With Thanks

There is nothing like standing on the tip of the easternmost part of the western hemisphere to make a traveler feel small, superfluous, and miraculous.

The Place: Point Prim, Prince Edward Island, Canada.

The Date: February 13, 2010.

But it could just as easily have been 1810, as I rounded the lighthouse on this slender finger of land that juts out into the icy Atlantic waters.

At that moment I was not thinking about the three different planes that had ferried me from Kentucky to this island. I was not thinking about the rented, post-recall, Toyota Tercel that had carried me across the bridge from Charlottetown, down the snow-covered countryside to this frosty shore. I was not even thinking of my own family, scattered across the southeastern United States, several thousand miles away.

I was thinking about the faceless family that had come before me. Of the ships that had carried them to this very island, with names like Robertson and Leach, Bernard and Beck. I was thinking of those first lonely winters and of the women who had managed to survive them. I was thinking of how cold I was in my wool coat with the fox fur collar and my good gloves and my thickly woven socks, and of their own, thin feet in their own thin stockings.

I was thinking about the breakfast of omelet, toast and tea that fueled my half-day's journey and of the hard jerky and black coffee that likely fueled their transoceanic travels. I was thinking of the women who had borne children on a day such as this, who had struggled to keep those children alive, and who had buried many under this icy soil.

I was thinking about the miracle that they not only survived, but prospered. And that I was here, on Point Prim, looking across their frozen sea.

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?

Being a word person, statistics usually sound like just so many numbers to me. Such-and-such percentage of that, at a rate of x per second. A ratio of y to z with a frequency of x. I don't get it, and often I suspect statistics of being roundly manipulated to make a point for the user, instead of for any real, objective inquiry.

But today I came flat up against a statistic that was physically obvious and statistically disturbing. My oldest daughter had her first vet school interview at Purdue University, a sprawling, prestigious, nationally known Indiana institution. It was cold, it was snowy, it was windy, it was exhilerating, it was scary--it was everything you might imagine such an event to be for a middle-aged mother and for a young woman about to start the next phase of her life.

And it was disturbing. Why? Because there were too many women and not enough men.

I can hear the Steinem-ites screeching in dismay.

This is not an anti-feminist statement. This is not the platitude of an insane woman who wishes to turn back the clock to a simpler time when she wouldn't even be taught to read, much less be able to vote or to blog (for Pete's sake), about reading, voting, or blogging.

No. This is a humanist statement, a futurist statement. And here are the statistics to back it up: Purdue University graduated its first class of veterinary medicine students in 1963. The class numbered forty-three graduates, all of them men.

Today, on Purdue's campus, the female interviewees outnumbered the male at a ratio of nine to one. Nine to one. Yes, a resounding victory for Ms., and for all the Ms.'s that followed her, even for me, with my life of freedom. But what does this number portend for the future? What will become of a nation where fewer and fewer young men are lining the halls of institutions such as this?

I asked my daughter where they all were and she said, with sardonic humor, "They're all getting drunk and playing video games."

Not all. Not yet. There are young men in my life who are focused, who work hard and who play hard, who have goals and who have dreams. They may play the occasional video game, they may lift the occasional beer, but they are young men of substance.

But that's my small Kentucky corner of the world. Today, across this flat, wind-swept Indiana campus, it was all talented, intelligent, driven young women in suits and heels. The few young men looked alone, pale and out of place--exactly where we women were a few short decades ago--but in the face of today's statistic that fact gives me no peace.

Where have all the young men gone, and what shall we do without them?

Doxology

There are places in this world that are word places. They inspire us to words, they remind us of words, they provide us with words. City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco is one such place. A few days ago I visited there and climbed to the top of these very stairs. What I found was, indeed, poetry. Shelf upon shelf of the stuff.

Poetry can be a scary place. The lines don't look right. The rhythm doesn't feel right. There is no punctuation where we expect it to be, and then suddenly-wham!-there is a mark of startling urgency. We want it to rhyme, and then when it does, we accuse it of being trite.

In many ways modern American poetry got a gigantic kick in the butt at the top of these stairs when Allen Ginsberg took on 1956 conservative, post-war America and threw it back in its face in one long gulp of a howl, first published by the two men who owned this same bookstore.

In case you were wondering, the 60's ain't over, my friend, because just last week

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat

up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities

contemplating jazz....

(read the rest of "Howl" at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html)

A short walk down Venice Beach and I was right there with Ginsberg, only instead of rushing to pen a celebratory anthem I was moved to moan a funeral dirge, mourning the hollow eyes and hollow lives lining that sunny sidewalk.

But, glorious world that it is, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, a few short steps away, under the very same sun, you see a Mexican family doing their Christmas Eve laundry together in a laundromat, a mother from Ireland who crossed the Atlantic to help her son get settled into his new American job, two elegant, friendly ladies who, when asked about Christmas Eve services, laughingly refer to their Jewish heritage, then give directions to the nearest church. You gather into a rosy warm Italian restaurant packed with laughter and conversation and you talk to Ariel from Argentina, a young man with a dream who wants to get it on film.

In short, at the top of those stairs, on those very same shelves,

Always there is something worth saying

about glory, about gratitude.

Mockingbird by Mary Oliver

I am grateful for the words. Yes. For all of them.

Hello?

Recently I had a conversation with a writer (who was, at the same time, magically making my roots disappear) about the writer's essential need for readers.  To paraphrase, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  Or, in writer's terms, if a piece lies in a drawer and there are no eyes to read it, no mind to absorb it, no heart to feel it, does it really exist or is it merely black ink on a white page?

Some days later I am still pondering this question and thinking about that vital element of writing:  dialogue.  For isn't that what it's all about?  One mind having a dialogue with another.

Even the best of books, the most scintillating of stories, if left to itself on a shelf, is a dry, dusty tome with no sound track.  But pick up that book, even if it's simply to move it from one pile to another, open that cover and scan any page--the instant engagement of gray matter with printed matter creates a kinetic energy that cannot be duplicated.  

Some of my best conversations have been with writers through the pages of their books, each dialogue as individual and unique as the writer himself.  Compare reading Ray Bradbury's galloping, breathless, electric prose to the thoughtful, Aristotelian brick-by-brick work of Wendell Berry.  My reader's brain is put through the paces of blood-thumping aerobics and the sinewy stretches of classic yoga.   

But in order for a dialogue to exist there must be a corresponding response, a give and take of communication.   And respond I do--either by actual letter through the mail, or in my journal, or in my own writing, or even on this blog.  The drawers of writers are stuffed with dialogue--between themselves and other writers, between themselves and their readers--a readership of one will do.  Because eventually somebody will come along and clean out that drawer, pick up those pages, and a connection will be made, a dialogue will begin.

Another tree will fall and another ear will hear.

Closer to Fine

                                       "...a thing doesn't have to be perfect to be fine.  That goes for a picture.  That goes for life."                   

            Journey by Patricia MacLachlan

I've been thinking a lot lately about the prison of perfectionism.  Those four walls can get mighty close on occasion, and rarely, if ever, do they admit any light.  

Sometimes you have to "pull a Shawshank" (anybody who's ever watched late night cable TV knows exactly what I'm talking about).  You keep an escape hatch hidden in a hole in one of those four walls, behind a poster of your favorite pin-up talisman:  it might be a movie star or a sports icon, it could be a holy symbol, or a piece of music, perhaps a snippet of poetry or a picture of an old lady behind a typewriter.  You know what it is.  I don't have to tell you.

That hole didn't get there overnight.  That hole took years to make, because first you had to get the tools to make it.  They had to be smuggled in to you by somebody from the outside, somebody who had already figured out you didn't have to be perfect to be good.  You took the tool, you kept it close to you at all times, you touched it in your pocket to make sure it was still there.  Then, you began to use the tool in small, barely perceptible scratches, until finally, there it was:  a small, dark tunnel out, just barely big enough for you.

You wait.  Because you're afraid, sure.  Because you might be seen by those faceless Nazi guards who keep their searchlights trained on you twenty-four hours a day.  Because it's safe here, in these four walls, because nobody sees you and you don't see them. 

But, finally, the night comes when you know it's time.  You just can't take those walls a second longer.  You pull aside the talisman and you crawl.  You go the distance, through the mud and the muck, through the dung nobody should have to crawl through, and there it is.  It isn't perfect.  It's rainy and it's muddy and it's dark.  But it's life, and it sure is fine.

I Hear Dead People

Sometimes, on days when the computer screen or the notebook page taunts me with its stoic blankness, I wish I heard dead people.  

I wish a dead person, or a live person, or even one of my chickens, would come tiptoeing up behind me on their wispy ghost feet, or their squeaky new Chuck Taylors, or their tiny little chicken claws, and whisper in my ear.  I wish they would say, "Miss Portia (they are southern--they have nice manners), here is what you will write today.  These are the words you will use."

And then my hands would fly.  Fly.  Across that page, over the keys. And then, the writing would be done.  I would sit back and read what I had written and be surprised.  I would be grateful. I would be tired. I would be glad.

But, no matter how hard I may sit and stare, no matter how long I may wait or how many salt-throwing, wood-knocking wishes I may wish, there is no person, dead or alive, no clucking, cooing chicken, to give me the words.  There is only me.  There is only the pen, or the computer keys.  There is only that.

And that will have to be enough.  

Yes, Ma'am

"The more Resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you—and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it."

Steve Pressfield, The War of Art

Above quote from "Read Write Believe" blog, courtesy of Sara Lewis Holmes

A couple of years ago I packed my car and drove east, into the mountains of Appalachia, for a week-long writer's workshop.

I was scared and nervous, like the first day of 7th grade, 1973. A week in close proximity with real writers. Could I survive?

A friend supplied me with a veritable cornucopia of treats and surprises to see me through the week, packed in a real metal miner's lunchbox with the Peabody Coal Company sticker still affixed to the lid. Me, afraid, jittery, self-conscious, heading into the Appalachian coal fields with one goal: words. Ill-formed, unplanned, but gut-level necessary.

I drove down Hal Rogers Parkway, past the rolling green hills of my ancestors, deep into the shadowy valleys at the base of coal-scarred mountains, and I thought about the stories I wanted to tell but was afraid to put down, of the stories I had been tip-tapping around for years.

That night, when I got to my musty, square box of a windowless room and opened my lunch pail, I found this card with its terse, to-the-point message. In response to this command, with the typing of these words, I say "I will try."

Postal Service

The other day I wrote letters to two writers. I love to send letters to writers. Every time I sign my name, put a stamp on the envelope, and drop it in the mailbox (at the post office--these letters are far too important to mail from the boring mailbox at the end of my driveway), I am giddy with anticipation. I am almost asphyxiated by the pure oxygen of my own hope.

Hope for what? It's only a letter, usually a fairly short, overly verbose, breathy exclamation of passionate praise with a final note of thanks to an author for doing what, to my reader's eyes, seems to come as naturally as--well, as naturally as breathing--that's the cliche' you would expect to fill in that particular blank.

I don't hope to become enshrined for posterity in the author's personal correspondence files, to be discovered when a scholarly, not overly creative PhD edits said author's papers and publishes the "collected letters," of which my epistle will form the centerpiece. No.

I don't hope for the author to recognize, in the purple prose of an obsessive fan, the raw talent of an award winning writer and rush to his or her editor waving my letter and demanding instant publication for any words I might pen. No.

My only desire is to continue the dialogue which was begun between me and the writer the first time I opened his book. Because if I don't the frustration makes me itch--a behind the eyes, in the brain kind of itch that won't go away until I see my envelope drop into that slot at the post office, because there's so much I want to say to this person who has spoken so much to me.

And then sometimes they write me back! How cool is that?

Tut Tut, It Looks Like Facebook

So I did it.  I created a Facebook account.  I actually have a profile picture (albeit a really bad one--I can't really look like that can I?), I actually have "friends" (not very many, but enough to make me feel popular!), and I actually post from time to time.  

It's a fascinating world out there in Facebook-land.  A tiny (in my version) or not so tiny (in most people's versions) universe of interconnectedness and short blurb-sized windows into other people's lives.  

Some of it's goofy, some of it's dangerous, some of it's downright idiotic.  But, surprise, some of it's quite lovely.  Tiny, sparkling gems of wit, of satire, of poetry, tripping from the keys of the least likely of people.  

And, biggest surprise of all, or maybe not now that I think about it, are the young adults who exploded Facebook into being in the first place.  They have mastered the fine art of portion control (not at the drive through, but at the computer), where they temper their comments into pithy phrases that make me pause.  

Sure, sometimes it's a simple quote from a favorite pop lyric of the moment, but their choice of lines is packed with emphasis, loaded with meaning.  Sometimes it's a bit of dialogue from a not too politically correct movie that leaves me smiling at its apropos timing on an especially gloomy day.  Often it's a simple shout out to somebody who's feeling down, pictures from a girls night loaded with extra eye shadow, or a subtle moan of dread over an upcoming test.

Whatever the message, whatever the hour, there's sure to be something worth reading when I log on.  And this, perhaps, has been the biggest surprise of all.  They are literary, they are poetic, and they don't even know it (at least the best of them don't).  They are comedic, they are satiric, they are elegiac and tragic and dramatic and goofy.  

And they friended me.  As I step a first, faltering toe down the path in this modern-day billion acre woods, I say to them all, thanks for noticin' me.