You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I’d finished my laps. Was getting ready to exit the building when I glanced at the literature rack. There it was:
I’m retired, like most of the people I swim with.
Still, this matter of pride kicked in.
I have more than enough to do as it is. So I’m telling myself.
As I said at the time …
Guess one of the advantages of living in a rental unit is that the smell of fresh-cut grass is provided by the maintenance crew – allowing me a little more time for reading, writing, and screwing around.
I see it’s time to make some more coffee. Care for a mug? Catch you later!
Many folks won’t swim in the Gulf of Maine even in the height of summer. It’s just too cold, they say.
I can sympathize, though some perspective helps. Rarely is the Atlantic around here warm enough before the Fourth of July. Oh, there may be a few rare days, but nothing dependable. We’ve found that anything below 57 F is foolish – even when the air temp’s over a hundred.
Yup, 57. That’s the blue-toe limit: edge into the surf bit by bit. First, the toes. Then out. Back again, top of the foot. Out again. Back again, to the ankles. You get the idea. If you actually make it to total submersion, you come out fast. Like a bullet.
Over time swimming here, you might even get to the point where you can guess within a degree or two. Sixty’s about my bottom line for swimming. Sixty-five is where the water starts to get comfortable. And 70, a rare delight, is heavenly.
For reference, I’ve come to rely on the NOAA Northeast USA Recent Marine Data Web page, which includes readings from buoys. Lately, as the water temps have been edging 50 F – finally even a tad over before ebbing – it’s become a topic of conversation.
Which prompted this response the other day: Ever hear of the 50-50-50 Rule?
Eh?
Fifty minutes in 50-degree water gives you a 50 percent chance of drowning. (Or 50 percent chance of surviving, depending on your outlook on life.)
In light of the blue-toe limit, I had no idea the odds could be that favorable. Not that I ever intend to press them.
Somehow I avoided most of the usual traffic tie-ups and wound up with some extra time to kill in the Boston area on what turned out to be the first afternoon with real spring in the air. Given the time to kill, I headed off, camera in hand, for a walk along the Charles River.
At one point, I looked down along the riverbank and saw a limb draped out into the water. Five turtles were sunning on it in a wonderful composition. The camera was in focus and I needed one more step before I aimed and clicked. Just as I did, they slipped one by one into the water.
Maybe next time.
On the way back, I came up on a couple, hand in hand, as they strolled along the pathway. Another great shot, this time of street fashion. They were in matching all black, except for his shorts, which were black with great swirls of yellow and orange. I should have taken a shot but wanted to respect their privacy.
Now I’m wishing I’d gone ahead anyway.
Two nights before, as I was heading off to a committee meeting, I saw the perfect shot of the tower on City Hall, its gold-leaf dome and golden weathervane brightly lighted by the setting sun against a slate-gray background. Unfortunately, I wasn’t carrying my camera.
That has me thinking how many great photos turn out to be like those turtles, just slipping out of sight.
Maybe it provides all the more respect for the good photos we have.
Every writer, we can presume, has plans for the next work – or several. Tackling them, of course, can be another matter altogether, especially if the schedule’s already full, even before we get to the overdue house and garden projects. Or some equivalent.
Listen to other writers, by the way, and you’ll hear just how much of that schedule now focuses on marketing, including social media, to push already published work instead of doing the, well, not exactly “fun” part (it is, after all, work) but the passionate core that prompts the entire enterprise: drafting and revising. The very thing that makes us writers.
For me, much of that has also involved moving four decades of serious writing, however experimental, into the public access where adventurous readers might find the volumes. Places like Smashwords.com and my Thistle/Flinch site here at WordPress. To be candid, the backlog was inhibiting my ability to forge ahead on new work – not exactly writer’s bloc, but something more like claustrophobia? Having the remaining novels in the pipeline for ebook publication is a huge relief.
Let me repeat, though, about the necessity of marketing and how that should be the focus.
What’s taken root over the past several months, though, is another novel. One that just might pull my Hippie Trails series together a half-century later. That is, something that covers far more than just ’60s and ’70s. Am I crazy?
Well, maybe. What’s shaping up is far different from anything I’ve previously undertaken.
For one thing, I’m starting with an overarching structure – something approaching an outline, rather than my usual setting forth on a journey to see where an image or character or idea will lead. And then there’s little autobiographical here; it’s largely new territory, apart from tying up some loose ends from the earlier novels. The dictum, “Write about what you know,” gets readjusted to “Write about what you would like to know,” meaning more about certain ethnic groups I’ve encountered, businesses I’ve brushed up against, spiritual practices, histories, desires, losses. I’m even beginning with a commercial genre in mind, which means drafting from a perspective and in a voice far from my own.
I’m not sure this is a work I’ll actually finish. It may be too difficult. Or it may become more of a collaboration, perhaps with a circle of beta readers set at liberty to edit at will. (Have I ever written of my theory that what we know as Shakespeare was the product of a circle of very talented improvisers, whose inventions were recorded by the playwright? Almost a committee, if you will, except for his imprint on the final version.)
Different from anything else I’ve done to date? How about needing to finish a draft of the last chapter, along with a stretch of the opening, before writing anything else? Or heading off with 80 or so pages of notes for the middle, plus questions to pursue? It’s certainly driven by the characters and events that turn in directions I’d normally avoid.
What I do know from experience is how crucial it is to sit down at the keyboard when these juices are flowing.
Physical exercise has never been high on my list of activities – at least until I discovered hatha yoga a year after I graduated from college. From the time of required elementary-school gym classes, or phys ed as they became known in high school, I found the experience largely tedious – there were always better things to do. And calisthenics were simply mind-numbing. As for that lap around the track? The teacher who told a student it was good for a broken leg – true story, I was there – convinced me the male authority figure we were dealing with was an idiot. Or just insane. Yes, I did enjoy hiking and bicycling but they fell outside the sphere of “exercise.” Ditto for the contradancing.
The major exception was my first winter after college as I swam regularly at the local university indoor pool – a privilege that came through my roommate’s girlfriend, who happened to be the chief lifeguard. This was just before taking up yoga, come to think of it. (The school wised up later and started charging “outsiders.”)
And then? Well, I tried several times to get a regular routine going, but nothing ever took hold. And then when I retired from the office and changed medical plans, my new doctor began encouraging … maybe not running the way he does, but something cardio-vascular. Oh, my.
Tick-tock to last Christmas, when my beloved elder stepdaughter gave me a yearlong pass to our city’s indoor pool. Meant having to go through some hoops, of course – the whole matter of scheduling, locker rooms, gear. (I’ve always had to use nose plugs – my sinuses are horrible – so where do you find a new pair in January?)
Let me say, the first month was embarrassing – three laps just three times a week. And then Doc insisted it be daily, or in my case, five times a week. What happened to the two dozen lengths or more I used to do without pausing? These days, I could barely breathe.
Three months later, it’s up to nine laps – a quarter of a mile – but I do have to pause every length or two to catch my breath. But it’s getting easier, generating less resistance. I’m still not getting much sensation of flying, something I used to appreciate, but it’s coming. Or even a feeling of being one with the water.
But, hate to admit this, I miss the feeling on the days I can’t go – the weekend, mostly, when the available hours don’t match mine.
And then there are the casual conversations with fellow swimmers. Nice to know I’m not alone after all. As for the embarrassment? Ah! Not anymore. We just keep plugging along. Or I just say I’m trying to keep my physician happy. Not that it matters.
Found myself chuckling the other day as I was making photocopies on the computer printer. What came to mind was the memory of my old definition of knowing I’d made the big time as a writer would be when I had my own IBM Selectric typewriter and my own Xerox copier. Gee, it didn’t even have to be Xerox, now that I think of it. (And it wasn’t even something really big like a sailboat or shiny new BMW.)
My, how that dates me! But let me explain.
Not too long ago, writers like me were clunking away on big old manual keyboards, even in newspaper offices. The electric typewriters were more likely to be found in the jewelry store on the corner or at the bank than on the desks of people who had to type constantly as part of their employment. Well, really good secretaries also had them – with a lot of our admiration.
While the news writing could have cross-outs and handwritten insertions, serious literary submissions were expected to be perfect – and each submission to the journals was expected to be clean, meaning a copy seldom lasted long in the face of multiple rejections. (Remember, even top-flight authors can expect to receive an average of 20 rejections for each acceptance – or that was the story back when all this was going on. And simultaneous submissions were absolutely verboten.)
So that’s where the photocopier comes in. The small-press editors eventually began allowing copies rather than originals, which was a big blessing for poets like me. Still, it meant finding a decent place to make copies. When I lived in the desert of Washington state, for example, a trek to Seattle four hours away included several hours making fresh copies.
Once I’d moved up the management ladder a few notches, I did splurge on an electric typewriter, one I loved despite its annoying flying f that nobody could keep repaired. Half of the time it would land several spaces further down the line than where it was needed.
Newsrooms, meanwhile, finally got the Selectrics – not to facilitate reporters’ work but to allow the stories to be scanned directly into type, which raised an entire other nightmare. (Try editing one of those!)
What I really envied with the Selectric was the fact you could choose different fonts and sizes – those magical metal balls that flew around above the page you were typing.
~*~
So here we are, a few decades later. How obsolete all that has become! The computer keyboard allows instant corrections, unlike the bulky typewriter. Even the Selectric. And I have quite the array of fonts and sizes to select from, even before shopping around online for more. So much for the four or five choices in the Selectric, if that many. As for that photocopier, I can simply scan copies from the top of that computer printer for all but the most unusual projects.
As for IBM and Xerox? They’re hardly the monolithic powerhouses they were then.
My, how the field’s changed!
As have my measures of “big time.”
One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.
On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.
~*~
Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.
I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.
Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.
What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.
As I said at the time …
Standing in the blank fields of Ohio … gray March … the utilitarian cemetery … beside my mother’s grave, knowing soon my father, too, would be planted here.
As it turns out, not as soon as I envisioned. He recovers somewhat. Several years later, I return to the spot, this time with my sister. We explore more, find other great-great-grandparents buried in a cemetery two or three miles away – not at all where I previously thought.
This time, I begin to appreciate the section numbers of township maps, as I place my ancestors’ farms, how often they abutted each other. How many, only a mile or two from this spot, back when these lands were mostly forested.
A native, a student at a then-new state university, a journalist who worked on three of its daily newspapers (each in a different quadrant of the state), I’ve spent a third of my life in Ohio. Married there and, a few years after returning, divorced; nearly married there again, too. Many of my ancestors, I’ve learned, settled Montgomery County in its first decade.
Yet, reviewing my creative writing – the poetry, fiction, and essays – I find little that’s directly about Ohio. Curiously, those few passages typically appear in pieces about other places – Indiana, Washington State, the East Coast. What instead becomes apparent is the fact that my roots remain, complexly and paradoxically, embedded in Ohio. Unavoidably, in my years as an exile, much of my writing comes out of those Buckeye origins. Whether my years away have been the result of forced expulsion (job market, especially) or of self-chosen escape, I nevertheless carry inevitable values, images, and expectations that are not just Midwestern, but more distinctly, those of the Miami Valley. As I’ve delved into my ancestry, moreover, I find also a forceful sub-current of dissenting religious practice and witness in overlapping Dunker (Brethren), Quaker, and Mennonite farming circles planted there – and to these, mysteriously, it would seem, I’ve returned in new settings.
Surveying material currently available for submission turns up very little with even the word “Ohio” in it. (Some fiction, essays, and genealogical writing need more revision before their release.) The five poems enclosed (an offer of first North American serial rights for work you select) do, however, spring deeply from the state – not just the land, but also the emotions. Maybe it’s a sense of the lovers, who were also Buckeyes. Maybe the awareness of mechanical work and objects. Maybe the crossroads nature of the state, looking west (in one poem, the prairie that stretches into Illinois) as well as east, to Baltimore and New York (as in “oysters”) or even, as stated, England. Maybe the underlying naïve outlook that becomes vulnerable to betrayal. Or the dreams of acting (hints of Broadway or Hollywood). Whatever the combination, something of the state is compressed into the fabric of these pieces.
Here’s hoping they work for you.
~*~
For the record, they didn’t.
Jnana's Red Barn 