You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I wish he hadn’t said it. My former landlord in the Yakima Valley, visiting us here in New England, remarked on how many of the houses he saw that were in need of new paint. That was before he saw ours, too.
Now, in this seemingly picturesque location, everywhere I turn, I see houses with peeling paint. Or worse.
I wish he hadn’t said it.
At least he said nothing about roofing.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a reader, thanks, especially, to a third-grade teacher who got it rolling and a fifth-grade teacher who extended the Landmark history volumes. Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Gulliver’s Travels were all early triumphs. Curiously, Huckleberry Finn was easier at age nine than it was as required reading at seventeen; the second time around, the dialect was more difficult to handle. My general interests, however, soon veered from history to chemistry until the writing bug hit me through a very demanding high school sophomore year English teacher who drilled grammar so thoroughly we were diagramming 250-word sentences and arguing our alternative versions. She also solidified a tentative curiosity in my enrolling in journalism the next year, which wound up leading to my career path. In my senior year, when I was editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper, another English teacher confidently insisted, “You know why you write.” Followed by, “Yes, you do.”
In truth, I’ve never quite been sure what her answer would have been. I assumed she saw a desire to be noticed or appear important. But that’s not what I would have answered. I was, after all, a skinny intellectual in a school that valued football and basketball players. Moreover, my father’s side of the family – the ones I knew, since my mother’s parents had both died before my birth and the rest of her blood relations were in Missouri – had little use for either art or learning for its own sake. They were a practical, God-fearing people where a gift in language would be best employed as a preacher. (Lawyers were another matter.) Only after my father’s death did I learn he had once dreamed of being a sportswriter or the pride he took in my work as a professional journalist. When that flash connected with my grandfather’s saving copies of all of the Dayton Journal and Herald newspapers from the World War II era (“Someday they’ll be valuable”) and his mother’s lifetime of meticulous reading of the daily news could I finally perceive their approval in what I had come to see as a low-paying, and increasingly low-status, occupation.
From them I also carry a deeply ingrained sense of social responsibility, one in which my personal relationships are often motivated more by duty than love. Here, then, my leap in concern from history to politics would seem natural. Little wonder the novels Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 re-ignited a passion for fiction and what the written word can do. Politics is also the mother lode of journalism, especially for those of us who believe progress is possible through civic action. And so I might have answered Miss Hyle’s statement with, “I write to improve the world.”
~*~
(How audacious that sounds now, more than four decades later. How innocent, too.)
~*~
What she may have seen was unmistakable ambition – a desire to win for the sake of winning, apart from being noticed or appearing important, regardless of the game at hand. Winning as an act of self-affirmation. Winning as the reward for solving the puzzle faster than your rivals. With or without the laurels, trophy, or monument.
Secretly, though, there has been the hunger for a monument, the book in every home or library, the paperback cover in the supermarket and drugstore, the repeated praise in the New York Times Book Review section. Even, at one early point, the aspiration to have not just volumes of poetry and fiction but a play or musical on Broadway as well.
But then the plot thickened.
And how.
Buying “free-pastured” eggs from a coworker produced one of those Eureka! observations in our kitchen. Just look and you see how different organic or natural food can be. The yolks were bigger and brighter than anything we got at the supermarket. Tastier, too, which isn’t always the case with the back-to-nature examples.
The shells, I should add, came in lovely pastels, depending on the breed. The light green was my favorite.
And then he moved on, and so did I. Or maybe winter came first, with the annual drop-off in hen productivity.
Still, we see a difference in the free-range eggs we’re buying these days, rather than the supermarket’s own brand.
This was one of the big items that used to appear in the personals ads. The lady wanted a gentleman who was “financially secure.” But what did that mean in practice?
For some, I suppose, it was a seven-figure portfolio … or better.
For others, maybe someone who held a steady job or was supporting himself? Or maybe could simply pay his half of the rent?
Of course, it was ultimately a personal perspective.
So how would you have defined it?
It’s now been 12 months since my first ebook appeared at Smashwords – a list that now presents six of my novels and a full-length poetry collection. That’s in addition to my poetry chapbooks appearing at other presses.
First, I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. What you’re seeing is the fruition of a lifetime of writing that’s now, finally, coming to light. I cannot imagine trying to write seriously without a desire to share it with others – especially when I hear you tell of ways it speaks of your own experiences or sparks related memories.
I also want to acknowledge the fact that these are not works I could write today, not for a decline in ability but rather because each of us evolves and changes over time. My energies, inspirations, perspectives, and focus are different now than they were 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. I look at these works and find much that is wonderfully baroque or surreal or passionately intense and realize I’m in a much different sensibility today – yes, I’m happy to have these souvenirs from the journey, these touchstones and treasures, but they come from my younger years and their visions and even the different companions who shared my life back then, in contrast to the household I cherish now. More than ever, I’m ever-so-grateful I set aside the time over the years to draft and revise then, rather than waiting for my retirement years as so many wannabe writers do.
Let me just say there’s much more coming in the next 12 months.
And thank you.
If we can believe their proclamations, two things single women in this part of the country typically seek with a partner are romantic candlelight dinners and long strolls on a moonlit beach.
The dinners, we can suppose, are either at elegant restaurants or in his dwelling (where he displays his gourmet cooking skills to her fullest appreciation), either way with suitable wine in sparkling stemware. Let’s just hope he remembers to ask her beforehand if she enjoys his signature dishes. (Mea culpa, on my end.) I don’t think hamburger and fries, by the way, go with her candlelit setting.
From observation, let me add that the restaurants often wind up as intimidating experiences for the would-be couple. When my wife and I go out, we expect to laugh, to banter with the wait staff, to be entertained by the possibilities of food and ambiance. When we were reviewing dining spots, even the disasters turned into fun-filled adventures – OK, if we’d been paying full fare, we would have been justifiably miffed. As columnists, though, we got our revenge.
The nighttime beach, though, is another matter. Having had opportunities to spend time approaching midnight on local beaches, I can tell you few couples are found strolling there, much less romantically. Except for a few nights in prime summer – the days hovering around the century mark, the night’s nippy and windy. The moon, for its part, is in its fullest stages only a few nights each summer, and many of those are cloudy. Without a bright moon, it’s impossibly dark near the water – even spooky, with or without sea fog rolling in.
You can come to love the ocean that way, but it’s a stark environment.
For romance, though, I think you need a driftwood fire. Plus the right wine and a corkscrew.
Wine? It’s the one thing both events seem to have in common.
Finding yourself single after the dissolution of a marriage or the death of a spouse is bewildering, at best.
The loneliness and grieving can be nearly unbearable, and emerging from that into some kind of social scene is, well, a lot worse than high school ever was.
Trying to find the right place to meet appropriate potential partners is no less challenging. You hear all kinds of suggestions, from health club to Laundromat, and all of that’s problematic. These days, as a male, I’d look at a yoga studio, just saying …
Another of the complications is the fact – well, it was a quarter-century ago – that the available women were concentrated within the bigger cities, while the corresponding men were an hour or more away, beyond the suburbs.
In the time since then, a number of online dating sites have appeared, and I’ll let others relate their adventures and successes or failures.
But when I was available, the personals ads began to flourish. Out of necessity, I suppose. They even had their own free booklets, like TV listings.
Coincidentally, around the time I remarried, there was a blowup at my newspaper when the publisher went livid over a personals ad where one hopeful had described himself in opposite terms to the usual cliches. (He touted himself as fat, lazy, unemployed, and the like, as I recall.) It was enough to get me and now-elder stepdaughter (and fellow writer) to start reading the Boston Sunday Globe’s more varied ads for insights in the ways people perceived themselves or tried to portray their desires. Usually, they churned out short resumes full of contradictions or things only others could adjudge. “Beautiful” or “handsome” was common, usually preceded by “very,” but that’s something purely for the viewer to decide, thank you.
At any rate, a few entries would stand above the crowd.
One, for instance, described herself as a “Land’s-End kind of gal,” and you really do get a good sense of her in those five words. (We gave her ad a B+ or A-.)
The all-time winner, though, was along these lines: “Happy blue-eyed plumber in search of articulate, well-poised woman to bring (something) into my life. Children a plus.”
He alone could say if he was happy, and “blue-eyed” certainly told the reader about looks. “Plumber,” meanwhile, indicated responsibility and economic status. As for children? Few novelists deliver as much with such economy.
The ad, we noticed, ran just once.
To my mind, one of the great questions about the human condition is just why an individual is romantically attracted to one person but not another.
We can start with physical attraction, of course, which opens a whole list of possibilities. Since I’ve always been a heterosexual male, I suppose my checklist would start with blonde, redhead, or brunette, although I must confess that on a few women, bald can be incredibly stunning. By the way, I happen to love long hair, which to my good fortune my wife possesses. We can move on to blue-eyed, true green, hazel, or brown eyes. And that’s even before we get to height or shape or … you get the picture.
Of course, things get really complicated after that. How much do we want the other to share our deepest interests, even to the point of being a mirror image of ourselves, and how much do we want them to differ? Where are the crucial points of commonality and mutual life’s mission – and how much deviation can we accept or allow? And just how do our emotional styles work together … or clash? What about our attitudes toward money, time, wealth, possessions? How much risk can we tolerate? And so on and on.
For me, keen intellect is essential. One who reads widely, at that. And then there is the spiritual side as well as strong ethics.
On top of it all, one of my measures, if pressed, would ask if this is someone I’d like to gaze on over the breakfast table. And, I could ask, is hers a voice I would always enjoy hearing. Would she always have fascinating stories and insights?
No matter how much I once tried to refine the list, though, something was always missing. In all my years between the collapse of my first marriage and the beginning of the one that counts, I came across a few women who were top candidates on paper but, when we were together, nothing clicked. So what was the missing magic? In the end, I still haven’t a clue.
I come back to this question of mutual attraction when I consider the Apostle Paul’s counsel, “Better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9), and ask, “What if heterosexual marriage does not quench the burning?” My examination of Scripture long ago led me to conclude that the ideal of Christian marriage is not so much the bearing of children but rather the “suitable helpmeet” and that, in turn, points toward monogamy and a unique kind of balance I see as more than an equality in the relationship. You can see where I’ve landed on that debate.
Of course, that also spurs another question – one that involves keeping the focus and the flame strong. Anyone have any suggestions there? These are, after all, central enigmas of our human condition.
Inscribed on gravestone of John P. Hale (1806-73) in Dover:
He who lies beneath surrendered office, place, and power rather than bow down and worship slavery …
He was the first United States senator to take a stand against slavery.
Earlier, while serving in the federal House of Representatives, he refused to follow the New Hampshire legislature’s directive to support the admission of Texas as a slaveholding state. In the following election, barred by his party from running under its banner, he ran as an independent; none of the three candidates won a majority and the district went unrepresented.
The older I get, the less I know.
It’s not just a matter of recall, either.
At least it’s no longer called “absent-minded.” Or just plain “spacing out.”
