stood sentinel against the living room wall.

There was an arbor over the door, crowned with a winter-bare wisteria. A dormant rose climbed the wall of the south wing that had been invisible from the front yard. An open-work shed with a sagging cover of heavy plastic formed the north wing, connected to the house via a small walkway. Big windows gave us a view of what looked like a big kitchen and sunroom.

When we met the landlord a few days later, we found that the living room felt small and dark because it was paneled in dark knotty pine. The landlord asked if we would like it painted white. We said yes. There was one small bedroom in the front corner, with an adjacent bathroom. That south wing turned out to be the master bedroom – my bedroom. A huge room reached by a long hallway, with its own bathroom and walk-through closet. There was a sizeable utility room and a third bedroom, converted from an old garage. Ugly, but who cared. I wasn’t going to sleep in it, and neither was Caroline.

We got the house.

The firebox in the fireplace had big rusty holes in it which we discovered our first night there when we lit up a Duraflame. It put a bit of a damper on the party, so to speak, but we installed a wood stove and a new chimney liner, which turned out to be a very good thing because the wall heater in the living room never did work. There were a couple of electric outlets that didn’t connect to anything, either, and it seemed that several of the wall switches didn’t turn on what we thought would be the obvious lights, but we soon learned what they did turn on and we lived with it.

We bought it a new red couch and a Tree of Life rug. I set up my computer desk in the sunroom. Coming out to the car one day in late February, I found pink blossoms had fallen on the roof, from a camellia tree I didn’t even know was there. As spring came on, the magnolia bloomed and bluebells sprang up in all the planting beds. When summer came, the wisteria hung thick with purple bells, and the south wall burst into bloom with yellow roses. Two rhododendrons, a lavender and a red, bloomed in the front dooryard, and between the camellia and its neighbor, the laurel, I never got wet carrying the groceries inside.

I loved that house.

We had huge summer parties, birthdays, Thanksgivings, tree trimmings, Christmases. We played video games and watched everything from The Walking Dead to Call the Midwife. Caroline moved in and out and in again and went through two relationships. She started her business from that house – Sweet Caroline’s Jams and Jellies. I finished one novel and wrote two more, writing at my computer desk in the sun room watching the birds and squirrels come and go from my feeders.

We cooked and played and argued. We laughed and cried. We lived the hell out of that house.

And then, all too soon, even though it had been 14 years, it was time to go.

The New Yorker published this piece by Nora Ephron last spring and, aside from the obvious points of difference, it told the story of me and my dream house. I, too, had handled rent increases with a bit of aplomb over the years, but in the last 18 months at the house, the rent had increased $250/month, and I didn’t drink enough tea to amortize that amount into anything reasonable. On top of that, I was getting too old to take the best care of the gardens. The English ivy was creeping in, the wisteria was climbing the twin arborvitae and threatening to climb down the chimney. The pots I had used to fill with pansies every spring were the worse for wear and abuse. The lewisia had split the sides of its container, and the huge pot where I had once tried to grow a peony was overflowing with moss.

The refrigerator leaked, the utility room floor felt soft underfoot, and a few rats had begun to sneak in. These were things the landlord should handle, and likely would have, but somehow I could see another rent raise coming should I complain about it. I got rid of the rats by stopping up the holes and putting all the food in bins, but little pools of ugly water seeped from under the fridge on a regular basis, and that just couldn’t be put off much longer.

What finally did me in, though, was the plumbing disaster.

One day the toilets backed up, and when I plunged mine, it came up in the shower. Scratch that backbrush. I shoulda hung it up, anyway. I called the landlord, he called RotoRooter. Problem solved. A few days later, it happened again. RotoRooter again. This time they call me out to take a look: there is toilet paper blossoming out of the access pipe. The landlord says it is my fault – they found a (he whispers the word) tampon. He wants me to pay half of the bill. I’m 74 years old. My daughter uses new-fangled washables. ‘Tweren’t us, honey. The landlord suggests (in a strangled whisper) that perhaps I could use less paper when I, er, clean myself. I’m left speechless.

The third time it happened, it blew the lid off the second access pipe. There are bouquets of used toilet paper strung along the side of the house for six feet. This time, RotoRooter ran the line all the way to the road, which is where he found the block. The landlord calls me to suggest that I dig a hole and shovel it all back in. I need to stay just a couple more months so I can finish packing, so I don’t suggest that he go fuck himself. I tell him I’ll think about it. I don’t.

But just like that, I fell out of love with my house. I couldn’t afford the rent. There was more to take care of than I could handle. And then, there was all that rotting toilet paper. Which to the day I moved out did not get cleaned up. We put plywood over it to move stuff out from the backyard.

I loved that house. I left a piece of my soul there. Few of us are lucky enough to find a dream house. I did. Nora Ephron did. But there comes a time when the good times are all gone.

Time to go.

Blue Moon

Thirty-two years ago, a girl walked into a bar. This is not a joke.

That was my one-liner from my Farewell to the Moon party last night. It contained two minor falsities. I actually arrived in late September, 1985, and at age 42, I was hardly a girl. But moving on – there wasn’t much more I came prepared to say. Once I started digging into the memory files, there was a good chance the band would just have to go sit down. And nobody, not even me, would have been happy at that.

So since, using my favorite excuse, I am better in prose, I thought I would write a little bit about the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle in these pages. The Blue Moon is a crucible through which I passed in mid-life, and whoever I was when I arrived, that passage has shaped into the woman I am now.

Therein lie more than a few tales.

I was introduced to the Moon on my first night back in town – I had lived in Seattle for a year or so before, but knew nothing of the Moon at that time. An old friend from Green Bay scooped me up and took me. The bartender had long, graying hair and a cowboy hat, and my first thought was, well, if they’ll hire him, I think I could get along in this bar. The topper came a couple of hours later when some crazy man behind me started yelling, “Famous Irish toasts! Nom de plume! Nom de plume!”

I later pinned it down to one Pat Clary, born on St. Patrick’s Day, who a couple of months later told me, in a hushed voice, that he’d been keeping an eye on me (this was in the way of cloak and dagger, not stalking), that he’d had his best men on the case. “And what have you discovered?” I asked. “Well,” said he, drawing it out a little. “You’re all right.”

And I was all right. The Moon was a place where folks delighted in absurdities, where my sometimes inappropriate sense of humor felt right at home. Where we could be ourselves – whatever self we felt like being on any particular night.

My memories of the Blue Moon from the seven to ten years when it was my daily living room are a little like those of the early days of Saturday Night Live. The days of John Belushi, Gilda Radnor, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, and Chevy Chase. As in, there will never be another era like it.

Bill Heintzelman, the playwright bartender, who wrote one of my favorite lines in a play about some prisoners who take over the prison. “Doncha miss the hopelessness?”

Richard the Weight Lifter bartender, a sweetheart of a guy who you were happy to have on your side.

Chuck the Classics Scholar bartender, who wrote graffiti in Latin and Ancient Greek on the men’s room walls.

Maggie the Biker bartender, who closed out Grateful Dead Night with John Phillips Souza and Stars and Stripes Forever, yelling, “Have you no homes? Have you no stereos?”

Sheelah, a fellow Deadhead, who organized the party last night, and who, on one hot summer’s night, when a customer knocked the small bartender fan on the floor in front of her, looked down and deadpanned, without missing a beat, “And another fan falls at my feet.”

And of course Cowboy Dave. Still a legendary bartender. We tried a couple of times, but it never really took. I should have known it was doomed when he told me right off the bat that his favorite movie was “A Boy and His Dog.” He’s in Panama now, howling with the monkeys.

There were years when I would pull into the parking lot, fluff my hair, and head into the Moon muttering, “Showtime!”

Because we were all characters in search of an author.

Ross Lavrov, the Russian translater, who translated for Gorbachev and once brought a bevy of Russian sailors into the bar who demanded sanctuary – not from America but from the Blue Moon.

Ulrich my Favorite Nazi might take some explaining, but I don’t have time. Suffice it to say that he loved it when some sweet freshmen from the University wandered into the bar so that he could lay his “Hitler wasn’t that bad” spiel on them and watch them freak out. Seventh heaven for Ulrich. His scorn for home-grown Nazi youth knew no boundaries. Besides, one of his best friends was Harry, a black guy. Nobody could really put Ulrich in a box.

Rudy Russell, the Mayor of Volunteer Park, who wore every left wing political button he could put his hands on – I think his jacket was probably bullet proof with them.

Fernando, the artist, who loved the women. Who said to me once that he could fall in love with me, but I was too skinny. He liked his women wall-to-wall. To which I responded that life sometimes worked out perfectly, because we would never break each other’s hearts.

Robert E. Lee, who made candles and sold them in the Moon. $5 each. I had about 15 at one time. I think I’m down to one that I’m taking east with me. Someone once asked him if anybody ever called him Bob. “No.” Sheelah and I went to his funeral some years back.

G.G., who drank burgundy and shuffled around the bar. He finally moved to somewhere in the Caribbean and survived a hurricane, I disremember which one. He came back once for a visit – turned out he was a very talented keyboardist. So many things you never know.

Paris Fletcher, who when asked what he was going to do with his dog, Merlin, when he went to the bar, replied, "Oh, he comes with me."

"They let dogs in?" he was asked. "What do they do about the smell?" "Well," Paris drawled. "The dogs will just have to get used to it."

Baker Bob, Coffee John, Burgundy Bob – an old friend of mine who has since disappeared told me once that he wanted to be known as 4 Bong-Hits and a Six-Pack Joe.

Most of them are gone, now. But their ghosts remain. In a good way. In some other universe, Pat Clary is still declaring, “I don’t like anybody, I never liked anybody, I never will like anybody.” Kevin Cunningham is wandering in with some plastic grapes he just picked up at a yard sale and ordering a corn dog. The Racoons are meeting tonight (Monday), shaking the tails of their long hair instead of a coon skin hat.

And yes, there are a few literary fellas in the front booth, arguing over one thing or another. Tom Robbins drank here. Theodore Roethke drank here. It is said that upon learning of his Pulitzer, he turned and said to his class at the University of Washington, “To the Moon!” The alley behind the moon is now officially called Roethke Mews.

I could go on and on, but this is too long already. I’ve left out lots of my best friends, most of whom have either come from the Moon or been introduced by Mooners.

I won’t find another such place in this life. There are many things for which I am grateful, and a few of which I am proud. I am both grateful and proud to have earned the title of Blue Mooner. A place that will continue to shine with its own light.

Thank You Notes

Sometime over a year ago, at a suggestion from Stephen Colbert, I logged into Donors Choose and chose a project to fund. The cool thing about Donors Choose is that anyone can contribute for any amount - fund a project in full, or contribute to an ongoing project. I found Ms Szarko's project entitled "The Tale of Unorganized Chapter Books," asking for $30. My $30 bought the bookshelves and some clipboards so that the students could write while seated outside or on the floor. Here are their Thank You Notes:

I'm just sorry it's taken me over a year to say Thank You back.
@DonersChoose

#sharethanks

Idylls of Iowa II

Books, radio, TV. The lines of communication – of story-telling – from Homer to The Walking Dead. All of which have been referenced, at one time or another, in the pixilated pages of barbarasbookhouse.com. The beginning of which is to be found in the good old days in idyllic Iowa.

I attended kindergarten and first grade in the same two-room schoolhouse my grandmother had attended, a couple of blocks down the street from the Corner Store, in Badger, Iowa. I wonder if anyone ever beat my record of most books read in kindergarten.

Radio was where it was at in media. My parents listened to Don McNeil's Breakfast Club, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. The Shadow, of course. Not exactly children’s fare, but if I was chased from the room, I surely snuck back in to listen. I remember the scream of the woman who discovered her husband burned to a blackened crisp, and picture his face resembling a burnt marshmallow. I still like my marshmallows burnt, but I'm still getting over my horror of cremation. Just in time, I suppose. Volcanoes were popular lairs for the evil minded, probably because the bubbling sound effects of someone falling into them were deliciously horrible. Not unlike the bubble and pop of a thickening cream sauce.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there was Cinnamon Bear. No fires, no lava. Just lovely, lovely fantasy that still brings imagination pictures back to me. An ex-boyfriend of mine remembers them vividly and somewhere around here is a set of tapes that he gave me a while back. Saving them for when the dotage gets serious.

I am having one major memory glitch. I have a very distinct memory from the Badger apartment above the Corner Store, of a head scarf my mother had. It was black, with a cap shape for her head and two longer flaps to tie around her ears and under her chin. I used to steal it so I could pretend I had long black hair, and imagine myself the “Evil Queen,” Ming the Merciless’s consort on Flash Gordon. Which I think I remember from radio or TV. But all of my research does not reveal Flash Gordon on radio or TV in the late 40’s. The radio show ended in 1936 and the TV version didn't begin until 1954. This is how memory becomes myth? Or did I just myth it up?

My dad may have invented the sports bar. He was a tee-totaler so it wasn’t really a bar, and I have no memory of sports on TV, although the interwebs tell me that the 1947 World’s Series was televised. What he actually did was buy the first television in town (300 Norwegian farmers, remember?), put it in the basement of the Corner Store, and stock a lot of soft drinks and ice. I don’t know how much he cut into the business of the actual bar, kitty-corner across the street, but I remember a bunch of guys down there hanging out on stools drinking cokes. It only just occurs to me that maybe they brought flasks.

My dad put in a jukebox, too, and I could play it all I wanted. My favorite song was “Around Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” by The Andrews Sisters (although for some reason I always thought it was Patti Page). I probably danced like nobody was watching.

The Lone Ranger started in 1949. I was 6. Tonto was my first true love, if you don’t count The Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver. Nothing could beat Silver. When I could climb to the tops of any tree I could get a foothold on, the place that had the highest, thinnest branches that would hold my negligible weight I called Silver. I climbed with a book shoved into my pants and I would settle into a comfortable crook while I read myself into another adventure. Sometimes, when the wind blew, we galloped, Silver and I.

When we moved to Illinois, the tree was a mulberry, and I read and rocked in the wind covered in mulberry juice from the berries I ate on the way up to Silver.

Idylls of Iowa I

There’s an old nursery rhyme by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that my mother often told to me:

There was a little girl who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead

And when she was good she was very, very good,

And when she was bad she was horrid.

I am never certain if my childhood memories are actual memories or myths told so often by my parents that I have come to "remember" them. But surely some of them are real memories. My parents weren't there for everything. They certainly weren't down the basement with Johnny and Martha and me, pouring over horror comics, or under the blanket in the backyard of the parsonage, playing doctor. I think we were playing doctor. Whatever it was that we were at under the blankets, I really only remember that it seemed quite naughty. So this is where I start to begin to remember who I was, when and where, and how it all began.


Long ago, in the 1940’s, I lived in a little town of 300 or so Norwegians near the center of Iowa. My father owned the corner store, which was directly across the street in one direction from the Texaco station and in the other direction from the elevators of the farming co-op and the railroad tracks. Kitty corner was a bar/railroad station. Down the street past the railroad station was a little white two-room schoolhouse, with a big swing set and a box elder tree in the back, and in the opposite corner of town was a playfield with a baseball diamond. My dad taught me how to ride a bicycle on that field.

There was, of course, a white Lutheran church with a pretty steeple, a post office which also served as Central for the telephone service, and a building with a meeting hall of some sort upstairs, which I only remember because I went with my parents to see a traveling theatre group perform The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Which I wouldn't remember at all but for the man who suffered a grand mal seizure and fell flat on his back like a log. People gathered around babbling concern about whether or not he would swallow his tongue. I must have been 4 or 5. These things stick with you.

The Corner Store was a two-story brick building with the store below and our family apartment above. There was a cold locker in the back, where people brought in their beeves and pigs to be butchered (I think they did, anyway, because we had a butcher). And I remember that we had a butcher because once a year, he went to an annual buffalo hunt and I can remember being taken back to the cold locker to see the buffalo carcass hung up in there, sans head, which might have been somewhere else being stuffed.

I remember my dad getting shipments of dates in barrels and little me hanging over the barrel rim, when nobody was looking, fishing for dates.

The Post Mistress and Telephone Central was a woman named Pearl. I have a vague memory of her having black hair and a sharp disapproving face and a general resemblance to Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz. I don’t remember this specific incident, because my crime was probably a common occurrence with me, but the story goes that Pearl called my mother in high dudgeon one day because her daughter was playing in the street, naked, in a mud puddle. As I recall (or, as the story is told), my mother was more "put out" with Pearl than with me. Lutheran mothers didn't get angry. They got "put out."

I remember running with the other children toward the railroad tracks when the train went by yelling at the man in the caboose to blow the whistle, and he often did. I remember Main Street outside our house piled up with snow. And I remember going, for realz, over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house on the farm, the Home Place, for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And in a few weeks, I'll remember some more. To be cont …