Quite Elegant Circumstances

Sleeping in a bay window overlooking Dolores Street. Even after all these years, San Francisco is The City, the home country. L's flat is in the blue building at the corner, kind of hidden behind a smaller tree. It's going ok. (Though I gotta say, today she is right cranky. Better, I think, but cranky.)

the easiest pumpkin "pudding" imaginable

I used to spend more time cooking... before I had to give up both wheat and dairy (and then soy). Since I mostly cook for one now, and because it's too hard to cook for larger numbers with foods I still love, but can no longer eat, I have had to find ways to streamline. Otherwise, it feels too much like I'm dining on the law of diminishing returns.

I don't remember when, but on one fortuitous shopping trip, I discovered that Quaker sells a very convenient box of individual packets of grits. Now grits have become my main staple. I began using them just by cooking a packet in the microwave (for one minute) to go with some eggs and maybe bacon, but then discovered, gradually, that I could cook a light-- but very satisfying-- meal in a bowl, beginning with one serving of grits. And in practically no time. (Note: I always cover the grits, etc., loosely, with a paper towel or napkin or paper plate, nothing plastic, to keep them from spilling over.)

I began experimenting by adding just one egg, after the initial cooking, and then returning the bowl to the microwave for another spell (times vary, but probably for a minute or two); and then adding two eggs (w/ Omega 3); other times one or two eggs with some frozen shoepeg corn (smaller kernels taste sweeter & better & are easier to digest), and maybe with some bacon or ham, which might also be heated in the microwave on a plate on top of the bowl of grits. At other times, some mushrooms, from a can if that's all I had on hand. For something sweet, a chopped up banana is also good, or a few berries. Or just a small sprinkling of chocolate chips.

More recently, though, I had been wanting something with pumpkin, probably an unsatisfied craving leftover from the holidays. Finally, I opened one of the several cans of organic pumpkin pie filling that had been collecting in the cabinet, and used about 1/3 of it, adding it to the cooked grits, after beating in two eggs. (Remember, this is all happening in one bowl, with a spoon and a fork, and something to cover the bowl while in the microwave.)

I started off with two minutes in the microwave (after the initial minute for the grits), but the "pudding" needed more time, perhaps because the combination of two eggs and the moisture in the pumpkin. I think I gave it another minute and a half. Earlier on, I used to stir in between microwave sessions, but now I usually just put it back in for more time, if it's underdone. Everything puffs up a bit, far less than a souffle, but still pleasingly, and then settled down a bit, like other baked custards. The texture is not as smooth as the usual pudding, but then the base is ground corn, not milled flour. But if you like polenta, you won't mind.

For a little extra flavor and other good things, I'll dust it with a very small amount of Green & Black's ground chocolate, an equally small amount of flax (because I'm still getting used to it), and a packet of raw brown sugar. Why all the individual packets? Partly for convenience in measuring, but also because I've been making it at work in the communal microwave, and having it for breakfast, while other people are eating other goodies that I can't have. I never used to buy pumpkin pie "filling," only the packed pumpkin, but in this case, having it pre-spiced is a definite advantage, and because it's an organic brand I found in the supermarket, it doesn't contain other things (like modified food starch) that I never know for sure are safe for me to eat.

I confess that I may actually like my "pudding" even more than I used to love pumpkin pie. Which was considerable.

Not At All Easy To Read

My boss the head of reference thinks that interest in the Kerouac scroll must be a generational thing, since he doesn't care at all. Me, I have history of a sort with manuscripts typed on rolls of teletype paper, and the museum is free on Friday evenings, so I hurried over after work.

The whole west wing of the museum echoes with the clatter of typing. I thought at first it was a recording, but it was way better than that: at the entry to the exhibit there is a room with old Underwood typewriters, and visitors are encouraged to compose either haiku (a bunch of Kerouac haiku are hung on display) or road narratives, and pin them to the wall. Type type type. Type type type. There is a film on continuous loop, apparently a shortened version of "What Happened to Kerouac". There are enormous blowups of the pictures from Life Magazine of an impossibly handsome Kerouac sitting by his typewriter, holding up the scroll as if reading. There are display units with photos and books of other Beats, and a display panel about Kerouac's associates' New Mexico connections. The sound of typing from the anteroom stops, begins again. Type type type. Type type type.

There is a long long case diagonally down the middle of the room, with the first thirty-six feet of the manuscript unfurled. I don't know if it has been opened to different parts of the story in different cities, but we get the beginning. He composed it with the real names. Neal is Neal. The paper is almost transparent, and the grain of the cloth on the floor of the case shows through behind the typing. Even if one weren't bending over sideways trying to read across the lines at an angle without leaning on the case (which might set off an alarm), it would be hard to read. With or without bifocals. As presented, impossible. I went to the foot of the case where I could at least read straight on instead of sideways. It was the part where he is picking cotton for two dollars per hundred pounds. I read until I was practically standing on my head trying to puzzle out the last visible letters as the paper wrapped around the glass dumbbell holding the rest of the novel. Type type type type type type.

The museum rented a billboard, along I-25 northbound from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The same text as the bumper sticker above. If you didn't know what it was about, you wouldn't know. Good pix in the San Francisco Chronicle.

On the way to fetch LobsterBrian from airport

ruminations

Our bodies disease when we fail to confront disappointment with loving persistence. The small cleaving occurs the first time, the cleft widening as our spirits are buffeted about over time. Failure to love, failure to joy--these are the seeds of unsought unchosen illness.

Love and joy, then, are key to healing: this is why aligning ourselves, our minds and spirits, becomes critical. Thus we infect ourselves day by day and arm ourselves against disappointment. More importantly, the infection spreads to others.

And helps them to heal.

Thence also we conclude that rage destroys body and mind in loosening our attachment to life and affects others' attachment, as well. We may leave the susceptible in a weakened, disappointed place.

***

When young ones are small their parents help them to redefine their emotions: the child exclaims I don't love you any more or I hate you; the parent says You must be so angry right now, so disappointed. Because being angry doesn't mean you stop loving. I won't believe it does.

I have raged until my mind and body and life went entirely to pieces. Exhausted, I hear the small mental voice: Just because you're angry with someone, it doesn't mean you don't love them. Rage-and-pain magmaspatter resolves to swirl of ash and then to clean settling snowsift, and I stand holding all that love in the bowl of my hands--and I begin to heal.

And because I know there is no spatial separateness, not really, I pray that my anger's cooling-receding cools and transforms the anger of others.

Unblocked, at last

With more than one blogger identity (both old and new versions), I was confused about how to log-in and post here. But tonight I'm unblocked. Hooray!

The dusting of wet snow was a surprise this morning. We knew about the inches of rain, the flooding and rising water in the area around us... but not the snow. Power outages... my train wasn't running, and I had to figure out another way to get to work. Only a little bit late A very minor inconvenience, all things considered. And this Nor'easter is still not over. So many people have had to evacuate their homes, and so many of their homes are now ruined.

I've been reading Joan Didion's book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," and thinking about people I've known who have died recently. In particular, a 44-yr-old woman-- physician, wife, and mother of three-- the wife of a former boss of mine. What an incredible woman she was.

And then today that inexplicable shooting-- a massacre, really-- in Virginia. The coverage has pre-empted some unimportant and ridiculous sitcoms. Too bad it was just the typical network-style coverage.

It's staggering to think of all of that grief and mourning to come... and that's just a fraction of what we are wreaking every week in Iraq.

Done, Done, Done With The Desert

High tide at First Beach, Quileute Reservation, on Saturday.
Turn your volume down before you click. What I wanted to catch was the rattling thunder of the backrush pulling cobbles down the foreshore, but the little camera's audio pickup was overwhelmed.

By August, I will be living out there somewhere within reach of Ocean. For now, back to work here in the high desert.

14 April 2007
Thursday we woke up to half-a-foot of snow on the ground
yesterday was bright and warm, grasses and fruit blossoms
I thought then to wear a bright dress to work today but
damn! it's pouring rain this morning, so back to protective denim.

My aunt in Louisiana phoned the shop yesterday to tell me
of their pygmy goat in labor too long
and the head of the dead kid stuck
part-way out, and the rush to the surgeon.

5:30 a.m.      What month is this? Mar ... no April, oh
I remember, I've been writhing and night-
maring about taxes, till I remembered
"cut-off date" does not equal guillotine.

This feels good, waking early and writing. I would like to say I've missed it, but in the weeks of absent impulse I've missed nothing. March was the shop's worst month since its opening 16 months ago, and I could order no books and the shelves have grown anemic. That mercenary alarm, and the tax bit looming, and all accounts in disarray since December's move, receipts and statements disappeared, and the body swooning and drooping: no poetry there, only sleeping late napping napping and in other hours reading compulsively

convulsions of Shakespeare
I spend my late evenings stalking
the seventeenth earl of Oxford,
dear Edward, threading behind the scent.

I did take off a Wednesday afternoon
to drive employeeRory 'round
the SurpriseValley, where he's never
been, so he finally might under-
stand all the fuss, and see where
half our customers hail from.
I found the place suddenly changed, with
an Internet espresso place, and
a gallery in the saddlery, and a
billboard at the four-corners promoting
"6-acre ranchettes."

I tried some Journeys, those mental
forays into inner dimensions
(infernal dementia) that so fascinate me.
In one I was guided down a
broad thoroughfare to a capitol dome
and briefly I imagined myself supinated limp
across father Lincoln's alabaster knees
like the Pieta.
In another I swan deep and deeper
till I bumped against a living wall of whale-hide
there was no getting past.

In a high moment this week
I told a dream to a shop-customer friend
as though it were prophecy.
She countered (her husband a psychologist) Jungian, with
      a certain more internal perspective.
Yes, I said, yes, you're right,
and I let it go--but doesn't she get it?
I thought later
(later, when I got it)
that all this outer is only projected inner?
That all this "inner" is just the breeder
      for molecular circumstance?
The scales fall away ...

6 a.m. Do I go make a Serious cup of coffee?
or slide down
under the down
and go back (go back!)
to sleep? O let's be strong:
coffee it is, then.

Two earls to tell of today.
I mentioned Edward Oxenford already,
whose labors of love were lost behind Shake-speare's mask.
But I found another earl, as well, recently, and sent for
the little book Near False Creek Mouth
Earl Birney's poems from 1964 Vancouver. He wrote I guess mostly in the '40s and taught at the University of British Columbia and an image I find personally devastating from a poem called "Memory no servant," its last line--
        But what I can be certain not to forget:
            ten feet from the first bridge
            on the highway north from the town
            a turtle coming up from the gulf
            Both wheels ran over its middle
            The sound      a crushed carton
            Looking back:
            the untouched head
            ancient      stretched      and still
            moving

(Strange thing about living in town now. I am not privy to the conversations of wilderness birds but can hear the mews and cries of gulls who populate the vacant lots here. I used to see them before in fields, I remember, just after plowing, but their daily cries at all hours, this is new to me--or renewed, inasmuch as they were ever-present in my Culver City childhood.
These, I suppose, must be the inland,
Mormon gulls
fond of locusts and alkali.)

But I find behind these Birney lines
a pointed kind of racism, dated chauvinism,
and a lot that bugs me.
So I suppose I'll do with the moving head
of the crushed tortoise
where the book falls open anyway.
and re-price it and put it on the shop shelf.

Seeing The Thirteenth Redd

On Thursday M and her friend counted 12 steelhead redds in their assigned stretch of creek. Last night at dusk we walked down into the nearby stretch, and she showed me how to recognize the disturbed gravel patch which means it's a place where a fish dug a hole and buried eggs. I put on her waders and pretended to see what she was pointing out. Maybe I saw. I certainly got to experience the bliss of standing in the middle of the creek...

I Never Met a Tide Table I Didn't Love

Now there are three: in my shirt pocket the one I tore out of the newspaper the day I arrived—and isn't it DIVINE to be someplace where there's a tide table in the newspaper— and the one for April we got at the lodge in Kalaloch; and in the pocket of my pack the elaborate one with conversion tables and suns and moons and whatnot for the whole year for the whole northwest that came from the all-in-one store in Forks.

Yesterday and today drove out to La Push. Beautiful capital-O-Ocean. No whales, though other people were seeing them. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean. No rain yesterday, some rain today. Who cares. Beautiful ocean, beautiful ocean.

Um, yeah, I also talked to a storage place about where to put my stuff when I get here, and bought a county street map, and found out what I will need to get a library card when I get here,

and bought my hostess a big Stanley thermos for a bread-and-butter present. Haven't seen her all day, she got a call early this morning from a volunteer biologist who needed help counting redds in Siebert Creek (?? wikipedia says 'a salmon redd is the space at the bottom of a stream that a spawning salmon makes for its eggs'). She crashed around assembling her waders and daypack and rushing-away breakfast and (not very good) thermos and so on, and was gone. By the time I got back from the Ocean, she had gone off to Port Townsend to hear a naturalist talk about newt migrations. Or something equally entrancing.

Did, Might

M loves Beach Four on the Olympic Coast the best, because it has tidepools. We walked, and got rained on. She took a longer walk, to further tidepools. I got my book and myself pervasively damp, mismanaging raingear. Coming home we were chasing a rainbow for almost an hour. Caught it at Crescent Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

M is planning a trip to Bhutan for next month, so she can finish her book. Yesterday's expedition was by way of playing hookey from preparations. Today she is making phone calls about immunizations, and such. I might go out to La Push. The gray whale migration is passing.

Beach Four
Crescent Bay

Closer To The Ocean

The maples have their catkins blooming, and leaves beginning to leaf out. I dreamed last night the tide was full in the bays and inland waters I drove past yesterday. There's a cherry tree out the window in fullest dress.

I'm in my friend M's cabin in the woods behind Port Angeles. An agenda-less spy trip. Look at places to rent, poke around town. Go out to the ocean. The real ocean. I read the apartment ads in the paper yesterday. M tells me I can stay with her as much as I want, and that she might go away next winter and I could sublet. We'll see.

Day rose beautiful. There will be pictures later, but around here you go when the weather says go.

25 March 2007
Home, and past the postprandial cocoa. Now the ticking clock and the ambient music just audible.

We traveled. Yesterday morning we shut the cats inside for overnight with food and water and clean litterboxes. I drove the XL minivan--Sally and Apple leaped in sans leashes, panting with happy, BrotherB confused by deviation from routine, but with a vague understanding of Journey.

On the way out of town I stopped at the shop: Here's cash for the change box, coffee beans for the break room, pay yourself from the till and if we sell nothing today I'll make it up to you on Monday. Thanks!

***

I'm home now--we're home--the three-and-a-half hours on the highway flew past as I reran in my head the scenario, the Fabulous Happening, I had anticipated--which I always anticipate, and which for once actually came to pass.

(interruption)

26 March 2007
During the first hour of the drive I listened to a tape cassette employeeRory loaned me, of the Truth of 9/11, of the New World Order, of the governmental stockpiling of viruses. I listened to both sides of the tape (nothing new) and as usual despaired. Then I found a Catholic radio station broadcasting out of the tiny mountain town of Greenville and they were saying the rosary, so for the final hour off driving I said the rosary along with the radio: opiate of the people, baby.

When we arrived in the city limits I stopped for some groceries at the health food supermarket, and then we checked in at the Matador Motel, room 47, gray-haired woman and her small Down syndrome brother and their two dogs. I recommend the Matador, a down-at-heel establishment with a Spanish revival motif. No perfumes, no air fresheners, no disinfectant scents. Just clean. And they like dogs.

I telephoned Jesse and he gave me directions to the property he shares with a kind of communal group. We drove over and he gave us the Grand Tour. We saw the results of his gardening labors, the great huge artichoke plant and burdock, broccoli bolting already and yellow-and-black-blossoming favas, anxious crape myrtle coming back from the dead. And more, and more.

(interruption)

28 March 2007
The dream, what year was it I dreamed it?, maybe '78 or -9, my peak dreaming years, the apocalytic dream wherein my family comprised my little boys and John then-housemate. First John and I entered a shed at the edge of a farmplace, the two of us standing shut into the dim outbuilding with a German shepherd dog that suddenly attacked us, snarling, and we fled out the door, then walked glumly a dusty road, all four of us, I think, and then I left them all. I took off on a tangent of my own, found myself seated on a bus that made its way into an urban war zone. I've written up this dream before and can refer back, but anyway the wartorn streets, I'm running from cover to cover, from bashed wall to rubble pile. I'm searching frantically for my lost daughter, and her name was ..., her name was ... And I made my way down halls of ruined apartment buildings where squatters lived in secret, it took ages, my search, weeks, but finally I did find her, and rushed to embrace her, lifting her up into my arms in almost a swoon of relief. Her name was Dawn Spirit, and in almost the instant of my embracing I was returned to the bright dry backroad, where I walked with my sons and lover, all happy now, and the German shepherd dog smiling alongside.

So now 30 years and more past that vivid dream I found myself in my waking life walking last Sunday noon in a beautiful city, talking (just prior to leaving) with my grown younger son, having watched him perform in a play the night before, blaze of talent he is. We stood at the wrought-iron-bounded outskirt of a little park. Two figures approached us on the macadam'd trail, tall blur and smaller blur at the edge of my vision. I talk and gesture, incorrigible raconteuse, when I notice my son's expression shifting toward the figures, changing from a bland face of polite time-biding to one of startled recognition,

and he says, "Oh, hi." And I turn and the blurs take on human shapes, and then feminine ones, and then become a woman and a little girl. Finally the woman's face after a moment more assembles itself into the lovely one of my daughter-in-law, and if this is so, then this person with her, this tall now-round-countenanced child of between four and five years, whom I haven't seen since she toddled, this would make this child my granddaughter, and at the instant of this realization my body before I can hesitate lunges for her and grabs her up into my arms, I spin crooning and kissing, my heart pressed to hers and huge love bursting, and even though I have terrified the little girl, my grandchild, who struggles after her first stunned surprise out of my arms to cling behind her mother out of sight, I know with a flood of recognition the remembered relief and gratitude and sense of completion, the remembered dream embrace from years before, I know it as some milestone passed, as of the end of exile, trial survived. Spirit's dawn.

See You Up There...

Heading up to the next state north for the study-meeting with Roshi. It will be more difficult this time than when I went in January. They are in their practice period schedule. Wakeup bell at 3:40 AM. All meals with oryoki. Etc.

Really don' wanna. Will anyway. Back Friday.

A decade ago I used to make this trip a lot more often, in parallel with several other people. (A highway patrolman once nailed three separate vehicles full of us, all speeding north up US 285 to get to an ordination ceremony.) Here is a ghost story from those days:

Date: Tue, 20 May 1997
From: (mb in santa fe)
To: (wc)
Subject: ghost

It turns out that the only thing wrong with my answering machine is that the volume was turned down, so I couldn't hear any messages people had left. Wondering if I could figure out what I had missed, I rewound/played back repeatedly until the machine agreed to play me all the messages it had on its tape. Including, as it turned out, very old ones somehow stranded on parts of the tape apparently never recorded over. Back back back in time I went, techno messages from my boss, New Years greetings from my Mom (which year?), suddenly there was a part of a crying message from an unidentifiable voice who had just heard about R's death. October 1995, I just had time to think. And then there was R, not only his voice but his living self: a messsage like probably fifty others I heard over the years. Hi cutie, have you heard from J, how many vehicles do we need to take, give me a call if the arrangements unravel, see you up there.

See you up there.

Since here and now I wasn't on my way to the mountain and R is nineteen months dead, what seemed most likely was that... that what? That what seemed to be now was actually some other past time, or some present parallel time, in which R was, is, still alive. The tape itself seemed more real than any reality I know.

R is now a further ten years dead. When I was on the mountain in January, I didn't offer incense at his stone. Must do it this time.

Blue Sky, Forsythia and Fruit Blossoms

I asked my neighbor, who takes walks, to let me know when he saw some forsythia in bloom. He mentioned it on Sunday, so I took the camera this morning when I had to drive down to the other branch library.* All over downtown, and the South Capitol area, and my own neighborhood, the apricots are blooming. Happy Spring Equinox, everybody.

fruit tree on Candelario Street


walled yard on Sena Street
*As of Friday there will be not one but two other branches. Grand opening and all that.

One Lifetime Appearance In This Form

My literary life impinged on my work life a lot this week. The poet featured in the next issue of the online poetry magazine M.S. and I publish came by the library with visuals to accompany the issue: retablo portraits of poets, the painted blocks of wood carefully wrapped in tissue, some with verses on the face of the block, or the back, or one of the margins. I went in early the next morning to scan them on the scanner in my office.

And I made several quick trips across downtown on hypothetical lunch breaks to see the proofs of my broadside. This winter S. V. acquired '80 drawers of type and tons of paper all gotten from the retirement of Michael Gregory in Bisbee, AZ.' She has sublet three-quarters of her former bookstore space to a gallery, and reconstituted herself as Counting Coup Press in the remaining room. She offered a contest, write a one-page composition on the subject 'Things That Want To Be Counted'. It appealed to me as an assignment, instantly I began to make a list; and in a moment of friendliness, no more ('Ah this was fun, thanks'), sent it to her. I won the prize, which is to have it be printed on a Broadside.

Not what I meant at all but yes, thank you. In my persona as the poets' techie I've been producing an online poetry broadside since 1998, and by golly now I get to be a broadside. It's huge, it's gorgeous, it's not a whole lot like what I wrote except that the words she's riffing on in many sizes and arrangements of letters are mine. I loved seeing it backwards in the chase (which I hope is the right word). Picking up some copies up Monday afternoon. I want heaps, they are my one lifetime appearance in this form.

Reading News

Two days after I returned The Concept of the Buddha: Its Evolution from Early Buddhism to the Trikaya Theory by Guang Xing to the interlibrary loan system after struggling with it for a MONTH and in such little pieces that I retained almost nothing, I find out that its topic is exactly what Roshi wants us to study up for a meeting at the end of the month. No I didn't xerox it before sending it back.

Well, then. Here I am at mom's for the weekend, lying as usual about how many books I brought. (When she asked, I said, "Three.") Actually, I brought three mysteries--Robert Parker, High Profile; Beverly Connor, Dead Past; and Jimmie Ruth Evans, Best Served Cold; two nonfictions, The grandest of lives : eye to eye with whales / Douglas H. Chadwick and The yellow-lighted bookshop : a memoir, a history / Lewis Buzbee. (The purse book is still the Allingham mystery. One or two more nibblings on it while waiting for this or that and it will be well-started and I'll have to read it. Allingham is pleasing to read.) The ones that are sitting next to me on my mom's marble coffeetable are the Buzbee and Connor. Buzbee came very highly recommended, and is nice but not a knockout. The Connor is dynamite. Things are what they are.

A very nice response

I didn't care much for the letter that provoked it, but again I regret not being able to give Cary Tennis a good long hug for his wonderful response. Click here to read it. (You may or may not have to navigate around an ad.)

Did you know ... ???

My son, age 31, is back in college. Counting on financial aid and loans, we learn the following:

"Male students who fail to register with Selective Service before turning age 26 are ineligible for Federal student loan and grant programs, including Pell Grants, Federal Work Study, and Stafford Loans. (Parents who want to borrow a PLUS loan do not have to satisfy the registration requirement.) Several states have also made Selective Service registration a prerequisite for state financial aid and for matriculation at public colleges and universities.

"Even if you disagree with the requirement, you should register. Failure to register can have a serious negative impact on your ability to obtain a driver's license, qualify for financial aid, pursue an education, or obtain employment."

Halfway Between the Rim and the River

On the cusp of spring, went hiking yesterday with a neighbor and a friend. We went on the Vista Verde Trail, which follows a bench formed by a landslide block inside the Rio Grande Gorge,
about halfway between the mesa top and the river. Canyon wrens were singing.

The real purpose was to get out, out, out of town, and that we did.

The trail just ends, spang in the middle of the canyon, and there you are with the sound of the river far below, and the level line of the Taos Plateau above. We sat at the end of the trail, and passed the binoculars back and forth, and enjoyed the sun of a perfect blue-sky day. There were ducks down there on the river, little specks bobbing around and diving; white underneath, white patch on their heads? Maybe? Too far away to identify. Maybe buffleheads, but buffleheads are so little: how could we see them from so far away???

Lytton at Stonehenge

Meanwhile, acting on what he called an 'inspiration', Lytton shouldered a knapsack and marched off alone to Salisbury. The next few weeks he spent trudging obstinately over the Wiltshire and Berkshire downs. ... 'It was really a heavenly experience,' he afterwards enthused in a letter to Henry Lamb (9 November 1912). 'I recovered my health and spirits--but not only that: I found that there are joys in solitude that I'd hitherto hardly dreamt of.'
      ... He was by this time sporting a conspicuous, bright yellow coat worn over a beautiful new suit of 'mouse-coloured corduroys' and an orange waistcoat; and his outlandish, heavily-haversacked figure caused some stir among the local populace as he stepped out gaily along the roads and fields, especially because he was also wearing golden earrings. These, he told [his brother] James, were a great solace to him, although evidently outraging the good citizens of Wiltshire. ... One of the highlights of his journey--certainly the most exotic spectacle that it provided--was Lytton's raid on Stonehenge. From his hotel at Amesbury he stole out at dusk, and with the moon bright and rising behind him, approached the monument--a dark cluster of awkward shapes standing isolated in the empty plain, as if they had somehow been forgotten and left behind there. At a distance it all looked disappointingly small and squat; but then, drawing nearer, he realized that in this peculiar compactness lay its unique power and beauty. He thought of the fallen gods in Hyperion--the great old stones seemed to have come huddling together in a melancholy little group, like the last fragment of an army. They had that ominous look of blackness and contraction which extreme old age alone can give. The barbed wire fence was easy to negotiate, and on entering the ring, Lytton discovered that the effect from within, under the gathering twilight, was altogether different, inexplicably awe-inspiring. Each stone was in reality a gigantic bulk dwarfing him into insignificance, while, in the darkness which stretched away beyond the pillared circle, the twentieth century appeared all at once immeasurably remote.

Books received (for Sam, not the bookshop):

Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Eccentric & Poet, by Royall Snow (1928)
and
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes (lectures 1927; book 1955).
I won't pause in the Strachey, in which I am approaching page 800 with only 300 beyond that to go, to read these instead, but I will reproduce here the following wonderful paragraph from the Xanadu book (and how delightful to receive these lovely heavy silk-covered volumes from an era when books were revered):

"I propose to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of the genesis of two of the most remarkable poems in English, "the Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." ... [W]e shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus--with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the daemons of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus; haloes and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders; meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts, and watersnakes, and the Wandering Jew. Beside that compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodical. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry. And in that paradox lies the warrant of our pilgrimage.

I'm having a great time tossing in a personal order or two along with all the customer orders to augment my reading. No contemporary titles, but old old books by and about obscure literary personages of bygone years, wonderfully cheap because unsought for, but always handsome. Now I need an old dark tall set of shelves to display them on, instead of my stacked wooden fruit crates, which are charming and which suit my ragged poetry and poetics circa 1950-2007 very well. But the gilt-stamped Victoriana, not so much.

Two Stones

I spent 72 hours in England once. It was 1989. Roshi had promised me years before that he would take me to Stonehenge, and this was it: I was headed to Germany to help him with his first European sesshin, and we added three days in England to my itinerary. I landed at Heathrow, rented a car; went to Avebury, and Stonehenge, and the Nine Stones in Dorset, and back to Stonehenge. (Philip spent the same three days in Paris.)

Nine Stones is right next to an A road, but at that time there was a dense screen of brush along the roadside. I parked illegally on the verge of the road, and pushed through the vegetation, through the gate, into the small circle.

There was just me, and the stones, for as long as I cared to stay inside the circle. Unlike the mega- megalith sites, the Nine Stones are human sized.
Myself, standing next to the tallest stone

Modern Times and the National Library of the Czech Republic

I was struggling to write a post about Interlibrary Loan for the library's blog—the struggle being that I had to work in a couple of seriously flat paragraphs written at my request by the interlibrary loan librarian; but it goes up over my initials and I wanted to at least split the difference between what she wrote and my voice—and wandered off to watch Worldcat grow. The third title to add itself before my very eyes was being entered by

NATIONAL LIBR OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Book

Title Moreplavecka odysea :
Author Pavloskova, Karin,
Publisher Knizni klub,
Pub. Date 2005
Language Czech

It gave me goosebumps. Sigh. I do love this aspect of the modern world. It's too bad the cost of technology is so high in global ecological terms, and we probably can't sustain it...

I watched a while longer. Here's another

Contributed by: NATIONAL LIBR OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Book

Title Two Prague stories /
Author Rilke, Rainer Maria,
Publisher Vitalis,
Pub. Date c2005
Language English

As long as I'm writing about the workplace, I could tell you I found myself crying over hardware this week for the first time in about twelve years. Finally around 4 PM on Friday I received a soothing phone call from one of the city's IT guys. It almost sounded like... well no... we are still awfully likely to open the new Southside Branch Library on March 23rd either with 15 defective public use PCs or with no public use PCs at all if we have to send them back.

But the city guys who control our tech environment are maybe finally paying attention to the situation they've gotten us into. Suddenly decompressed from my misery, I floated downstairs and momentarily I loved every library patron in sight: the street guys, the trio of teenage girls walking around me, the tourists, the book addicts we see every day, stroller families, oldsters, and all.

22 February 2007
Last night I walked to the shop to keyboard a poem about aging I'd dashed off unthinking except for rhythms and sympathetic syllables. I woke up the old Mac and typed in the lines, and then I locked the place up again and started east down Second Street toward my little house. The evening was black and cool and the old street lamps' light reflected a little from the damp asphalt and from parked cars' windows. Ahead of me three-quarters of a block the weak light illuminated something low overhead, a white winged creature now soaring, now fluttering in place like a great, silent moth, now soaring again. It was an owl, probably a barn owl or maybe a snowy, bright, scrutinizing the quiet empty streets for a glimpse of dinner. I slowed my steps and then stopped to watch, but when I did the owl seemed to fix its attention on me and turned out of its way to fly to where I stood. I stood transfixed as it drew near and then stopped overhead, fluttering in place perhaps 50 feet directly above me. Hello, I said, and I grinned upward at it, and after another flutter or two the quiet bird turned its attention toward an unlighted side street and fluttered off. I like to think I communed for a moment, was visited and greeted and blessed. But then I wonder whether owls seek body heat, and whether my upturned face looked to it like a little white animal peering out from between my great long overcoat and woolen hat. No matter. I carry in my memory the gentle image of that small pale angel flapping overhead like the Holy Spirit, my welcoming face open and loving below, the two of us exchanging something.

23 February 2007
I'm thrilled to report my arrival tonight at a point halfway and a little beyond in Holroyd's Lytton Strachey biography. A small magic has occurred with relation to this. You will recall yesterday's description of my encounter with the owl. This evening then I got quite a jolt when I read on page 549 a piece of a letter wherein he asks a friend to have an "owl stuffed with wings outspread, so that I may hang it up over my bed and confuse it with the Holy Spirit in my last moments."

!

****

I want you to know that I'm getting very good at finding just the book any customer describes these days. My latest triumph: the young man who just opened the skateboard shop next-door to the old Golden Egg (the lawyer moved away) came in this afternoon and asked for "that Hunter Thompson book with the cover that looks like a pack of Camels." I brought him Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker. "Thats it!!" he cried.

24 February 2007
My Saturday helper came in today. It's a dilemma. She's a nice girl. But her family is very poor and she works here to earn their gasoline money. I wanted to let her go the first day: she hates working with books, and so I hear lots of heavy sighing every time I give her something to do; she hates people, so I can expect no customer assistance; alphabetizing is not on the menu, so I've been having her organize the romances by color (series)--pretty simple, but her lower back hurts too much if she bends over and her upper back hurts if she squats properly. She comes in on Saturdays at noon having had nothing to eat yet--or, as today, having eaten only half a donut--counting on my snacks. I talked to the school counselor who had asked me to hire her, and she asked whether I couldn't hang onto her if they got her into some program where they paid her wages and worker's comp. I said OK. I regret it, but I'm torn. I want her to eat ... but I'd like to have an employee who wants to be here--who likes books, at least. But if the special program pays, I suppose I could find her something antisocial to do for four hours a week. Eventually I'll have inventory software and a barcode reader. Nothing makes her happier than being allowed to sit at the computer.

The business week started out dreary and saleless, but Thursday-Friday-Saturday have almost made up for the quiet days. Many friends pop in and out the door, and that's a good feeling. Maybe next month I can get a phone line at home and finally resume blogging for real. It's funny, I go around the house talking to you all in my head but never able to grab up the Powerbook and go with it. Then I don't write anything when I do have the chance, because I think I've told you already. Ha!

Doppler effect

The pain in my right hip
first whispered to me fifteen years ago.
Attention!, this pain, who is female, said.
I pretended she wasn't there
and went on about my business.
I chose to exercise my pain-ignoring skills
in one more instance
even as her whispers grew to shrieks.

I stepped out one night a week back
onto the concrete back stoop
forgetting the ice sheet
and slammed down hard on my right hip.
I lay there alone under the porch light, wrist throbbing.
Is this it? I wondered, I'm only 53
and the child is coming back into my face
after some unfortunate years.
It's too soon, too soon.

But then I stood and walked
and considered the hairline fracture
widening over time, like Grandma's.
Her sister Great-aunt Ila flew out
from Minneapolis that year
and the two old ladies with their broken hips
were chauffered in matching wheelchairs
around Descanso Gardens.
After twenty more years they died
ten days and fifteen hundred miles apart.

Pain chortles: I have your attention now.

I walked up to the shop this evening to see if I could make a few minutes to keyboard some stuff. But the stuff waiting to be keyboarded is too much for me, though I made a start.

I'm exhausted, folks; the shop is taking off bigtime: yesterday, listen, yesterday I had a $421 day--and I'm scrounging to keep the shelves filled. My Ann Arbor supplier is shipping boxes full as fast as he can, but they still take 10 days to get here, and so I"m digging deep in the overstock/dump stock. And running running shelving shelving. Got my morning employee, Rory, but he's a painter and musician and spends his two hours a day painting my "signage." Which should be complete the end of next week. And my Saturday sidekick isn't really going to work out, not really loving books all that much. Wish Amber would come back.

In other news, this building just sold. You heard correctly. And rent's going up. I've decided I have to buy a shop on Main Street. So let's concentrate on that, shall we?

"How Many Books Did You Bring?"

On my way to visit mom for about three days. Both my mother and my sister are in the habit of asking me how many books I brought with me when I visit, and I am in the habit of lying. They don't approve of my proclivities. Here is the truth:

I am bringing a) the two books I am already in the middle of: a mystery by Howard Engel and The Concept of the Buddha: Its Evolution from Early Buddhism to the Trikaya Theory by Guang Xing, which is nearly as unreadable as it sounds; plus b) Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn; a mystery by Theresa Schwegel; an old paperback of Edmund Crispin's last mystery; and Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night for after I decide that Guang Xing is simply not distracting enough for the circumstances of the visit. Total of six. (Just in case, you understand. Of course I won't read them all.)

Oh. I don't list or count the purse book, of which there is always one but which only ever comes into play if I am unexpectedly stuck someplace like Discount Tire, and is not of great interest by definition; if it were interesting, I'd have read it and replaced it with something else already.

Next week I'll work out how to have some sort of 'what we're reading' in the sidebar.

Catchup

Here are photos of the bookshop as it exists at the moment.

A not-so-small magic accounts for the new aisles: I took back all the shelving I'd hope to negotiate possession of (from the old large building), and this left me with most of my books on tables and on the floor. I was lamenting the situation to a friend as I made several photocopies for a stranger who'd just walked in. He overheard me and said he'd just closed his video shop in another town and would I like to buy his shelves for a very low price?

And so I did.


Five more tall pine shelves are being built as we speak, and before long the walls will be covered with them.

Everything's still in progress. The kids' corner is dim and uninviting. Probably I will move it to the sunny front window area.




And the Romance nook. Sigh. Well, they're all on the shelves, but I need better lighting, and a little decor ...




PoetThomas made me these temporary window signs.




New employee Rory, a musician and artist who just moved here from Canada, is in the process of painting my official "signage":

Migrating Northwest

Ever so slowly.

By the fall, I will be closer to the ocean. Meanwhile, nearly comatose with fear of change; and thinking nearly every minute about work, as I have done for about the past 20 years... that work which will no longer be in the center of my life beginning about the middle of July. The center of my life will be the sound of waves on the shore. And if it's not enough, whew, then what.

Since I offered to make this blog, I have been north to meet with my teacher; and south, to meet with sandhill cranes; and have weathered (ha ha, inadvertent pun) about six weeks of unlikely unlocal deep snow winter; and for the first time, after 22 years, am having anxiety dreams about the workplace every night.

Boy, I really don't know about this. But ok. Here is a place for the community of people who kept in touch with Bookinista to keep in touch with each other.

Hello out there.