Saxon Henry's Blog, page 29

Passages

The Miami airport provided me with a wealth of sensory perceptions and surprising events during out treks to and from Costa Rica. During our tip on our way down, I saw Father Guido Sarducci, a character played by actor on "Saturday Night Live," filming a skit with a stuffed figure satirizing Pope John Paul II. The pontiff was arriving in Miami that week to kick off a nine-day tour of the U.S. and Novello was beating all the media to the punch with the shriveled up dummy he...

Finité!

As the intense thunderstorms continued each night, lightening nettled the darkness and thunder convulsed the walls. The rain gushed in such torrents that I wondered if God was trying to wash the filth from the streets of Limon. Gertrude said the strength of the storms was unusual; that even as accustomed as she was to the tropical spectacles, she was terrified. "I covered the mirrors when I heard the clap-clap last night," she told me the next morning. As we sat drinking her sorrel...

Drip, Drip, Drip...

Though better than most places we'd stayed, our room at the center was filthy by the standards I'd known all my life. My mom was a stickler for neatness. In fact, she's a rare breed—one of those house-proud women who actually moves furniture to clean the baseboards with regularity. In trying to bring our large bedroom up to what she would have considered deplorably dirty, I used a quart of SaniPine and a container of Ajax liquid. It helped, but the mop Gertrude gave me to use on the floor...

On the Outside Looking In

The Episcopal Conference Center was once a hotel, and it was a significant improvedment from our last accommodations—the room that had crawled with roaches and bred mold like it was a vaccine laboratory. As it turned out, our host and hostess were a bonus. Not only were they the caretakers of the center, Gus was a Perpetual Deacon for St Mark's Church next door. When he smiled, his face squenched into a knot like the top of an orange where the stem had been removed. When he was slightly...

Playing Chicken

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It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I took those limes from the hands of the woman in Germania and yet it felt as if we had only just left Costa Rica. For future projects, Jim had decided we would not be staying long. Instead, we'd take one-week and two-week trips, which would be maniacally sprinkled between beach time, ski time, party time and "real life." As we loaded our bags into the car for our first trip since our work in Germania had ended, I thought about how my writing...

Like Dead Bubblegum

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Jim returned from Costa Rica completely frustrated because the government had impounded the truck he'd sent. He spent the entire four days trying to extricate it but the bureaucrats wouldn't budge, and for reasons he didn't understand, he was detained at the airport when he was trying to return to the states. It took an intervention by the Bishop to get him out of hot water and on his way home.

As was the norm, the setback didn't keep him down for long. The Sunday after his return, we were...

I'd Cared Too Much

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Since my epiphany on the airplane during our trip from California, I'd been doing a bit better at protecting some time for writing. I'd finished and submitted a poem, my first attempt at publication, to Byline Magazine. It was inspired by Ernest Hemingway's book of poems I'd found in St. Augustine.

Upon Reading "The Complete Poems of Ernest Hemingway"

I sat in Northgate Burger King
with Ernest Hemingway;
washed in concentration,
shades of "oily weather" gray.
Complete Poems this book...

Interruptions, Nourishing and Maddening

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I had mapped out the details for a second trip to California in celebration of our wedding anniversary. It would be an orchestrated drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Huntington Beach, staying in bed-and-breakfast inns along the way. I was eager to walk the beach in Carmel again, and I had decided to take Robinson Jeffers' poetry with me—intending to read his words during our drive south. This, as it turned out, was impossible because Jim took the undulant coastal...

The Small Joys

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Our traveling reached a fever pitch as winter turned to spring. Jim loved being "on the go" so we crisscrossed the country in planes, trains and automobiles—Colorado morphed into Panama City, and a drive down the coast road of California was wedged between trips to Atlanta.

My writer's notebook held longing: "I want to get past the point of simply existing everyday; I believe the attitude of 'just get by today by doing the minimum' is what has made me lazy. There is much to do and it is...

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