Saxon Henry's Blog, page 26

A Steady View of Heaven

We were beginning our next project in Costa Rica—a block church in Pocora, which was a tiny village near Siquirres where we would be staying. Fortunately, we wouldn't be sentenced to the Roach Hotel, as I had dubbed the bug-infested building during our previous stint in the small town. Jim had found us a portion of a house to rent so we could have a small kitchen and a bit more privacy than the parish house would have afforded us. We arrived at the advent of the rainy season and were promptly informed by one of the most bizarre people I would ever meet in Costa Rica that we were lucky because it had been exceptionally hot before the monsoonal weather had descended. 

His name was Barney and my take on him was a ne'er-do-well, ex-pat American who had landed in the Costa Rican jungle, tasted the Guaro and decided he had no reason to ever leave. He had signs of a heart but so little patience for connection that he seemed incapable of opening himself to nurturing of any kind, especially with the parishioners in Pocora who were so excited about having their own church they were effusive in their thanksgivings. The Jamaican and West Indian women were especially unrestrained, leaving Barney no choice but to shake his head, grumble and retreat to his hut to protect himself from any goodness that might have accidentally spilled over on him! 

He must have been terrified of emoting because he'd freeze when the women approached the clearing where the foundation of the church had been poured. Hesitating like a confused child, he would watch with horror as they made their way around the jobsite hugging everyone. Their voluptuous bodies and strong, meaty arms seemed made for enveloping others and it was a bit shocking to suddenly be wrapped in a mountain of an embrace but Barney seemed to take it especially hard. As they would draw closer to him, he would take a few steps back and pause before breaking into a stumbling run that led him into the jungle and out of empathy's way before they could embrace him. 

The only time he seemed comfortable in his own skin was when he stood around telling Jim bawdy stories about his military days. I watched as he laughed at his own tale one day, wondering why being hugged and touched by these women, which was nourishing to me, would bother him so much. They were so sincere, and the kindness of their attentions knew no racial, cultural, national, or class boundaries. In fact, if I had believed in the pearly gates, I would have wanted the greeting I received when I arrived to feel similar to these great, fleshy arms opening to welcome me. Since I'd never had a steady view of heaven and its master—an outlook that had become even more clouded during my time in the mission field—I celebrated the fact that having these magnificent women enfolding me was reward enough for my desire to live life with integrity. 

I wondered if the matriarchs of the little village were aware that I had a battle raging inside me as they wrapped their arms around me. I was craving home so acutely it physically hurt. More often that not I had to talk myself up from moroseness when I awakened each morning by vowing to do one small thing to make things better just to get myself out of bed. On the successful days, I felt relief. During the less than stellar ones, a sinking feeling ruled while the battle consuming my energy wore on. I was actually succeeding when a painful turning point occurred one day and the veneer of bravado I'd managed to wrap myself in was ripped away.

It happened while we were eating lunch in the cantina in Pocora. I saw a sight that sent me into the deepest grief—a dog so starved it trembled, the sagging skin on its body quivering as it hung slack over its bony frame. It was skittering around sniffing for crumbs on the ground as I looked at it in horror. I glanced at Jim and declared I was going to feed it. He frowned at me, though he didn't argue knowing that I had a stubborn streak about things that touched me so deeply. I rushed to the meat market nearby and bought some raw hamburger, which I place on the ground near the skittish dog. Tears were running down my face as I watched it inhale the meat. I felt better even with everyone sitting in the café laughing at me, but only for a moment because that's how quickly I realized that unless I was going to feed it regularly I'd only prolonged the agony of its life rather than really helping it. This was a lesson I'd have torture me many times as I ached to make things better in the challenged places I found myself inhabiting.

The poor dog's comparison to my Lhasa Apso, Samurai, was extreme. Sam was my surrogate child and I pampered him to no end when I was with him. As a dog lover and owner, I knew how helpless they could become once they were made dependent upon human beings. I couldn't understand a culture that cared nothing for other creatures needing their support. A dark splinter invaded my heart that day and it stayed there festering as I tried make sense of what I was seeing.

Church held no solace for me as the words cascading from the lips of the ordained seemed empty, almost as rote as the Nicene Creed we mouthed every Sunday. There were divine moments but they were always of the mundane variety. The Sunday after I'd tried to help the ailing dog, a half a dozen ladies sat in front of us in church—some petite and shrunken, others ample and buxom. Each one had on a perfectly combed black wig—their heads a rising and falling row of curls framing the napes of chocolaty necks. As I sat there studying their heads, I noticed how they suddenly leaned in the same direction, their heads tilted at exactly the same angle simultaneously. I looked to the front of the church where the lay reader, a tiny black man with glasses turned askew on his small face, was tilting his head sideways in an attempt to read the Epistle. I looked back at the ladies in front of me and had to press my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. It was then I realized I was leaning, too. The lay reader had the entire congregation tilting their heads as they watched him crane his neck into the slant of his lenses.

A visiting priest, Charlie, was preaching that day—his sermon about offering weaknesses up to God so that his power could be made perfect within each one of us leaving me feeling less than inspired. "When you are in a time of weakness, that is when his power is best used," he proclaimed. If only it were this easy, I thought to myself as I looked down at my hands gripping the prayer book in my lap. Was offering my weaknesses up to some ephemeral deity really the best tack to take as I suffered through my struggles, or was M. Scott Peck right when he wrote, "Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization…This means we give away our power to that entity…In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom." 

Had I been able to grasp the depth of his meaning, I would have seen that taking my own power would have been the best piece of advice I'd ever received but I wasn't ready. Maybe if I could go backwards from the end, everything would start to make sense! I thought. If only that were possible!

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

This is a participating post in the phenomenon called #LetsBlogOff. To see the rest of the witty repartee taking place on other food-for-thought blogs, click here for the menu.

 

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A Road Less Traveled

I'd made a bold move by signing up for my first writer's conference in St. Simons Island, Georgia. The morning I was to leave, I made umpteen excuses to stall as Jim tried to shoo me out the door. By the time I finally pulled the car from the garage I had a knot in my stomach the size of a grapefruit. I gripped the steering wheel of the Jaguar to hold myself steady during the drive south, using every ounce of my resolve to keep myself from turning tail and heading back home.

Once I arrived, the setting inspired me—a good first sign I decided as I drank in the spiky mantle of cattails edging the marsh that spread out around the hotel. The murky water filling the shallow expanses sparkled like it had been sprinkled with bugle beads. I unpacked and wandered around the room like a testy lioness, finally giving myself a break as the early evening sun transformed the water into a festive crackle of light. I drew a chair to the window to record what I was seeing in my writer's notebook, regretting my decision to leave my camera at home so that I would be forced to capture everything I saw in words. Though I was happy for the exercise, I missed looking through the lens to capture the details of such a resplendent setting. 

When the tide went out to sea, it left a slick plane of polished mud stretching out from the hem of the mounded land on which the hotel was built. Hummocks of grass sprouted in the water, which took on the color of a knife blade as the sun glided westward. A brown rabbit fed on the green tufts, its ears moving like the sonar of a ship as its nose twitched with its chewing. A woman called out to a friend as she passed it, causing it to raise its soft head and sniff the air before hopping into a thicket of stunted bushes, the bottom halves looking as if they'd been stained by tobacco from an incessant submersion in sludgy water. 

Just before sunset, the light infused the water until it appeared backlit like an ice-skating rink. A meandering walkway cut a linear silhouette through the center of the scene, and a rail of pickets framed the water and two figures standing separately on the edge of a copula that punctuated its end. They were perched on opposite sides of the octagonal surface that rested just above the face of the water—the man leaning forward with his arms spread, hands grasping the railing and hips cocked in a stance that "read" frustration. He changed positions often as if his thinking was too tumultuous to allow him to stand still.

The other figure was a woman whose gaze seemed to burn itself into the horizon. What questions did she ask? I wondered. Had these two bodies, black against the glow of the water, ever been intimate with each other? It wasn't likely given how they inhabited separate worlds at such close range, and yet something about them made their stories seem intertwined. Why would I think this as each of them walked silently from the pier, keeping whatever struggles they were experiencing secret? And why did I assume they were grappling with something? If there was conflict, it would not have been with each other; was it with the sea, or only in me?

I was beyond nervous to face the other writers at the conference—something I had never done and something I had little confidence in doing—so I walked to the edge of the bay the next morning before it was time to meet to try and calm myself. The bank was pocked with holes into which crabs rushed on tiptoes, scampering around like ballerinas on point. Several challenged each other, face-to-face as they sidled across the mud, their shiny, claw-tipped arms raised like swords. Their warring world was far from clean, but the muck in which they lived was elemental, unlike the toxic waste spilling from the factory across the Intracoastal Waterway. It belched smoke and steam at a serious rate, and I'd noticed that cloud towers had formed at sunset the night before near the spewing of the pollution. I'd wondered then if nature was hoping to rain the toxins down before they had a chance to erupt into the atmosphere. 

The summer solstice had arrived at 11:57 p.m. as I tossed and turned, feeling overwrought and chiding myself that my nerves were getting the best of me. It turned out that my anxiety wasn't unfounded because as early as my first session, it was clear I wasn't going to do well at the conference. I managed to keep myself steady through the first day, retreating to my room as soon as an excruciatingly slow dinner had passed. I was polite enough as I made small talk with the older women at my table, all hoping to publish cookbooks or craft books about knitting and crocheting. I knew I was being arrogant but the quality of the writing that had been shared that day was disappointing. Once back in my room, I stood watching the edge of a front approach and wondered if I shouldn't just go home.

The explosion of gray felted clouds comforted me until the rain came, tough as nails as it pelted the windows. Far above, a half-moon, muted by mist, emitted a fuzzy light as the storms began to overtake it. When the torrents were unleashed in full, the pounding heavens echoed my internal chaos. I decided to leave the next morning, feeling conceited that I'd dismissed the majority of the attendees because I did not feel as if they were serious writers while also feeling clear that this was not the way I wanted my writing education to unfold.

On the way home, I was barreling north on the highway near Savannah—speeding along at 90 miles per hour—when an old man in a pickup truck crested a hill in front of me, driving the wrong way in the fast-lane of the highway. Had I been passing someone at that moment, it's not likely I would have survived the collision that would have been unavoidable, though he might have made it given he was perched in an ancient Ford pickup as solid as a hunk of steel. I shuddered as I watched him blunder on his way and prayed that he would not meet anyone else head-on. The experience made me cringe; made me grateful that I had lived to cringe, and I vowed to try to be more appreciative of the opportunities I had in my life, even when they turned out to be disappointing.

Back home, I found myself so emotionally charged that it seemed I was spilling myself on the sidewalk, emotions leaking out of me like perforations had sprung up in my psyche. I couldn't seem to get back to my writing, the conference having taken the wind out of my sails, so I did the best I could by scribbling missives into my writer's notebook: "You are almost a stranger to me, oh book that glues my guts together and holds the secret dream I nurture in silence. Why is it called free verse if it is never free? After all, someone had to pay the price to write it, no?" Do words have a shelf life? I wondered. If so, would mine be out of date before I'd ever figure out how to make them palatable enough to consume?

In a week's time, we would be heading back to Costa Rica and I caught myself humming, "Do you know the way to San Jose?"—the answer, of course, being yes. Before we departed, I made a trip to Atlanta to have my car serviced and felt so weary that I began to seriously wonder what was wrong with me. It frightened me that I was such a sad case of the walking wounded. My therapist had me reading M. Scott Peck's A Road Less Traveled because I found myself so solidly groping for direction and a measure of peace. I tried to let the book help but it simply made me wonder why I'd come into adulthood with such issues like character disorder and whether I really needed to know what my dis-ease was called.

I felt spent, even as I craved the motivation to carve beautiful words into the spongy surface of a page, any page. For whatever reason, they simply would not come. Peck implied that God is love but I couldn't seem to feel how the concept of a divine being fit for me because my soul was scabbed over with so much pain that the concept of unconditional love seemed like such a foreign thing. I did hunger to learn so I continued to try to make sense of his advice as I dealt with the stress that I was possibly on my way to losing Jim and my own life. If I continued to digress into the hard-bitten places I seemed destined to live, I didn't feel my life would be worth much anyway so it was difficult to see the point in trying. 

"I want so badly to 'get it all together' so I can have an effective life," I wrote, "but I seem to become all the more ineffective the harder I try." Jim and I attempted to talk about how lost we had become to each other but he remained adamant that I had not been working at our relationship so I limped away, yet again, feeling as if everything that had happened was my fault. How could I work at anything when I didn't have a clue as to who I had become? I wondered. Our life had gone through so many changes, as had I, and it was remarkable to me that he was able to stay unscathed. I felt that I had lost myself under the weight of everything I was handling. "It's ironic that I'm so materially fortunate," I wrote, "and that I feel uncomfortable with my life I can't enjoy it. It's time to grow into it so I can be an effective person in the world and in my relationship. But how?"

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

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Water Pumps and Troy Boys: A Legacy for #LetsBlogOff

We were spending Memorial Day weekend at the beach, hosting "the gang" as we called the group of friends we often gathered there. When I opened the sliding glass doors, the ocean's bald horizon greeted me like a long lost friend and I thought about how it always soothed me to return to this lip of land at the water's edge. I wondered if the writers who had been exiled from places they'd loved felt as much longing as I did when I was prevented from making my pilgrimages to the seaside. Ezra Pound, who was relegated to the Italian countryside when he wasn't imprisoned, came to mind, as did Dante, who'd been deprived of his beloved Florence. 

I decided to take my writer's notebook onto the beach, intending to make some time for words before our friends arrived but the sun had other ideas for my afternoon hours. It quickly warmed me into submission, turning the pristinely blank page I was poised to sully into a blinding white sheen. As I stared at the great expanse of water that petered out at the extremity of the sky, my pen seemed remarkably heavy. Before long, I gave in to the ocean's whispering and dropped into a dizzy sleep. 

I startled awake when the nettling of palm fronds entered my consciousness a few hours later. The light had changed and the wind had picked up, making the sea oats sway resolutely as they caressed my skin. The beach was deserted, the only thing marring the stretch of sand as far as I could see a beaten-down Adirondack chair slumping at the ocean's edge. Its posture was giving away the fact that it was dreading the incoming tide that was lapping thirstily at its splintered feet. Its brokenness was such a poignant sight and it struck a deep chord of loneliness in me. As I studied its bereft pose, I spotted several dolphins rolling in the waves just offshore, the flashes of light on their skin, which gleamed like patent leather, tipping me off that they were there. 

As I squinted into the ocean's glow, I realized there was an entire school of them frolicking in the water and it overjoyed me. I decided to watch for a bit, crouching along the highest point of the beach where ragged plants formed a fuzzy outline at the cusp of dune after dune—the growth as stubbly and sporadic as a teen boy's new beard. Buried in the spritzing grasses, I felt one with the chattering world. I could have easily been plant matter as I felt my hair being swept around by the brisk currents of air, one with the spiky green tendrils of plant life surrounding me. My hair dancing wildly, I stayed anchored in the cool sand, watching as the pod of dolphins disappeared into the deeper blue of the choppy Gulf of Mexico. It was one of those days when I had to force myself to go inside.

That night, I left the doors to the bedroom open so I could let the sweet, sticky darkness wash over me as I slept. The dampness complemented the ocean's murmuring, and I fell asleep remembering how the night had ridden in on the coattails of a giant molten sun heaving itself behind the clouds. It disappeared without a shred of remorse, and had I longed to call it back, it would have scoffed at me—its schedule of traversing the heavens much more important than my piddling desires to stay steeped in light.

The next morning, the world dawned misty and gray, a scene wrapped in moisture from the ocean's pull. As I went out for an early run, I noticed it was one of those special mornings when both spheres were holding their own in the sky—the sun waxing and the moon waning, as delicate as sugar lace being slowly melted away by the intense heat of the dominant star. The gang descended that afternoon and the hoopla commenced, leaving scant time for reflection, reading or writing. The long weekend passed quickly, and Jim flew off to some business meeting, leaving me to drive home in his oldest son's car. It overheated every eighty or so miles, the six-and-a-half-hour trip turning into a ten-hour nightmare of hitting one small town after another to see if anyone had a water pump for a Jeep Woody. Time after time, the answer was, "No dice!"

The first place the SUV acted up was Troy, Alabama. I sat on the curb at Mike's Downtown Gulf in a foul mood as I observed the Piggly Wiggly across the street. I let my impishness reign as I perused the signs in the window, which seemed awfully suggestive for some reason. "Breast and Roll 99 cents" sounded like a cheap version of kinky foreplay. Another declared, "Thigh Box 99 cents"—a new-fangled ritual, perhaps? Where were the whips and chains? I wondered. No deal on handcuffs today?

The owner of the station, Mike, would have been the perfect fit if someone had decided to form a contemporary version of the Beach Boys. He sauntered up to me and blurted out, "Just three months ago I was cutting meat at the Winn Dixie." Great! I thought. A butcher had disassembled my transportation in bay number 2! Undeterred by my look of dismay, he continued proudly, "I cashed in my stocks and bonds when they tried to transfer me to Birmingham, and bought the station." I congratulated him as he flitted off to pump gas for an elderly gentleman in a van with a faded Tom's logo slowly disappearing from the peeling paint. 

After two hours of lolling on the curb, Mike and his mechanic announced the car was fixed and ready to go. I drove away feeling hopeful but guarded—the anxiety of watching the gauge wearing me down. I was just about to relax when I reached the interstate at Montgomery and the hulk of a car overheated again. I decided I'd have to marshal all of my mental resources in order to make the best of the trip, which relegated me to the apron of the highway time after time while the car cooled down. 

I sat fuming as heartily as the Jeep, deciding to make a list of the southern-style oddities I'd seen during the drive in order to keep from going insane. There was the sign at the Ebro Dog Track proclaiming "Over a Million Dollars Won Each Year." I wondered if there shouldn't have been fine print that read "$10 at a time." On the outskirts of one tiny town, I had watched big-haired women flow into and out of Pretty Please Beauty Shop—a name that couldn't have been more southern if it had tried. I declared that if I ever made it home, I'd gather all my things and move to Random Road, a dirt lane that meandered into the woods in the middle of nowhere. Wouldn't that be the perfect address for the frustrated writer? I thought. I'd disappear into the woods and never come out. Three decades later, they'd find me dead, my little cabin filled to the brim with manuscripts that would be touted as some of the most lauded writing of all time. My oeuvre would be exalted and I'd take my place in the pantheon of literary superstars à la Ernest Hemmingway and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ah, what a legacy that would be!

Back on the road, I made it to eighty-two in my game of counting ragged tire treads that had been flipped from careening tractor trailers before the temperature gauge started its climb to the red line once again. My anger trumping caution, I decided I was close enough to home to push the Woody past its limits. When I pulled into the driveway and parked the beast of a car, I let the evening envelope me with its lush air overrun with fireflies. I stood and watched them winking in the dark, imagining that they were celebrating my odyssey's end. Though the day had been hellacious, I did my best to let it go and celebrate the small miracle of a sliver of peace before the next day dawned hectic and frenetic. The weather had bloomed with high humidity seemingly overnight—a sign that spring had decided it would give itself over to summer with vigor. I looked forward to tomato sandwiches and fresh vegetables from my uncle's garden but not the storms that would roll in during the afternoons, making the lake posture like the ocean as the tumults brought their forces to bear on its surface. 

The tempests would grow so menacing at times that I couldn't pull myself from the window as I marveled at how darkly they scowled. There was one particular tree beside the condo that always seemed to have the most difficult time—the savage pushing and pulling of the wind aiming to take it to its knees. I thought about how life could certainly feel that way from time to time, especially on days as frustrating as the one I had just found myself enduring. I turned out the lights and let the images from my drive north sift through my mind. The experiences did seem so random in some respects, but wasn't there possibly a pattern to them that would make sense in my life someday, somehow? What would it all mean as I continued to navigate the road running along the spine of my life—in vehicles dependable and not so trustworthy, and during days when the universe would buoy me along or during those when I was challenged to my very core?

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

This post was a participating entry in the current Let's Blog Off skirmish. To see a host of other talented writers telling their views on the subject of defining a legacy, click here.

 

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A Gritty Song

Late spring was masquerading as summer. Even early in the morning as I walked Sam, it was so humid the cicadas were barely whispering as if to preserve their energy for the full-on heat of the hottest part of the day. It wasn't until bedtime, well after dark, when they began wheezing joyfully in the cooler air. We were heading to Suwannee, Florida, the next morning to be the guests of one of the couples amongst our bevy of friends. They had invited us on a fishing trip and I was wondering how soon to take the Dramamine I'd bought as I sipped my morning coffee, looking out at small bits of the lake I could see over the deck railing. The slices of water were reflecting a cloud-choked sky as opaque as a gray cat's eye narrowed in a fit of hissing anger. 

I had stocked up on Dramamine because I'd just had my first bout of seasickness during a fishing trip with Jim, the nine-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico making me want to toss my toenails. I wasn't much for fishing, hating the fact that it must have hurt like hell when a hook entered the gullet or the outer rim of a fish's bony lip, but I did love to eat fresh seafood so I went along, making do with taking notes about the cruelty of it all in my writer's notebook. I did have to admit there was something graceful about the act of fishing, the caster's shoulders flexing when the line unfurled, the reels singing a gritty song, and the lures striking the black surface of the choppy ocean with a plop. 

I wondered if the view the fish had as they contemplated the lure was akin to peering through gray/green water glass. Was it the murkiness of their world that fooled them into thinking the contrivance they were about to devour was sustenance? The foam that floated past as I lounged on the front of the boat was like spittle on the face of an elderly man whose expression had gone slack, though this unfathomable water presented a countenance closer to the face of a poker player—so much activity beneath the surface kept secret by the mind willing it not to show. The oyster beds drew black lines on the horizon—dark as India ink—and buoys and fishing boats pocked the water as far as the eye could see. One mound of shells was like a dark pillow continually gathering sand to soften its entry into the water. Nearby a lone leafless tree seemed so forlorn as it spread its arms to the sky, begging for a mirroring stripped-down lover to echo its hapless shape. Did it curse the fact that it landed in such an isolated place?

Jim was the first to pull a fish from the water, its vacant eyes disguising the turmoil its gasping mouth and trembling fins betrayed. Was it wondering what explosion had hit its soggy world to cause such an upheaval into what must have been a painful deluge of light? Its luckier water mates hid out in the leaden liquid filled with marsh grasses that segued to a dusty green shelf of mangrove. As we made our way from the ocean into a wide creek, foamy blankets of Milfoil swayed with the movement of the water near the jagged banks, unfathomable as it ate the light that might have penetrated to the creekbed. We crept into the channel just as dusk's light was purpling the surface of the water. Stumpy palmetto palms craned their bushy heads skyward, native-like and curious, they seemed to furtively peek from the grassy beds, some leaning precariously to one side while the others listened for noises in the opposite direction. 

Snowy egrets were stark against the deep-coated world as if announcing their greatness by flashing their wings—the pristine hues of their feathers catching bits of illumination. I watched a giant pink sun sink below the line of the world's edge as a frog began its honking, inspiring the entire amphibian nation to follow suit. They were so boisterous they could have been a flock of geese camping in the midst of the tall grasses, and I wondered how large a frog would have to be to make such an impressive sound. 

The next day I sat as morning awakened and marveled at the calmness of the water surrounding the house—there wasn't even the tiniest ripple in sight. Birds twittered, and just as I thought about how the world was softly silent, a pine tree beside the porch creaked as if to prove me wrong, then someone cranked the engine of an airboat across the marsh. It sounded like a giant mosquito buzzing around in the humid air. A second boat geared down on the river as the water mirrored the sky's baby blueness, the reflection of marsh grasses turned upside down as stem met stem, connecting twin opposites on the surface of the river. These thick-haired grasses held froths of white flowers, each delicate like a pin on a jaunty beret that would have been right at home perched askew on a young girl's head. 

We were back on the water by mid-morning and as we approached Deer Island, the throaty grinding of the boat motor was the only sound reverberating in the hot, damp air. I tried to imagine how it would feel to be driftwood and realized that being blown into the ocean would likely be the perfect version of a nightmare—the water incessantly lapping at the skin, raw and exposed to the morning sun, which only added insult to injury. The waves would eat at the flesh, polishing the dermis to a stony smoothness. My view from my prone position would be water lapping up and over my eyes as the tide filled my world with nothing but liquid, a flood of color as murky as the feeling emanating from my abandoned heart. Grasses would drift onto my torso and rest like dark scars as the high tide receded, taking with it all the choking I had been forced to endure while the water entered every fissure it was slowly creating.

That evening, I sat on the deck of the couple's waterfront home, enjoying the quiet as the sky deepened, attempting to record everything about the trip that I'd found interesting. Darkness was grabbing at my pen and paper, so I had to write as quickly as possible as night ushered in the cool air. A cricket called from the flowerbed as the breeze stirred the ferns above the water that rippled past. A dark cloud was skulking toward me from the west and I had to squint to see the words I was recording as its front edge reached me, further muting the light. Wind chimes made far-too-happy sounds as I raced to get my reactions to the watery world in which I'd been immersed on paper. I'd never noticed how the tinkling of the hollow metal mimicked china teeth chattering on a winter morning. I looked up as something skirted past my peripheral vision to see a small black bat flutter against the charcoaled sky. In relief it was quite outstanding and I watched as it pirouetted in the last bit of light that oozed from the far horizon. Suddenly the dark consumed it and me; I put down my pen and rested in the chair in secrecy, the words I'd so desperately wanted to put on the page invisible in the inked evening. 

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

 

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A #LetsBlogOff Redux on The Road to Promise

It's time for another #LetsBlogOff brouhaha and the subject we are to address today is "what makes a good story?" I think that identifying what constitutes a satisfying read for each of us is such a subjective thing that it's impossible to define the art-form with sweeping statements. I attempt to practice the craft here weekly (usually for #WriterWednesday) as I reveal bite-sized pieces of this memoir I'm determined to write and publish in book-form. Today I celebrate my 63rd post with this #TravelTuesday trip to the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I received a beautiful gift recently when Rufus, a #LetsBlogOff crony, featured my storytelling efforts on Dog Walk Blog. I'd be interested to know if you agree with his premise that what I am doing is indeed storytelling. Even if you disagree, I'd like to know. To see my fellow blog-off'ers' contributions, click here: you will be well rewarded! And now, without further adieu, this week's chunk of my journey along The Road to Promise:

Berating the Wind

One night, I drank in the beauty of the full moon's reflection as it cut a wide golden-silver swath across the lake, zigzagging its way from the other bank to ours. It seemed as if the radiant disk was determined to take a shimmering journey—casting off in the darkness as it searched for a mirror in which to view its visage. I reveled in the fact that from my spot on the deck, the lake seemed to have become the moon's rippling partner in its quest.

The trip to the mountains had made a tremendous impression on me—it was one of the most spectacular days I'd had in quite some time. The pleasure arose from a combination of things: my good mood, the gorgeous weather, the music filtering through my headphones and my heightened awareness of the things around me. I could remember everything so vividly, especially how the sun had drenched each flash of my memory. It was my companion that day, illuminating things so unforgettably that my drive along the twisting and turning highways of the southern swath of the Appalachians seemed hyper-brilliant. 

I'd perched for hours on a high bald and from my position on a blanket spread on the dandelion-strewn grass, I read several quotes by other writers about their families, one of which gave me pause for the poet's use of the word "isolation." Yvonne Sapia had written, "Aristotle told us that tragedy begins with the family. Isolation begins with the family. I write about the situations that separate us even though we are one. I also like to write about change, self-discovery and recognition of things. Finding a sense of place. Finding balance." I thought about Aristotle's premise as I stared at the statuesque stone tower rising above the hilltop, looking taller than a skyscraper from my prone vantage point. Because the ground wandered down a slope, it appeared as if the monument's shadow had gone and fallen unceremoniously off the hill. 

The dandelions, which glowed iridescent yellow when the sun struck them, bobbed their heads as the wind whipped up the sloping ground. It was as if they were nodding in agreement that they were all the prettier for their luminosity. A bird caught my eye, flying in circles above me as it put on a show—all powder-dusted indigo and white-tipped arcing wings. I sat, completely motionless, and forced myself to stare into more blue than any human could possibly absorb even as my vision swirled and my eyes begged me to close them so they could rest from the sky's intensity. Jim had gone off on his hike, leaving me to read and write. The only other person in sight was a boy who was lazing on the grass halfway down the ridge. Surrounded by the thin air, I thought about how Siler's Bald seemed very close to the top of the world. The sound of the bees buzzing was so strong in the silence that it was as if they'd been primed with jet fuel and had been given extra power.

The hardwood trees had not yet sprouted green and the last withered leaves of winter clinging to their limbs were chattering along with the sere grasses skirting the edges of the field as the wind buffeted any exposed expanse it could find. Looking off into the distance where the mountains fell off to meet the valleys, it seemed certain that were I to put a finger on the seam between them, I would find a pulsing, a velvety green vein more alive than the one that snaked beneath the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. 

I was writing in my writer's notebook about how frightened I had been at one point on the trail when I'd had to traverse a skinny path with steep drop-offs on either side of my feet. I had steeled myself for the ten steps in front of me and had kept my eyes focused straight ahead. It was at that moment that we walked through a cloud. I looked to the sky as it was drifting around me and it seemed to be flying at a precarious speed into the clear air beyond my grasp. I was giddy as it rushed by, and I wondered if birds felt this same excitement when they were skimming along through a puff of fluffy moisture. I'd never thought of clouds as fun but having penetrated one, I'd found an altogether new appreciation for the whimsical side of what amounted to atmospheric vapor.

The sun was hot in the little clearing where I'd spread my blanket and I was contemplating moving closer to a scrim of gnarled and twisted trees weathered by an excessive exposure to sun, wind and rain when a girl came traipsing from the shade they created. She was on her way to Clingman's Dome and she sat to rest for a bit, telling me that the trees would not be greening because a beetle was killing them. A blight had taken out all the Chestnut trees several years earlier, she said, lamenting that there were fewer canopies left during the summer months that ever before because the trees were garnering so many enemies. 

I was anxious to get back to my reverie so when she heaved herself from the ground, the twisted branch with its splintered ends she was using for a walking stick making an indention in the moist earth, I smiled politely and returned to my sky-gazing. The only thing marring the beautiful day was the incessant intrusion of bugs as they repeatedly made Kamikaze dives at me. It was as if every insect in the world had decided to spend the day sightseeing just as I was. I wondered if there was a published itinerary somewhere entitled "Best Bug Spots of 1988" with a ping on a map that let them know this was the place to be on this particular afternoon. Maybe it was written in the star patterns at night and we humans weren't privy to the language that would allow us to decode the map. 

On the drive in, we'd seen first a bear and then a fox, each of them going about whatever it is that wild animals do, which due to their proximity to the road likely meant avoiding getting run down by automobiles. I was hoping nothing that intimidating would show up while I was lazing in the sun contemplating the razorback ridges with all their conifers gone. I was heartened that at least the trees were thinning only on the peaks, proof being that I'd spent almost an hour walking through the hollows on our way to the top of the ridge, feeling swallowed by great clusters of pines and firs that were breathing a chilly muskiness down my neck. I'd shivered more than once at the dense life-force they exuded, the experience reminding me that I'd always favored tree-lined streets to open expanses because they seemed so much friendlier with their protection from full-on sunlight. "If all the trees disappeared, the world would become disagreeable indeed," I wrote in my writer's notebook from my perch on high. "When will we humans begin to take this seriously?"

Seeking a better vantage point, I had moved to a large, flat stone, which seemed so ample it could have been a throne. As the sun moved away from the bald with the waning of the afternoon, I noticed that the seat, which was cupping me so generously, grew cooler and damper than when it had been warmed by stronger light. As I studied the scenery splaying before me, it seemed clear to me that when the mountains were formed in this part of the world, it was as if they had awakened to their new surroundings, yawned and stretched their arms to find their rippling muscles forever frozen in a sinewy display. 

Because there were absolutely no "people" noises—such an oddity in the dizzy rush of a world I normally experienced—I'd begun to notice natural sounds, such as the groans emitted by the nearby trees. One in particular was decidedly fussy as the wind had its way with its contorted form. It was the saddest of them by far, one side of its leafless profile covered in thick green lichen. I wondered in that moment what the forest must think of the noises we humans make. I mimicked the tree's sound as closely as I could and was surprised to hear an immediate echo. I said the word "tree" aloud in the best tree-like voice I could muster but it said nothing back. Hoping that it would repeat my word was too much to ask, of course, because it would certainly have wanted to wait until I'd left this patch of near-wilderness before it spoke of the name I'd given it to its gnarled cronies.

Just as I noticed that my hiking boot was perilously close to injuring a clump of tiny purple bluettes extending their faces from beneath the stone's base, Jim ambled up—satisfied that he'd conquered another strip of the Appalachian Trail, or, as he likely saw it, had put another notch in his hiking belt. We headed back to the car and as I was about to turn a bend at the crest of a nearby ridge, I was startled when I heard the unmistakable sound of applause. I rounded the corner to see a bank of rhododendron bushes slapping their thick leaves. Suddenly I was flanked by two steep walls of them, and the sound they were making was delicious. We exited the ravine just as a cloud lifted its thumbprint from the mountain and I noticed there was a pattern to the twitching the wind inspired. 

As I waited for Jim to unlock the car doors, I celebrated the beauty in which I'd been steeped that day, thinking of Henry David Thoreau's statement, "I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright." I had certainly felt magnetism during my time on Siler's Bald and it was my turn to applaud nature for entertaining me so thoroughly that day.

During our drive home, I revisited Sapia's musings, especially her desire to explore "situations that separate us, even though we are one"—there was a time when we were one with nature; a time when "finding a sense of place" would not have been an articulated issue because we were "of a place" simply by being in (and staying in) that place. My life had become such a frantic ebb and flow of movement that I had no idea where "my place" would have been. Isn't that what makes me feel so off balance so much of the time? I wondered. We were two months away from beginning a new project in Costa Rica and I thought of the prospect with trepidation. How in the world would I find my balance with that challenge looming before me? I asked myself silently, not daring to voice my consternation aloud as the light leaked from the evening sky and we slid silently westward toward home.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

 

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Object of Desire

During a picnic at Chickamauga Battlefield, I thought about how serene the place seemed with sunlight flooding onto the grass, the smattering of yellow flowers infusing the textured fields with pinpricks of vividness. Then I thought about how terrifying it would have been to end up alone in any one of the fields at night with the ghosts of so many soldiers lurking about. Couldn't the tortured spirits once trapped in bodies prostrate on the bucolic expanses, suffering as their blood seeped into the soil beneath our blanket, still be floating about in pain? I wondered. The statues dotting the meandering meadows were emblazoned with names too plentiful to absorb, especially while the birds sang so beautifully. How would they have reacted if cannons had been blasting into this lovely afternoon light? I wondered. 

The clouds passing lazily by would have witnessed death during those war-torn occasions when men went after men for the rights they upheld as dear. Did the wounded pray for darkness to overtake them so they could die in peace or were they bargaining with God in the off chance they would be plucked from the grass, even while it meant escaping impending death might mean facing uncertain futures?

I only intellectualize what might have happened, not going so far as to feel into their sadness as I lounged on the blanket with the wind strumming through the trees. I knew this was lazy writing behavior but I contented myself with watching the breeze set a rhythm for the clover, which seemed agitated in its vibrations. So much better to lie in peace than die in fight, I thought, even while I realized the importance of freedom for an entire race of people had been won during those battles. Tennessee had made a name for itself in that war—the volunteer state—and I did believe it was right to feel grateful to those who had died there, giving their all with as much meaning as they could muster, whether they truly wanted to be involved or not. 

I had packed Richard Ford's book Rock Springs with our picnic food and I kicked back after we'd eaten to see if I could interpret why he was being celebrated as one of America's greatest minimalist novelists. I was caught completely off guard that I had such a tough time with the material. For someone who could speak so positively about the writing experience, his characters were so downtrodden I had to pause after making my way about halfway through the fourth story. "Good god," I jotted in my writer's notebook, "all of this is just too down and out; please not yet another depressing scene!"

The opening of the story "Sweethearts" was an example. Arlene, the protagonist, was saying good-bye to her ex-husband Bobby. The narrator, Arlene's current partner Russ, unveiled the scene: "This was not going to be a good day in Bobby's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail. He had written several bad checks, and before he could be sentenced for that he had robbed a convenience store with a pistol—completely gone off his mind. And everything had gone to hell, as you might expect. Arlene had put up the money for his bail, and there was some expensive talk about an appeal. But there wasn't any use to that. He was guilty…"

My immaturity as a person hampered me from putting the gloominess aside in order to see that his stories ask good questions, which he allows to unfold naturally. It occurred to me that I was trying to answer the questions I was posing in "Legacy," the short story I'd been writing, much too neatly. A sinking feeling settled in the pit of my stomach as I realized this was one more issue to add to the long list of challenges I was facing as a fledgling writer, a complication I could ill afford as I already felt my creativity was being sapped by some unseen force. Memories washed in and out of my mind like the tide at Point Lobos but nothing would stick because there was so little time to record anything. 

I had let Jim talk me into a day-hike to Clingman's Dome and it was the perfect weather for it. I noticed as we drove into the Appalachians, passing the tattered houses along the roadsides, that the elderly backcountry folks I saw had the kindest faces in repose. There seemed to be a tremendous patience in them that was unique to these marginalized people. I wondered how Ford would have characterized them and I thought about making notes about them but I didn't want to miss any of the scenery whizzing past my field of vision. The dogwoods were still blooming at the higher altitudes in the mountains. They filled the gaps with whispers of white, becoming gauzy plumes enveloped as they were in elemental hues of green and brown. 

The tin roofs on the oldest houses slanted far beyond the interiors in order to cover the wrap-around verandas, making the homes appear as if someone had socked dirty floppy hats on their heads. As far as the eye could see in this part of the country, the rounded knobs of mountains protruded into the sky. Power lines—the intermittent reminders of "civilization"—cut gashes in some of the peaks, and where the mines met the road, the hearts of most of the hills were scooped out in the interest of culling their copper. I'd never seen dirt as red as the soil left at the scene of the massacre, which had left the entire region broken and barren. The bloody-hued hills spilled into the creeks like veins spouting sludge-like liquid, making quagmires of the soil-clogged rivers. The world seemed incredibly dead and I felt as if I were intruding on nature's suffering, that all she wanted was to be left alone so she could grieve the scars she had yet to have the strength to heal. 

I was listening to a Windham Hill compilation and the lyrical music stirred my feelings, making me want to touch the land somehow but I realized that given the immenseness of it, I was as lost as a desperate lover unable to reach the object of his desire. It was then that I noticed an enormous black crow standing at the hem of the asphalt, head bowed, contemplating the sparse grass beneath his feet. I wondered if the bird, who looked so wizened given his monochromatic severity, was a reincarnated monk who had come to listen to nature's dirge. He was so intent I was able to fool myself into believing he wasn't simply readying himself to drag a worm from the soil but was bearing witness to the earth's pain. 

My mood stayed somber as we drove along, even as the midday sun washed the rocks along the undulant Hiwassee River in quicksilver hues. They were so brilliant they set the thrashing waters of the river ablaze. The churning rapids, the plundered landscapes and the mirrored surface of the rocks sparked a question in me, even so early in what has become an environmentally conscious game to so many people who give lip-service to the cause without putting any weight behind it: "There is so much written about man against nature; what of the struggle nature faces against man?"

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

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The Life of a Writer

During our last day at the beach, the ocean turned steely as the sun moved behind a plum-colored cloudbank flooded with mauve layers of escaping light. Closest to the proximity of the sunset, the water still glimmered—the way a hunter's gun would catch the light in the early morning as the lid of the blind is thrown back and he emerges, his barrel lifted upward. The sand was littered with tiny parcels of light as the sun's last showing of the day illuminated bits of broken shells their former inhabitants had abandoned for better protection or in succumbing to death.

One of them called to a wasp, which had landed on the large mutilated shell at my feet as I combed the sand for unscathed offerings. I crouched and watched as it lingered a bit too long and was swept up in the surf, now littering the sand like its damaged fascination, its wings wet and useless. What an echo of life! I thought. The ocean had beckoned to the hungry creature, offering it a buffet of possibilities within the crevice it explored in the shell's heart only to sweep it away with her choking liquid. As the wasp helplessly tumbled in her rolling embrace, I wondered why the ocean felt the need to take the breath of others. Didn't she feel confident, as strong as she was, I questioned; didn't she trust that she'd have enough of a life force to sustain her throughout eternity? 

That night I watched a television interview during which Faye Dunaway remarked, "What do you do when you're vulnerable? You cover it up and pretend you're in control." I thought of that wasp, so insignificant against an ocean that certainly wasn't giving up its forcefulness. It struck me that my own sense of power had grown such a tiny bit as I continued to develop a small writer's voice, and the thought soothed me as I turned out the lights to be sung to sleep by the waxing and waning waves. 

The solace was short-lived as I faced the flight home the next morning. We slipped away from Panama City before dawn, the wings of our small plane vibrating in reaction to the unfriendly air mass we were battling as we clawed our way past Montgomery's cloud-choked sky. The radar fanned on the control panel, seeking rain's presence and painting itself spotty green in victory. It yellowed when finding heavy patches of Mother Nature's wrath, the brilliance of the sunny hue the antithesis of what it represented. 

Jim puttered around the cockpit doing what pilots do and I wanted to tell him to keep his eye on the road, though there was no need for him to peer through the embattled windshield, which was taking it on the chin as the rain pelted it in a staccato rhythm. Had the ride not been so bumpy, it would have been a pleasant experience sliding through the blueness of the sky as the day dawned bright above the blanket of clouds. I was determined to finish Weber's article, which I'd started the day after I'd studied the boys on their bikes, but the plane shuddered to the point that the words were vibrating. As I held the magazine still enough that I could follow the text, I found Ford's take on the life of a writer to be fascinating, as he saw it as a combination of self-sacrifice and self-championing. Could I champion myself if I ever found the courage to make the sacrifice to write? I wondered as I read that fiction writing was to Ford as useful a thing for a culture as there is. He went on to say, "Not that I've been so useful, but it is as high a calling as you can have…serious devotion to it purchases some rights: the right to presume, to make things up, to create."

I knew I was doing certain things the "right way," namely keeping my writer's notebooks. Ford kept them; would spend months accumulating the "raw stuff" that would come together to make his novels or short stories whole. He maintained that anything that appeared to him to be singular would end up in his notebooks. "Here's a sentence I wrote [that's] not meant to be interesting to anybody else: 'Christmas, comma, Jesus Christ.' That'll turn out to be a dialogue line."

He went on to tell Weber, "A sentence in my notebook will come at a place where I never imagined it. And that's what writing is for me, taking the raw stuff and recasting it into a logic that is its own. Taking lines which maybe occurred in life in one context, and then creating another context for them." Ford says of the characters in Rock Springs that though readers may think of them as less articulate, the stories assert they have just as much to tell. When Weber mentions that the critics contend he gives his uneducated, unambitious characters too much credit, he responds, "It's a philosophical point very near the heart of everything I write…If I were limited to just predictable responses, if we believe 'Here is a guy who can only think this or that,' that people live within their givens, then life's pretty well set for us. But human beings continue to surprise us. It is just a fact of life that people pick up Volkswagens at moments of stress. People just say things that make you stare off, sometimes."

As I clutched the magazine, stretching the page to a tautness that would keep the words from jumping around, I prayed I'd get to the point of being able to say what Ford declares next: "I've just given everything I've ever written my very best—my absolute, greatest best shot. And that's all."

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

To see the trajectory of my writing life to present day, visit Roaming by Design and see what I'm up to these days as a writer. You can also see my #LetsBlogOff pals doing their thing here!

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A Real Place in the World

I was lounging on the deck making my way through a stack of magazines I'd brought from home when I found an inspiring article in The New York Times magazine by Bruce Weber entitled "Richard Ford's Uncommon Characters." Talk about life imitating art right before my eyes: those boys, who'd been embroiled in a struggle for dominance, were so common as to be uncommonly real! In Weber's article Ford remarked, "A lot of people could be novelists if they were willing to devote their lives to their responses to things." Wow! I thought. Simply recording the boys' actions wasn't nearly enough! I had to determine how I would have responded to what they were doing. The idea appealed to me but where did I even begin?

In the piece, Weber stated, "The stories in Rock Springs…are populated by characters who are mostly down and out, natives of a remote region that simply doesn't offer them enough. It's a class of people familiar to readers of current fiction. But unlike those in, say, the early stories of Raymond Carver, whose work set the tone for many of the new writers of the 1980's, Ford's characters rarely yield to despair or defeat. They actively seek the high-minded solace that's available in self-knowledge, in the future, in love.

"The individual's struggle for transcendence is an old literary theme, of course. But in the narrow mainstream of contemporary American fiction, it's absence has been well-noted—and by an increasing number of critics missed—particularly in the spreading influence of the so-called 'minimalists.' According to many literary observers, short-story writers like Carver, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel, by virtue of their many imitators, have spawned what has become a dominant fashion in American writing.

"The perceived minimalist formula is marked by a technical expertise resonating primarily in the service of characters so burdened by powerlessness, diffidence or anomie that their engagement with the world around them is superficial or oblique. Their often introspective revelations tend to reinforce this sense of isolation…Ford is onto something new…providing American fiction with the theme that life is serious, rather than life is trivial or that life is very grim. That there are issues in this life worth trying to clarify.

"Raymond Carver, who is Ford's close friend, is unequivocal. 'Sentence for sentence,' he says, 'Richard is the best writer at work in this country today [1988].' Ford says, 'I really think that human beings accommodating themselves to a landscape, to a place, is natively dramatic, that that in itself is potentially the stuff of literature.'"

This made me think of the people I'd been meeting in Costa Rica and how dramatic life felt to me just by the sheer fact that the people there were responding to such a fierce environment. Ford went on to say, "The stories didn't exhaust all the things I care about, the things that move me to write…The other books are novels, and in writing them, I exhausted everything which is, in a way, my own private definition of a novel. I try to exhaust my own interest in a place. Then I'll just move on, write about someplace else where I kind of notice again how people accommodate themselves to where they live. That accounts for the kinds of things I write." 

The article made me want to read his work so I put Rock Springs at the top of my book-buying list. One of the main reasons I was anxious to see how his writing style unfurled itself on the page was this statement by Weber: "Ford's sentences are raggedly lyrical, an eclectic music equally capable of the elegant, vaulting language that seeks to encompass an ambiguity and the brisk simplicity of vernacular speech…Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the stories in Rock Springs is a climactic explication. In his most trenchant passages, Ford launches an almost essayistic probe of human yearning and the stories resonate finally with the conviction that his characters have a real place in the world, however strained."

Ford tells Weber, "What I write is fiction. What I do is imagine a place and call it a name." Weber asks Ford about his relationship between the place on the map and the place on the page. "Me," he answered. "It's just me. There is a place, and there is an impulse to write, and I am the only important meditative there. Which is not to single out my own importance, just my responsibility." 

I sat for a while, staring out at the deepening blue of the water as the day waned, feeling envious of someone who could talk so confidently about writing, the writing life and his responsibility within it. I wanted to rest in that hallowed place so badly I could taste it but the writing I was doing was paltry and stunted. Would that ever change? I wondered.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

 

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The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod

The #LetsBlogOff question today is "What is Creativity?" I usually post these forays into tandem-land with my fellow Let's-Blog-Off pals on Roaming By Design but today I'm giving a nod to the memoir I'm rolling out here bit by bit because this is one of the most creative things I am doing right now and it just so happens that today's post is about exploring creative writing. I love it when synchronicity happens! 

Follow the Leader

One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: "Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won't answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work." I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!

I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera's book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: "All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?" I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.

With Kudera's questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who'd taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first "game" involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line. 

Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. "I'll betcha $60 that I can!" The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, "I'll betcha $50 million that you can't jump that." They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.

He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to "make it." He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, "That was no good!" The little guy countered, "What? It is so; it's exactly the way you did it across the street!" 

"That was over there," the mean kid responded. "This is over here and over here it doesn't count if you touch the stick!" The little girl yelled, "You owe him $50 million!" The dejection on the smallest boy's face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was "Follow the Leader" and you've likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard. 

The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn't stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup. 

What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was "Follow the Leader," each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called "crash position" and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy's name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid's name. They must have raided both their father's garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash. 

I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer's notebook and thought about how Michael's psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn't have even thought about had I not read "Dialogue on the Art of Composition," one of the chapters in Kundera's book. "Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation," he said. "Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length." This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative live.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

A list of posts by my #LetsBlogOff cohorts in crime can be found here.

 

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Ineffectual Torture

Something had begun to niggle at me about Jim. "I feel your churning beside me; your ineffectual torture," I wrote. Was I projecting? I wondered. It was possible, but I wasn't completely off base because I had come to realize that he was lost without his work, which he had largely turned over to his sons, and the mission field, which I had been so happy to leave behind, all the while realizing it was incredibly selfish of me to feel this way. 

He was ever on the lookout for ways to assuage his loss from letting go of the lion's share of his power in the business he had worked his entire adult life to build and I cringed when he announced that he wanted to be behind the controls of the plane more often as we traveled the southeast U.S. He renewed his pilot's license and decided the perfect time to get back in the cockpit was a trip to the beach. I dared not say aloud that the prospect made me want to faint, because he would have seen it as weakness on my part. He banked the plane hard to steer us on course as we left Chattanooga's airspace and we found ourselves butting heads with a cold front that had screamed through town during the early morning hours. I trusted him in most things, of course, but my veins were coursing with fear as he flipped buttons and pulled knobs, the dropping and rising motion that happened almost simultaneously making me feel oddly giddy and absolutely terrified. 

We skirted the weather system until we'd cleared south Alabama, and it looked as though God had been doing some deep spring-cleaning, using foamy carpet cleaner on the sky as far as the eye could see. I was running metaphors through my mind to take the focus off my queasy stomach, which Jim—seeing the panic on my face—assured me was unwarranted nerves. I calmed myself by deciding then and there that I had nothing to lose but my life, and if it came to that it was likely to happen fairly quickly so prolonging the torture by imagining what would come to pass if we were pitched onto the land, broken and burning, was an exercise in stupidity. 

We made it to Panama City just fine, and the ocean, as it always had, lulled me into peace. I agreed wholeheartedly with the notion that the sound and the motion was womblike. A gull careened overhead as I lounged on the deck, looking as if it had absolutely no control from its internal cockpit. Trust is a funny thing for a bird in brisk winds! I thought as I sat there wondering how many of them actually crashed—to think that none of them ever did was silly, wasn't it? 

A massive fire was burning miles away down the beach and the winds were turning it into a Hades-sized blowtorch. The smoke was being carried away by the upper-level winds, creating a shelf atop the billowing plume that intercepted the sun during the early afternoon, masking its power. By early evening, the smoke stretched far out to sea as we sat at the water's edge, our chairs sinking into the sand with each wave that lapped beneath us. I admired the metallic sheen of the ocean, which was mirror-like until a rolling crest foamed and tumbled ashore, washing its own image out to sea. 

During my morning journaling sessions, I was working on descriptions of experiences I'd had in Costa Rica. I was trying to describe a scene I saw in Limon in which a harelip and an elderly man sat on a dark porch talking. There were no chairs under their behinds—just bare concrete, the hardness of which did little to dampen their merriment. It was as if they had no clue their accommodations were spare; the old man must have been particularly witty because he continually drew laughter from the gaping mouth of the other man. I wanted to study his deformity but I didn't dare stare at him because it would have been beyond rude. I made do with a few furtive glances, marveling at the fact that he could so unselfconsciously express glee. I wanted to capture the animated beauty of his face, which completely negated the imperfection of his crimped lip. There was something about his dignity that felt almost holy to me.

Early on in our Limon days, I'd met the sweetest man named Mr. Green at St. Mark's. I thought about how there were so many people I'd come to know only by their last names, as decorum didn't permit being on a first-name basis for quite some time. He had tutored me on my diet as we sat in the parish hall in Limon at a dinner held by the local Episcopal Church Women during our last trip to Limon. "It is best to eat only hard foods," he said, just about the time I took the first bite of my sandwich, "they cause less wind in the belly." I thanked him and told him I would definitely remember that as he pushed his chair back, already canvassing the long row of tables to see who was nearby.

I watched as he visited with most of the other people in the room, flirting ever-so-slightly with the women who would giggle like they were teenagers when he'd tell a joke or inquire after their well being. The sun was filtering through the window as he leaned over the table to chat with another man I'd seen at church functions, though we'd never been introduced. The light striking his dark skin created a silvery gray glow on the backs of his hands, which looked as tough as tanned leather.

On our way back to San Jose the next day, I had studied the landscape to see if I could push myself to better descriptions than I had been recording. It was the time of year when certain giant trees were blooming orange, their lost petals creating a smattering of confetti on the ground. Some fields that would normally have been a lush grassy green were speckled with resplendent orange light, the sun infusing the fallen blossoms with effervescing color as they lived their last decaying hours so exuberantly. What a paradox of life and death irrevocably intertwined! I thought.fields as And how lucky were the cattle grazing in those fields as they nibbled beauty! Many of the stocky animals had guardian angels on their backs—regal white birds holding vigil to nab the errant insects attempting to light on their burly mobile kitchens. 

As we drew closer to the mountains, I noticed a number of trees carrying dense vines on their beefy outstretched arms, which made them appear as if they were draped in cloaks of velvety green. They towered over the other trees as if holding court—telling their charges how to behave with their grand, sweeping gestures that were dripping with finery. One particularly statuesque tree wore vines across its very top in an umbrella shape. It was almost as if it had been crowned the king of the copse it found itself gazing down upon. It brought to mind how the strongest, tallest specimen in any given situation could quickly turn into the most vulnerable when mighty winds blew through.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

 

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