remnants of the day

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I'm not very good at putting things away. Going on three months after Lesley & Brian's wedding, there is still evidence of it out in plain view. Peter's wedding shoes in which he stood as Man of Honor for his sister are on the living room floor, and Lesley's cleaned and boxed gown sits in the treadmill room. Peter has no need or room for these shoes on the ship, and Lesley & Brian already have more books, pots & pans and clothes than they can accommodate in their small NY apartment. Where would they store this big box, on top of the TV?



We ourselves have too much stuff. Don and I grumble about it now and then.

But let me veer from that thought. Let's look at the stuff. I want to express gratitude for the ones who make it. I look at Peter's beautiful shoes, or Lesley's dreamy gown made by Mika in NY, and when I stop and think of the skill and dexterity it took to make them, I have to pause.

Once when I ventured to Chicago alone for a few hours at the Art Institute, I took lunch in the little garden restaurant. When you eat alone you have to occupy yourself somehow. I had a journal and pen, and before I requested my food, while I ate it, and afterward, I sat and jotted down all the professions involved within my small sphere at that table. There was my waiter, Dan, and the cook, Charlie. A farmer named Joe raised the vegetables and the chicken was probably grown in one of those big factories. Elsa at a pasta company poured ingredients into a big vat to mix the dough. There was the dishwasher Sammy who might have burned his hand with the steamy sprayer. Sarah ran the machine that manufactured the linens after a farmer named Michael grew the flax (read here if you think that's an easy job). Todd designed and laid out the menu and another few people printed and laminated it. Who made the plastic for the lamination? Ellen designed the plates and glasses, and Leiton mixed the ingredients and molded them in just the right process. Lisa in brown delivered the big boxes of heavy dishes to the restaurant at the end of a long day of deliveries, at about 6:30pm. And of course there were many other designers, planners and makers - just around my restaurant table.

I have not done any of these things. I've cooked, but not for a whole restaurant. I could probably design a menu. But I would have no clue how to pour the ink into a machine to print it. Have you noticed how we notice mistakes and flaws (Just look at that splotch of ink there!), but rarely do we notice, let alone appreciate, a job well done in the normal realm of daily life?

To make a pair of shoes?! That is an art that has always fascinated me. What a collection of tools a shoemaker must have to craft those gorgeous seams and shape the heel! Look at this shoemaking book illustrating how to "last the back" with pincers, nails, and patience. Or better yet, watch this 3 minute video of a guy making a shoe by hand. See how important his own bare feet are:





I could probably have sewn Lesley's wedding gown, but would she have wanted to wear it? Poor thing. She would have, to please her mother. In the last photo, taken by the wedding photographer Mihaela Avasiloaie, Lesley's gown which was made by Mika, thank goodness, waits for her to put it on behind the spinning wheel that was passed down on my mother's side. Someone made that old piece of technology with their hands - carving, sanding, waxing and assembling so it works (still works). What women spun wool on this wheel? Lesley dreams of raising her own sheep, shearing them and spinning wool for knitted garments she designs. Imagine the satisfaction in the completion of that circle. She won't be doing that in NYC. Some stuff has to be spread out.

Last photo by Mihaela Avasiloaie

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blasphemy

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The trees of green, orange and red that line my drive to work thirty minutes each way five days a week, as well as the sumptuous light that rises behind the green barn each morning, have filled my sight with eye candy. Filled up past capacity, over-saturated. All that bending of apple boughs, swelling of gourds, plumping of hazel shells, angled light brimming over, clouds blooming, and twittering swallows that Keats wrote of in his Ode, frankly have me gasping for the bare bones of winter. Don't show me one more beautiful leaf on your blog, I beg you -- I'll explode!

I try to live in the moment, but I'm longing for less opulent ones. I covet the next season, looking over the fence toward not greener grass, but whiter. I can't take any more of this beauty I tell you. Even this shiny Beetle I saw two weeks ago the same day I stopped to take pictures of a patch heavy with pumpkins as far as the eye could see maxed me out with its allurements. Do I want to hop in and ramble down Route 66 on a two week road trip? Not really. I'm riched out!

I want smooth flat crispy snow fields with a spike or two of corn. I want bare black trees lining them. I want to come home and after supper I want the glowing family room window pulling me back to the house from the corncrib with an armful of firewood.

Come here wind, blow away all this color. I want to go inside and hibernate.
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corny garden fun

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If April showers bring May flowers . . .

what do May flowers bring?

Pilgrims.

Planting tulip bulbs Saturday I thought about my dad in his quilted plaid wool shirt raking leaves. His wavy rusty hair had gone gray in those later years, but I still see him standing in the russet maple leaves with matching hair blowing up like a flame to the sky.

Dad was a Baptist minister. He crafted words into two sermons every week, fifty weeks a year, one for the formal Sunday morning service and another for the more casual evening service. His words were not flowery, they were just right. He wanted the gospel to speak for itself through him, a simple vessel. His Virginian accent had softened so you could just barely tell he was Southern. My ever-supportive mother said every week, "Carl, that was the best sermon you have ever preached."

But when he was home, he hardly spoke. We - my mother and eight kids - had to guess what he was thinking. Sometimes he would sit at his end of the big dining table, put his fork down and wait while we figured out what he required. Was it the salt? The bread, butter? The peas? At last after we passed him two or three things he would help himself and we would go on with our own plates. I am guessing he thought the other nine of us talked enough and he just didn't want to add anything else to the room.

But both my parents loved words, the English language, witticisms and word plays of any kind. Nothing got my dad to chuckle through his teeth like a word play. He didn't write this verse I found, but it is just the kind of thing he would have memorized and recited with a big goofy smile.

Cabbage always has a heart;
Green beans string along.
You're such a Tomato,
Will you Peas to me belong?
You've been the Apple of my eye,
You know how much I care;
So Lettuce get together,
We'd make a perfect Pear.
Now, something's sure to Turnip,
To prove you can't be Beet;
So, if you Carrot all for me
Let's let our Tulips meet.
Don't Squash my hopes and dreams now,
Bee my Honey, dear;
Or tears will fill Potato's eyes,
While Sweet Corn lends an ear.
I'll Cauliflower shop and say
Your dreams are Parsley mine.
I'll work and share my Celery,
So be my Valentine.

"Let's let our Tulips meet."

Do you know about "spoonerisms"? Take a minute and at least read the first story of Rindercella, her mugly other and two sad bisters and how she eventually slopped her dripper for the prandsom hince to find who tried it on her mugly other and it fidn't dit.
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What else?

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What Else?

First you're born and
you're alive-
What else?

Over the years
you hear confessions
that you tuck into
your swaddling clothes

Eventually you wear them
like a fleece
of deep forest green
collar up

A cozy suspicion
clothes you
the way night
clothes the moon

And what is that moon
if not a comfort
in the deep blanket
of your life

the stone that might help you
remember
What else?

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a different light

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Sky lover Violet Sky commented on the special warm glow of the morning and evening sun in October in my last post. I agree with her. Sometimes, though, as she no doubt could attest in Toronto, the glow of October's light is rather cool, if that makes sense, and sends you inside for a warmer radiance in a brick fireplace. As another friend says, it's starting to be "candle time."

Inge and I drove an hour and a half to my family's cottage (home of the Wild Things swing) for a writing retreat. It was dark and chilly - except for some brief moments such as this one when Inge was crowned with cool light on a stage of diamonds backed by milky drapes - and when it wasn't raining, light fingers of wind tipped the oak leaves spilling their rain reserves down onto the ferns, moss and tin roof. It was just the right atmosphere for nesting in the couch cushions behind a stack of books and a slow dancing fire.



Conversations with Inge are about stories. Of authors she reads and the very few I read too, such as Orhan Pamuk (click here for my encounter with him). Oh - his beloved İstanbul is also my beloved İstanbul. Or is it? He steps out one way, and I step in another. It is his story, it is my story. Or we talk about her mother's scattered leaves of stories collected and piled in attic letter boxes before Inge and her sister arrived, a world apart. Or Inge's own story, which she wants to write down for her fourteen year old son, with her places, favorite things, her poetry, sketches and photographs. We talk about truth versus fiction. What is the Truth? How does Memory serve? How can I fill in the vast gaps of knowledge about daughter of Swedish immigrants Grandma Olive? I don't remember her at all though she must have held me before her death when I was four. What can I piece together of her from what I have heard from stories told by Mom: taping wallpaper designs around the walls to match patterns as she drew them; sisters Susan, Bootsie and Nancy: falling into the goldfish pool and being terrified of breaking something valuable in the not-too-child-friendly house; and brother Nelson: Saltine cracker & peanut butter sandwiches she made for his snack - each unique and colored by their own separate memories? And what truth of her can I corral from her china, or the "bastard" cabinet she painted, or her sewing box, and the vases she collected?

Just as there is a different light in October, and there is a different light inside, there is also a different light within each of us. This light is more powerful than we are sometimes willing to acknowledge, and it slants this way and that and glows uniquely from each individual. As Eric Maise wrote in one of the weekend's fireplace books (one Inge gave me on some Christmas or birthday), A Writer's Paris, from the chapter "Hemingway Slept Here":

I don't care where Hemingway slept. . . What writers write interests me. . . . If Hemingway is important, it is because what he had to say still touches us. But is it important that on this exact spot, now smack in the middle of a fancy mall, he had onion soup after a night of debauchery? Hardly. The past is no substitute for the present. Love the 1440s, love the 1680s, love the 1920s--love any epoch that touches your soul. But start each day focused on your writing and not on your literary maps.

Bring along the stories of others that have touched you. You can't help it. But write your story, as only you can.

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simple sudden October

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Impulsively, I have to show you the morning, driving out of the farm and across the county on that old meridian road. It stops me sometimes.


Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote yesterday -

A day isn’t just a standard measure,
all the same size so each fits on a calendar page.
A day is a period of light, an astronomical event.

I will respond to your comments in the last post soon.
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Where the wild things are swinging

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If I had to choose only one book to save from our children's shelves when they grew up, it would be Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. (No doubt a whole lot of other people feel the same.) Sendak wrote and illustrated the 48 page, ten sentence book in 1963, and I discovered it the next decade during bookstore "squats" in the children's section when I was in college. Maybe I wished I had written it and drawn those illustrations. A few years ago I did copy one of his pictures onto the new seat Don sawed for our 60-year-old swingset my siblings and I grew up with, which now sits on the hill behind our family cottage. This was the first time that old swing seat had been replaced. I used to fly so high on it that I wondered what would happen if I looped all the way up and over the top of the A frame. What I imagined didn't happen, thank goodness, but Sendak's vision did, as I copied and painted his swinging characters right onto the new wooden seat. I even bought a copy of the book to leave in the cottage's red reading room so kids would be sure to have the book handy for a read after swinging.




So you'd think I would have been ecstatic at the movie theater recently when I saw a trailer for Spike Jonze's upcoming feature movie version of Sendak's book. But my immediate reaction was horror. NO! You can't make this book into a movie! I closed my eyes to shut out the images and saw only those from the book in my memory.

In the book you have ten glorious run-on sentences (for example: "Almost over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of my own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."). You have a boy's dream after he has been sent to bed without his supper, illustrated in some of the most evocative images ever. You have a nightmare transformed into a love story, the mysterious dilemmas of parenting with mercy and grace, and conversely of being a child who has to grow up into a responsible person, but not quite yet. You have delicious and cuddly monsters painted in warm earthy tones. You have cute small Max in a white wolf suit and crown. The way he dishevels that crown when he's sleepy is so charming! As a lover of children's illustrations, I got lost in them. I wanted little text. Making it into a movie would fill in the gaps of imagination in unwanted ways, changing it forever.

It is the dilemma of all books-to-film. How do you take Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and make it into the film "The English Patient"? In that case, the book is spare and wonderful, and the movie is lush and wonderful. Both succeeded. But often the film is a disappointment after a rich book. Of course the opposite can often be said too.

In a fantastic article Loring sent me by Wendell Berry (he whose beloved poem resides on my sidebar) about our country's warped economics, in which he criticizes the entertainment addiction we're in (The Progressive, Sept. 2009, p. 24), Berry wrote:

If you can read
and have more imagination than a doorknob,
what need do you have
for a "movie version" of a novel?

To agree with Berry, you could argue that a novel is different from an illustrated children's book. Without illustrations, a novel relies on the reader's vision of each scene and interpretations of characters. If you're a good reader, this terrain can be fertile indeed. If a movie gets made, and if you had any attachment to the book, you wish they would consult with you about the cast, set, direction and costumes! It's your story now after all, for the scenes and characters have evolved into your inventions too. Especially vile is when a film is made of a classic tale, such as "The Scarlet Letter" or "Last of the Mohicans," and the story is changed unrecognizably and unforgivably into a more palatable (sell-able) Hollywood adaptation. Why not just write a new story-script in the period and context?

To argue against my original mortification, a children's illustrated book is different, no matter how sacred, especially if the author was also the illustrator. Apparently Maurice Sendak has been working on a movie version of Where the Wild Things Are since the 1990s, and he pursued Spike Jonze as the one to make it. How do you argue with a book's author, if he had a vision for it as a film? It makes perfect sense that a visual artist would cross over into film. And from the enticing film sets and costumes I've seen so far, I myself can feel the pull. Can he help it that so many of us own this entity called Where the Wild Things Are and might object to his decision? Such controversy in my head over his imagination's expression!

In the video below you can hear Sendak and Jonze describe their collaboration in the movie. As Sendak says, Jonze took the peculiarness of the book and made it into his own Where the Wild Things Are with Jonze peculiarness. The glimpses of the monsters in the misty forest and silhouetted by the crashing sea, and of the fabulous Max, who happens also to be a "Max" in real life, have seduced me. Guess where I'll be October 16? In the presence of a newly inspired and evolved expression of what Maurice Sendak made possible: a wild seat to ride up and up as high as the next visionary could take it.

But please, no movie version of Goodnight Moon. I can live with the sweet animation narrated by Susan Sarandon, but I will not allow my future grandchildren to watch it on TV when I'm around. They must look at the pictures from my lap and hear "Good night comb and good night brush" from my voice box, feeling my heartbeat against their temples. And then I will close the finger-softened pages of the book and tell them for the 100th time how their mother said "Dat Doh" for "Goodnight Moon." Then I will eat them up, I love them so.




Here are my siblings' grandchildren helping me put the new swing on that old swingset.

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