Tag: Memories

With the harvest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Kitty’s new place: the smell, the copper drain ring in the kitchen sink, the freezer box suspended within the refrigerator all remind me of Gran’s second-floor apartment. All of those motionless Sunday afternoons hearing invisible traffic, bells, and wind.

Sign outside her window

FORD (blue
LINCOLN (white
MERCURY (red

just like our place in Prairie Depot, Ohio

~*~

A fine salad Kitty created tonight

Pieces of homegrown
watermelon
cantaloupe
peaches

~*~

One of every five commercial apples in the U.S. was grown in Yakima County. Peaches, pears, plums, apricots, and cherries were also valued fruit harvests. They play a major role in my Nearly Canaan novel.

Irrigation had come a long way from the ditches used in orchards in this circa 1913 Webster & Stevens glass negative photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Orchard labels from Yakima in a Chris Light photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Lithograph label from California Historical Society collection …

~*~

13:IX:77

Pickers began on the apples this morning

seis y media

first the Goldens: the reds come off later

man with a limp
carries the ladder

~*~

14:IX

Ordered new car yesterday, Subaru

Legs for Kitty’s loom finally arrived after a long wait: it’s now “grown up”

Mention of Kitty taking the Greyhound to Ellensburg …

~*~

Where did I hope to be at 30? And how close am I?

Where have I been? What dreams and teachings have I forgotten?

A dusty novel manuscript, an unopened violin case, a holy title I seldom use — and all of these chains to Maya

~*~

28:IX

apples, gone from the orchard
at least around the house
prop sticks stacked between the rows
ladders, folded
sweet smell of bins
awaiting the straddle buggy

She’s in a bummer today. Not a single good word till I got mad and screamed and left the house and mowed the lawn.

Our orchard shack cleaned, inside and out, everything back in place and straight. TV moved from the meditation room [living room] to the bedroom. Good vibes back, our home is home.

~*~

3:X:77

[Desert reality}:

How strange that dew should be a sign of autumn!

This ink has an odor I now associate with Mr. Weiner’s junior high school art classes and later with my high school art class wash room.

Overheard: Yeah, Fort Lewis is a wild place. Kids go in, find live grenades. Fort Carson, too — stretches almost from Colorado Springs to Boulder. They wanted to expand it but faced a vote.

~*~

10:X:77

Called Subaru, told our car’s on the way, probably off the boat on Friday. Last boatload, they couldn’t get our five-speed, though it was promised, per the salesman.

The mail had a letter to Mrs. James Hodson from Mom Moran …

~*~

Later in month:

Sharon P from Kitty’s Ohio Northern days showed up in the Central State art building, wants to be an actress, just got a divorce. Seems Kitty really dumped on my in her journal the night before, can’t figure out why we’re married, “Most people need each other but we don’t,” ignoring the joys of shared freedoms. So Sharon’s husband had come in and asked why not, I’d say they were never married. And now she’s coming to visit us in the orchard?

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Along more than artistic lines

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Canadian Opera’s Marriage of Figaro at the Capitol [theater in Yakima]: well done yet I’m perplexed by what makes a performance exciting and vital rather than merely competently technical …

I’m sure I enjoyed it all the same. It is one of my favorite operas.

~*~

By the way, in reviewing my journals, I see there were more musical performances in my life during those years than I’ve recalled.

 

Slices of life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

An evening party in town, a political party fundraiser, after a rare rain had finally soaked the earth …

An old woman’s bathroom, ointments, creams, bottles of prescriptions, tweezers, scissors, lipsticks, perfumes, dirty towels, an unpleasant smell. Quotations taped to the wall.

Hamburgers on the grill. Why do none of their names stick for me? Why don’t I want to speak?

Two old women sit mysteriously behind their cigarettes, one in golfing attire, the other in a pink dress. Sometimes I don’t want a cocktail. I can’t find my friends. Who are these infants, crawling around my legs? Why did I find this place?

~*~

Don’t ever want to live again where I can’t see the Milky Way — Eternal Light — River of Light — our home in the universe.

[Not knowing there was a long dark period ahead.}

~*~

Kitty found an apartment in E’burg and is excited, a “place like Laura’s” or our “town house.” A bohemian dump. Maybe even my encampment on Mondays with a college library or movies and jaunts to the mountains … even courting her anew …

Dinner at New York Pagoda Café …

~*~

Picked up a hitchhiker on my way to work this afternoon. Seldom stop nowadays, did so today as an afterthought, his smile and the modesty of his destination: Union Gap. Fact was, he was walking, not standing; his big backpack barely fit in the Bug’s backseat. Turned out he’s a picker from Tempe, Arizona. Worked last five days on pears, $20 his best day’s pay. Got his check today. Getting cold, wished he hadn’t lent out his second sleeping bag to a friend with a job in town. He puts one inside the other. Once he’s home, he’ll play basketball, get a student ID, perhaps take an acting class.

“Oakland,” he says, “a lot of baseball players come from there.”

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Looking at the notebooks themselves, beyond their content

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

My journaling in college-style spiralbound notebooks would continue for another seven years before getting interspersed with hardbound sketchbooks. I wouldn’t move away from them altogether until mid-’87.

Some of the habit no doubt was reenforced by the fact the notebooks were cheap. Money was always tight for me. I also enjoyed picking them up casually in bookstores, especially in and around university campuses.

They’ve always been workbooks for me, something of the moment. Frankly, I never expected to live this long, and any posterity was intended for my published poems, fiction, histories, and essays.

Look at how some of mine opened in this period.

Vol. 49, 1 July 77 / day after the full moon: blue Western College Bookstore Association, 100 sheets, usual size

Vol. 43, Turns out to be the second a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.

Vol. 43, 1 Sept. 77, Orchard Shack. (Numbered out of order.)

 Vol. 42, 1:X:77 Orchard Shack. So this is really out of sequence! Covers just the month of October …

The first of my beloved longbooks was not from Cornell in ’71 ….

Now they morph into long unruled sketchbooks … or so but rather a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.

Vol. 44, 1 Nov. 77, Orchard Shack, the third of the Strathmore sketchbooks

Observing seasons
in one place

Note the impact on Hometown News, Nearly Canaan, and Secret Side of Jaya. Also the poetry, especially American Olympus …

Each journal volume somehow opens anew, yet usually fades off at the end.

~*~

I wonder how others approach the practice. I’ve heard of using loose-leaf pages and binders, to facilitate reordering of pages. An alternative is to have several volumes at a time, each devoted to a different subject.

Use of writing instruments can also be considered. Ballpoint pens gave way to felt-tips, for instance, and much later fountain pens. As for journaling exclusively on a laptop or smart phone? The plot thickens …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Slant shots with a cosmic ricochet or two 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When you sit for Meeting and see only chessmen on a board around you, you’ve lost touch with yourself.

Who knows whose game has you trapped, much less in what game.

Example of miscommunication:

“Are you Saved?”

“Are you Self-Realized?”

“Are you Yielded?”

Before Self-Realization, my belief that truth or the mystery could be found and answered in a woman’s love, classical music or jazz, a fine set of books. And thus the constant sorrow interspersed with flashes of delight. Now, further along, a taste of energy that goes so far beyond as well as a dryness of what’s been lost.

As for the girls I desired in high school? How common! [Sex and spirituality are closer and more essential than is often acknowledged. My, this could fill volumes!]

3 July, ’77 … evening Quaker Mtg at Dory Matson’s, the Wilkenings were there … Ellensburg?

First Mtg after summer: 20 adults, five children.

Me, thinking of the Mountains and Rivers sutra

and our Meeting’s love of hiking-skiing-camping

3:X: Been wondering about the break with the ashram, whether it even still exists …

What is the role of religion in a “man’s world”?

To give death meaning?

To uphold what’s good, noble, heroic?

To overcome the Little I?

Meeting last Sunday was at Michael and Tarn’s …

My first Quaker memorial service was Ken Scott’s …

The difficulty most had with the silence, women whispering (gossiping?) to husbands, etc., a packed room — having many standing didn’t help. The service began with the family singing songs informally …

He was 31 …

~*~

JESUS APOLLONIUS

Did Christianity change the Romans?

Or did they change Christianity?

Their vestal virgins redressed as nuns?

Thus, the Reformation

as another uprising of Germanic tribes

against Roman tribute

The mafia

supports its church

~*~

ARE WE GETTING CLOSER TO QUAKERS OR ZEN?

“There were no representatives of the gods inside; the place was empty, and the secret shrine contained nothing” — Pompey, on the Second Temple of Jerusalem

“They worship on the clouds and the Spirit of the heavens” — popular saying of the Jews, recorded in Juvenal.

Geeze, is that all it takes to confound Empire?

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

As my world turned

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So we were settling in.

our orchard tenant shack here
like Snyder’s place in Dharma Bums
out back of a holy family’s
out toward the birds
and simple
like the long-legged house
of Wendell Berry’s uncle
close to nature
beside the river

Noz [our black cat, half-Siamese] goes berserk when we’re not home: rolled a geode across the floor and ripping caulking from the windows …

Noted on 15:VIII:77: Kitty received notice of her in-state status today. Next up, $50 in the mail to Central.

A week later: With Celeste over Saturday night.

And then we to Seattle Sunday: dinner at Costas [my delight at souvlaki?}, then a movie house of 99 seats, lobby three times larger than the viewing room …

In the morning, my wishing Kitty would say something profound rather than weeping over a slender girl or some fine threads …

Back in our desert orchard:

Tarts baked in stars

So hot that apples sunburn

and I’d thought Ivar’ was joking

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Exploring the psyche, as well

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Churches can tell you a lot about a town. It’s ethnic components, first and foremost.

In the Valley we had Buddhist churches as well as Indian Shaker

The Indian Shaker church, as described by Elizabeth Colson in The Makah Indians:

People come and go, without waiting for the end of the service; participants and onlookers; no hymn books; praying not in unison; simultaneous performance, with each participant voicing their own prayers; shaking comes at the end, as participants stand shaking violently or circle the room as they go … during the shaking, several men ring handbells — “Dear Lord, send us your holy power!”

POWER SONGS

Also: “You’ll be a great doctor. You’ll see a hand sticking out of the ground. When you see that, you go put your hand close to that so that power will get in your hand. That’s the best you can get if you become a doctor, that hand sticking out of the ground …”

Vlada Karpovich via Pexels.

A map allows you to go back through places you’ve been while also looking ahead.

The topographical maps of the valley, especially.

Trail maps, too. The Cascadia books!

As I noted: Several times last week, in conversation someone got too close physically or gave a look that broke through the façade — my reaction of quick fear, a fleeting impulse to run — how far I’ve come from yogic self-clearness …

Reactions to Carlos Castenada’s Journey to IxHaMm: 

  • Laugh! Lightning!
  • Reverse all assumptions.
  • “Everything agrees with me!”
  • Create a fog around yourself so others cannot manipulate you by their preconceptions.
  • No need to explain to others, your action becomes false in the telling.
  • Caw like a crow, like an omen

Early July: Tuesday, went to town, looked at new cars — torn between the class and comfort of Audi Fox, the rugged opportunities (high country) of Toyota Land Cruiser … $7,000 either way … Land Cruiser eats the gas …

I had never even considered I could afford a new car before that.

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Some quivering in the newsroom

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At this point, I’m not sure exactly when ActionNW was launched as weekly tabloid insert focusing on outdoors activities and opportunities, everything from hiking and camping to hunting and fishing and rodeos and travel, especially daytrips.

I do know that it soon became one of my responsibilities at the paper, Noted on 10:III:77, eight months after my arrival, “ActionNW preprinted today — I finally changed the format, raw-wraps [ragged right] and quote-outs. Oxford rules atop the pp. A cram-jam job that worked, and I’m happy.”

Obviously, we weren’t doing a lot of discussion before each edition. It really was seat-of-the-pants, like so much American journalism.

Over time, it would become the closest I would have to running a magazine … I took some inspiration from the Sunday Herald Tribune’s New York section. Yes, the Sunday magazine continues long after the newspaper itself folded.

I also found a letter of recommendation I wrote for a photojournalist buddy: “He sets high standards for himself and uses his art as a means of maintaining a state of constant discovery about life itself. As a result, he has deep influence on many of his colleagues.” Little would I know the eventual downfall …

Goz, bringing in a Time magazine review to Wren, pointed out: journalists as novelists seem to lack plumage. They cannot make their sentences dance, they cannot make them spin with magic.

Sounds like so many of the rejections I’ve been collecting.

James Michael Gosney, 79, died Nov 7, 2017. He was a sportswriter we tasked with the lead stories in ActionNW before giving him a daily column he used to profile everyday locals …

~*~

Noted on 30:VI:77, full moon: Maurie retired today — reception party at the office, surprise party later — new suit, everything like a high school graduation …

Officially, he was news editor of the afternoon edition … died March 16, ’92, in Yakima nursing home, I find now …

A sweet guy, as I recall … pretty much semi-retired already …

Was this another opening for me?

[How much I was oblivious to what was popping up around me or my threat to others and their existing order.]

So during this stretch I had Mondays off … allowing me an “outdoors day” free of the weekend crowds …

In mid-August: With a Wednesday off work, I slept till 11. Who needs 11 hours sleep? I had set the alarm for 6.

Wednesday, I shift back to two weeks of night labor, wondering how Tippet will accept my presence over him …

Friday night, after work, stopped at the Lewisville (a log cabin tavern) for a pitcher with Whiz and Jeff. Goz dropped in after a glut-out on escargot and Reisling. He and I talked out back till 3:30 under half moon and clouds after the tavern closed. He wondered about the value of it all, “Am I a good writer?” Answering himself, no, but later, yes, reflecting on the joy he’d given old men with one piece.

“Hooper, he was a good editor. Could really make a piece sparkle. But you, Mr. Hodson, have a touch that may be better.”

~*~

How many times have I not done something because I know from news stories how dangerous the time/place/action is?

How much have I never done because I was doing my job instead?

~*~

A really bad night at the office, when Macknicki and I were suddenly far behind after the new copy courier had dumped all of the UPI perforated tapes because the machine had gone bad. Perton swearing he’d never seen things so bad, copy piled up, etc.

Yes, I was dead when Kitty came home and was pissed I slept late the next morning.

Notes of frustration, having to cover for Mrs. Stone plus a farm tab on top of what was already too much …

~*~

22 Nov., morning, I note working two weeks of day slot (the afternoon edition), which even means getting Thanksgiving Day off … (Hurray!)

And then our HR administrator noticed Mrs. Stone was 15 minutes late the day she “fell” … um …

[slackers]. And thus to can or ax a bounder can become natural, to make the forest come to climax or to fulfill its own — to bump them off keeps the youngest saplings from starving.

16:XII: Worked night shift, came home, my wife within, the little house seemed so sad, even from the distance.

At work, two-paragraph story, conductor Thomas Schipper had died, of cancer, age 47. I had almost played his recording of Rossini’s Stabet Mater today as a requiem for Nosmo. How strange.

~*~

Gil’s leaving, for Woodbury, NJ, and a daily of his own, yet our sense of loss and reassurance, Whiz and me.

Gil telling me how Kent’s a bit afraid of me, thinks I’m unpredictable, too independent for his taste — how the back shop claims I’m indecisive (what I get for being considerate of them).

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

With yellow bursting in the grass

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Those yellow flowers, what do you call them? They are so beautiful.”

“We call them weeds.”

The Frenchman cannot understand our reaction to dandelions.

Still, a sparrow carefully picks at the puffs bit by bit for breakfast.

A jerk here, tug there, then swallowing. And flies away.

~*~

Summer Full Out:

Kat smoking her new pipe

~*~

Nosmo:

Our four-legged asshole
an input-output equation
hops on our bed
tears at the carpet
leaps nearly three feet at eleven weeks
stinks terribly
goes after moths
when we call, he comes
“He’s really a dog”
“He’s really a pest”