American Stories NOW

Breathe

2012-01-22T12:06:00.004-07:00

I want to remember this, and so I write it down.

Ted spoke today. Ted doesn't often speak, but when he does, I listen. Ted is eighty-six years old, a former chemistry professor--he and I have taught in the same classrooms--and an emigre who as a young boy was lucky enough to escape Hitler's killing machine. During his long career, he taught both philosophy and science, and asked his students to think not just about how the world is bonded together, but about the very idea of bonding itself. Ted has been retired now from teaching for many years; his hands are calm, and when he stands in a meeting to speak, he grips the back of the chair in front of him, if one is there. If not, he stands and folds his hands in front of him, balancing himself from the inside. His voice is soft, and it shakes slightly. I should be clear: this is a bit like saying a tree shakes softly. You don't confuse the delicacy at the edge with the welded rings of the core.

Today Ted stood and gripped the back of the chair in front of him, and this is the story he told, as nearly as I can capture his words, and his lilting voice:

"Today, I am thinking about meditation. I have practiced meditation for a long time. When I do so, I do it by focusing on a single sound, or a word; or else I will concentrate only on my breathing, my breath going in and out. It is very important to me, this meditation, and I am very interested in meditation as a subject.

"But one day, not long ago, something began to happen to me. I did not only meditate, but I began to think about meditation. I began to read a few books on meditation, and then more and more. Then, in the way of things, other people began to recommend books to me, and before I knew it I had quite a pile of books beside me, books about meditation and about other subjects that are also very important. At about this same time, I became aware of a feeling--a feeling that I had not only so many things to read, but so many, many things to do, so many things that I must do. I became overwhelmed by this feeling, and began to be quite unwell. I went to my doctor, and my blood pressure was elevated--it had gone through the roof, in fact--and he put me on medication, and told me that we must do some ultrasound tests to check my internal organs. At this point, I contacted my sons, who do not live near me--one of them lives in Tokyo, and has done so for a generation now--and I told them what was happening, thinking that I should let them know just in case something was going to take me off to the hospital. My son in Tokyo wrote back to me right away, and this is what he said:

'I want you to go back to breathing. I want you to think only about your breath. Your body needs oxygen, and so you must take it in. You must breathe in what you need, then you must breathe out what you no longer need. You must breathe in the oxygen. You must breathe out the carbon dioxide, which you no longer need but that something else--the plants--can use. I want you to do this, and think in this way. Breathe in what you need. Breathe out what you no longer need. And I want you to do this for twenty minutes.'

"It was amazing, the difference this made. I realized, as I breathed this way, that the books that I had did not have to be read right now. And that the things that I had to do, they did not have to be done, not right now. When I went in later on for the ultrasound tests, nothing showed up on them at all. My blood pressure was normal again, and the doctor congratulated himself that it was the medication that had done it.

"As I breathed in and out again, I remembered things that other people had taught me about breathing. That, for instance, when we breathe in we have the chance to take in the suffering of the world, of a group or an individual, or maybe of the suffering we are immediately aware of . . . and then we have the chance to breathe out our compassion and love. This memory came back to me as I breathed, as I concentrated on taking in what I needed.

"When I told my son about this memory that had come to me, he reminded me that the idea that we breathe in the suffering of others and breathe out our compassion for the world is a practice known as Tonglen, and that it has been practiced in India and in Tibet. And I wasn't at all surprised to hear this. And then I thought of something else."

For a moment I had trouble, as Ted's voice shook, understanding. He was saying that he had been watching a television program earlier this week, and the program had been about . . . I breathed, and then I decided that the word he had said was "god." But that didn't sound right. Then I breathed again, and I realized he had said the word "garden." He was saying that he had been watching a program about gardens here in North Carolina, and that one, the Charlotte Botanic Garden, had a section devoted to a meditative garden, a space in which to sit and breathe.

". . . out what you no longer need," Ted ended, and sat carefully down, feeling the chair beneath him, while in the room around him the words god, garden and breath danced, forming an unstable compound.

Kill Devil Hills

2011-10-22T10:18:00.002-06:00

I awoke one morning less than a mile from where two human beings let go of a world and a word. The world was sandy, sloping, then flat as a biscuit. The word was no.

I'd just moved to North Carolina, and I wanted to see with my own eyes where the Wright Brothers had done it. I pulled my husband out of our motel bed--the view outside the window was of a wall of dune, with the sun rising behind it--because I wanted to get there when the museum opened. Ours wasn't the first car through the gate; it was the second. I found my heart pounding. Strange. I'm no aviation buff, I know nothing about planes other than how to sit in them and ask for a blanket. But my eyes pricked in the white light. I could see the two wooden buildings, and the stone markers laying out the first attempts. The museum building itself was disappointing--a mid-century scoop of white and orange sherbert thrown down on the tree-circled plain. The trees weren't there when the Wrights came to Kitty Hawk for the openness and the solitude. The sand they coveted for its soft landings has long since been replaced by grass, carefully planted to keep the dunes from shifting, from blowing clean off the map. When we arrived, a lawn mower was plying up and down the site, stodgy as a cow.

We walked slowly through the museum, which wasn't all that bad on the inside. The history of the flight was laid out on the walls, step by step. We went from glass case to glass case. Here were copies of the earliest letters, asking for information and advice from experimenters who had tried but failed. Here was a notebook, and a propeller blade, and here the metal husk of an engine that had crashed. The family that had arrived ahead of us wandered through and looked vaguely bored by all the detail; their little girl tapped on the glass in front of the engine block with her plastic dinosaur toy. When her mother said, "Don't do that!" the little girl, true to the spirit of invention in the room, began tapping on the wooden frame next to the glass, instead.

"Isn't it wonderful," Orville Wright wrote, "that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them."

In the next, larger room were replicas of the Wright Glider and of the Wright Flyer. A mannequin lay prone on the Glider but not on the Flyer. True, the gliders were the brothers' first great successes, teaching them the rudiments of how to fly before they flew; before the gliders came the kites, which taught them the rudiments of how to steer before they steered. Still, when Wilbur won the coin toss on December 14, 1903, and was the first to try the Flyer out on the sand, he misjudged badly and pulled the nose up too fast, making too steep an ascent. The machine stalled and crashed before it went anywhere, and the men had to spend several days repairing it before they could try again.

I grabbed my husband by the sleeve and pulled him through the glass doors out the back of the museum. There was no one on the distant field of sand, grass and stone. We would have it all to ourselves. I hurried toward it. This was where they had done it. December 17, at 10:35 in the morning. It was 9:35 now, about the time they would have been getting everything into place. We passed the replicas of their wooden camp-shed and hangar. It was so cold, that winter, they'd had to sleep under five blankets with their caps, clothes and shoes on. But the winds were steady, and that was all that mattered. The sheds were rough and small and primitive. We walked the distance it took to drag the Flyer from the hangar out to the launching rail. The brothers needed the help of five men from the local lifesaving station, who had been signaled with a flag that it was time to haul the 640-pound Flyer into place. I straddled the rail, which was used to get the machine rolling, and held my breath. The two brothers had held each others' hands tightly for a moment, witnesses reported, before letting go.

I had my husband take a picture of me where the flights began.

We walked out to the first of the stone markers. Orville. 120 feet, 12 seconds. Wilbur. 195 feet. Orville. 200 feet. Wilbur. Their father had named them after preachers he admired. I choked up touching each stone, as though it had something to do with me personally. Nonsense. I wasn't even sand in 1903.

The longest flight was the last one that day, Wilbur's. 852 feet, 59 seconds. When you reach this, the farthest marker, you can look back and see how little and yet how much it was. Resting after that flight, the men had left the Flyer on the sand and were stunned and unable to save it when a huge gust of wind rolled it over and over and wrecked it. They were done for that year. But in the distance, on Kill Devil Hill, you can see the looming monument erected a quarter of a century afterward to that morning's glory. From below, it looks disturbingly like a pedestal cigarette lighter.

Up close, again, it isn't so bad. Begun in 1928, the winged style is Art Deco, and the little green busts of "the bishop's boys" at the base bring it down to earth. It looks strangely like a tomb, with its great bronze door decorated in panels showing the fall of Icarus and what looks like a god grasping blades in his hands. The brothers aren't buried inside, but in Ohio, next to their mother, who was mechanically minded, and built toys for her children, who later built their own toys, and then bicycles.

I tell my husband we have to go back to the museum because I need something. Badly. I didn't know it until just then, but I need that picture of the moment the Flyer left the ground. It isn't so much the machine itself that arrests me: it's Wilbur, standing off to one side, all of his weight on his forward leg as the Flyer leaves the earth--yet he's the one who seems lofted, out of body, as if he can't quite believe it, as if the whole thing, a decade's work and centuries before that, has taken him by complete surprise. The photo was taken by a man who had never operated a camera before in his life. The whole moment seems ridiculous, impossible. Blink. Over.

I ask the ranger on duty if he likes working at the museum. He's from San Diego, and has only lived and worked at Kitty Hawk for five months. He seems pleased but not overly enthusiastic. Hey says you get to see cool things, and points to a military helicopter that has just landed behind the stone markers, bringing in a special group of visitors, although he can't say who.

"They were supposed to come a few days ago, but the wind was too strong."

In front of the camp-shed and hangar a group of ten geese have landed and settled into a ditch. A tour bus from Mount Zion Church rolls up to the museum and opens its door. Every human being who gets out of it is old and gray. Wilbur Wright died at age 43, of typhoid; Orville sold their airplane business and lived for forty years without his brother. He lived long enough to see the huge monument go up on the hill, and said of it that he was glad at least it wasn't "freakish." Above the monument the moon has risen so high I can't get it into my camera's frame along with the obelisk. I have to choose one or the other. I choose the moon.

--MD

Humanity

2011-08-12T08:09:00.001-06:00

In Boone, North Carolina, a three-mile track of narrow asphalt and iron bridges creek-hops and rolls past meadows, sports fields, the ruin of an old dam and the pale blue tanks of a sewage plant. Start at the Armory, and you'll come first to the Equestrian Field. It was empty as a Roman arena yesterday when I and my husband and our two dogs strolled by, its grass perfect, untouched, an oval platter. The fence was freshly stained and smelled like biology class. Joggers went around it, not through it, and passed us going in both directions. A woman too heavy for her feet rested on a bench, then got up and tried again. Another runner passed, and for a moment the air smelled of eucalyptus. We aren't trees, but apparently we don't, from time to time, mind smelling like them.

At the first bridge we met a mother and her small daughter walking a tiny dog. I asked what breed it was. It looked like a pug had crawled inside the glove-box of a terrier.

"Oh," said the mother, "she's a Humane Society dog. Great dog. I think she'll find a good home."

"So you're fostering her?"

"No." The mother stroked her daughters' curly hair, and the daughter, holding the leash, imitated her, bending down and stroking the dog's fur. "We just like to stop by the Humane Society and take a doggie out for a walk. They really appreciate it when you do that. And it's so convenient, right here on the Greenway. Except that now they're moving at the end of the month."

"That's a pity."

"Well no, not really. We won't miss the sewage plant."

We waved and walked on, taking a path that led away from the main one and into the trees. There we met a woman walking an old, gray-muzzled cattle dog off-leash. She made a move to tether him, considerately, but we told her we didn't mind. I asked where the trail came out, and she showed me where it joined the Greenway again. The arm she pointed with was bright as a chalked sidewalk, tattooed with blue and yellow daises. Her hair was wild, and it looked as though she'd been lying on her side, dreaming.

At the power station was an old marker explaining how electricity came to Boone in 1915, lighting up a school and six residences. I wondered what it must have been like to get that first surge. The dam was nothing but old oak beams on the floor of the creek now, and the station a stone ruin that looked like a bombed church. At the creek's edge we met two college students. One was studying criminal justice, the other wanted to be a veterinarian. Her, dog, a Blue Heeler-Aussie mix, was named Beau, and playfully fought our dogs to hold on to his own toy.

Around the next bend we started to smell sewage. The breeze flushed the stink up our noses, that smell you're ashamed to recognize as so familiar, as your own, magnified and gone stale. What a nuisance, we said. And right along the Greenway, too.

"Although maybe we shouldn't fuss," my husband said, staring through the chainlink fence toward the cesspools. "We're looking at what's probably the single greatest human achievement, ever. It's what the whole of modern civilization rests on."

Right next door to the plant were the low, dilapidated roofs of the Humane Society. It was easy to see why a move was underway. The buildings and kennels were small. The human stench too close. Two young women came out leading a hulking white dog. We stopped to say hello. His name was Scout; he was a year-and-a-half old, and they had just adopted him. It was sad, they said, how many dogs needed a home. Then Scout pulled them off into the grass. He had to use the bathroom.

The Greenway ends here. Time to turn around and run the gauntlet of need and shame and power back to the arena and the Armory, with our dogs pulling ahead, sticking their noses in everywhere, judging how recent a mark was, and whether its architecture needed redoing.

Wallfish

2011-07-07T06:18:00.000-06:00

I learned a new word this week: to "wallfish" is to bury or conceal wires behind a wall by means of creating a hole in it, and then hooking or fishing the wires up through it. It's a mechanism for hiding what's messy, or for trapping what's live and dangerous in a safe place. I have Andrew to thank for my new word. He came to my house this week to install cable television in a room where wires and plugs had been lying around scattered like kelp with teeth. The first technician who'd come to the house hadn't wanted the job, but Andrew was up for it.

"Sounds like in-house," Andrew said about the other guy. "They're always looking for excuses not to do things."

"He said my cable wasn't grounded," I told him, "and it couldn't be done. Are you not in-house?" I gathered that meant he wasn't someone who worked directly for the cable company.

"No, ma'am. I'm a contractor. But the ground's no big deal. I'll do it, and they can come by and ground it later."

"If it's safe for you?"

"It's no problem. Long as there's no lightning."

"Have you ever been shocked?"

"Not by our wires, ma'am. But by other people's, sure. Like the phone company. Somebody calls in while you're handling a line, and man, it can make your arm go numb." He grinned. Mischievous.

Andrew was maybe nineteen, cleanshaven as a bootcamper, hair like a Beatle's. His accent was thick and smooth, butter melting in his mouth.

"Andrew," I said while he got his monster of a drill bit out, "are you from around here?"

"No ma'am. I'm from Ruffin, North Carolina. Tiny place. Only one stoplight. It's got lots of space. It's nice."

"You like it better there than here?"

"I do. But it's good work here, even if they don't pay us as much as in-house."

"But I hope they pay you well," I said as he got ready to crawl under my house in the narrow and the dark and the heat, so he could fish the line up.

"Did till a few months ago. Then they cut my pay about thirty percent."

"But why would they do that?"

"I'm not supposed to talk about the company. But they're trying to get rid of us independents, is my guess."

He disappeared, and a few minutes later a line appeared miraculously through the sheetrock.

He told me, when we were on the same floor again, that sometimes customers expected him to work in rain and lightning. He wasn't supposed to work in storms, but the week before a man had wanted him to run an aerial between two twenty-foot poles with a driving front blowing in.

"So what did you do?"

"I told him his line wasn't grounded," he laughed. "Sometimes, you know, you gotta find an excuse."

I asked him if he'd gotten much training for all the unexpected things he had to do. He said he'd gotten a full eight weeks, but now the company was pushing trainees out into the field after only three. "It's crazy. Half the time I still don't know how to do what I need to do. I go real slow to make sure I'm doing it right. I don't know how these new guys are managing."

"You don't seem slow to me."

He was already checking my cable connection on his laptop. I jumped back. His machine had crowed--a rooster's lusty cockle-doodle-doo!

He grinned again. "It's just telling me there's a work order update. It used to be a woman's voice. But I changed her to a rooster."

"Why'd you do that?"

"It sort of wakes people up. One time I was doing a job at a church, and there was this prayer meeting going on in the next room, and they all had to come out and see if it was inside, it sounded so real. Plus, it's a great conversation starter with customers who don't want to talk to me."

"Sometimes they don't want to talk to you?" What on earth did they do? I wondered. Just disappear while a boy jabbed live wire through a baseboard or danced up a telephone pole?

But Andrew seemed perfectly capable. He didn't even need me to talk to him, I realized. He just wanted me to.

"Some don't want to talk to begin with. But it gets them going."

He covered the hole with a plate and gave me extra wire.

"Do I owe you anything?"

"Nope. It's already paid."

It was getting late. "I hope this was your last job of the day."

"It was."

"I hope you won't have to work on the holiday." The Fourth was coming up.

"I do. Saturday too."

"Well Jesus, I hope you get time and a half."

"We don't."

He grinned and reminded me what number to call if I had any problems. And I couldn't for the life of me understand, I couldn't see, I couldn't guess, what lay behind that easy smile. The rooster gave out a last call, then was shut up in the laptop.

--MD

Grandmothers' Story

2011-03-10T08:04:00.007-07:00

This week, a dear friend of mine lost her grandmother.

I lost my grandmother ten years ago.

My husband lost his grandmother ten years before that.

Grandmother Number One was named Marguerite.
Grandmother Number Two was named Anna.
Grandmother Number Three was named Cecilia.

One grandmother lived to be one-hundred-and-two. She spent that last year of her life curled in a fetal position, blind.

Another grandmother lived to be eighty-six. She spent the last year of her life not knowing where she was, a feeding tube slurping what looked like sea-sand into her stomach.

Another grandmother died shouting at the nursing home attendants. The place where her right leg should have been was the place where they set their bottoms, instead.

"When you die you got to die!" she said flatly.

The grandmother who was blind grew up in a bordello.

The grandmother who lost her leg chased "the colored" off her property with a hoe.

The grandmother who didn't know where she was traveled halfway around the world to be with the woman she loved.

Two of them died without a wrinkle on their faces. (Beauty is that nurse who comes when you don't need her anymore.)

One of them was married to a wildcatter.

One of them (the racist) was hired to replace a first, dead wife with the same name. (The children hated her.)

One--the one who traveled halfway around the world to be with the woman she loved--died on the morning of that lover's funeral.

They fill the ground, like stars.

--MD

Adult Swim

2011-01-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

In Austin a few months ago, after one of my lectures on writing and creativity, a woman in her forties came up to me and asked if she could talk to me about her dream of writing a book about her experiences as an immigrant in America. After chatting for a while, we decided to go and have a cup of coffee--my new friend was bright and articulate, the day was beautiful, and the setting (on wide, green Lake Austin) was energetic, with boaters and paddlers splashing all around us. The chance to sit in the sun and talk about memoir was irresistible, so we settled down at a table, and she shared her story, both unique and familiar to me (as an immigrant writer) about feeling neither here nor there, neither one thing nor the other, unsure of home but somehow, slowly, more sure of the self that crossed fluidly back and forth between two cultures. She told me her book would begin on an airplane . . .

She asked me to tell her everything I knew about undertaking such a project (she was a tax specialist, and this was the word she used) and what it felt like; I remember telling her that the journey was long, required a great deal of passion and doggedness, and would take her through not just intellectual but emotional highs and lows. We talked about what she read, and what she liked to read. She'd never written anything creative before, she told me, or taken a creative writing class, but she had always believed, with hard work, she could do anything. She was so self-possessed I didn't doubt her for a moment. We parted with smiles and hugs, and agreed to stay in touch.

Last week we spoke again, over the phone, and I was curious to hear how she was feeling about her project. She told me flatly she'd given up on the whole idea. After talking to me, she said, she'd admitted to herself that what she'd been carrying around in her head all these years was the fantasy of publishing a book--not the job of actually writing one. After our talk, she said, quite confidently, she'd understood she didn't have the patience to do it, the will, and it was time to let the fantasy go. She said it felt wonderful. Like a boulder lifted from her shoulders.

***

A few weeks later I sat with another woman in her forties, an old, dear friend from high school whom I hadn't seen in ten years. We had dinner, and at first things were a little stilted, as things tend to be when a lot of water has gone under the legs of the bridge. Then finally we started talking not just about our successes, but about our many failures and detours and dead-ends. She told me she had never felt like a very creative person, though once she'd thought she would do something artistic that would make her wildly famous, like be a singer. She remembered, even now, very clearly the moment in her twenties when she realized it wasn't going to happen. She'd made peace with it a long time ago. It was fine.

But then, very recently and out of the blue, she'd decided that she needed to be creative somehow, because she (a lawyer) was somehow less than she should be. So she bought every book she could find on throwing ceramic pots, and paid three thousand dollars to have a kiln installed in her garage. After a few months, and after much contemplation of the kiln, she sold it. Without ever having fired it up or touched a single piece of clay. She'd realized that it was a fantasy; that she really wasn't interested in doing what it took to make pots.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine. Do you know what I really like? Finding pots. Finding things. I love those treasure-hunting shows on TV. That's when I realized I don't want to be stuck in one place, in my garage. I want to travel. I want to find unexpected things."

***

One day I woke up and decided I needed to take swimming lessons. My mind had been seized, almost overnight, by the idea that I must swim the English Channel. It was a persistent dream. That I would become athletic. Buy a one-piece, regulation, approved bathing suit. Register with the Channel Swimming Association. Train for months on end. Arrive in England. Hire a pilot boat. Battle the Channel garbage, the tankers, the current to get to France (which tries to pull you away, I knew, just as you begin to reach it). Return triumphantly and, as is the right of every, and only, successful Channel swimmers, sign my name on that ancient pub wall.

I read every book I could find about the crossing. I bought goggles. I discovered I had no natural talent for the crawl, that I was sorely lacking in bodyfat and buoyancy, and also that I didn't like and was in fact afraid of depths I couldn't reach with my big toe. I discovered, in fact, that I don't like to swim for more than thirty minutes at a time, and prefer keeping my head out of the water, even then. I started to let the dream go.

It didn't feel like a relief, though. More like a death. The death of a universe, alternate though it might have been. The collapsing of a star.

***

There is an art, of course, to relinquishment. It's often an act of will, not just a giving up. A creative leap. This is not my place. Jump. Here I go.

I'm not quite sure I've mastered it.

I looked today, again, at open swims, places to train in lakes and bays and oceans. I haven't been in the water since last summer. I don't like cold, you see. I won't swim in the winter. (The Channel is forty degrees.)

When my new friend in Austin had told me it was my describing to her what it took to write a book that had driven the idea completely out of her head, I'd said something like, "Oh my God!" and made a sound that approached blanching over my mobile.

"No, no, don't feel bad," she'd consoled me. "It made me see more clearly what I really want to do. And what I really want to do is just start working less. And have more time for myself. That is really the dream. The dream of time."

I want more time.

I want to be able to travel. To find things.

I want to sign my name on that ancient pub wall.

In the dream, there are clues. But then we always knew that.

I want to sign my name.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Counting

2010-12-25T19:06:00.004-07:00

On a snowy morning two weeks ago, I went down to the Matheson Nature Preserve to take part in the annual Christmas Bird Count. Marcy and Mary were waiting for me, coated, as I was, in shiny materials; the snow glanced off our shoulders in flakes that thinned and thickened and then thinned again. A clumsy stagehand seemed to be in the clouds, that morning. He couldn't get the amount right. "I don't know if it's going to get heavier or not," Marcy said. "But let's go on in." We ducked into the brush, binoculars bouncing off our chests.

How we do love to count things and balance them out, at the end of a year. I have a friend who counts all her blessings. Literally. Writes them all down, with numerals to the left and periods to the right:

1) Health.
2) House.
3) Car still runs.

How we love to make lists--the best films, the best books, who's the hottest, who's the richest, how many mallards are on the water (three), how many harriers in the tree (two, the Northern), how many goldfinches in the bush (one, the Lesser; none in the hand).

I know writers who count how many words they've written. Other friends tally up how many pounds they've lost, or gained. My husband does this. I don't like scales. I use the mirror as a thermometer, stand naked, see where the blood pools.

Businesses count their sales. AIDS, heart disease, cancer counts its losses. Today, Miguel, hiking above the Preserve as I was, said there had been hardly any geese around this year, but he could remember when they were as dense in the air as the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

"I guess I have sort of a weird way of tallying things," he said apologetically. "It's the way my imagination works."

Not at all. I knew exactly how many he meant.

I used to count my dolls, when I was a girl, adding in the ones Christmas had added. My satisfaction was like a farmer's looking over stored seed. My husband counted his marbles. My grandmother, who starved during the Second World War, reduced to eating boiled grass, counted the cans of peas and carrots in her garage. I can't count how many times we had peas and carrots. I have friends who won't buy any gifts until after Christmas; they need the discounts.

I asked Marcy how many times she'd done the Christmas Bird Count. Ten years and ten times, she told me, and five times as the leader, responsible for all the counting teams in Grand County.

This was only my second time on her team. Last year, we'd seen a bald eagle together. But that day it had been sunny and clear. This year, things were eerily quiet. The snow stopped, not on a dime but down a long ramp, then turned to freezing rain. A dozen Eurasian collared doves squatted in a cottonwood, puffed and silent. I recorded their number in our waterproof journal. After a while, we noted an overabundance of magpies and robins. Nothing against them, you know, but you always hope to see something extravagant. Over the sloughs a tide of starlings rose.

"200?" I asked

"300?" Mary asked.

"500," Marcy said.

The more familiar you are with a thing, the better you are at counting it. Astronomers are a wonder with stars; a baby can't count its toes. It's all so overwhelming, at first.

"Are those," Mary pointed high along the ridge line, "the same three mallards we saw on the water?"

"Let's say yes."

"Have we counted those magpies already?"

"Let's say no."

I asked Marcy if there was something she'd always been dying to see in the Preserve, but never had; she told me every year she hoped for a pygmy owl. It was just dark enough, in this bad weather, she said, that owls might be out. Nearly crepuscular. (Google has a new website that counts how many times a word has been used in print between the years 1800 and 2000. "Crepuscular" is on the decline.)

No sooner had Marcy said this than I started imagining I was hearing hoots. It's a problem writers have. We imagine pygmies where there aren't any.

At noon we started getting hungry and needed a break. We turned around. You don't count the birds on the way back unless you see a new species; they're probably the same ones you've counted already. We saw the same robins, or anyway decided they were; instead of owls, we came across a family of big-eyed, big-eared mule deer. A female, two young 'uns, and across the trail from them, rutting, a six-pointed buck. All four froze and stared at us. We froze and stared back. One of the youngsters, not knowing any better, drew closer. In the buck's eyes I imagined I read:

How many?

What species?

Greater or Lesser?

Barbara Walters annually tallies up The Ten Most Fascinating People of the Year. I always hope for something extravagant, but am generally disappointed.

Lesser, I answer. Though doing the best we can.

A buck can't even count the points over its own head.

But he can feel the weight, I hope, and knows, as time passes, he is more than he was.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Oil and Water . . . a Fundraiser for the Gulf Coast

2010-12-21T09:39:00.001-07:00

Friends, I'm so pleased to have one of the essays from this blog, "Butterfly," included in this anthology. If you're looking for a gift with a bit of heart this season, or simply want to support recovery from the BP spill, or simply like good collections of creative nonfiction/essays, I hope you'll check this out. From LL Publications:

Members of the Southern Writers group She Writes, Zetta Brown and Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown, gathered submissions and created an anthology of stories, poems, and recollections in response to the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf. Oil and Water...and Other Things That Don’t Mix features 27 authors, women and men all dealing with the theme: “Conflict...Resolution Optional.”

All proceeds from Oil and Water...and Other Things That Don’t Mix will go to directly benefit MOBILE BAYKEEPER, and BAY AREA FOOD BANK, two charities helping to combat the effects of the spill and help the communities affected.

Authors included in the collection are Jenne’ R. Andrews, Shonell Bacon, Lissa Brown, Mollie Cox Bryan, Maureen E. Doallas, Mylène Dressler, Nicole Easterwood, Angela Elson, Melanie Eversley, Kimeko Farrar, L B Gschwandtner, John Klawitter, Mary Larkin, Linda Lou, Kelly Martineau, Patricia Anne McGoldrick, Ginger McKnight-Chavers, Carl Palmer, Karen Pickell, Dania Rajendra, Cherie Reich, Jarvis Slacks, Tynia Thomassie, Amy Wise, Dallas Woodburn, and contributing editors Zetta Brown and Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown.

Retailers who wish to stock the Oil and Water anthology can contact the publisher directly: editor(at)ll-publications.com

Celebration! ASN Recognized in Creative NonFiction Issue 39

2010-11-08T08:58:00.001-07:00

Dear friends, I'm taking a moment this morning to thank Creative NonFiction, one of our finest journals celebrating the form, for publishing "Meeting House," (re-posted below) in its Fall 2011 issue. Over the summer, CNF announced its quest to find examples of "truly literary blogging," and "Meeting House"/American Stories NOW was one of two blogs selected to be featured, chosen from over 800 considered by the editors. I'm pleased and honored, and delighted to post the piece again, for those of you who may have missed it the first time. Here's to the canvas we call flash non-fiction, and the quest to render the world a few words at a time. And don't forget to order your copy of CNF. Let's support the genre we love.

Meeting House

2010-11-08T08:48:00.001-07:00

The Live Oak Meeting House, where Friends gather each Sunday to sit in silence until the spirit moves them, wasn't entirely quiet, at first. The child in the pew in front of me whispered as she nuzzled against her grandmother's neck. The couple opposite me turned the pages of the books they had brought with them to read. A man behind me sniffled with a cold; in the windowseat to my left, two more children whispered and squirmed. A woman in front of the couple with the books wiped a tear from her eye, then began writing in a journal. Around and somehow over us was a sound--I was a visitor to the meeting, and thought at first it must be the cooling system, then decided it was recorded audio--inhaling and exhaling. Like amplified, human breathing.

At last all was silent but for this sound. Even the children held their peace. The woman with the journal continued to write. A middle-aged man behind her, with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap, hadn't moved a muscle in the fifteen minutes since the meeting had begun. I turned my head a little to the right, and saw, tucked in the corner, a young, pale woman in a wheelchair, a white hose attaching her to a breathing machine. This was the sound filling the Live Oak Meeting House.

After a few more minutes, a middle-aged man stood and said:

"I'm sitting here thinking of a man who once told me he wished he was young again. He said to me: 'God I wish I was seventy again.' It was forty years ago when he said this to me. Across a chessboard. We were playing in a tournament together, and I was a teenager, and I wanted to win so badly. And this man, who was in his eighties, could see it. So he looked up at me and he said, 'God I wish I could be young again. Young people tend to think only about beginnings. What you need to do is think about your end game. Even when you're young. Think. Think that way.' He ended up teaching me so much about chess, that afternoon. And then I never saw him again. Or thought about him much. Until last week. I remembered him, for one reason and another, and realized that after all these years I might be able to look him up on the Internet. And I couldn't believe what I found. He'd had a biography written about him. He'd helped to train Bobby Fischer. He'd been somebody.

"The more I read, the more I was astonished. He'd spent his whole life in and out of penitentiaries. He'd done time at Alcatraz. One of his specialties was stealing cars. Especially Volkswagens. He loved to steal Volkswagens. He'd steal them and turn back the odometers. And there was more. In the 1930's he'd been arrested while holding the bag of money in the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping case. He hadn't kidnapped the baby; he'd only claimed to, in a fraud, and then demanded ransom money, and when they came and gave it to him he got caught. Off to jail he went. His whole life was like that. Stealing cars. In and out of jail. What finally stopped him was a car accident. In a Volkswagen. When he was seventy years old. After that he just played chess. His whole life he was a con-man . . . I guess I'm just thinking, you never know who's sitting across from you."

The man sat down.

The woman's regular, controlled breathing filled the room again. I liked the sound of it. I liked the way it divided up the minutes, made me feel my own breath, and aware of the breathing around me, made me glad the woman was breathing, and getting help to breathe, and glad we were all breathing, and that we still had time.

At a signal, the children rose and were guided out to daycare, where their assignment for the day was to make a heart like a mirror, a heart covered in tinfoil, so that when you held it up, you would see your own face.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

What Am I Doing Here?

2010-08-25T17:28:00.005-06:00

I meet Dale at the trailhead to Flat Pass. The rains have churned the trail to pieces. Our dogs run ahead of us, open-mouthed, instant friends. They plunge down the hill toward the creek. Dale walks with a dryer sheet tucked like a television make-up tissue into her collar, to keep the flies off. Dale knows unexpected things. For years she worked for the FBI, one of the first group of 35 women to be hired and trained as agents by the Bureau. In those days her neck was draped with gold and diamonds: she worked Corruption, and one of her longest undercover assignments was posing as a rich woman eager to make more money by breaking the law. She fingered wiseguys, businessmen, politicians on the take. In those days, they didn't expect a pretty woman to be packing both a tape recorder and heat.

"Did you like the work?" I ask, impressed.

"I loved it. And I was good at it."

Even though we're in the backcountry her blonde hair is perfectly combed, her powder in place, and I can see it would have been easy not to recognize her for Johnny Law.

"Was it tough work?"

"Well, it's just like they say. You go in thinking you're going to save the world. Then you despair. Some of the men I spent months investigating got off, one way or another. You ask yourself why you're doing it. Then you become resigned. Then you decide just to do what you can right where you are. You try to do good where you can."

Since retiring from the Bureau, Dale grows grass and raises sheep and has the wool shorn and sent to the Navajo reservation to be worked into rugs. She loves her animals. You can have a special bond with sheep, she tells me. They know you, and you know them. "They're my friends, my companions. They're wonderful," she adjusts the little white Bounce sheet at her neck.

Her days are almost busier now, she tells me, than when she was an agent. From morning till night she's working on her property, and the lack of good help doesn't make anything easier.

"You can't get anyone to do any labor. It's so strange."

We talk for a while about the strange shape our country is in. The dogs find the creek again and stand in the middle of it, with the water rushing all around their legs, trying to knock them down. We talk about how much we love our dogs; we talk about our families. Dale never married; in the old days she was always working odd hours, with never any time to meet anyone; then later on she found that men weren't too keen on a woman who knew more about firearms than they did. She could see the insecurity in their eyes before they walked away.

Her father had died some years before, but her mother was still alive, or rather dying under the care of hospice in Colorado. Not one thing alone was killing her but many things all at once. Once a month Dale left her sheep to go across the state line.

"My sister and I take turns. I go, and most of the time my mother doesn't even recognize me. She just keeps asking me, 'Where am I? What am I doing here? What am I doing here? Please, what am I doing here?'"

Dale calls the dogs out of the water and gives them each a treat. They come to her hand and then race off again through the scrub. We turn around and start heading back toward the trailhead. Dale has to get back to her sheep. She also had a llama once, but the relationship didn't work out.

"Llamas don't like women," she tells me.

--MD

On Noticing Small Things

2010-08-22T11:12:00.005-06:00

On noticing small things: If you haven't done this lately, do it. The world is an astonishment, a golden coin always jingling in your pocket: whenever you want you can take it out and marvel at its richness.

And you are a part of it. You are of the same value. There is the elaborate beadwork of your own skin. There is the perfect array of your eyelashes (bat your eyes, feel them). There are the textures of the things your eyes fall on, some of them as fine as your own skin, even finer, and some as broad as the hull of a ship. There are tiny things that move and crawl in our gutters, and the way water washes in a gutter, sometimes in long straws, and there is the rather brilliant design of the piece of furniture you might be sitting on, to say nothing of grass and sand, that never complain when we sit there, what resilience, what beauty, what fineness. When was the last time you looked at a cloud, a shadow, the fold in your elbow, the perfect roundness of a dinner plate, a clever, clever cardboard box, the shapes of words themselves? Them selves. Oh it's delicious, it's funny, it's charming! And there is the way rust grows and even garbage lies, waiting to become something else. And sounds. Not just one, most of them come in layers. And your ear can hear. Have you listened? Have you tried to separate the sounds? Take your hand and feel whatever is near you. Lick your lips and notice the taste. Close your eyes and watch color turn down, as though it had volume, as though it were also a sound.

Open your eyes. Smell the air. What is it?

Extraordinary. Take time. Count the riches. Brush the earth off as happily as you would the roughest diamond.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

The Cut

2010-07-22T13:30:00.006-06:00

She cuts my hair.

Her own is a starburst of magenta and yellow, fireworks on display. It must be fun, every morning, I think, to stand your hair up on end. It must make you feel constantly surprised.

We talk. She cuts my hair whenever I'm in town, and though months pass before we see each other again, we always pick up as though she's just lathered my scalp under water the day before. We talk about our work and travels, we gossip about celebrities, we mourn or praise the state of the union, we admit we're not exercising as much as we used to, we share a little about our families.

"How is he?" I ask about her husband while she drapes the bib around me (it always makes me feel like a little girl again).

Her husband (like my father) was diagnosed at 51 with congestive heart failure. He's already lived longer than expected--thanks, she's told me, to his athletic background and his mighty lungs. He was an avid mountain biker and the owner of a successful mountain bike shop in Colorado; but at 51 he'd been told by doctors that if he wanted to prolong his life, he needed to spend the rest of it tethered to an oxygen tank. At first he refused.

"But . . . but how did you feel about that?" I ask her, wondering, thinking: how do you manage, how do you go on when someone you love pushes away the line that could keep you as one?

"Well," she combs my hair and then has me part it myself, "it really troubled me at first. But then I made my peace with it. It's his life, after all. We respect each other that way, these days."

I try to say something reassuring, consoling: "Well, at least you can look back and say it's been a good marriage."

"Oh yes," she nods her mane and takes her scissors out of her pocket and narrows her bright, eyelined eyes. "But we're not married anymore."

I stare in the mirror. I follow her round, nimble, aproned body moving around my small, bibbed one. For the last three years, we've been talking like old friends, while my cut hair fell over her toes in her flip-flops--and I didn't know this?

"You're not married?"

"No. I still say he's my husband. But we divorced years ago. So many things weren't working. He was very . . . competitive."

Then she tells me that, years before, when they were first married, he had wanted her to mountain bike with him. And so she had. She had learned how. And she had frantically tried to keep up with him while he asked her to do more and more and more impossible things, impossible climbs, straining, gasping to push her body beyond what it wanted to do, beyond what she wanted it to do, beyond what she wanted at all.

"I would be on a mountain with him--I mean dying for air, just dying--and he wouldn't even wait for me. He was like that. He loved doing better than other people. He loved beating men younger than he was. Everyone. Everything was like that. He wanted the upper hand. I wanted to live in a city. He wanted to live in the country. He wanted me to work in his business. I wanted my own shop. So, finally, we divorced, and then he got diagnosed, and I came back to take care of him. And now he can hardly do anything. Do you know what happened one day?"

"What?" I hold very still as she razors the back of my neck.

"One day he found out he couldn't get up a hill anymore. How nearly impossible it was for him to take a breath. And then he came home and he apologized to me. He said he'd never known how hard it could be to climb."

"But you've stayed divorced."

She starts trimming my bangs. Expertly. Fast. "Believe me, we're much better off as friends. We each have our own space in the house. And now I can even admit I learned so much from him. I mean, I was one amazing mountain biker. But me, I know when enough is enough."

Then she says that the doctors didn't really understand the nature of his heart disease--that that they had told him there was nothing to indicate why his heart was failing, and that they could only speculate that he had used his heart in the wrong way when he was younger, pushing it in the wrong way.

"He's doing the oxygen now?"

"Oh yes. 24/7. Wait, this is going to be cute," she says and gets the hand mirror and spins me around in the chair, so that I can see what she could see, what she has seen, all along.

--MD

Small-Town Fourth

2010-07-03T17:37:00.004-06:00

We got to the park just after the parade of water and fire trucks and decorated bicycles had gone around its small green square. Uncle Sam, his top-hat made of something soft, like the coat of a stuffed animal, waded in his long striped pants through the grass. The water trucks had snugged up close to the curb, under the cottonwoods, and their giant hoses were now feeding the white slip 'n' slide the children were screaming and hurtling their bodies over. The park's pool has been closed all summer for renovation. Vote for Sheriff White the side of the biggest, shiniest water truck says.

The signs around the park clearly say No Dogs Allowed, On Leash Or Off, but our dogs stay politely near the curb, and that woman's mini-Yorkie pup doesn't really count yet as a dog, small as a haircomb, and anyway petting-camels are being unloaded from a horse trailer, the first one already tied by its red leash to a tree. You can forget how huge a camel is, how hairy its hump. The children who've never seen one before stare. Those of us who have, stare. Cotton candy freezes in beards under everyone's chins.

Jamie from Animal Control comes by in her black uniform--she doesn't mind if you call her the dog-catcher, by the way--and bends down to pet our dogs. She tells us she lost her beloved Yodi, part-coyote, part dog, three days ago. She says she can't talk about it, and goes on stroking our youngest, her eyes wet.

The mayor walks by and doesn't smile. Maybe he's tired. Maybe politicians need a holiday, too. Under the gazebo a high-school girl is reading her winning essay answering the question, "Does America Still Have Heroes?" We can't hear a single word she's saying, what with the children dive-bombing into the water just to her right. I worry about how long she practiced, if she imagined silence and dignity attending her words. I stand still to let her know I see her. A young Navajo boy is practicing his lasso-work while his mother sells fry bread. He expertly ropes a mock-metal-calf he's brought with him, the knot around its neck as perfect as a pretzel.

Everyone wants to eat something, ice cream, palm-shaped sugar cookies, popcorn, cotton candy, coffee cake. It's ninety degrees. Our friend Tad is selling oven-fired pizzas, delicious, but business has been slow, and he may have to move with his wife and baby to another, cooler town. Behind him there is one ride, something like a red starfish whirling wildly. It looks dangerous.

The average age in the park is eight. The old people look young today in their shorts. Only their bare knees show the long haul, like a camel's. A solitary man is trying to sell his apricots from a picnic table.

Our neighbor walks by; he and his wife built their dream house in this town a few years back, a beautiful bed-and-breakfast; and then, soon after it opened, she died.

He has his new girlfriend with him now.

It's a new year, America.

Just beyond the apricots, behind the sign giving the park's name, every kind of bicycle you can imagine lies in the grass, unwatched.

--MD

You can listen to me read this story here.

Legs

2010-06-30T12:46:00.003-06:00

If you see someone sitting in a park on a blanket, surrounded by all his belongings, you know the story isn't going to be a happy one. And yet that doesn't diminish its light.

Ron is sitting on a blanket, his thin legs covered by another one, near the shore of Ellis Lake in downtown Marysville, California. His two dogs, Poodle and Hank, are close by, chunky chow-and-boxer mixes ("They're also part wild, part timberwolf," he tells me). Ron's face is thin and stubbled with white beard; tattoos blacken his arms below his t-shirt; on his left shoulder sits a blue-and-white pigeon, tied at the ankle with a shoestring looped through Ron's belt. The pigeon, Ron explains, isn't tied because the bird might fly away (it can't, with one wing paralyzed and a mended broken leg). It's tied because, the day before, while Ron was busy repairing his leaky canoe with some silicone, he'd turned around to see a fat white cat with the blue-and-white pigeon in its mouth. He had just spent weeks repairing the bird's broken leg with a series of popsicle sticks. He wasn't about to let some cat have it. So now he kept it leashed.

"I'm not like some people. I don't see why you should have a pet if you're just going to ignore it."

Ron's canoe is perched at the edge of the lake, with a fishing rod and two life jackets stored inside it. He makes money by renting the canoe to visitors to Marysville's little oasis, which lies in the center of this Gold Rush town, surrounded by traffic and low, historic buildings. Ron has no home, although he does have a storage unit, he tells me when I sit down next to him, where he keeps a few things. "I could go live in my ex-wife's garage, but she's a drug addict. And she's raising my five kids to sell drugs. I can't bear to see it. But when I call social services to check on them, she finds out it was me, and then I'm not allowed to see my kids. Things aren't so good right now." He straightens the blanket over his legs. Ron has bone cancer ("my marrow is drying up"), and after a moment he pulls the blanket back to show me his bare, reedy ankles, and how one of his legs is longer than the other. MediCal had paid for two rounds of chemo and one of radiation. But now he was back on the street. He'd been living by the lake for months, with his canoe and its trailer and his bags of dog food and bird seed, getting by.

He seems to be a familiar sight to the locals; people pass him and smile and wave, then walk on. Ron calls out, friendly, smiling back. The bird rides his shoulder.

We talk for a while. "Have you always lived in Marysville?" I ask while stroking the big, friendly dog beside me, Hank.

"No. I'm a native Californian, but I've lived all sorts of places. I used to live in Houston working for Brown & Root. Once I lived up in Utah in the ski areas, and fixed snowmobiles. Have you ever been to Salt Lake City?"

"Yes."

"That Mormon Temple there, that white building. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."

All at once I felt something burning down my side. Hank had hiked his leg and was peeing on me. And my god, this was no ordinary dog piss. It was fierce, it smelled wild, of the woods, wolves, packs. And as strong as skunk. I leapt up.

What rattled me more than being marked by Hank was the look on Ron's face. White with shock and shame, every line along his thin mouth was saying: Someone finally sits down to listen to me, and this is what I let happen . . .

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he kept saying, abject. "I don't know why he did that, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry."

"It's all right, really, it's no big deal. I have dogs." I pointed over to my motorhome, parked on the other side of the street. "He probably smelled them. It's all right, really, really, I have a change of clothes right over there."

"I'm so, so sorry. Hank . . . Hank . . ."

"It's really nothing."

But the shoulder that had been hoisting the pigeon is sagging. Ron is ducking his head, pulling Hank to him, and doesn't seem to want to talk anymore. The moment, hardly begun, has broken. Confidence is gone. I'm stinking of Hank, and know I have to go, and clean up. At the edge of the tame lake the canoe tugs.

I look back. The last I see of Ron he's sitting, a thin letter 'L' on his blanket, his two dogs standing guard beside him.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Call To My Father

2010-06-19T15:35:00.007-06:00

Dear friends, today I am going to try to do something I don't know that I can do in the context of a blog, though I very much want to. I am going to try to write about my father.

I lost my dad on June 20, 1995, when he was fifty-five years old, and I was thirty-two. For years he had suffered from heart disease. A week before he died, knowing only that he wasn't doing very well, I went out to North Carolina to see him; I asked his doctor the prognosis, and was told my father had six months to live. My dad and I spent a wonderful week together, talking. Then I went home to check on things, telling him I would be back very soon. As soon as I got home to Texas I began looking into the possibility of a heart transplant for my father, something he had never wanted to do ("What if I get the heart of a bad person?") but was now, at long last, beginning to consider. I called him to tell him what I'd found out, and this is what we said to each other:

"Daddy, what are you doing?"

"I've been working."

"Daddy, why are you working? You need to rest. You work too hard."

"But if I don't work, I start thinking . . . about . . ."

"Daddy, Daddy, listen to me, I don't want you to go. I want you to stay. Please, I want you to stay. You have to fight to stay. You have to fight."

"I know, I know, but I don't know how."

"You need a new heart. Daddy, I would give you my heart if I could. Do you hear me? I would give you my heart."

At this point we both started crying, and my mom had to take the phone away.

I have to stop here now, for a minute.

***

We were able to get back on the line together, and talk about a transplant. He had been looking into this, too (this was all so much harder in those days before the internet). The last words we said to each other were, "I love you." Twenty hours later my father went into cardiac arrest. I flew to North Carolina, and fell into my mother's arms, telling her I should have stayed, my last words to my father shouldn't have been over a telephone. No, she told me. You know how he loved to talk on the phone. You know how it was easier for him to talk on the phone than to say anything face to face. You know you would never, never have had that conversation any other way.

And she was right.

***

My dad loved phones. Before he died, every Wednesday afternoon he would call me. Every Wednesday he would phone me to see how my writing was going, and every Wednesday I would tell him how hard it was, how I was struggling, trying to find the right words and sentences, trying to make the story come alive. My father, being a businessman in the shipping and transportation industry, didn't quite understand why I couldn't just slap the words down, box the pages up and send them out into the world. But still, every Wednesday he called, to see how my work was going . . .

My father died before any of my books were published. Before he left us, I didn't know, I didn't feel how real life was, how much it meant, and what it was: brief, exact, vivid. When he died, I wrote his eulogy, and it was the first piece of exact writing I'd ever composed. It was the first time I understood that a writer's responsibility is not just to make pleasing shapes and sounds and tales, but to capture with blunt honesty the life of a human being. Within six months of my father's death I finished my first novel. Within twelve it was accepted for publication. My mother gave me my creativity, my love of stories, my joy in people and my thirsty imagination. But my father, who till the end got up every time he was knocked down, knew how to go it alone when he had to and knew what it was to stare at the absolute, made me a writer.

***

When it came time to write my second novel, I wrote it for and about my dad. This is something I've never talked about publicly, until now.

My father didn't live to see me published--but he never had any doubt that I would be. That last week we spent together before he died, he told me story after story, and I made sure he saw me write them down, so that he would know: I will try to see that your stories will not be forgotten, that they will not disappear. He told me about hiding under a table and secretly scrawling a sentence into the wood. He told me how during the war he had wandered the ruins of Rotterdam, and found a bloody shoe. He told me how his father, a Nazi collaborator, was later caught, and how the entire family was punished, including my small father, only six years old. He told me how, as a fifty-year-old businessman, he was invited one day to lunch at a Rotterdam hotel--and didn't realize until he got there that it was his childhood prison, renovated. He told me he ate lunch in a daze, unable to speak of it with his colleague.

But when The Deadwood Beetle was published six years after my father's death, and dedicated For Carl, only those closest to me knew it was for and about my father. Because I was unable to speak of it. Six years after his death I still couldn't talk about him; I knew that if I tried, I would have to be led from the stage, or the bookstore, or the university hall, a wreck. And so I told no one. The stories were what mattered then. The telling of them. The recording. But I will say it now. The Deadwood Beetle is for and about my father.

My mom told me that once my dad said, frustrated, "She wants to be a writer so badly. And there's no way I can help her."

But you did, Daddy. You did.

***

As my father lay in the hospital on a breathing machine at the very end, his heartbeat fading away, we "talked" by phone one last time. As I raced to an airplane I stopped and sent him a fax--there was no internet, no email, no texting, then--and my mother, because the nurse said he might still be able to hear, read my words into his ear. I want to shout them out now:

"I am so proud of you, Daddy. And I am so proud of my love for you."

To fathers everywhere: you make us, even when you don't know that you do.

Thank you. Thank you. Daddy.

Tango

2010-06-17T17:50:00.009-06:00

I chat with Becky as her puppy, Nala, rolls on the ground between us, that round little body savoring every position it can get into: left, right, head up, head down, on back, on stomach, nose to tail, tail to nose, up on all fours, strutting, tumbling, squirming, panting.

Becky adopts and trains Golden Retrievers, and at any given time has three or four of them. Some of them are bright and happy; others led hard lives before she took them in and have only slowly learned how to move through the world.

"Tango," she points to the shaded kennel behind us, "is still so afraid of people. Of course. That's what being locked in a tiny shed for the first year of your life will do to you. For the longest time she couldn't even extend her legs. She didn't even know how to run. How do you forgive people that? Is it any wonder she's afraid to look you in the eye?"

We were sitting at the edge of a park in Maybell, Colorado, surrounded by dogs running, racing. Some of these too, I knew, had come from unhappy pasts. But now they were pouncing with joy.

Nala, the puppy, was one of the lucky ones. She'd found a good home right from the beginning. She was still lolling on the ground in front of us, chewing my shoelaces.

When Becky isn't running with her dogs, she teaches special needs children. I ask her how her year has gone, and if she's teaching summer school.

"No," she shakes her head. "I love my kids. But I need a rest, too. It can be . . . intense."

Then, without my asking, she begins to tell me a story. As if it's so important, now that I've asked about her work, she has to tell it. It's the story of an eleven-year-old boy, Ellis.*

"At the beginning of every school year," she says, "I ask my students what they would like their goal for that year to be. What they want to accomplish. What they would like me to help them with. And Ellis, he raised his hand, and he said,

"'I want to walk.'"

It didn't seem a realistic goal, just then. Ellis had spent most of his young life locked in a small closet. His muscles, not allowed to move, had never grown or elongated properly. He had never been able to walk. He'd only recently been rescued and placed in a foster home--a wonderful and loving foster home, thank goodness. Now he wanted to learn how to walk. But he didn't want his family to know he was going to learn to walk, he told his teacher. He wanted to surprise them. That was the goal.

It didn't seem something that could be done in nine months, but Becky told Ellis: "Okay. If that's what you want to do, that's what we'll do."

And then she marshaled his other helpers, his therapists and his fellow students, and every school day they took time out from class to go out in the hallway and begin teaching Ellis how to walk.

Sometimes, in writing this blog, I am startled by the simple beauty of what people tell me.

As the months of the school year passed, Ellis made progress. First he could stand, aided. Then he could take steps, aided. Then he could walk a bit down the hall, aided. Then he could walk all the way down the hall, aided. Then he could walk from wall to wall, grabbing on. Then he could walk down the hall with spotters beside him.

As May drew closer, Ellis told his teacher he was ready to spring his surprise. He wanted to surprise his foster mother on Mother's Day. Even now the goal seemed uncertain, but Becky agreed it would be done. At this point Becky enlisted the help of Ellis' two foster brothers, who were let in on the plan. On Mother's Day, May 9, 2010, Ellis asked them to call their mother into the living room and sit down. She had no idea why. She sat down.

Ellis' two foster brothers then went and stood on either side of his chair. As they spotted him, Ellis got up and walked across the room to hug his weeping foster mom.

I'll mention in passing that most of the people I meet who train dogs are stoic, tough, and completely unflappable. Becky, with her closely cropped hair, strong legs and arms, determined chin and steady eyes, is no exception.

Her story over, she wiped her eyes quickly and stood up to get Tango out and run him.

"When I first met Tango, she couldn't do anything. Now look at her. Let's go, girl! Let's go go go."

--MD

*Ellis is not his real name.

Bruises

2010-05-24T18:28:00.001-06:00

Over the weekend I attended a workshop led by Brooke Williams, author of the lovely memoir Halflives and my neighbor here in the beautiful southern Utah wilderness. Brooke is now at work on the story of one of his Mormon ancestors. Or possibly at work on more than one story about more than one ancestor. Brooke isn't sure. Dead people keep talking to him.

"Let's just be still and listen for a while," Brooke said, "and see if anyone comes to us, and just start writing and see what we find."

There were ten of us around the table. None of us regarded Brooke's request as an unreasonable one. Most of us were already in the habit of spending time with invisible people. Most of us knew that the job of the writer is to make the unseen seen.

I closed my eyes and waited. It wasn't long before a dead man came to me, a relation I'd been aware of but never thought--or wanted to think--much about, a violinist and teacher of violin who'd lived a long and (I hoped) productive life before being exterminated at the Sobibor concentration camp. His showing up surprised me; we'd never chatted before. (I really hadn't wanted to think about him.) But there he was. I was able to write a bit about how I knew about him, a few pages of stiff, self-conscious writing of the kind you do when you feel someone's right at your back. Then we took a break and went out for lunch, and then we came in again and sat down to write some more.

The afternoon was better; I wrote about how, when I was young, I didn't want to play the voilin because it would leave black marks on my neck. How I chose the flute instead, which ended up being a disaster because, not only did the instrument not touch me, it didn't suit me at all.

I thought about how, only recently, I'd picked up a friend's violin and how strangely familiar it and the bow had seemed.

You see, the voice said behind me, you need to play what fits naturally to your hand, even if it bruises you.

The work I do often comes painfully to me. I'm often tempted to play something else, something shiny instead of strung with gut. Then when I do . . .

You find you don't have the mouth for it.

Right.

Ah. So then you know.

Yes.

It was time to put our pens down and talk about what we'd written. Brooke had been chatting with a man on a train traveling West from Denver. Monette had a woman lead her down into a well and tell her to sit there. Diana didn't want to think about the dead anymore and wrote about a tree. Riley's grandfather, a World War II pilot, had killed himself and she didn't know why. Nancy had a woman tell her, "You can never speak all the love inside you."

"When you get to the core of things," Brooke said, "you end up writing a story that you think is not your story. But it is your story. Because it's everybody's story. Everybody lives there."

Andante.

--MD

Ghost Story

2010-05-02T10:59:00.005-06:00

My husband and I like to visit cemeteries. In Santa Fe, New Mexico we took the dogs away from the crowded Plaza and headed instead to the oldest graveyard in town, a quiet, neglected strip of land on a busy street in a noisy, industrial neighborhood. Pull through the gates in late winter or early spring, and what you'll find are bare trees. Dead weeds. Row after row of gravel lanes, pocked with holes where the prairie dogs have burrowed under the caskets. Headstones marked with German names. Hispanic names. Some dating to the Civil War. Some, older still, broken away, names missing. Some of the newest are handmade: wooden boards inscribed with what looks, oddly, like silly-string, but on closer inspection turns out to be bright blue caulk. In one corner lie nothing but children who died in 1939. "Baby Boy." "Baby Lady." "Whom," one inscription goes on, "our arms never held, yet now hold so dear."

I jump at a sound. It's a pick-up truck pulling fast through the gates. Something about its speed and the scowl of the driver tells me we're in trouble. My husband puts the dogs on leash and waits to one side.

The driver pulls up to me. He seems angry.

"You're trespassing. And your dogs have to be leashed in this town."

I nod carefully at the strong, heavy-set Hispanic face with its light speckling of freckles. Something about writing this blog has taught me not to assume all hope is lost when two wary human beings meet for the first time.

"I'm very sorry," I say as my husband leads the dogs away. "We couldn't resist. This cemetery is so amazing. Beautiful. Does it have a name?"

"It doesn't have a name. It's private. And the dogs have to be--"

"I'm really sorry again. You're absolutely right. They're leashed now. But it's just so beautiful here, we couldn't resist coming in." I introduce myself. "Are you taking care of this beautiful place?"

He relaxes a bit, points to a red adobe house at the edge of the property.

"That's mine. And those are my German Shepherds, there. They're trained to chase intruders out. They're chained right now, or they could have seriously hurt your dogs."

That explained his anxiety. And now he goes on to explain, relaxing a bit more, that he and his wife have taken over the cemetery, after years and years of neglect, crime and vandalism. They were very protective of it.

"It doesn't have a name," he repeats. "A hundred years ago, it used to be something for the rich ladies of Santa Fe to take care of. But then it got handed to foundation after foundation, and each of 'em took worse care of it than the last." He shakes his long black hair over his steering wheel. "You should have seen it then."

After the state of New Mexico retired the cemetery's debts, including an unpaid $100,000 water bill, Pete, a landscaper, was allowed to take it on--providing he planted new trees and removed the dead ones, and obeyed a new law that didn't allow him to plant or water any grass.

"So," Pete sighs, "that's why it looks the way it does. But the families of the deceased are just glad someone's taking care of the place now. Used to be a drug den. The dealers would hide the stuff in the urns. Someone would come to pick it up. But I'm not afraid of thugs. I'm retired military, Special Ops. Airborne. I was in Columbia during the drug wars. I was there when we, you know, weren't there. So punks don't mess with me. It's just the prairie dogs that are the trouble now."

Especially the ones that liked to bring skeletal human hands and bits of chewed coffin to the surface.

"The families don't like that," Pete tells me.

"What do you do?"

"I have to gas them. I don't like that, either."

He points to some land connected to the cemetery and tells me it's where a concentration camp once stood. "That's where they put the Japanese during World War II. The barracks were right there. That wasn't so good, either."

"Is it scary here sometimes?"

"Yes. You see things. My wife and I both do."

"Like . . . ?"

There was a little girl. Both he and his wife had seen her many times. She seemed to live in their house. A white girl in a white dress, with short blond hair. She liked to let the dogs off their chains. They would hear her, and come out into the yard to find the dogs free.

I remembered all the children's graves in the corner.

"What happened in 1939 that so many people died, Pete?"

"Smallpox. They just . . . died. Sante Fe was just a hole in the wall in the old days. No medicine. No real doctors."

"Are you afraid of ghosts?"

His tattooed arms grip the steering wheel. "No. The spirits only bother you if you're a bad person. And I take care of this place. I planted all these trees. You should come back in the summer. It looks different then. Really green."

"I think it's wonderful you're bringing this place back to life."

"Well . . . I try. But sometimes it's not easy. The records are so bad. One time, when a film crew was here, we accidentally dug up an unmarked grave. There are all kinds of people under our feet we don't even know about."

"I guess we just have to be careful."

"You do. If you come back, keep your dogs on a leash."

"We will. Thanks."

We shook hands. As I leaned into the window I noticed Pete's black boots, his black jeans and his black sweatshirt with the full, black hood behind it.

--MD

A Story From One of America's Prisons

2010-04-30T18:21:00.003-06:00

My friend and fellow writer Kathryn Patterson drew my attention to this story today, written in one of her classes for prisoners: "Nature for the Nature-Deprived" was written by Texas inmate Samuel Daugherty and submitted to the PEN American Center's 2010 Prison-Writing Contest, where it earned an Honorable Mention. An excerpt:

"Our world is concrete, steel, and red brick, and we must take nature where we can find it. Getting the chance to grow a plant, see the sky or water, or wiggle one’s toes in the grass, are special occurrences. The lengths we will go for our own slice of nature are unusual, indeed. One fellow I know in the hoe squad jumps in the water and goes swimming any time they lead him near. He could get shot for that, attempted escape. I’ve seen people do some strange things for their slice."

Take a look, and see what you think.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Two Views of Manhattan, Part Two

2010-04-04T16:39:00.007-06:00

In The Ramble in Central Park, Dick and Allen sit on a bench in front of a birdwatching area strung, like an avian Cirque du Soleil, with suspended Clorox containers and white athletic socks stuffed with seed. Sparrows, mostly, they say when I stop to ask what they're viewing. It's still early on, only two weeks into the season. But the Park, Dick explains to me casually, one leg folded over the other, is one of the best places to watch and wait, thanks to the migration. Dapper and obviously well-settled in the world, old men now, Dick and Allen have been watching birds together since the 1940's, when they were ten years old. They still make time to sit together, they tell me, both in the city and at their homes upstate and in the Colorado mountains. Today they sit at their ease in The Ramble, while a fat squirrel disappears into a Clorox bottle. At various moments they direct a young photographer they've hired, who's balancing on a ladder and behind a huge lens, to catch this bird or that one. They don't answer when I ask if there is something they have wanted to see all their lives, but haven't seen. Dick jokes only that Allen is old enough to have seen a Dodo.

The same day, in the Park, near the Museum of Natural History, I meet a dogwalker who doesn't offer his name, but who does tell me the name of the dog at the end of his leash: Penelope. Penelope is a lovely fawn and white pit bull. I can't remember ever thinking of a pit bull as being lovely. But she is. I learn that Penelope is up for adoption from a local group called Stray From the Heart. The dogwalker works for her foster family, and for others, walking up to twelve dogs a day--although he was, he nods toward me with a strange, unstable roll in his eyes, once upon a time a professional trumpet player, trained at Julliard and a regular performer at Radio City Music Hall. Pit bulls, he tells me, are not mad dogs. They're made that way. Most of those he walked came from the Bronx, where in addition to being fought they were strung up by their paws and beaten, to make them mean. With the economy being so bad, more strays were coming in than ever before; even sweet, tender things like Penelope, who had never been abused, but still, because she looked like a pit bull, would be hard to place. All that could be hoped, he told me before we parted ways at the next corner, was that the family who had her now would decide she was good enough to keep. And he hurried away in his dusty black coat and loose sneakers, Penelope close at his heels.

--MD

Photo by Bruce Barone

Merlin

2010-03-16T17:07:00.011-06:00

Merlin is doing something on his front lawn I don't quite understand. As I walk by, he's cleaning a long canvas strap with a dull blade. The thick strap is suspended, stretched, between two trees. He nods at me and smiles from under a sharp black cowboy hat, saying good afternoon. I used to live in this neighborhood in Dallas, on this very street. But I don't remember him. He strikes me as someone I should remember. His beard is white, long and pointed. His eyeglasses are perfectly circular, the frames pewter-colored. Around his neck hangs a thin leather strap with a simple ring, like a wedding band, rung through it. The rust in his cheeks is matched by the rust in his tie-dyed t-shirt. His jeans are fresh blue, his moccassins mustard yellow. I nod and return the good afternoon, curious, but then continue down the street, marveling at how many of the old clapboard houses have been torn down, replaced by chunky Tudors in brick and stone. My old house, amazingly, is still standing. When I come back to the corner, Merlin is standing on the strap suspended between the two trees. He's balancing, walking back and forth, bouncing. It's a tightrope, I now realize. In the time it took me to walk the length of the block and back to his blue clapboard house, Merlin has pulled two thick crash pads onto the grass, placed them under the line, taken his mocassins off and hopped up and started jaunting. As he bounces and jumps clear, I ask him how long he's been tightrope-walking.

"It's not a tightrope." He shakes a white finger at me. "It's a slack-line."

"Oh. A slack-line. How long have you had it?"

"Since October. I can't do much yet. You should see what some people can do, though. Want to try it?"

"I think I have the wrong shoes on."

"Naw, girl. People do this in anything."

I kick my clogs off and stand in my socks on one of the crash pads while he takes the dull blade I'd seen him use earlier and cleans the grass and mud from the line. I tell him my name, and ask him his.

"I'm Merlin."

"Like the magician."

"I am a magician."

"What do I do?"

He explains I should get my right foot up on the line, first. I do, and the canvas strap, only an inch or so wide under my sock, starts vibrating wildly.

"No worries, that's just your nerves, girl. Pay it no heed. Hop up with the other foot now, and I'll hold you. Keep your eyes looking straight ahead, and don't ever ever ever look down. That's the trick. And when you think you're going to fall, just bend your knees."

"Okay."

I hold fast to Merlin's shoulders, and hop on. He's steady and solid and warm, so comforting that when I've finally got two feet on the line, I can't bring myself to let go of him. The strap is still vibrating crazily, and I don't see how I'll ever calm my nerves and balance. Then I remember. Just look straight ahead. And if you think you're going to fall, bend your knees. Let go.

I grab Merlin a few times until I feel it: that strange moment when you forget what you're doing, forget yourself, forget, for example, that's there's anything at all unlikely about meeting a stranger in a cowboy hat and suspending yourself two feet above his lawn on a canvas strap. It's only for a few seconds, but I balance.

I grab Merlin, laughing, and hop off.

"That's amazing," I pant. "You are a magician."

"Want to see something else?"

He unknots the thin strap from around his neck, and starts doing tricks with the wedding band looping through it. The ring jumps off the strap. It jumps back on. It's knotted in the leather. Then magically unknotted. It flies through the air, then lands smack in the knot again.

"You're good."

"Should be. I'm a street performer."

"You make a living that way?"

"I've always managed to stay alive."

"By doing tricks?"

"Well. I had a job once. The girl I was with then"--he swings the ring around on the strap--"she was younger than me, going to college and all that, and spending all her time around wannabe doctors and lawyers and such--she told me, one day, that she thought she was living with a bum. And I supposed that she was. So I decided I should show her that anyone can make money, if that's all you care about . . . and I got a job, and went to school, and then I started my own business, and pretty soon I was making money all over the place, in land surveying. But then one day I surveyed myself, you might say, and I noticed I hated everything. So I quit everything and went back to learning magic. And now I'm not with that girl anymore," he waves the ring again, "and I'm learning this." He points to the slack-line.

"And what do you hope to do on it?"

"Yoga poses. Tai chi. That will be hard. But good for me. Also I'd like to recite my poetry on it. I'm a poet, too. Want me to write a poem for you?"

"Yes, please."

He closes his eyes and improvises:

What are you afraid of? That you won't have enough money? Or enough food? Are you afraid you're going to die? Or that you won't live? Are you afraid you are going to fall? And that you won't get up again? Maybe you're afraid of everything, then? Everything there is? Let me ask you again, my friend. What is it that you're afraid of?

"Of falling," I admit.

He opens his eyes. "But I told you what to do."

Look straight ahead. Don't look down. Bend your knees. It's not a tightrope. It's a slack-line.

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking out," Merlin said before we shook hands and parted ways.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Butterfly

2010-01-26T08:58:00.014-07:00

"I don't know who broke our butterfly," Brandy tells us, "but when they find him, just hand him over to me, and I'll break his legs."

We're 150 feet underground. The air is damp, 85 degrees. The light is artificial. Brandy's cheeks are warm and flushed.

Sometimes, you need to go down to go up. I'd visited the Caverns of Sonora when I was twelve, but hardly remembered them. As a college student hitchhiking to California, my husband, standing here in the warm, wet light beside me, had once gotten as far as the cavern entrance, but didn't have enough money to go in. In those days, the cave was a small, family-run affair; it's still a family affair, and the same family still owns the place, but now there is a gleaming Visitors Center, and a campground with RV hookups, and a parking lot big enough to attract tour buses.

Yet on this deep, dead-of-winter day, we are the only ones in line.

Before we can go in and down, our guide Brandy has to take a call from her daughter's elementary school.

"Sorry," she blushes (she's blond and small and doesn't look much more than a kid herself). "Your child starts coughing, and right away they want to send her home with swine flu. I really feel bad you had to wait. But once we're down in the cave, we're completely cut off from everything." She smiles, her long lashes like wings.

She seals the air-tight door behind us, and we begin heading down toward the two miles of open cavern network. In less than a minute we're in another world. We've stepped and slipped into a plane of jewels. The Caverns of Sonora, Texas make Carlsbad look like an abandoned strip mine. Here, everything is so close, and so beautiful, it takes all you have not to touch it to make sure it, and you, are real.

Brandy is teaching us the names of the formations we're seeing as we go along: popcorn stone, flowstone, cave coral, cave drapery, columns, dogtooth spar, quartzes, soda straws, stalactites, stalagmites, helactites. Geodes "bake" like crystal-packed muffins on the walls.

"Now, all of this grows at a rate of one centimeter per 10,000 years," she tells us as we pass a huge column growing out of the floor, close to touching its twin descending from the ceiling. Called the "Kissing Column," the two formations are--yes--a mere centimeter apart.

My husband, who loves to talk to people and ask questions:

"So . . . do you like doing this for your job, Brandy?"

"I LOVE it! I love both things I do. I guide in the morning, and then I go to nursing sch00l in San Angelo at night. And then I practice my anatomy down here." She points to metacarpals of flowstone, brachial tubes of coral, helactites in the shape of mandibles. She also directs our attention to formations that look like bacon and pork chops. She savors the work.

My husband, ever interested in the consequences of actions over time, asks: "But if you like it so much, what will you do when you're all done with nursing school?"

"I don't know," Brandy grimaces, and switches off the lights. All through the cave, she's been turning the lights on and off as we go, so that what lies in front of us always remains in darkness, and what lies behind us is in darkness, and the only place illuminated is the place where we stand. "I don't want to think about that right now. Ask me later."

We pass signs of damage, places where tourists, unable to keep from reaching, have blackened the calcium walls with human oil. We pass through chambers of pure, undamaged white to reach Horseshoe Pond, an emerald lake surrounded by a halo of pearls. The water is so clear it hurts to look at it.

"This is my favorite room," Brandy says.

"Mine too," my husband nods.

At the deepest point in the cavern, Brandy turns off all the lights so we can appreciate the total blackness of its natural state. She informs us that if we stayed down like this for two weeks, we would start to go blind. "The retina starts to decay," she says matter-of-factly. Then she puts the lights on again. "Okay, so now I'm going to take you to see the butterfly--sad as that is."

The butterfly was once the glory, the pride and the emblem of the Caverns of Sonora. I remembered seeing it when I was twelve, so small and amber-colored and perfect, a marvel of accident. But a vandal had since broken off one of its translucent wings, probably while trying to steal it. It was a two-man operation: during a tour of more than thirty people, a "plant" at the head of the tour had distracted the guide, while a man at the back hopped the railing, attacked, and stuck the piece in his pocket. The damage wasn't discovered until the next tour came through.

"And then we cried." Brandy lowers her eyes. "All of us who work here cried and cried and cried and cried. It was horrible. They did end up figuring out who it was. From his credit card. He has a history. The Texas Rangers are still after him. But so far no luck. Anyway we don't do big tours anymore. No more."

The mood turns somber--but no sooner has Brandy turned the lights around us off and on again than she beats her long lashes and goes back to smiling and guiding. There is so much to SEE down here, after all, she says. Maybe we would discover something else just as beautiful. Maybe SHE would. There were seven miles of cave, total. She was always looking, among the thousands of formations, for the next butterfly.

As we begin to emerge from the depths, my husband asks Brandy what kind of nurse she would like to be.

"Life-flight."

--MD

I Celebrate The Reader

2010-01-22T19:28:00.004-07:00

I'd arrived a bit early for the lecture I was scheduled to give, and was introducing myself to some of the audience trickling in who'd come to hear me talk about creativity and leaping forward in our lives and work, when a tall, quiet woman glanced over at me and seemed to want to catch my attention, yet seemed shy about it at the same time. I came over and we started chatting, and finally I asked her what it was she did.

"Nothing," she said.

"Nothing?"

She meant, she explained quickly, that she did nothing "creative." And added that she probably didn't really "belong" at my lecture. She was just . . . visiting.

"But what do you like to do?" I asked.

"Oh, I love to read. I have a book group. I have to read good books, and I have to be with people who know how to talk about books in a way that matters. So I started this group. There are just seven of us. But it's really important to me."

"So you created this group."

"Well . . ."

"And you love to read. And you create discussions about books, original discussions. And reading itself--that involves your imagination interacting with the imagination of an author. You create images in your head. You create your own reading of the book. Yes?"

"Well . . . "

Someone else came up to us. Again my new friend was asked what she did.

"Nothing," she answered, shyly.

***

My challenge to myself, this weekend, is to think more closely about that word "creative," and to dream up new and still better ways to tear down the walls that have inadvertently grown up around and hedged that word.

Creativity, my friends, isn't only over on this acre, and not on that one. As a writer, if I achieve anything at all, I achieve it through you, whose hearts and spirits and minds and eyes open to this page, who lend your memory and imagination to it, so that it no longer lies flat and full of dull symbols, but rises, as if under a wand. Reading is a deeply creative act. Readers, you are my partners in creativity. You are brush against my brush.

I celebrate, you, the reader. Click clack click clack. I make. You make happen.

--MD

Meeting House

2010-01-17T13:54:00.013-07:00

Blizzard

2009-12-22T09:36:00.010-07:00

Lisa and I met as we landed at Salt Lake City airport. We hit the ground with a jolt. A moment before we'd been flying through whiteness, and from my window seat I had seen . . . nothing.

No depth. No space. No sky. No ground. It was as if we were buried. Or else suspended. And then all at once, the earth caught me under the chin and I let out a little cry.

"First time landing in this kind of weather?" she asked.

This after hours of silence, both of us quietly reading our books.

"Yes. It's all new to me."

"Where're you headed?"

"Colorado. You?"

"Home. To Montana."

"So you're used to this?"

"Pretty used."

She pulled her turtleneck up under her chin. The flight attendant announced we'd arrived but that we couldn't proceed to our gate because every plane was delayed, since every plane had to be de-iced. We would have to sit and wait.

"I hope you came from some place warm?" I sighed.

"Georgia."

"Me too."

We introduced ourselves. Lisa, it turned out, had been in Brunswick for a long-overdue family reunion. She and her brothers and sisters had flown in from every corner of the country to see their aging parents. All but one brother, who like her lived in Montana.

"He didn't go?"

"He drove. He won't fly anymore."

The flight attendant interrupts again, this time to offer her congratulations to all those on board about to enjoy the luxury of staying in their seats and continuing to Honolulu. Gloating cheers floated up and down the aisle.

"Have you ever been there?" Lisa asks. "Hawaii?"

"It's been years."

"I was there. Just before this trip. And I told my brother I was going, and he asked if I was going to see Pearl Harbor, and I told him no, I wasn't planning on it. He doesn't talk much. He's never been there. But finally he said he thought maybe I ought to go, and if I did, maybe I could take a picture for him. So I said, well, all right."

"And did you?"

She nodded. She didn't expect it to be so beautiful, she said, standing over the water where those men were locked away, never coming off their ship. She not only took pictures, but bought one of the flags that had flown over the monument.

"You know, every day they fly a flag--well I guess more than one--and you can buy one if you want to. So I got one for my brother. Like I say, he doesn't talk very much. We live in the same town, but he never talks about his time in Vietnam, or why he won't fly. He started crying when I gave him that flag, though. That's something at least," she leaned forward, looking out the window.

"You're a good sister."

"I don't know," she said, and looked at the frost growing steadily on our wing, at the ice that would have to be removed before this bird could lift toward the islands.

--MD

The Fixer

2009-11-29T15:23:00.008-07:00

"My husband always said, 'My wife can fix anything.'"

Her name was Karen. A moment before, I hadn't known her. I'd stood alone in the crowded waiting room of the hospital--so many people in it I couldn't find any place to sit down, every chair lining the walls already taken, every table encircled by chairs already filled--and looked around, a bit lost. Unless you're in a hospital waiting for a new baby, a waiting room isn't the happiest place to be. People were coughing. People were nervous. People were fidgeting. Otherwise they weren't moving. They were going nowhere. The only seat left open was next to a very well-dressed woman with beautifully braided hair, and her large purse was in that chair. I hesitated; luckily she noticed me, and nodding said the spot actually belonged to her son, but since he had gone down to the cafeteria for lunch I was welcome to have it, at least until he came back. I sat and told her I was grateful, that I was waiting on a loved one, and overly anxious, and that it meant something just to be able to sit down.

"Are you waiting on a loved one too?" I asked.

"My husband."

"And are you nervous?"

"I'm at peace."

We both hesitated. A hospital is a private experience, no matter how public the room. Neither one of us wanted to pry. But at length I asked her how she managed to be at peace.

"It's because I know it's going to be okay."

"But how do you know that?"

"Because I've been through all this before."

With our hands on the table across from each other, most of our shyness slipped away now, and she told me, straightforwardly, that she was waiting for her husband, Curtis, who had already been through a heart transplant. It had started three years before, when he'd come down with nothing but a funny cough. At first, they'd both thought it was just a reaction to the chemicals he had to pick up at the Houston plants where he worked as a truck driver. She was a nurse, and she couldn't find anything wrong with him; and so they went on. Until that one evening when Curtis told her he couldn't breathe out of his left nostril.

"'Oh, don't be a sissy,' I told him, 'you just have a cold.'"

"'No, honey,' he says, 'I'm serious. Something's wrong. I can't breathe out of one side of me.'"

And then he collapsed.

The doctors decided it had been, not a reaction to harsh chemicals, but rather a rare strain of virus that had attacked and destroyed his heart muscle. He was put on the list for a transplant, but wasn't likely to make it, she was told. There just wasn't time. They were about simply to go home, with a portable pumping device attached to him to give him a few more weeks, when Curtis had looked her in the eye with a look that said, No.

"And that's when I said, 'Okay, you wait here'--and I left him and I went down to the hospital chapel and prayed. I'd never even really talked to God before. We were never what you would call intimate. But I said, 'Lord, I know I've always been able to fix everything myself, but obviously I can't fix this. I think I need help. My husband needs a transplant. I don't know what to do. I just don't.' And the next day my husband was given the heart of a nineteen-year-old. I didn't stop to ask questions. I was just thankful. I remember at two in the morning the surgeon came out and he told me that young heart was beating all on its own inside my husband's fifty-six-year-old chest, that it knew just what to do. And a week later, we were sent home. And a few weeks after that, Curtis went back to driving his truck around again."

Her eyes fell. She didn't seem to want to go on.

"Is he . . . in for his heart again now?" I went on, heedless. Because her story had made me forget mine. I had transplanted, substituted it for mine.

"No. Something else."

"I'm so sorry."

"But I'm at peace."

"Because you've been through this before."

"Yes. Yes."

This time--she spoke after a long pause--her husband had fallen down and hit his head. Hard. It had had nothing to do with his heart. He had fallen, and they had done a CT-scan, and discovered that a huge lumpy mass had planted itself on the front lobe of his brain. He was in neurosurgery. They'd taken him in at nine that morning, and he wasn't expected to be out until three that afternoon.

I looked at the clock on the waiting room wall. It was only one.

"But I'm at peace," she repeated.

Then I heard my name being called out. My own loved one was out of surgery. The surgeon wanted to see me. To talk to me. I stood, nervously.

"Honey, thanks for talking to me, what's your name?" she asked quickly. "Mine is Karen." She stood.

We held each other, chest to chest. A long moment.

--MD

On the Road

2009-11-23T20:16:00.003-07:00

Kind readers, here is why I have not posted a new story of late: I've been on the road, speaking. And I've been listening, too. A new story to arrive shortly. In the meantime, here is a quick slice of my own life. With warmest and best to all--Em

A New Story Submitted by a Reader

2009-10-26T13:04:00.006-06:00

Dear friends, I'm so pleased to share the story below, sent to me by a writer I met through that chattering tree we now all know as Twitter. If I needed any convicing how wonderful social media can be for the sharing of short stories . . . well, actually, I didn't need any. Elegant and earthy, "El Papi" comes to ASN from Naples, Florida; if you'd like to contact the author, feel free to leave your comments here, or find him perched on Twitter at @boudreaufreret. And now, let's all feast together, and enjoy!
--MD

El Papi, by Boudreau Freret

2009-10-26T12:46:00.010-06:00

José's El Papi Taqueria is hidden, tucked away in a corner of the Kwik Pick convenience store. The Kwik Pick has no gas pumps. You can purchase a single cigarette at the cash register from opened packs. You can wire money home. A poster in the front window next to the door advertises bus service to a handful of Texas cities, and several more scattered across northern Mexico. Houston is over a thousand miles away.

My town is a haven for seasonal residents who fall into two categories: those from places that get cold in the winter, and need browning by sun and golf; and those from Mexico and south Texas, browned by birth and labor.

The Kwik Pick exists to serve the latter. To the former, both it and El Papi's Taqueria are all but invisible.

Not to me. I am privy to the Taqueria, and the magic José brings to Florida from home.

Today the lunch crowd hasn't yet arrived. Two men sit at one table; their dark blue shirts have lettering over the front pockets I can't read. I have my pick of the remaining half-dozen tables. It's easy to move to the counter without the perdón that, in half an hour, will be necessary to weave just a few feet across the room.

José smiles and greets me with a hearty, “Hello, my friend!” I am the thing here that is not like the others, yet José seems happy to have me. He greets everyone as if they are his favorite guest – his only guest – and still makes it feel special. “You want what you always have?” he asks as he sets down a pan and takes up his pad. José's English is better than my Spanish, and I'm briefly ashamed.

“I don't think so,” I tell him.

“No?” he looks concerned--then smiles broader than should be possible.

“No. I'm at your mercy. You pick."

“Oh, I know just what you'll like,” he says, scribbling on the pad. “Maíz or flour?”

I scowl a little. “Maíz. You know that.” Always the corn tortillas. He makes them every morning.

You can see the street from every table. I'm sitting at one with less sunlight, so I can both stare out the window and watch the telenovela on the tv, high on the wall in the corner. On the screen, a woman is upset with a man in a doctor's lab coat, while a baby wails from its clear plastic hospital nursery bed.

The lunch crowd starts to arrive. Some sit; most stand and wait to take their orders with them back to work. They stand first at the counter, then spill into the room, finding space where they can until they've backed up to my table. We're all in this together now. I've lost sight of José, but I know he's just a few feet away, back there smiling at his customers and taking orders.

Then the crowd parts, and José appears, bearing a plate. He places his creation in front of me, turned just so, then vanishes into the crowd only to reappear seconds later with a cup of salsa verde picante. He leaves it, grins, then is swallowed again.

The plate, the food. Oh my, the food.

This is not just food, any more than Isaac Stern just made sounds from a violin, or Pavlova just moved, or Michelangelo just made decorations.

On this plate is a celebration of all that is wonderful about being human – all that looks pleasing, smells wonderful.

I savor the moment and the thousands of parts that compose it: the tastes, the colors, the telenovella in the background, the window facing traffic. An endless parade starts and stops outside, land yachts toting golf bags to artificial destinations.

I wonder what all those people will eat for lunch. For a second, I almost pity them. Almost.

By Boudreau Freret
Naples, Florida

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Delicious

2009-10-12T15:19:00.006-06:00

It's Deli Day at Temple Israel. In the community hall the stage is piled thick and close with white paper bags, each bag containing a wrapped corned-beef sandwich, a container of slaw, a pickle, and some mustard. The corned beef has been flown in from New York City. The bags emerge from offstage--the Temple's kitchen--and are deposited in white clusters like folded swans along the proscenium's edge. Then they make their way down through the plastic-gloved hands of volunteers to waiting customers, like me.

Stage right, iced-tea cups are being noisily filled.

One of the volunteers, Jerry, hobbles toward me, smiling. His service at the Temple is only one of his many responsibilities as a retiree in this small town; he also helps to bring ballet to Columbus, known more for its army base than for Giselle.

Jerry loves everything about the dance, he confides in me, knowing my background--even if he isn't moving so well himself right now. He points at his knees.

"I'm so sorry. What happened?"

"I just had knee surgery."

"Oh no. Too many waltzes?"

"Just an old army injury. Nothing romantic."

He holds himself very still while we talk, balancing. He tells me how, as a young man in Connecticut, he had first seen the great, ground-breaking modern dancers--Límon, Cunningham, Graham--and that he still tends to prefer modern dance to classical.

"Why is that, do you think?" I take a glass of iced tea.

"Because it's so open and free and improvisational. It's just fantastic. But then again . . ."

"Yes?"

"You know . . . I could tell you the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life . . ."

I clutch my bag of corned-beef to my chest, nodding.

"It was a classical ballerina. Makarova. She was . . . extraordinary. She was so ethereal. Mesmerizing." He's squinting up into the the blazing light of the Temple's hall. "I sat there watching her . . . and it was as if I could feel myself rising out of my seat along with her. Floating. I've never experienced anything like that in my life, before or since. That feeling of lightness. Of being lifted. I guess that's one of the things we hope art will do for us."

"Yes."

"So, since you were a dancer once, I hope you can recommend a ballet company we could bring to our town?" he asks, guiding me toward the dessert table, filled with dozens of beautifully skirted cakes and pies, being served, in generous slices, to the gleaming, uniformed men of Fort Benning.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Stake-out

2009-10-04T17:11:00.013-06:00

Bill simply got tired of being around the kind of people who weren't exactly happy to see him, and that he didn't want to see. So he quit law enforcement, dead-of-night surveillance, investigations, and watching bad people do bad things--and came to live and work at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Retired, his work is unpaid (his wife, the breadwinner now, directs operations for the Grand Canyon Association). His responsibilities, as he described them to me, were "to do anything asked."

"I build displays," he said as we sat together on the low stone wall lining the rim. "I take people on tours of the Kolb Studio," he pointed to the famous building wedged and clinging to the blunt cliff. I had visited the Studio earlier that day; the Grand Canyon had been a lonely place when it was timbered and mortared, stone by stone, a hundred years ago and more.

Now of course, we were anything but lonely. A crowd from a tour bus passed by us.

But this is what Bill loves most about his new life. He loves being around people who are on vacation, in a good mood. And being around tourists who represent the entire world.

"But don't you ever feel a bit crowded? Overwhelmed?"

No, he shook his Grand Canyon Association-capped head. The rim offered its periods of solitude. During a full moon, in winter, he often didn't sleep. Instead, he bundled up and came out to sit where we were sitting now. For hours.

If it had snowed, the earth around him seemed to glow, before dropping off into phantasmal darkness.

Even more amazing were the mornings when an inversion--he lay his hands flat and tried to describe this for me--filled the Canyon with white cloud. Then, it looked as though you could walk right across, from rim to rim. People, photographers especially, waited their entire lives to see it.

"Of course, the tourists end up complaining. They say they can't see a thing. But they just don't know what they're looking at. That what they're getting to watch is as beautiful as anything you could ask. And now it's one of my jobs," he adds smiling, "to help them understand."

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

What

2009-10-02T20:29:00.002-06:00

"A story is not about a moment in time; a story is about the moment in time."--W.D. Wetherell

Photo credit: Bruce Baron e

Dry Lay

2009-09-28T17:52:00.014-06:00

He's unloading huge, rounded river stones from the back of his truck. I ask what he's making. The mason, currently of Fort Bragg, California, lately of San Diego and before that a lifetime pitched in Park City, Utah, where he lay rock, mounded fireplaces and bricked walks for the rich and famous, is building a retaining wall for a bright, white cottage in Mendocino.

He puts his fingers to his lips; there's a writer inside the house, he explains to me, so we have to keep it low.

"Do you like this kind of work?" I whisper. "It looks . . . heavy."

"Like doesn't come into it. I tell you what, if you want to raise two daughters, you have to work hard, and that's it."

His passion, really, he confides in that low voice, is carving basins and sinks out of pure red stone. He reaches into the front seat of his pick-up and pulls out a binder full of pictures to show me. The smooth, heavy bowls gleam like coral under their cheap overlay of photo plastic. Meanwhile, the Pacific roars and carves all around us.

Except he doesn't have time for such vessels right now, he tells me; right now most of the time he does whatever he can, in this economy.

"It's beautiful work, though."

"Want to see where I'm building the wall?"

We creep to the back of the house, me glancing up at the lace-curtained windows, curious.

Alice Walker?

Then I see the wall.

"What's holding the stones together?"

The river rock, holding back a bed of fresh garden soil, seems to me to be floating, disconnected.

"It's called a dry lay," he says patiently; that's a process in which very little mortar is used, and then most of what little is used gets scraped away--to make it look, from a distance, as if nothing is holding the stones together at all.

"You're almost done?" I ask, feeling the gapped surface.

"No. She's got some other things she wants me to do around here. Fixing other people's shoddy work." He points to the cracked flag of a back stoop.

"You're working pretty constantly?"

"Seven days a week. Need to get this done 'cause I have other jobs waiting."

"And how are your daughters?"

"Just graduated and out of the house."

"You must be proud. Of yourself, I mean."

He shrugs, as if to say, you only do what's expected, and asks me what I'm doing, wandering around the village, so early.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Why

2009-09-23T08:36:00.004-06:00

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything."

--Joseph Conrad

To Make Time

2009-09-22T08:24:00.009-06:00

I have a friend--I'll call her Jennie--who was diagnosed eight months ago with breast cancer. I learned this very recently. Jennie and I are friends whose worlds overlap only along a very particular seam: we meet and see each other thanks to our dogs, who compete in canine agility.

In the sport of agility, dog and handler are required to navigate a complicated obstacle course with the goal of finishing cleanly; the object isn't so much to come in first or second or third, as it is to get through without crashing into a jump or hurtling into the wrong tunnel. When I didn't see Jennie and her beautiful Belgian Shepherds during the spring and summer this year, I didn't think too much of it. One of her dogs was older, I knew, and needed more care than usual, and my travel had taken me far away from our regular stomping grounds.

In southern Colorado I finally caught up with Jennie again: she's a tiny woman with flowing salt-and-pepper hair, and when she competes alongside one of her majestic dogs it's like watching a sprite racing a Lipizaner. She'd just completed a difficult run when another friend came up to me and commented that what Jennie was doing was absolutely remarkable, considering what she was going through. I was stunned. I had no chance to talk with Jennie privately that day. But the next she arrived at the field wearing a black t-shirt with two big, embossed pink boxing gloves dangling from a coiled pink ribbon. I hurried toward her.

I apologized for not understanding why I hadn't seen her in so many months, and she told me it was all right, she'd kept very quiet about it in the beginning. At first, feeling a persistent pain in her right shoulder, she'd thought it was only a bruise where one of her dogs had jumped joyously up on her. But when the ache didn't go away she'd had it looked at. By then the cancer had metastasized to her bones and liver.

The doctors in Colorado gave her a choice: pursue a fast, radical course of treatment that would help her but make her very ill; or a less intense, more methodical one, that would proceed slowly but could still yield positive results. She chose the second route. It allowed her to keep working, she said, and to keep her hair. Now, after many months, the cancer had receded from her liver and her bones, and only remained in the breast, where it had started. Her prognosis was cautiously optimistic.

"That's wonderful," I breathed out. "But . . . you're so brave. I would have gone for the quick approach. I would have been too terrified to do anything else."

"I was terrified," she said quietly. "But I just wanted to do what felt right for me. I wanted to keep feeling healthy. I wanted to feel and look like me."

"And you're feeling okay now?"

"Pretty good. This is my first time back doing agility. I asked my doctor if I could, and she said go for it. So here I am." She told me she was getting a little winded on course, because the cancer affected her lungs and breathing--but that otherwise the weekend was going fairly well.

We had to part because it was Jennie's turn to run her dog again. I watched her take him through the unfamiliar obstacle course, and noticed her loyal companion was slower than usual. I wondered if it was because he sensed something was different, and was holding back.

"Now, whatcha doin, boy? Come on, come, come on, let's go go go go go!" she urged him. Running.

They crossed the finish line--a good, clean run, but not speedy. I couldn't tell from where I was standing if the judge had said they had "made time"--the term for completing a course within a required number of seconds. If you don't "make time," it doesn't matter how flawless your run is. It doesn't count.

I found myself running toward the scoring area.

"Did you? Did you?" I called out.

"We'll have to see," she waved back. "It's gonna be close."

A few minutes later I saw her at the scoring table. Smiling.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Join me on Twitter . . .

2009-09-21T14:00:00.003-06:00

. . . for updates from the road and from my current lecture/workshop season:

http://twitter.com/mylenedressler (for writing-related tips, stories and links)

or

http://twitter.com/doctoremspeaks (for widely ranging inspirational links, tips and stories from "The Art of Inspiration" tour)

And off we go!

--MD

Ron Walks

2009-09-17T14:06:00.009-06:00

Ron Wach has been hiking almost constantly for fifteen years--ever since he endured his third car accident while commuting to his job with a large pharmaceutical company in a big city. On that day, he was sitting still, stopped by traffic, when he was hit at 65mph by another car.

"That was it," he told me, leaning on his two titanium hiking poles on the Broken Arrow Trail of Northern Arizona. "I took that as a sign. I quit."

We were talking on a dusty piece of red rock, shaded by knotted and crossed junipers. I was on my way back to the trailhead, and had just left a large party of hikers I'd bumped into on the bluff above us--a group of white-haired, sun-loving retirees from downstate, women and men who'd munched on peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and noisily urged me to buy a house in Southern Arizona just as soon as I was lucky enough to be fifty-five. They'd been as rowdy and lively as Ron was careful and still.

He tended to hike alone, for the most part, he told me. He'd taken a basic survival-skills course so that he would be safer doing so, and in his fifteen years of trekking had hiked in two hemispheres, from Canada to South America. He had to use two hiking poles because his balance wasn't quite what it had been before the accident.

He seemed thoughtful, and a bit lonely to me; eager to talk and yet shy. His face was clear and soft, his curled hair colored a light brown. It was hard for me to tell how old he might have been: whether he was a subdued man in his early fifties, or a spry one in his sixties.

Since he seemed a bit lonely, I pointed up the hill, to where the senior citizens were camped off-trail for lunch, and told him what a friendly, happy lot they were. When I left him, Ron was still standing under the crossroads of juniper, hesitant. In a moment I'd rounded the bend and he was out of my sight. I didn't see whether he'd headed up the hill toward the Sun City crowd, or had turned and followed the trail down to the solitude of Chicken Point.

--MD

Photo credit, Bruce Barone: "When I went to NYC/Hoboken . . . I stopped in Fort Lee to photograph the George Washington Bridge; I had a moment of sadness as my Dad, who passed away a few brief years ago, lived a few blocks from the bridge. It was at that moment I realized I was wearing his shirt and tie, and I had last stood here with him by my side." --BB

News from the Road

2009-09-15T21:20:00.004-06:00

Dear Friends,

I hope your fall has begun on a cool and fresh note. My thanks, as always, for allowing me into your lives as I share some news from the road. A few delightful things are at hand:

For those of you who have been asking when my next extended writing course will be offered, New Plains Press is sponsoring my workshop, "Creative Living, Creative Writing," in beautiful Taormina, Sicily, June 6 -19, 2010. New Plains' in-depth Writers Retreat promises to be a truly remarkable immersion experience, offering classes and workshops in both fiction and poetry; lectures on Sicilian writing and literature; boat and city tours; and optional offerings including language classes at the renowned Babilonia Language Institute as well as lessons in Sicilian cooking and cuisine. We'll be based in a beautiful, comfortable hotel perched in this lovely island town; in our free time we may sample the screenings at the prestigious Taormina International Film Festival. Now: if you find yourself unable to resist all of this any more than I've been able to, I hope you'll visit

http://newplainspress.com/Writer_s_Retreat.php

to register. I have the feeling I can look forward to seeing some of you there.

And for those who have been inquiring after my 2009-2010 speaking tour, "The Art of Inspiration," I'm so pleased to share with you that it launches early next month. For a detailed appearance schedule, or to make a booking, please visit www.mylenedressler.com. I'm looking forward to sharing this beautiful, interactive talk (which uses story, sense, movement and sound to harness our creative energies, both as individuals and as communities) with a wide range of audiences.

Again, my thanks for your support, your interest, your wonderful friendship and fanship. These are dear to me.

Warmly,
Dr. Em

Life Touch

2009-09-13T13:10:00.014-06:00

"I had a terrible mother," the woman sitting across from me in the Pep Boys waiting room said.

Her own daughters, one eight years old and the other thirteen, clung close to her side. The girls were dark-skinned, small and beautiful. The woman was large and blond, with poodle-thick-curling hair and a quick smile.

We both--this friendly woman and I--had blown-out tires, that afternoon. The Pep Boys waiting room in Fort Worth was our refuge: cool, unexpectedly clean, and with a TV remote resting on the table between us so that we could turn the volume down on the set bulking over our heads. The elder girl turned it very slightly up again.

I asked what it was like raising two children these days, and my companion admitted it was difficult; her elder daughter, especially, didn't like school, and so was required to read books in order to score points to earn her cell-phone minutes.

"I don't see why," the elder girl pushed the buttons on the remote. "I already do chores around the house."

"Which pays for your rent and meals," her mother said simply.

"She doesn't want to give me any privacy," the girl grumbled.

I had the feeling I was hearing a conversation that had wheeled around the block a few times.

"When you sign a lease, you can have privacy," her mother explained. "Until then you are in my care."

That was when I had asked where she had developed such sturdy parenting skills, and she'd told me about her "terrible," drug-addled mother.

"She had me when she was fourteen. She didn't even try to take care of me. So I lived with my grandmother until I turned ten. Then all of a sudden I was sent back to live with her. It was horrible. I left when I was sixteen. I got a job at Jack In The Box, found a cheap studio apartment, paid my own rent, and got my high school diploma. I never went to college but I learned at work how to keep the books--I'm just good with numbers--so then I went to work doing finance for grocery stores. Like Albertson's."

"Is that what you do now?"

"No, I work for a company called Life Touch. It's a photography service for churches and schools and graduations and so on. I'm their head finance person. I like it. I like what I do."

I looked at her girls. "And their father?"

"We're divorced. We have a good relationship, though. He just doesn't speak English. He's Mexican. I tried to help him, to help him get ahead, but he just wouldn't help himself. So. Both of my girls are bilingual, anyway. Me too. I took classes and taught myself."

I asked her then if she still had contact with her mother, and if her mother knew her granddaughters, and how they were doing.

She shook her head, and for the first time looked down at the Pep Boys' blazing white linoleum, and left her gaze there. "I don't want them to see her. I got tired of trying to explain to them why she was always drunk or high and had a different man with her every time. So last time I told her, 'That's it, you've ruined your last Christmas, I am not having you in my house anymore.'"

"That had to be hard."

"It was." She looked up. "But I'm determined to live my life differently than she did, and that my girls will too. Now this one," she touched and stroked the dark hair of the younger one beside her, "loves to read."

"I love it that you love to read," I said.

The girl ducked her head shyly into the sturdy arm beside her.

"She reads because she wants to," her mother said. "Isn't that something?"

--MD

Photo credit: A Friend in Nonotuck Park, Bruce Barone

Straw

2009-09-10T11:09:00.013-06:00

"At present, I am aware, an audience impatient for blood and glory scorns the stress I am putting upon incidents so minute . . . One will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work; who, as it were, from some slight hint of the straws, will feel the winds of March when they do not blow. To them nothing will be trivial . . . They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder not, as foolish people do now, that this great matter came out of that small one." --George Meredith

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Bluff

2009-09-08T18:38:00.016-06:00

I love duck ponds. The colors flashing on the birds' backs. The way the water divides alongside their carved bodies, with little resistance. I had a chance one afternoon to sit with Gayle and enjoy his reed-fringed pond in Southeastern Utah, and watch the wild mallard, the teal and the wood ducks gliding by. Gayle and his wife, Charlie--no, I'm not making this up, every story I tell on this blog is absolutely true--together have lived in the tiny hamlet of Bluff for some seventeen years, their property stretching from the edge of the lone highway through town to near the sifting banks of the San Juan River. Three hundred-and-fifty people live in town with them--that is if everybody shows up all at once. I'd just been to Cemetery Hill, and it was filled with Mormons, Native Americans, many young children, and the Tibetan-flag-festooned graves of pot-smoking hippies, as Gayle explained them to me. Living in Bluff was still like that, he said, except that the dead got along much better.

"Were you born in this part of the country?" I asked from my lovely rocking chair on his porch.

With the gently lined face of a man who's spent most of his life under the bill of a cap, Gayle told me he'd grown up in an isolated part of Colorado, many miles from where we were sitting now. To give me a sense of how private and remote his family once was, he explained to me that his clearest memory from childhood was of his mother loudly berating his father:

Husband, this going into town once a month has got to stop.

Gayle left as soon as he could, joined the Navy to see the world, then came back to the States and went into the construction business (he still owns his own construction company) and jobs that took him from Montana all the way to New Orleans. Where, he told me proudly, he built a bridge across the Mississippi River.

I asked him if it had survived Hurricane Katrina.

"You better know it."

"Good work," I said.

We rocked in our lovely chairs.

After decades of being on the move, Gayle got sick of traveling and just wanted to be still somewhere. But like his mother he ended up marrying someone who didn't want to be still. As he said this he pointed out a pheasant skulking near the edge of the pond. The ducks were out of sight now, somewhere behind a small, reedy island.

"Do you know, I used to crawl on my stomach for a quarter mile just to shoot a bird?"

He met his wife Charlie when they were both going through painful and difficult divorces. One evening, soon after they were married, Charlie had been sitting right here on the porch, watching the pond at sunset, when an old coyote had come limping out from the brush for a cool drink of water. Just as he'd bent to the surface of the pond and started lapping, he unintentionally scared up one of its wild bass, which leapt high enough for him to catch it--reflex!--between his jaws. Then Charlie had watched as the coyote loped away with flesh dangling from either side of its mouth.

"Sometimes, the good thing isn't where you expect it," Gayle said. His pond lay calm and still in front of us.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Move Yourself. Move Others.

2009-09-02T17:37:00.013-06:00

Cross-pollination/news from my website:

"This fall, Dr. Em continues her longstanding tradition of reaching out beyond the pages of her books to create inspiring, memorable, moving events that challenge her listeners to claim their own stories, light the fire of their own imaginations, and reach for their highest aspirations."

"I speak on a wide range of subjects and meet audiences wherever and however they live, work, breathe and dream, yet two ideas are always central: I believe that as individuals, communities and business partners we must continually find ways to connect powerfully and imaginatively to each other… and that we will only inspire those around us when we have charged our own minds, hearts, voices, and our reaching, physical selves, with hope and courage."
—Mylène Dressler

Talks and workshops for Fall 2009/Winter 2010:

“The Art of Inspiration in Challenging Times” (for all audiences)

Join Dr. Em for her new series of lectures and seminars confronting the reality of the times we’re living in now. Learn what fresh steps can be taken to awaken our creative spirits and re-energize our passion for success. An interactive event that invites its listeners to explore memory, story, sense and sound as a means of sparking, within each of us, "a fiery laboratory of inspiration."

“A Dance With Language” (for all audiences)

"I was once a dancer told she should only dance; a professor told she should only teach; a writer and artist told I had no business with business. I listened to none of it. I empowered my own voice and drew on the many powerful stories and voices that danced around me. Now I help others do the same." Join in this series of events that explores the role of language in our lives and shares the intimate tools writers and artists use to move individuals and create vibrant, shared communities. An evening of imaginative narrative performance "wrapped in language that is crystalline in its clarity."
—The Denver Post

"Many students and colleagues told me that her event was the best they had ever attended—and this in a highly successful reading series that typically brings six or seven speakers a year. Intensely engaging and intimate… she has flair and a certain glamour, and weaves her reflections in a flowing and organic dialogue with the public. Captivating."
—Dr. Shannan Mattiace, Professor, Allegheny College, Pennsylvania

"Extraordinary… She has an innate ability to reach out and challenge you to think from a different place and consider a fresh perspective."
—Cynthia Fodell Mott, Marketing Director, The Houston Club; former Director of Marketing and Business Development, RE/MAX of Texas.

"I connected immediately with her, and left feeling energized, motivated and excited. She is a unique and energizing human being… a speaker who possesses grace, clarity, and offers genuine and effective advice."
—Lauren Rosen, filmmaker, The Carson McCullers Film Festival, Georgia

For bookings and further information: speaking@mylenedressler.com

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

High Functioning

2009-08-28T14:17:00.012-06:00

Jenny wants, she tells me as I hand my cash over the register to her, to do research into autism. As she says this she's working one of her three day jobs: this one is as a front-desk person at a resort just west of Sedona, Arizona. Her other jobs include waitressing at an upscale restaurant back in town, and peddling Mary Kay Cosmetics. And when she isn't serving wine and tapas or passing around lip gloss, she's attending classes at Northern Arizona University, where she majors in psychology.

"So why autism?" I ask, curious, as she hands me back my change. "Do you know someone who is--"

No, no, she interrupts me, wrinkling her freckled nose. But she's still determined to find out what causes it. She doesn't think, for example, that autism in children can be set down merely to an inappropriate regime of vaccinations. Some combination of factors, she tells me, brushing her short, blond hair behind her ears, must be at work--maybe a genetic component coupled with an environmental factor, which was only then coupled with a problematic inoculation. And then, she smiles at me confidently, there was also the widely ranging nature of the condition itself to consider.

"So you want to work with autistic children?"

"No. Just do the research side. I'm more a behind-the-scenes sort of gal."

We fall to discussing a documentary we'd both seen recently, about an autistic scientist who has done some unusual and very successful work with animals.

"The one who doesn't process in terms of language?" Jenny asks me.

"That's right. She 's thinks in color, I think--and spatially."

"Right. The one who helped cattle processors understand why their cows were so terrified to go down the chute."

"So she went through it herself, and could see exactly what it was that was making them so afraid. The way a certain black, square shadow fell just across the gate. Right before."

"So they fixed that."

"And now the cattle go in calmly. She helped them. The processors, I mean."

"Well, and the cattle."

"If you can call preparing an animal to be a steak helpful . . ."

"Well if it has to go," she shrugged, and I imagined it was the waitress in her pinching her shoulders together, "I'd say it might as well be helped to go peacefully."

Then I confided to her that a member of my own family suffered from a mild version of autism known as Asperger's. My twenty-something relation was able to live on his own, but he had trouble holding onto a job, and with authority, and with his unsympathetic neighbors.

"High-functioning." Jenny shook her head, sighing. "Not always so easy. So . . . what do you do for a living?"

I answered that I was a writer, a speaker, and a workshop leader. Also that I trained dogs, just for fun.

"So you have a degree of some kind?"

"A couple of them."

"Wow. You're lucky. Me, I'm thirty-five years old, and if there's one thing I've learned after fifteen years of no schooling and of having every kind of job you can imagine, it's that nobody pays any attention to what you have to say about anything important unless you have a PhD."

"Then you must be planning to go to graduate school?"

"Berkeley." She shut the front-desk register definitively, almost angrily. "I'm aiming high. So nobody will be able to ignore me because of what they think they know about me. Oh, wait, you want want of these?" she added, and from the holder next to her pulled out one of her Mary Kay sales cards.

In the glare of the bright lobby light I registered its pretty, soothing pink.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Valley of the Gods

2009-08-21T16:03:00.015-06:00

"Moki" is a Hopi word for "those who are gone," or "the people who have left." A winding, gravel road that contracts into three miles of hairpin turns cutting deep into the sides of a mesa above Valley of the Gods, Utah, is called the Moki Dugway. Parking at the top to look down into the Valley with its red buttes and eerie hoodoos, I met Dale, from Eastern Oregon.

I told him he seemed to be a long way from home; but no, it turned out he wasn't at all.

As a boy he had lived in a remote corner of Utah called Granite Canyon, and he'd come back many times, he told me, to visit what was left of his family's old homestead. This time he'd brought his wife, Patsy, with him, and his dog, named Bo. All three of them were comfortably retired--Bo napped at our feet as we clutched our sunglasses in the stiff wind above the dugway--and all had recently moved to Oregon to be nearer Dale and Patsy's children. But their hearts were still embedded in red rock.

Granite Canyon was so remote, Dale told me, that in the 1920's it had been a day's ride on horseback into tiny Cisco just to get the mail (Cisco isn't much more than a ghost town even now--I've seen it, and if people are living there, they don't want you to know about it). His mother had met his father getting the mail in this way, as they both crossed the Dewey Bridge at roughly the halfway point. They soon married and settled down in the Canyon to raise their children and cattle. Each time one of Dale's siblings had been about to burst into the world, his pregnant mother had mounted her horse, riding toward Cisco in hopes of catching the train in time to reach Grand Junction, Colorado, and the doctor. Usually, though, she didn't get close.

"In my case, she didn't," Dale grinned. "I was born in Utah."

It was a perfect life for all of them, tucked away in the hidden canyon, he said; but it all began to unravel with the passing of the Grazing Act. Soon "sheepmen," as he called them--I was fairly certain he wanted to spit the two thousand feet down to the Valley floor as he said the word, but was too much a gentleman in his nice clean windbreaker to do it--intruded themselves on the scene. The sheepmen weren't so gentlemanly, and they dynamited the passes that Dale's family used to bring their cattle down from the mountains and into the grazing fields. The ranch couldn't survive this and other explosions of the time, so the family at last gave up, sold out and left.

"After a long time," Dale said, reaching down and patting Bo, "I was finally able to bring myself to go back." All that remained was the chimney of the main house, and the ruins of the old root cellar.

"But the cabins in the mountains that we used to have for our summer camp were still standing, and the local people there still call them by our family's name. They're still called the Wood Cabins. I mean it. If you go there, you can see for yourself."

"So . . . this was definitely worth the climb to get up here, wasn't it?" he straightened and turned to Patsy, and then looked down.

"Yep. We definitely don't have anything like this in Oregon."

"Why our children would want to live in Portland is way beyond us. We won't, will we, Patsy? Not enough sun."

I asked him if the rest of his family had been back to see the old place.

"Oh, yeah. I took my brother there and showed him, and his face just lit up. Just lit up. At nothing but the chimney and the root cellar. Nothing much at all. But it was special. Just to be able to show him that we were still standing." And Dale stood and balanced and looked out over the twists and turns of the blasted pass below us, named for those long vanished.

--MD

Santa Maria, California

2009-08-17T09:35:00.011-06:00

I didn't know, until I met Dennis, that you could grow organic vegetables inside a small, ancient, crowded RV.

"These here are my sprouts," he showed me. "And here is some kale. And here," he pulled a Tupperware container from somewhere deep in the dense interior, "just take a look at these." He handed the bowl to me, and I looked down at an orgy of naked, thread-tailed, perfectly fresh beans.

Scraggle-bearded, tanned, lean in short-shorts and rough hiking boots, Dennis is someone I'd just met at a gas station where our two rigs had nearly collided. I'd gotten out and apologized, and he'd tilted his bleached head of hair toward me.

"You're not from around here, are you?" he said. "You're too nice. I can tell from your accent you've spent time in the South. Texas, my bet."

"How'd you know?"

"I can pretty much place any accent, I get around the world so much."

Dennis travels and lives in his battered camper with his surfboards on top, his bike suspended on the back and ladders hung from both sides. Also with a big, yellow, part-wolf, part-Akita named Suki in the cab. Inside his mobile home is his store of vegetables and jewelry. When I told him I was a writer, he told me he was at work on a book about "how to practice organic methods whether on the road or at home," and as we walked our dogs around the littered margins of the fuel pumps he added that he'd just come from three months of very helpful meditational studies down at the Agape Church in Los Angeles.

"I had to. To clear my head. You wouldn't believe how bad it's gotten. That's how I knew you were from out of state. People here are so angry. They spend too much time stuck in traffic, and fighting over the things that are disappearing. What I want is to teach people how to live simply and be at peace. We're going through a dangerously transitional time in this world, and we need to learn to love each other again."

As our dogs stepped gingerly over the tossed Doritos bags and trashed grass, I couldn't deny it.

For fifteen years, Dennis told me, he's been supporting his simple lifestyle by selling jewelry. Every year he makes a pilgrimage to Tucson to the trade show there, and stocks up on, as his card reads, "Natural Stone Bracelets, Hearts and Beads, Amber Necklaces, Pendants from Europe, Coral and Turquoise Nuggets, and Hemp, Coco and Puka Shell" classics. Then he drives up and down the coast selling his wares to surf shops, boutiques, and metaphysical dens.

"I used to make $2,000 a week. Now it's down to $600. People don't necessarily need crystals. Jewelry is a luxury. It's not like enchiladas or tacos."

I asked him if he was happy, and he admitted he had his moments, that it was all hard work. But life was still good. He began every morning surfing. Then, at mid-day, after making a few sales, he went swimming. He'd been on the road for so long he knew every public swimming pool between Santa Barbara and Half Moon Bay.

"And today is like that?" I asked him.

He nodded, and showed me his list of appointments. Then he looked down at his watch, and excused himself and his dog, because they had to get moving. He had to get to San Luis Obispo; the swimming pool there opened at one o'clock. Before he left, he wrote his website down for me, where he told me I could find his delicious recipes for simple, affordable, organic foods. You can read more about Dennis' beans and cookies at:

www.professorsprouts.com

--MD

Photo by Bruce Barone

A story submitted by my friend . . .

2009-08-09T09:40:00.004-06:00

. . . Weezie Kerr Mackey, just a few days ago. Weezie is wonderful writer and the author of the young adult novel, Throwing Like a Girl. Be sure to visit her sparkling website and keep your eye out for her next novel. Weezie lives in Houston with her husband and two sons; you can leave comments on her story, "Honeymoon," below, or contact her directly through her website. Now, let's all enjoy a good snuggle!--MD

Honeymoon, by Weezie Kerr Mackey

2009-08-09T07:38:00.020-06:00

During a thunderstorm last night, Matthew, my seven-year-old, came into my room and said, "I'm so scared I could cry." I said to come up and he flew into bed where I was reading.

He said, "Tell me a happy story. Tell me about your honeymoon."

I told him about Copper Harbor, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in February. A story he knows well.

After a while he said, "I wonder where I will go on my honeymoon."

We both watched the ceiling fan. I rested my open book on my chest and said, "It might depend on who you marry."

He said, "Maybe Australia. That's a really big island."

"Also it's a continent."

"I know," he said. "Or Pennsylvania. They've got a lot of interesting things to do there. Like that bell with the crack."

"The Liberty Bell."

"And the lady who sewed the American flag. She has a house there."

Matthew's first grade teacher, Ms. Allen, was from Pennsylvania. A great deal in his life last school year revolved around what Ms. Allen said.

"Or Hollywood. New York City. Are people allowed to go through the Great Wall of China?"

I wondered how to answer the "through" part of that question.

"What kind of girl do you think you might marry?" I asked, moving on.

"Pretty and cool, kind of like you because you love Daddy so much."

When the rain stopped and when he knew the time was coming for him to go back to his own room, Matthew said, "Your bed is so nice."

I remember thinking the same of my parents' bed.

"And I'm so tired," he added in case I wasn't catching his drift.

I don't usually let either of my boys sleep in our bed. I said, "Should you fall asleep here and Daddy can carry you into your room later?"

He smiled in that way children do at night, when they're cozy and happy and feeling sentimental. "Yes," he whispered because he got his way and didn't want to break the spell.

He nestled next to me, warm and damp, locking me in so that it was impossible to lift my book or turn off the light, or do anything but lie beside him.

Weezie Kerr Mackey
Houston, Texas

Photo, "View from my Loft in Eastworks," by Bruce Barone

2009-08-06T14:24:00.009-06:00

"One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you see."--Giorgio Morandi

Courtesy of my friend, the luminously talented photographer Bruce Barone.--MD

To see more of Bruce's work, click here.

Sandy's Golden

2009-08-05T11:54:00.009-06:00

Sandy breeds and raises Golden Retrievers in Grand Junction, Colorado. I met her at the small airport there, while we were both sitting at the gate waiting for a flight. While sorting through her wallet next to me she happened to pull out one of her business cards, and as soon as I saw the embossed dog-in-profile on one side, it was all the opening I needed.

"You run dogs, too?" I asked, explaining that I lived with border collies.

Her face lit up. As she talked, she pushed back her carefully done gray hair, animatedly, touched the bright scarf that partly concealed the wrinkles around her neck, and moved the light sweater she had thrown over her bag. Sandy was 66 years old, I learned, and divorced, and had been "in dogs" since the 1970's, when she was single. She hadn't wanted to be single back then, but well, so it was: "Vietnam took so many of the men of my generation, there just weren't that many good ones left."

The dogs, instead, became her life. She showed and still shows her Goldens in obedience and agility. She very rarely breeds; at the moment she was co-owner of a bitch, she told me, but the dog wasn't a very good parent to her pups, which sometimes happened, and not just with dogs.

"I did eventually get married."

She hesitated, looking down.

"But things didn't work out, Sandy?"

"No. Well. They worked out like this. I left Colorado and went to New Jersey. Why? Because I'd met and fallen in love again with my high school sweetheart. Can you believe it? It sounds so romantic, doesn't it?"

It did, I said . . . and waited.

She adjusted her scarf. "Yes. Yes. It was a wonderful little story to tell people. But it turned out that was all it was."

It turned out her new husband didn't like dogs. Especially males.

"So he made me give up all my dogs, my males, and get rid of all my agility equipment. And do you want to know what? It was NOT worth it. I ended up hating New Jersey, and that man I was living with--he wasn't the boy I remembered from high school. But still, I hung in there for three years."

She touched the sweater beside her. "I am a bulldog."

Eventually she gave up on the marriage and returned to Colorado, where she bought all of her agility equipment back and began raising Goldens again.

"And things are better now?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I am SO much happier. My life is wonderful again, easy again. And just look at this!"

From behind her luggage she pulled out a puppy carrier, which until that moment I hadn't even seen.

"You aren't!"

"I am. I am going to get my newest dog."

I didn't even need to ask:

"A male," Sandy said, with a smile.

--MD

A New Story Submitted by a Reader

2009-07-31T19:48:00.003-06:00

My thanks to Dr. Noreen Lape, Director of the Writing Program at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, for sending in this week's fine guest-story, "Ridgewood." In an accompanying email, Noreen told me she just couldn't shake all the small ironies in the incident below. Nor could I. Read on. Write on.--MD

Ridgewood, by Noreen Lape

2009-07-29T15:46:00.010-06:00

A transplanted northerner, I lived until very recently in bucolic Upatoi, Georgia. Unlike the city-folk in nearby Columbus whose homes sit as close as two Alabama cousins, Upatoians tend to opt for two acres and a pool. My middle-class neighborhood of Ridgewood Estates--a community of mainly 1970's and 1980's eclectic-style homes--had as its centerpiece a large, beautiful, white antebellum plantation known as Ridgewood. Every Fourth of July, in honor of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Upatoians join together at what I always thought of as The Big House for an Independence Day celebration complete with fried chicken, watermelon, live blues, and a spectacular fireworks show.

This summer, not long after the Fourth, my husband and I were at home on our two acres when a Guatemalan man named Romeo knocked on our door.

We thought he was looking for work; instead he was looking for help. He explained that he was stranded in Upatoi, twenty miles from his home in South Columbus. Cruising Victory Drive in the early morning, a contractor had picked Romeo up on a corner where he'd waited along with other migrant workers seeking a day's wages. After Romeo had spent ten hours at six different homes in Upatoi, cutting lawns, mending fences, planting flowers, hauling pine straw, spreading mulch, pulling weeds and pruning bushes, he decided his work day was over. Since the soft light of dusk had not yet given way to the still darkness of night, the contractor begged to differ, and so he exercised his rights not to pay Romeo and not to drive him home.

On hearing this, my husband Dale, a genuinely good guy, decided to give Romeo a lift. Juiced up on indignation and maybe a little testosterone, Dale thought he would swing by the worksite and have a chat with the contractor. As our Mazda Minivan inched toward The Big House, Romeo pointed out a sprawling ranch home on the left. A young black man, shirt sleeves rolled and armits stained with sweat, was trimming hedges in its side yard.

My husband rolled down the window. "Hey buddy, was this guy working for you?"

The man stopped his clipping. "He was, sir."

Romeo leaned across our front seat and demanded, "You pay me!"

The young man said to Dale, "He didn't want to finish the job. He got tired of all the work we had to do. I told him I'd drive him back when he finished. Anyway, I don't have his money. My boss does."

Not quite knowing what to do next, Dale pointed our minivan toward South Columbus. Romeo asked if we had any children.

"Two," Dale replied, "a boy eight and a girl five."

Romeo had left five children and a wife in Guatemala to come with his cousin to America to find work. Prior to that, he said, he'd been in the Guatemalan army.

"Litte pay. Too much gun," he admitted.

For the rest of the ride, Dale tried to convince Romeo to call the police and report how he had been ripped off. Romeo thought he might contact a Puerto Rican officer on the force who had befriended the migrant workers and looked out for them. Dale took the Victory Drive exit in Columbus and pulled into a trailer park populated by the city's poorest blacks and migrant workers. At the site of the minivan, the cautious gawked out of the dirty windows while the brave spilled out of the rusty metal pens that served as their shelters. They watched Dale and Romeo.

"Good luck, buddy. Remember, call that police officer," my husband said.

Romeo pulled out his wallet. "I give you money for ride."

Before Dale could answer, Romeo insisted: "You give me number. I work for you."

"No, man," Dale responded. "It's on me."

Noreen Lape
Carlisle, Pennsylvania

The Health of the Male

2009-07-27T16:23:00.006-06:00

I had never seen a kayak fisherman. At first, approaching the beached, bright yellow plastic boat with all its rigging, and the blond fisherman himself in his hefty gaiters, with an official-looking document swinging like a press pass around his neck, I thought I'd stumbled across a researcher. But no, Steve, as he introduced himself, worked construction, and had just come in from fishing on his day off. It was still early, and my walk around Monterey Bay had hardly begun; but Steve, at high noon, was already finished, his thirty-ish face just beginning to burn, the edge of his boat decorated with crusty, dense-skinned fish.

"May I look at them?"

"You bet, " he said, and introduced me to strange mouths and brilliant scales in colors I'd also never seen before: a copper, he called one gaping, wide-eyed corpse; another was a vermilion rockfish; then sandab, redfish, rock cod. All in all there were a half-dozen, and good-sized. I asked how he had caught them, and he showed me the several lines he'd trolled behind him as he'd paddled; he'd also carried a strong rod and reel, but had ended up catching everything the more casual way.

"Did you have to go out very far to find these?" I squinted into the brilliant bay.

"No. That's the amazing thing," he said. "Anywhere else, you'd have to go miles and miles out to catch certain kinds of fish. Here, you just go past the buoys right there, and bam, the shelf drops off. Huge, deep water."

We both looked at and tried to imagine it: the whale-deep water.

I asked him if he got out to fish very often, and he said he did, nowadays. He drove over from Salinas, the more affordable, inland town where he lived. Construction work along the coast had fallen off so badly he had more free time than he liked to think about; but there was no point, he figured, just sitting in front of the television. He might as well go out and catch his dinner.

"So one of these will be your meal tonight? How will you cook it?"

"Well, of course I love anything fried in batter--you too?--but I'm trying to be healthier these days. So I prepare a fillet--I do leave a little of the skin on, I can't help it, it's so good--and fry it in some butter--but not too much--and some garlic powder. I try to keep it simple and light."

"And you'll prepare this just for yourself?"

"Yep," he nodded. "Just me."

I asked him if he was happy with his catch for the day, and he tilted his head, as if, no, he was slightly disappointed.

"The thing is, I forgot my hat. So I couldn't stay out as long as I wanted to. You just can't do that, sit out and bake in the sun out there. You'll regret it later. So I came in."

I thanked him for showing me his fish, for taking the time to talk to me before stowing everything away again in what I took to be his pick-up truck, parked along the seawall above us. I hadn't meant to slow him down.

"No problem," he smiled. He was calm and friendly and obviously happy to have obliged. A family had come down to the sand as we spoke. As I walked away he waved at the children who had strayed over to the rocks, hunting for starfish in the tidepools.

--MD

The Health of the Female

2009-07-25T07:15:00.006-06:00

I stood outside the Otter Project in downtown Monterey, California, disappointed. The glass door to the office was locked, and as I peered in no one seemed to be moving around inside. I'd gone out walking the dog and had hoped to find someone to tell me how California's sea otters were doing these days. I was about to pull the leash away when a young woman with sandy, bobbed hair took shape on the other side of the window. She wore sturdy boots, a yellow t-shirt that read "All who wander are not lost," a bright smile--and she carried a key. I was in luck.

Heather let us both in. She'd been stuffing envelopes in the back but was happy to let us sit down at the large oval table with her and talk about the Otter Project (www.otterproject.wordpress.com). The Project is a small non-profit, she told me, that works to protect the otters from oil pollution, sewage and agricultural runoff, and pesticides like DDT and PCB. The chemicals weaken otters' immune systems, with the most dire consequences affecting the females, who are then unable to reproduce, diminishing the population of healthy otters overall. The Otter Project supports international efforts to ban pollutants and contaminants, lobbies local officials to fix sewage problems, and opposes drilling along California's coast. Its office employs three people; Heather is the administrative assistant, with primary responsibility for answering phones, getting materials out, website design and maintenance and social networking on Facebook and Twitter.

She struck me as warm, kind, knowledgeable, patient and excited all at once--I couldn't imagine a better ambassador.

"You must like your work?" I asked.

"It's so incredible," she beamed. "I am so happy, happy, happy!"

She works for the Otter Project for twenty-eight hours a week. At sixteen dollars an hour, she earns about $1400 a month. Her rent in Monterey (one of the most expensive places in the country, if not the world, to live in) costs her a thousand dollars a month. She manages with a little help from her parents, and by doing catering work on the side.

But life hadn't always been so happy, she told me.

"I studied Recreation Services in college and worked for years in the big hotels and resorts in Miami. I made huge money, wore a suit every day, was paid for forty hours a week and worked seventy. Then I moved into event planning, thinking it would be a little better, but after a while it got to feel like all I was was some conduit for funneling money from one wealthy human being to another."

So Heather quit her job, rested in Bali for a while ("the people are so artistic there, so filled with joy and color") until the money ran out, then came to California to work for a Los Angeles youth hostel. In California, she fell head over heels in love, but it ended badly, and she moved north to Monterey. And suddenly, for the first time in her life, she felt at home.

The only problem, she sighed, was that she was now thirty-five years old and still hadn't found someone to mate with for life. She was getting nervous; time was running out. And there weren't many singles in Monterey. "Only," she said, "young students over at the Institute and rich marrieds who are all settled down." But she hadn't given up on marriage and a family. "Something will happen. And I want to be here. It just feels so right."

I looked at Heather and wondered how it was someone hadn't latched onto her healthy, glowing, wonderful spirit just yet, and where she might find the right companion to help pass that spirit along . . .

--MD

In our next post: The Health of the Male

Stunt Man

2009-07-16T08:06:00.006-06:00

With only a few minutes left before take-off, a bear of a man bears toward me down the aisle of this small airplane. He's white-bearded, huge and solid, and he is--I feel this the same way you wince at the arms of a train crossing lowering just as you're about to clear the tracks--clearly bound for the seat next to mine. For a moment, I tense. I'd been enjoying having the arm rest all to myself . . .

But Harry Madsen shared our small space with aplomb, a practiced adjustment of his bulk. He pulled a book from the bag he'd tucked under the seat in front of him, without elbowing me; I glanced at it and said nothing, not until we were in the air and New York had dropped away from us like a crowded plate.

His reading appeared to combine philosophy and horse wrangling. I had to ask. He answered me carefully at first, as if he wasn't sure I was the right person to hear what he had to say.

"This is somebody I helped out with some guns."

"Oh."

"He lives down on a ranch in Arizona. He's got problems there."

"Oh."

"Coyotes. You like books?"

"I do. I'm a writer."

"Me too. At least, I am now. I'm writing a fantasy. Or trying to."

"It's hard work, isn't it?"

"No, not compared to what I used to do."

He smiled, and his teeth were perfect, as white as his beard.

Harry had worked for years in Hollywood, as a stunt man on tv series like Kojak and McCloud, and for Burt Lancaster in his films ("except I was a little too short--he was nice about it though, a great guy"). He threw himself around in comedies like Ghostbusters and, once, for Helen Hayes, wearing a pink blouse and a gray wig. I asked him how he'd found his way into stuntwork, and he waved his paw of a hand and said his father, who'd owned a ranch and silver mine in Oaxaca, Mexico had wanted him to become an educated man--but that four years of college had been nothing but boring, so Harry decided to join the rodeo circuit instead, working up and down the East Coast. One thing led to another, and one summer he found he was stunting in New York on the original The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.

"I love that movie!" I say, delighted. "Were you down on the train tracks with the electric rail? Did you bite it?"

"That was me, all right."

I told Harry he looked good, considering how rough and gritty the work had to be, and he laughed and said:

"Well, if ribs don't count. I got to know all my other bones by their first names."

The stunt he was most proud of was a perfectly executed hit-and-roll off a speeding car. His timing was so perfect, and the hit appeared so horribly real as the car smashed into him, that when the take was over the film crew, certain he'd been killed, had rushed into the shot, nearly ruining it.

"That was magic," he blinked, remembering.

Over time he became so successful at his work and so well-known that he was hired as a stunt coordinator, sometimes supervising as many as 35 stunt people for a single film, as he did for Martin Sheen's The Kennedy Years. Then three of his friends were killed in a single year. Two died in high falls, and one in a car-dive into the Hudson River. Dives were tricky; you took the engine out of the front and filled the trunk with sandbags and weight, to keep the nose up, but still it was dangerous, especially on the driver's side.

Harry looked down at his book of philosophy and said, "I told him not to do it. My friend. He called me the day before and asked, and I said, 'You can't do it like you're planning, not that way if you're going to be on the driver's side.' But he did it anyway, and the windshield crashed in, and that was that."

Not longer after, Harry was doing a bit of car-work himself and realized, just before the take, that he wasn't feeling anything. He wasn't sweating. His heart wasn't beating fast. That was when he knew he was done. Fear was what saved you. A stunt man had no business being a stunt man unless he was worried.

"So what do you do now?"

"I write. I travel. I live in the East Village with my wife. It used to be so rough in my neighborhood, but it's so quiet now. New York has lost its edge, too," he said, and told me he was on his way to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, to visit an old friend who lived in a peaceful little cabin, near Truckee.

--MD

Wedding Day

2009-07-07T20:35:00.011-06:00

I haven't posted for some weeks now, and for this reason: my 86-year-old mother-in-law has been struggling all this time, mightily, bravely, with broken bones, a weakened heart, and a blood clot that despite the strongest medicine would not dissolve and let her be. Last week, we lost her. Momma squeezed our hands until the end. She tried to hang on. But she couldn't.

Of all the stories that she told of her life, this is the one I want to share with you now:

It is 1942. She is standing on a station platform in Houston, Texas, waiting to begin the first long journey of her life, reaching up to hold on and get on board. She's dressed carefully in a light blouse and skirt, a short jacket, and a hat that sits over her puffed hairdo. She's a brunette Betty Grable, with full, round lips and shapely calves. She is twenty years old.

She's never been out of state before, and she's nervous, and she wants to look good. Real good. She's on her way to Illinois, to an Air Force training base where she'll be married to a man she's known for a little less than a year--that handsome, square-jawed boy she met on the floor of a local polka hall, even though she came, that night, swinging with another boy. Still, you don't always have to dance with the one that brung ya. Not during war-time. Not with all those hungry, eager faces around.

The young soldiers cramming that train tease and remind her of this through half-a-dozen states. She's the only pretty girl in the car, and so of course, how hard they try, oh how hard they do try to dissuade her, the whole way: Now don't you do it, sweetheart, not so fast, not when you haven't even gotten to know me yet, now don't you go chasin' after some dumb fly boy, honey . . .

And how she smiles and laughs and flirts with them, and how young and handsome and sweet they all are, but they don't change her mind, not for a second, not one of them, because she's going to marry that square-jawed turret gunner.

She's dressed to look good, real good, and she does her best to stay neat sitting up in a stiff seat the whole way.

If only it hadn't been so hot that summer of '42. No air conditioning in the cars, not a breath of fresh air unless everyone kept their windows shoved open, which they did. And so the soot flew in and rolled around the inside of the cars, and gave sweaty boys mustaches over their hairless lips, and any poor girl who thought she might arrive looking spruce for her wedding day black eyebrows and a grimy neck and a layer of dust all over her clothes as if a pencil had been sharpened right over her head. And that was how she showed up at the station. Not to be greeted by the turret gunner--thank goodness--who was busy training. But by another girl, who was already married and on the base and who helped her to get ready and cleaned up. And then it was time to put on the suit she'd brought in her one suitcase, and in a few minutes she was standing in front of all those handsome young boys who were there to be trained, trained to fight, but for the moment stood alongside her in the chapel, amazed by her, and there was her turret gunner, also amazed, and just as handsome as she remembered, and maybe even more so . . .

It was 1942, and it was war-time. You didn't hesitate. You took your chances. You stood up, and you said your name:

"I, Victoria Theresa"

and you said 'I do' to everything still to come.

November 2, 1922-June 28, 2009

Judy's Advice

2009-06-15T13:33:00.008-06:00

Judy's advice is to make sure you have a sure-footed animal underneath you.

As she said this we were poised on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I'd spotted her a few minutes before, sitting all alone, away from the crowd, on a shelf of yellow rock jutting a few feet beyond the safety rail. It was still early morning and cool in the desert; she wore a light, official-looking jacket with a corporate logo embroidered on its sleeve; her hair was neatly coifed, every short, brown strand in place, her head erect, business-like. She sat perfectly still, looking into all that airy, layered space, her square chin raised, her hands folded level across her knees. I wasn't sure I should disturb her; she seemed to have found a way to be alone and at peace in a Canyon bubbling with tourists. Then she turned her head slightly toward me, and our eyes met.

Judy, it turned out, was a financial advisor from Bangor, Maine, recently arrived in Arizona for a business convention. She'd come several days early so that she could venture deep into the Canyon, and the day before had completed a mule ride to the bottom and back. And that was how she could recommend solid hooves and steady focus to me.

What I wanted to know was what sort of advice she was giving her clients in Maine.

"Buy, buy, buy," she said emphatically, still with her hands folded across her lap. "Don't listen to the media. Keep calm. Don't panic. Keep buying, if you can."

I thought it best to take all of this with a grain of salt. I mean, that embroidered logo glinting on her sleeve, Ameriprise, 10,000 financial consultants nationwide: what else could I expect?

Then Judy said something else:

"The other thing we have to do right now is listen, listen, listen. But not to the talking heads. We have to listen to our best selves. We have to communicate that to each other. Communicate, communicate. Then we're going to be okay, I think."

I asked her if she thought the mood at the convention that week was going to be as positive and hopeful as her own outlook. She assured me it would be.

"Because the glum people don't come, you know. They don't think to get out and look at all of this."

She swept a hand across the bluish-gold horizon, then pointed down to show me the distant thread of trail where she'd taken the mule ride the day before. The name of her mule had been Maud. Maud, frankly, had been terrifying. Maud, it seemed, had a penchant for stopping and eating snips of vegetation . . . snips that happened to be perched on the edge of sheer cliff ledges. Yet at all times Maud was completely, stubbornly confident. After a while, Judy had to force herself simply to hang on tight and stare down into the pit of the desert while her ride went on about the business of living.

"Sometimes," Judy counseled, "you just have to trust that the mule knows more than you do."

--MD

Of Cows and Men

2009-06-01T14:04:00.005-06:00

Priscilla has lost her cows. This is not a good thing, not for a Navajo. For a Navajo, cows are income, cows are livelihood, cows are why you bother to get a grazing lease in the first place. Priscilla's family has had cows for generations. They should have about a hundred head right now. Instead, they have eighty. Twenty of the herd have been playing hide and seek for a while. Well, for about four years.

I met Priscilla in the Twin Rocks Trading Post, Utah, where she works during the day. She lives about seventeen miles from the post; when I asked her if I would know the name of the town where she has a house, she said,

"Nope. Just out in the big wide open. Out on the reservation."

Priscilla had just been explaining to me the difference between some of the Navajo baskets on display at the Trading Post. The wider the weave, the more elaborate the work, and therefore the more expensive, she said. Baskets made with a smaller weave cost much less.

"That's hard to understand," I puzzled over this (they all looked equally beautiful to me). "Isn't the smaller work much more labor-intensive?"

Not the point at all, it turns out. The dramatic, larger weaves are more sought after; the narrower weaves are rather everyday, originally made for household use.

Priscilla's family has lost twenty head of cattle down in Chinle Wash, and now the rebel herd won't come home. Every year her father, husband and son mount an expedition to get the runaways out. The cows simply retreat into the tight weaves of cane and thorny underbrush. "They just go into these little tunnels that are way too small and tight for people to go in," Priscilla told me, throwing her long, straight hair back, "and like, disappear." They take refuge in the harsh desert canyons; but since there was plenty of food and water in the wash, the cows had been doing just fine, year after year. They had no interest, apparently, in the everyday business of being rounded up, sold, and trucked off to die.

Last year, the annual cow-hunting expedition took with it a trained border collie purchased from an expert rancher in Colorado. The herding dog immediately took off after the delinquents, went into the narrow, thorny weave along with them . . . and never came out. Priscilla looked and waited for days, but eventually had to accept the dog had gone AWOL, too.

This year Priscilla and her family are having two Australian cattle dogs specifically raised and trained to work as a team to bring the animals home. At this point the pups are still too young to go into the wash, and Priscilla is nervous about them going in, anyway. She doesn't want to lose any more animals--especially dogs. I pointed to my own border collie, waiting patiently outside the trading post, and told her I could understand that perfectly.

"You know, somebody once advised me," she told me, "that if you lose a dog like that, you should leave behind some material that smells of you in whatever place you last saw the dog, and the dog will come back and lie down on it and wait for you."

I filed that away, just in case. "Do you think your dog is still okay, down in that wash?" I asked. "Do you think he might still come out?"

"That's what I tell myself. I hope so. But I don't know . . . and I don't know how much more we can take," she sighed, sitting again behind the cash register. "My dad is getting real old, you know, and all he wants to do is get them out before they come and take him away into the narrow place too."

I nodded, trying to picture it, an old man being folded into the wash with his cows, a single strand into the coffin of the desert.

--MD

A New Story by a Reader

2009-05-27T07:31:00.004-06:00

It's my great pleasure to share the story below, "Bull," sent in by Dr. Michelle Lee, a wonderful writer and recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, now living in Port Orange, Florida. No need for me to 'pre-read' this powerful story about Michelle and her father confronting cancer together. I will simply say that it is honest and beautiful. My warmest thanks to Michelle for sending it.

If you'd like to submit a story to American Stories NOW, please feel free to contact me for submission guidelines.--MD

Bull, by Michelle Lee

2009-05-26T18:25:00.007-06:00

I was with my father the day he was castrated. Not like a young bull in heavy summer when flies would swarm around the open wound in chaotic patterns of gnawing. Not with a sharp knife, a clean cut slicing the scrotum as neatly as a tab of butter. There was no ritual, no blood offering in a brass cup, no chants or blessing, no hands outstretched in a bowl of taking. There were no women swaying hip to hip outside his tent, waiting for the first taste of fertility beating raw outside a body. There was a gray carpet, a bank of televisions tuned to CNN, a receptionist behind Plexiglas, a nurse who called his name and escorted him through a door so he could be weighed first, then recorded on a chart. I sat in the waiting room with my purse in my lap. I counted tiles. I'd felt the needles pushing beneath the rice paper skin of his bicep, five tiny implants, five points of a hormonal star exploding. I counted tiles.

My father came back ten minutes later. His shoulders dipped south as he shuffled toward me. "All done?" I asked, and the corner of his mouth lifted enough to answer, to say he was more than done. In his neck, I could see the map of his veins, a mountain pass of blue roads falling into disrepair, coming to dead ends. I had spent twenty-one days clearing the underbrush from those roads, fighting to prove to my father that he was strong enough, that he could survive. I had held his hand when doctor number one with a degree from Columbia explained the radiation treatment. I had rubbed the soft spots behind his ears when doctor number three with the bedpan face listed the side effects of the chemo drug. I had stopped mentioning the disease. Words left me.

Our walk to the car was quiet. He ambled over to the driver's side, though I asked him if he wanted me to drive. He stuck the key in the ignition, but didn't turn on the engine. Outside, a pair of young trees bent in the wind that had picked up since morning. Their branches clattered together, shook a curl of leaves onto the windshield. My father began to cry.

"It's my fault," he said, his body rolling into itself as if to keep warm. "It's my fault." I protested softly, but my father, who had barely said ten words a day since he was diagnosed, was startlingly clear, almost adamant. "I've ruined her life."

For a moment, I wished he was an Alzheimer's patient and couldn't remember, wished that my mother was a blur in the blink of his eye. She blamed him for getting sick. She blamed him for the weight of his eyelids, for a tongue so thick his speech was curdled. She blamed him for having to come to this office today, for becoming less than a man, for taking away her sex life with the hormone therapy that made no promise to heal.

Yet my father stayed. He slumped in his easy chair with his head cradled in his hands and worried about how this woman who had slept with him for forty-one years was going to survive without him.

The tears beaded in the thread between his lip, spilled down to his chin. I took him in my arms, rocked this man who had shown me how to draw a horse with a piece of charcoal and taught me how to swim in the backyard pool. This man who hummed beneath his '75 Datsun on the weekends and came home every night in a tie at six-thirty. This man whose hands were once large enough to hold a baby bunny found on the back porch. This man.

Michelle Lee
Port Orange, Florida

Replenishment at Sea

2009-05-24T08:06:00.002-06:00

Cornville, Arizona. Five hundred miles from the nearest ocean I meet Kevin: short, mustached, strong, sunburned, with muscled upper arms that show off the edge of a tattoo just under his white tee; he's set aside his long-sleeved red flannel shirt and hung it on a nearby rail. He tells me he's content as long as he's living "the free life of a sailor."

I have to blink. We're in the high desert. And Kevin is finishing up a job scraping and staining the wood deck of a mountain cabin.

"I'm from Wisconsin, see," he says, as if that explains it.

Actually, it does. Kevin grew up near Lake Superior, where he does carpentry work in the summer and fall for about eighteen dollars an hour ("we've still got plenty of Chicago millionaires up there, so there's no shortage of stuff to do"). He could, he told me, charge forty dollars an hour, the way some of his competitors do; but then he'd be sitting around too much waiting. And Kevin doesn't like to sit around doing nothing. He keeps busy up north, working until deer-hunting season is over, and maybe does a little ice fishing; then in January heads south to escape the coldest part of the Midwest winter, which he hates. For a long time he worked on the oil derricks in the panhandle of Texas, even though now and then he got punched in the face just for saying which part of the country he came from. "First time, I never even saw it coming. I just said, 'Wisconsin,' and WHAM!"

When the derricks shut down and the crews were reassigned to North Dakota, Kevin said no thank you. Global warming, he was certain, was making the North even colder--even though, he admitted, every year one or two of the ice fisherman who ventured out onto Lake Superior still had a big chunk of ice break off underneath them and carry them helplessly away. "And then," he frowned, "they have to come rescue you by helicopter, which is completely embarrassing."

Kevin sticks to inland waters, these days.

His land-lubbing life began after his three years in the Navy. All he'd wanted his whole life was a battleship, he said, his eyes hard and still disappointed. "It was a matter of pride, for me, to be on a battleship. That was my whole goal." Instead, he found himself assigned to the U.S.S. Sacramento, a supply ship ("well, with some guns," he allowed), following the nuclear battleship the U.S.S. Enterprise around wherever it went. For three years Kevin stalked the Enterprise, shadowing her every move, dreaming of sailing aboard her instead of merely outfitting her in the middle of the night. This was called "replenishment at sea"--a highly secret process, still a mystery to the Russians and the Chinese, in which a U.S. nuclear vessel was completely resupplied, in darkness, without being in port, and sometimes in high seas.

When his stint with the Navy was up, Kevin left the water and tried to settle down. From time to time he rented a house in Wisconsin and filled it with belongings. But somehow, every two or three years or so, he just couldn't take it anymore and had to sell everything he owned and leave in the dead of night. When I met him he'd just done it again, and was living in a small tent next to his pick-up truck on the banks of a wide, blue, rippling creek. He had no family and no responsibilities, he told me; he could go wherever he liked and do whatever he wanted. "See, hauling stuff around," he said, picking up his scraper and shrugging his shoulders, as though shaking something cold and hard off, but then recovering, "is just not my thing."

--MD

Two Views of Manhattan

2009-05-19T18:12:00.004-06:00

Singh picks me up at my hotel for an early morning run to JFK. The light is dim, the streets and tollway nearly empty, but he drives with abrupt twists of his steering wheel, darting into what seem to me imaginary, short-lived openings. He tells me that he emigrated from India eleven years ago, and has been driving a cab in New York City for six. He started to notice a downturn in things long before the talking heads on television did. People traveling shorter distances. People tipping much less. And this on top of the longstanding loss of fares down to the World Trade Center. Since he rents his cab by the week and is responsible for the same payment no matter what, he explains to me, he now works roughly twelve hours a day to earn what he used to make in eight. He usually goes to bed at midnight, and gets up again at 4 a.m. The rest of the time he spends taking care of his family. His parents have been visiting from India, which was making things a little harder right now, with the extra cooking and laundry. It's almost a relief to get into his cab each morning, he says, even if things were far too quiet on the streets.

"So I guess now is not a good time to become a cab driver?" I ask him.

"No, no, actually it is. You could become one right away if you wanted to. That's the thing," he twists and darts. "Everybody complains there aren't enough cabs."

The day before I'd talked with Christie, who dressed in an elegant, all-black uniform sells handbags for up to $25,000 each at a mid-town boutique. She told me she was grateful at the moment for the women of Dubai, who still came in to shop and kept her commissions going.

She told me that she worked an unpredictable schedule: some weeks five days straight, then one day off; at other times three straight, then one off. A single mother, she woke up at six each morning, then at seven shook her fifteen-year-old son to life. (Through an older friend he'd just discovered pot, she confided, worried.) After seeing him off to school she walked and rode the subway to begin work at nine-thirty; in the afternoon treated herself to a decent lunch (her only real meal of the day); then at six-thirty rode the subway back to her Lower East Side apartment. She bought a lottery ticket once a week and dreamed of moving to California.

"What do you do when you're not working?"

"Nothing. I don't want to go out. I never do. I don't see anyone. I'm too tired. I have a gym membership but I never go. I read a lot. I'm in bed by 9:30 every night. I just take it one day at a time, trying to raise my son. I don't have time to think much. I just keep on."

At the airport, Singh takes my luggage from the trunk, nodding and quickly looking away as he pockets my tip, already eyeing the next lane opening up, exiting the dawn-red terminal. I look at my watch. Christie is just about to get up, an hour left before she has to wake her precious, only son.

--MD

Our First Story Submitted by a Reader

2009-05-15T23:46:00.002-06:00

I'm so pleased to post the story below, "We Were Talking About Her Daughter," submitted by Cassondra Ellis, a creative writing student and graduate of Columbus State University, Georgia. I hope you'll enjoy peering through the window she briefly and touchingly opens onto the life and conversation of a young, hard-working mother as much as I did. My warmest thanks to Cassondra for sharing her work with us! Just follow the link below to read and comment on her story; and contact me if you would like to submit a piece of "flash-non-fiction" of your own.--MD

We Were Talking About Her Daughter

2009-05-15T23:46:00.001-06:00

"We were talking about her daughter, my co-worker and I," I was telling my friend while she sat in the livingroom, still in her restaurant-worker's clothes, holding her seven-and-a-half-month-old girl whom I tell everyone I know is my god-child (of course I would--I have loads of pictures of her in my phone) but not really because there's a line-up of loved ones both friends and family members who would kill one another for god-parental rights. I imagine myself on that reality show The Gauntlet battling it out for this little kid.

"Yeah," I went on, "she told me once she had her baby girl, her entire perception of the world switched off of who she was before her child, to who she would become because of her. Like, she said she had almost forgotten entirely all she had done or all she was before this new focus entered her life. Then, it was all about her little girl from that point on."

"That's just about right, ain't it, Moo?" my friend said (although I wish she would call her daughter by her real name), holding her little one close while the baby tugged her father's sleeve trying to distract him from his college work.

"She's right, you know," my friend said. "I don't think I'm the only one who belongs to myself anymore. Now, it's all about Moo." She looked at her baby girl and grinned. "I mean, having her is like having a little Christmas present. Aren't ya, sweetie? And it's just like you know the present is there, and you spend all day thinking about it and when you'll get to open it. You leave home and when you come back, there it is, all wrapped up, ready to open. And once it's open you realize what a wonderful gift you have, and you just wanna play with it all day long, but you have to leave again, and it's sad, you know? To leave your gift behind. Sometimes the gift can get on your nerves or something, and you just wanna stop playing with it, but once you're away from it all day, it's all you can think about while you're away--but you remember that someone really nice who was watching your gift rewrapped it for you so that you could enjoy that same Christmas morning all over again." She chuckled loudly enough to startle the baby from her bottle (Moo went right back to chugging madly). "'I have a little iPod!' you scream to everyone you know. Moo! My whittle iPod Baaaabii!" She laughed and tossed the infant over her shoulder, and rubbed her puny back to calm her down so she could burp. My pretend-god-daughter grabbed her mother's neck, and let out a joyous cry.

By Cassondra Ellis
Columbus, Georgia

Betsy, Homeless

2009-05-12T14:47:00.005-06:00

Betsy was cheerful. Every time I drove by her in Chinle, Arizona, just outside of Canyon de Chelly, she waved and smiled and bobbed her matted blond hair at me. Every day I drove by her it was cold and windy and uninviting, and not very conducive to sitting down and talking; the campground where she was living was half closed, nearly deserted, its most regular visitors Navajo women living off the grid down in the canyon, who came in pick-up trucks loaded with empty plastic buckets and drums they dragged off and filled with fresh water from the camp spigot. Betsy was living off the grid, too, in a truck with a camper shell, its windows covered in foil. The camp had a five-day parking limit, but when I slipped out of our warm Safari and sat down at a picnic table to talk to her, one windy afternoon, she had already been there a week, she told me, and planned to stay at least two more.

Betsy has so many layers of clothing bulging under her light blue parka she looked Arctic, but she wanted to know if I thought she'd gotten a tan yet.

"Say yes, honey," she nudged me, winking, "and make me feel good."

I told her she had a nice burn on her face (I could also see a little of her dark neck, wrinkled and hung with a heavy necklace of cut black glass or stone).

She had a big book open on the table in front of her--the same one I'd seen her reading each day. It was a trilogy of Sandra Brown thrillers with a red mark-down tag on the front. I told Betsy about my interest in books, and what I did for a living, and her story began to shift as we spoke. At first she'd told me she'd lost her job in Colorado Springs, where she'd "worked security for Intel, on the Air Force base." Now, she told me proudly, she was a librarian.

She nodded and watched me closely. "I'm all about the reading, honey, don't you worry," she said. "I tell everyone I know they should read." She looked over at our vehicles. "Oh, I have a motorhome, too, you know!" She mimicked driving a large, angled steering wheel. "And a little sports car, too. But they're buried in the snow right now."

If she was from Colorado, that was certainly possible. I asked her what she was doing so far from home.

"I went to visit my niece in Arizona. But she's moving away. To Georgia. So now," she looked at me again, "I'm on my way to a new job. I'm going to work for a professor, just like what you were. I'm going to be his assistant. Up in Idaho. I don't want to live in the cold anymore."

I thought maybe I'd misunderstood. Idaho can be fairly cold. "That's wonderful. Which university?"

"I don't know. I just have an address. In Boise. They're going to put me in a dorm room until I get settled, see. I don't have to be there for another month, though. I'll have to get all my books shipped, of course. In my motorhome, I've got shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves of books. Maybe a thousand. I have to have my books with me. Always."

"Here in your truck, too?"

"Oh, you bet. I have everything I need. A bed and a tv and everything. Except," she said quickly, as though she thought I might ask to see, "I can't go back there right now, because my niece gave me a bunch of stuff. So I sleep stretched out on the front seat."

"Are you warm enough at night?" The night before it had fallen into the twenties.

"You know those special sleeping bags the rescue teams use up at Vail to get the messed-up skiers out? I got one of those. Hang on, I want to get your name so I can get one of your books." She stood from the picnic table and went to the front seat of her truck. "After I'm done with this one here, I'm going to take it back to the library and recycle it. I recycle all my books back to the library, you know. I'll recycle yours, too. Oh, wait, I don't have a pen!"

"If you want I could write it down for you."

"Okay. You can trust me with your name. But be careful, though. Have you been getting a lot of trouble from the Arizona police? They're everywhere, have you noticed? One border patrol guy stopped me for no reason and just kept asking me all these questions and questions and more questions about what I was doing, and I told him all I was doing was looking for a tomato. So when he was done asking all his stuff, I said, Well okay, now I've answered everything for you, what you got to do is answer me one question: where can I get that tomato? I mean," she laughed, "I'm down here in Arizona from Colorado, this time of year, and all I want to know is where can I find a big red juicy tomato. Someone told me they had them at a church somewhere. So that's all I want to know. Where is it? Where is that Church Of The Big Red Juicy Tomato?" she insisted, her eyes sliding away from me, losing me, but still smiling, distantly.

"I don't know," I admitted, as the wind whipped through the naked cottonwoods all around us.

--MD

Color Therapy

2009-05-05T22:21:00.013-06:00

It isn't usually the case, when you walk into an art gallery, that you find the artist whose work is being exhibited on the softly lit walls sitting quietly nearby, nodding a welcome to you. But Nicholas Kirsten-Honshin had decided, that morning I visited Sedona, Arizona, to walk the two-and-a-half blocks down from his studio to the Golden Lotus Gallery, and spend some time shepherding visitors through the simple marvels of his paintings. He works (he told me after we had introduced ourselves) by first preparing a large wooden board; overlays of paint came next, oils in delicate and strong colors, forming the austere but beautiful shapes of the moons, ravens, orchids, trees and seeds he delights in; last came the delicate affixing of Japanese washi paper, so closely woven with the work itself it seemed as though the paint, too, were made of thread, in places.

"Where did you learn to paint?" I asked, impressed.

Nicholas touched his gray beard. His eyes were peaceful behind very bright, very clear, and perfectly round blue glasses. Under his white shirt he wore a necklace of his own design, a silver pendant with a glowing stone in the center that, if held up to the sun at the proper angle, directed the light safely and soothingly through his eye and into his brain: he called this color therapy.

"I'm from Seattle. My father was a painter in Seattle who was involved with the Chicago Art Institute and studied in Japan. When I was a boy, he let me play in his art studio and watch him work. My brother wasn't at all interested in the brushes and colors, but I wanted to be in my father's studio all the time, because I loved it there. Then later I studied in Japan myself, the way my father did." We were standing and talking in front of one of his newest works: a silhouetted tree shedding dark leaves which fell to earth, then transformed into seed and rose again, renergized by a strange, stirring symbol spiraling just below the surface.

"I also write a poem to accompany each painting," Nicholas said.

My writer's ears pricked up. "When did you start writing poetry?"

"Ah, that started during a time when I couldn't paint."

"But why couldn't you paint?"

He hesitated. Then he told me, carefully, that he had gone to live in a place that didn't really lend itself to painting--a small cabin without electricity in the wilderness of the North Cascades. He had taken his son there because, quite simply, his son was going to die if he didn't remove him from the city. Nicholas made a broad gesture with his hands and said, "He was going to die an urban death. From urban dangers. My son had gone down the wrong path, with the wrong people. He wasn't going to make it if I didn't do something." And so the two of them went to live in the green, cold, deep wild. Nicholas had no light to paint by, and no room for his canvases; but his son worked and chopped wood for fires, and slowly healed and changed course.

"Now," Nicholas said proudly, "he's a manager at Whole Foods."

I looked again at the painting of the elegant tree dropping its leaves only to have them radiate upward again, reborn thanks to the churning, hidden, spiraling force underground.

"Your father must be very proud of you," I said. "Is he still living? Does he still paint?"

"Oh yes. He can't see very well now, and he's lost all of his fine motor skills, but what he's doing is absolutely wonderful. He's like a child all over again. He doesn't care a thing about being perfect, or feel the need to fill in detail. It's all big, beautiful, bold strokes of color." And to show me, Nicholas wove his arms freely through the air, as if, with his father's hands, he was painting and washing away, simultaneously.

--MD

To learn more about Nicholas and his work, visit www.honshin.com.

What is American Stories NOW?

2009-05-01T15:15:00.004-06:00

It's a love letter. It's a diary. It's a song.

A taste of what's to come:

I began collecting and writing true-to-life short pieces--"sudden non-fiction," as I call them--in early spring 2009. I'd just finished writing my fourth novel, and done (at long last!) with my fable The Wedding of Anna F., wanted nothing more than to hear other people's stories again. No more imaginary characters for me. I needed to get back to living, breathing human beings. I picked up my laptop, packed up the dog and husband, and hit the road.

My only rules for this blog, and for the encounters that lie behind it, are that each piece should grow out of a natural conversation and connection with someone I meet as I travel this strange, wonderful country of ours, or go around roaming my own hometown . . . and that each story be short, be real, and be respectful. I talk to far more people than I write about, and I listen far more than I talk. Not every conversation is, needs to be, should be a story. Some people tell me things which are simply too private to share. Others don't even think they "have a story to tell." Many don't realize what interesting, quirky, moving, funny and deeply beautiful things are tumbling straight from their mouths. As I see it, one of our jobs as human beings is to catch these gems where they fall, then fling them up in the air again, where they can glisten for a second, unexpected time. This is how we share our joy, and our sorrows, with each other.

Throughout the summer, I'll be posting a new story here, every few days. I hope you'll enjoy the people and lives you discover here, including the inaugural tale, Emily's, below. I'm more than enjoying myself: to listen is never to keep the lighthouse alone.

Welcome to American Stories NOW.

--MD

Emily's Story

2009-05-01T15:14:00.002-06:00

First, I want you to meet Emily. I wish you could meet Emily. I met her standing in line at the pharmacy counter at Walgreen's #3848, 3300 Center Street, Deer Park, Texas. It was a long line at the end of a long day. People weren't happy. We were all of us hurting; we were all sniveling. We wanted drugs, and not the cheap plastic reading glasses or the bags of Goldfish dangling from metal clips next to us, unappetizing bait. Emily stood right in front of me. I didn't know her name, then; all I knew, and very much appreciated, was that she was as big and comforting-looking as an ice cream truck, and as brightly colored, too. Her spiky hair was purple and yellow (tutti-frutti, to my feverish brain; sweet sounds so nice when you're not feeling well). Her chest was covered in a zesty, orange sherbet safety vest, and she carried a bright yellow hardhat, a bright pink phone, and on her feet wore big brand-new-looking butterscotch workboots with splotches of red and yellow paint on the toe guards. I wanted to hug her. The feast of Emily blocked my view of the long line, another fact I very much appreciated: there's no point dwelling on how far you have to go on a drugstore march--it's like forcing yourself to contemplate Everest from your basecamp in Jersey. Besides, by now I'd noticed the glow, the beads of sweat shining on Emily; I'd seen how she was bouncing in that glum line (full of people, like me, with too many white blood cells and not enough Blue Cross to shield us), so obviously happy she could hardly contain herself. She was bursting. She wanted somebody to talk to. You could see that.

I love to see people when they're feeling that way. She kept checking her phone and then dropping it to her side, sighing. I didn't even need to make the first move.

"You looking at the paint on my boots?" she turned to me, eagerly.

"I sure was."

"These are brand new, too. But I don't care. I made it. I'm in! You get to one week, they paint you! Red spraypaint on one boot, yellow on the other. That means, you're in. That means you get to keep the job! It means I'm officially one of the gang."

"Wow. Congratulations. What kind of work do you do?"

She went on to explain she'd just been hired by a company that marked gas lines so that construction crews wouldn't hit them and explode us all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas. She loved her job, she said. She loved it. It was so exciting. And unbelievable to have, too, considering how many people were losing their jobs, right now.

But you only got three 'strikes,' though, she added, in a darker tone. If three times, crews hit a line because you didn't detect and mark it with paint of the right color, you were out. So far she had no strikes. Zero. A perfect week, and it was her first.

"That's good," I said.

Then I looked up the line at all the snivelers and moaners like me and said: "I hope it's a job with good health benefits?"

"Hell, no. Thank God we got my husband's medical. But I still love it. I mean, they grabbed me and sprayed me today! It means I'm in! I've been trying to call my kids and tell them. I'll bet they'll be excited."

"I'll bet."

I understood, then, what my job was--for a few minutes, anyway. My job, for a little while, was to stand in for Emily's family. To hold the place they would soon be filling. It was nice, having a job, waiting in that line. It gave me a sense of well-being. It was nice to know what to do, how to mark a given situation.

"So this is a good day for you," I said to keep things going.

"Yeah. But not for this other guy in my crew," she shook her head. "He's been working with this same company for years now. And all of a sudden, he gets two strikes. In one week. This week. Everyone's so worried about him. Because he's really sharp, otherwise."

How awful, I thought. You think you know what you're doing, you think you have it down pat, and then suddenly you lose your touch, or have a run of bad luck. And strike three . . .

Then her phone rang.

"That's my daughter," she grinned, and turned away from me. "You're gonna love this, honey!" she said, and moved up one spot, and left me, happily, in the Walgreen's dust.

--MD