More than my life changed since retiring from the newsroom

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a dozen years since I left full-time employment, but I can say I still don’t know what “retirement” is. Could it be because I don’t play golf or tennis?

After years of hoping to be financially able to leave the newsroom and instead concentrate on a life as an author, I finally made it to freedom. In the years leading up to that, I had put together detailed plans of running on a tight schedule, rising to meditate and pray, do some yoga, attend to correspondence, tackle some heavy new writing, and so on, but that’s not how things turned out. At least guilt hasn’t kicked in. I haven’t exactly been a slacker.

In those earlier schemes, I didn’t envision swimming laps every day at the city’s indoor pool or my weekly trip to Boston to sing in a choir. Nor was self-publishing the novels and poetry or the expanse of blogging or other social media. Photography, even of a digital sort, was an unexpected new hobby. Yearly Meeting responsibilities, however, were on the list and duly enjoyed. I’m embarrassed to admit that many yoga exercises are now beyond me – it’s amazing what 50 years of physical neglect can do.

I’m still trying to discover my natural sleep cycle, too. Eastport is a place where most folks rise early, and that’s generally what I’m doing – often, 3 am in the summer and a bit later in winter. The roads around here are busier at 5:30 in the morning than at 5:30 in the late afternoon or evening. A nap helps but isn’t always a daily option. And I’m spending more time at the keyboard than is probably healthy.

~*~

The most obvious way my life changed my writing life was is in having longer periods where I could concentrate on a given work or project. I wasn’t writing on the fly, like graffiti, as I have quipped, or immersing myself for a vacation week or two and then reluctantly putting the manuscript aside. My attention wasn’t diverted as often, either. I no longer had the daily commutes as time for reflection, but it’s amazing what bubbled up as a swam my half-mile of laps – some of my favorite lines in What’s Left, especially.

No longer writing or revising on the fly apparently made my new work more difficult.

At the beginning of my new life, I took up blogging, first to clear out much of my backlog of writing and small-press first publications, and then the photography came forward. One blog became five. Networking face-to-face with other writers once a month was on my rounds, and there were other events for poets, too. That led to the release of most of my scripted fiction, a huge emotional relief.

Curiously, I haven’t written poetry. The focus has been on prose, especially my one new novel, What’s Left. You’d think in my expanded creative schedule combined with my earlier experience of shaping fiction, this would have been a breeze. Instead, it was the thorniest project. Its purpose was to wrap up the hippie era, drawing together my Kenzie stories. The book kept shifting focus, and even finding an appropriate title was elusive. (A cover image was even more problematic.) It was also the least autobiographical, even with the new Greek-Orthodox circle in my life.

I can’t say which of my novels underwent the most exhaustive transformation from their first published version to the way they stand now, but What’s Left was the most painful as well as the biggest turning point. None of the others changed that drastically from their starting point to what hit print. The changes from first published version to what now stands is another matter.

But What’s Left did prompt that deep reworking of all the earlier ones, as well as the big round of republication.

My other piece of new fiction was perhaps the easiest of all, the middle novella in the Secret Side of Jaya. This was set between two earlier ones that had undergone multiple revisions before I inserted Jaya as a unifying voice.

~*~

If I thought I could kick back after those revisions, I was mistaken. Quaking Dover was on the horizon.

It was the book I didn’t want to write, I was truly tired, but the one that’s carried me the farthest with readers. It wasn’t even fiction.

And it proved as difficult in its revisions as What’s Left had. There was the challenge of fitting myself into the text as the “gently laughing curmudgeon” that one insightful beta reader suggested. It ran counter to all of my journalistic training as a neutral observer and my yoga humility of rendering myself invisible.

When I undertook Quaking Dover, Covid broke out. My laps in the pool ended, as did Revels Singers in Boston. After finishing the first draft, I relocated to Way Downeast Maine in what became an ideal writer’s retreat. It was amazing what I could find online in my research and revision.

As I’ve said, our move was the next step in some necessary downsizing in our life. Over the past decade, I’ve shifted to the Web and am now largely paper-free. I am going to have to face considerably more purging when we get the rest of my book collection out of storage and try to fit what we can (or what I need) into this smaller house. And let’s not forget, there’s no barn here.

~*~

Quaking Dover did lead to live and streamed PowerPoint presentations, a further new skillset for me.

Among other things, my concentration isn’t what it was. I learned in a few months of working as a 2020 Census enumerator that my stamina has also faded – it was an exhausting job. My spelling’s declined. And I’m not as sharp-eyed as an editor, either. In fact, I’m more tolerant.

I’m reading mostly ebooks, avoiding the filled shelves conundrum.

I don’t feel an urgency trying to “understand my problem.”

Even the journaling is slowing.

And there was a round of renewed therapy, ending shortly before the death of my therapist.

Looking back over the year, with gratitude

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For me, this is something other than thanks-giving. Its part of an annual exercise and self-discipline that includes revisiting what I set out to do a year ago and seeing what was accomplished and what remains to address. Other parts simply acknowledge joys and blessings. It rather dovetails into sending out the Christmas greetings, too.

In 2024, I’m especially grateful for:

  1. Our home renovations. The transformation of our upstairs is a major quality-of-life improvement. And how, especially with three of us here now rather than just me.
  2. Sitting beside our wood-burning stove on otherwise chilly mornings and evenings.
  3. A steady supply of real tomatoes, once they started arriving in our raised beds in mid-August. Add to that gratitude that the local deer did not break down our chicken-wire fencing.
  4. Scallops in season. (And local blueberries, cranberries, lobsters, and crab.)
  5. My second week camping on the water, meaning a cruise on a historic schooner.
  6. Events at the arts center. Concerts, plays, open mics, contradances and lectures, in addition to rehearsing and performing with Quoddy Voices.
  7. My continuing appearances resulting from my book Quaking Dover. You can still find some of them online.
  8. All the eagles I observed during the alewives’ run and additional encounters after. Always inspiring.
  9. Using my passport. We do live right next to Canada, after all.
  10. Learning to watch for the Northern Lights. And then photographing them with my phone.

Acid test poet: Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Encountering a trio of his Sonnets in an issue of the Paris Review my senior year of college blew me away. First, by the fact that their iambic pentameter had been cut into lacy fragments but also that the remaining threads were made more powerful and light-filled as a result. Or, “oh, for the loving” (expletive), as he wrote. These were more like the collages of Robert Rauschenberg than the corseted stanzas of Shakespeare.

The fuller set, published in 1964, advanced the impact, especially in seeing how the collection came together as a series of essentially three poems that kept getting reassembled in new ways. Variations on a theme, as it were.

These were unmistakably urban, cigarette smoky, and not so secretly drug-infused.

They inspired my own set of American sonnets, The Braided Double-Cross.

As a reader, they also point me toward John Berryman and John Ashbery.

I love his definition of a poem as a miniature wind-up toy.

Now, for Fisher Ames Buck and his family

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Born in 1837 on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, to Ames and Amy (Creighton) Buck, Fisher and his family were living in Maine by 1843.

In the 1850 Eastport Census, Ames was a blacksmith, 49, born in New Brunswick. His wife was 50; and the children were clerk George, 22; Mary E., 19; Amy, 18; blacksmith Joshua, 17; Abigail, 15; [Fisher] Ames, 13; Anna M., 11; [Adelaide] Sophia A., 10, all born in New Brunswick; and John F., 7, born in Maine.

In 1855 Ames owned a house diagonally across Water Street from ours. An alley ran beside their house from Water to Sea Street, providing ready access to the Shackford wharves, as well as one labeled Buck and the A. Buck and Company steam mill attached to the William Newcomb sash and blind factory.

Ames was one of the six sons of Jacob Buck, half-brother of the Bucksport founder. Another son was Eliphalet, who landed in Eastport and is buried in neighboring Robbinston.

In the 1870 U.S. Census, his family included school teachers Mary, 29; and Ada, 25, and fish dealer John, 21. The wharf makes sense. And son Fisher Ames Buck had a household of his own.

The 1879 map shows a J.S. Buck wharf as No. 32 just below the Water Street property, presumably John S. Buck, and nothing for the Shackfords, who had previously owned multiple wharves there.

By the time of his death, Ames was described as both a blacksmith and a machinist.

Incidentally, Ames’ headstone in Hillside Cemetery gives 1796 for his birth and erroneously names daughter Amy Cory (1880-1886) as his wife. The date of his death is a year earlier than some other accounts I’ve seen.

~*~

In turn, Fisher married Clarissa Alice Bailey (1842-1922) in 1865. Their children include twins Frances F. Buck (1872-1934) and Frank Clifford Buck (1872-1950), William Edwin Buck (1875-1935), Alice M. (circa 1879-1955), and two who died in childhood, Harry C. and Jesse B.

Like his father, he was a blacksmith. Later he was an engineer. He was also a freemason, as was son William Edwin, and he served as a town selectman, 1874-1879.

He was among the subscribers underwriting Kilby’s 1888 history, along with a George N. Buck of San Francisco (his brother?).

Fisher died April 5, 1910, of pneumonia. He is buried at Hillside Cemetery in Eastport.

~*~

His son William Edwin Buck was father to Clifford Hilyard Buck (1899-1973). I do wonder whether they lived in the house or whether other family members did or whether it was rented out or even largely vacant during the period.

~*~

The Tides Institute & Museum of Art’s online photo collection of Eastport houses calls ours the Commander Albert Buck house, with the note: “He returned (after World War II) to Eastport with Rose and settled in the family house at the corner of Third and Water Streets.”

Commander Albert Clifford Buck (1886-1951), a U.S. Navy veteran of World War I and World War II, is buried at Hillside. He was 64. The headstone also names Elizabeth E. Lizzie Sears Buck (1851-1907). Who is she, other than born in Woodland, Washington County? Not Rose, obviously.

Albert, it turns out, was born to Fisher’s brother, John, the fish dealer.

So how did he wind up with the house? Forty years passed between Fisher’s death and Albert’s, and family members may have moved elsewhere for employment and other reasons. Perhaps the others simply weren’t interested. Who, in fact, inhabited the house in the interlude?

The neighborhood did have a number of Lebanese families by the early 1900s, attracted to jobs in the sardine canneries that ruled the local economy after the wooden shipbuilding industry collapsed.

Albert’s obituary mentioned that he had maintained a summer home in Eastport since the end of World War II, but neglected to note where his fulltime residence was. It also named a son, Charles S., stationed in Arizona (in 1951,) and brothers Milford in Rowley, Massachusetts, and George of New York City. (Milford R. Buck (-1952) is buried at Hillside. George is another mystery. The obituary also said the funeral service would be at the Washington Street Baptist church and that Albert was a freemason.

Just two years later, Charles, age 40, died of meningitis at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. He was an automotive mechanic and, according to the state certificate of death, was born March 13, 1913, in Massachusetts, to Albert C. Buck, born Maine, and Rose A. Mayer, born Massachusetts. In addition, he was buried in Rowley. What was the family connection there?

I’m guessing it’s where Rose’s family was. Albert was likely at sea for extended periods. In short, he wasn’t in Eastport.

Our home, by the way, had an unobstructed view of the water.