Posts Tagged ‘Big River Beach’

Sources of Wonder

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2012)

“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” Blaise Pascal

Marcia and I watched the movie Source Code last night and I loved it. I very rarely watch American movies and almost never watch films containing more than a suggestion of violence, and this movie was made by Americans and is full of violence; yet I did not feel I was watching a violent movie, nor did the film seem remotely American. I will not spoil the show by telling you the plot, but I will say that for me Source Code beautifully and skillfully explicates the Buddhist notion of karma and how through our actions and intentions we create our future.

I was thinking about Source Code this morning while walking on Big River Beach, amazed by how vivid everything looked and felt to me, as if the movie had somehow altered my perceptions. And then I realized I was in a state of wonder, that my personal cares and woes were no longer holding sway as they so often do these days, and I was inseparable from the wind and the roaring of the waves and the ravens gliding through the air and the sand underfoot. I was only there, it seemed, because all these other things were enlivening me, and in their absence I would disappear.

When I got home from the beach, I sat down at the piano and played with such ease and fluidity I was in heaven, and I knew the movie was working in me, though I couldn’t say how. I played and played, riding the waves of sound and marveling at the multitudes of harmonies—the entire escapade improvised yet sounding entirely composed—my hands and fingers guided by muscle memory and forty years of learning to be open to what wants to come through.

 “One never knows how one’s gifts to the world may brighten it for others and contribute to the ever-changing mystery.” Taylor Stoehr

I correspond regularly with three men, and each is a source of wonder to me. Max is about ten years younger than I, Bob is exactly my age, and Taylor is eighteen years my senior. Max is an artist and musician, Bob a former video producer turned Special Ed teacher, and Taylor is a retired English professor, poet, and translator. I am very interested in these guys and what they think and do, and they are interested in me. I have never met Taylor in-person, only met Max in-person a couple times thirty years ago, and only see Bob once a year, though for fifteen years we lived a few blocks apart and we saw each other every day.

These three men are my best friends, other than Marcia, and when I think about the truth of that I am both amazed and grateful—amazed that we have such rich connections through the words we write, and grateful that these sweet souls care enough about me to stay in touch over so much time and space. Their letters always induce in me a state of wonder in which I become for a time inseparable from their thoughts and feelings—a holiday from inhabiting this separate solitary self.

“‘I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or sometimes an evil imp,’” said the lama, smiling slowly.” Rudyard Kipling

When I was in my early forties, I met a British fellow at a party and we got talking about our favorite authors, and he was wildly effusive about Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and the novels of Russell Hoban. I had never heard of Hoban and had only read a short story or two of Kipling’s in my childhood. Because I was ever in search of great writing, I went to my favorite used bookstore in Sacramento, Time Tested Books, and got Hoban’s first three novels, The Lion of Boaz Jachin and Jachin Boaz, Turtle Diary, and Kleinzeit, along with a beat up paperback of Kim.

You may have heard of Turtle Diary, which was made into a charming movie in 1985 starring Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Each of Hoban’s first three novels is quite short, with chapters only a page or two in length. I gobbled those books and liked them pretty well, though the greatest gift I got from them was to be on the lookout for Hoban’s next novel, Riddley Walker, which is Hoban’s masterpiece, though not an easy read. Written in the imagined vernacular of a twelve-year old boy two thousand years after nuclear war has laid waste to the earth and the English language, I needed three determined tries at the book before my brain was able to translate Hoban’s disintegrated English into something I could understand—but I was glad I made the effort.

Reading Kim, on the other hand, was a complete life changer for me. I have now read Kim ten times in the last twenty years, having consumed it most recently a year ago. When I read Kim, I lose myself entirely in the language and the story, and always emerge from the experience deeply inspired to continue my creative pursuits, to amplify my spiritual investigations, and to relish every moment of life I am given.

For some years I urged everyone I knew (and even people I barely knew) to read Kim, but few of those who read the book on my recommendation found it to be the holy book it is to me. And more than a few women said the book was a male fantasy and not for them, and more than a few people said they thought the story dated and the writing florid, and some said Kipling was a racist and a sexist; and so I have ceased to recommend the book to anyone without massive disclaimers. Still, I read Kim every two years and the grand saga never fails to be a fabulous source of wonder and rejuvenation for me.

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” Frederic Chopin

In 1979 I was living in Santa Cruz and frequently attended concerts at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, a small joint in those days where jazz people with weekend gigs in the Bay Area would come down to give Monday night performances. One Monday evening I got to the venue early so I could sit close and watch Roland Hanna play. I had seen Roland when he was the pianist for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band, and I loved his playing on Jim Hall’s Concierto album, but I had never heard him play solo.

Roland Hanna was sometimes called Sir Elf because he was short and because he’d been given an honorary knighthood by the king of Liberia. But he became a giant to me that night, playing so melodically, so thoughtfully, so spontaneously, and with such groovy swing, that I walked out of Kuumbwa feeling blessed and more determined than ever to keep pursuing my own piano explorations.

My favorite Roland Hanna album was Swing Me No Waltzes, solo piano recorded in Sweden in 1979 on a Bösendorfer grand piano. I wore that record out; my favorite tune Roses Not Mums. Fast-forward several years to a jazz joint in San Francisco, Roland Hanna to play solo piano. Once again, I was there early so I could sit close, except there was some snafu with the club manager who didn’t know anything about anything and was insisting Hanna get a trio together because that’s what had been advertised. So Hanna’s manager got on the phone, and while the maestro sat in a booth sipping wine and waiting for a bass player and drummer to show up, I got up my nerve and went over to tell him how much I loved his music.

To my amazement, Hanna gestured for me to sit opposite him in the booth, which I did, and after I blurted something about seeing him at Kuumbwa and loving Swing Me No Waltzes, he smiled and said, “You play?”

“Um…well…yeah, though…”

He shook his head. “No though, man. You play. Own it.”

“Okay,” I said, sudden tears in my eyes. “Okay. Yes, I play.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re here.” He sipped his wine. “I like to play for players. You know? Because you guys get what I’m doing in a deeper way, you know?”

He was talking to me as a fellow musician, miracle of miracles, though he knew nothing about me. And then I realized he did know something about me. He knew I loved his music, especially Swing Me No Waltzes, which was an esoteric and wholly original creation, and my naming that album must have told him many things about me, about my taste and my personality. Or so I decided to believe.

“What’s your favorite tune on that record?” he asked, reaching up to shake the hand of one of three bass players who’d showed up in hopes of gigging with him.

“Roses Not Mums,” I said, nodding. “Such a great tune, such an amazing journey.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said, nodding in time with me, “but I don’t play that tune anymore. Wrote it for my favorite bass player, and since he died I don’t play it now. But I will play something you’ll dig, I promise.”

I dug everything he played that night, and when he died ten years ago at the age of seventy, I played his music day and night for three days, thinking of him, loving him, hearing him say again and again, “No though, man. You play. Own it.”                        

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Practice(ing)

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2012)

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath

Marcia and I were walking on Big River Beach yesterday, the wet sand firm underfoot—Big River swollen and muddy from the recent deluge, a light rain falling.

As we reveled in the windy wet, free from our various indoor practices, our conversation ran from gossip to silence to politics to silence to memoir to silence to what we might have for supper. And at some point Marcia asked me about a speaking engagement I’ve accepted, a keynote address at a writers’ conference, the dreaded topic—The Creative Process—chosen for me by the conference planners. I say dreaded because I think most of what I’ve ever read about the so-called creative process is hogwash, and I fear that anything I might add to the dreaded subject would be hogwash, too.

Long ago I worked in a day care center overseeing a mob of little kids. The day care center was located ten minutes from Stanford University and we were forever being visited by earnest graduate students writing theses about educational techniques, educational philosophies, educational processes, and God knows what else pertaining to mobs of little kids. Having no degree of any kind, let alone a degree in Small Child Management, I found it highly amusing to be the frequent recipient of attention from these humorless academics, some of whom, I’ll wager, went on to author textbooks for aspiring nursery school teachers, kindergarten teachers, and other Small Child Management educators. Could it be that information gathered from interviews with me conducted by these earnest humorless people helped shape curricula for early childhood education in America? I hope so, but I doubt it.

One day as I was supervising my mob of kiddies in our outdoor playground, a woman named Stella, a doctoral candidate at Stanford, stood beside me, clipboard in hand, asking questions about my supervisory process, a process I had theretofore never tried to elucidate to anyone.

Stella: I note at this time that all the children seem to be safely and happily occupied. I have recorded a current population distribution of one group of five children, two groups of three, four dyads, and three solitary individuals. Would you say this is a typical distribution of the total?

Todd: Um…well, certainly not atypical.

Stella: Would you characterize these as established groups or new and/or developing configurations?

Todd: The configurations are ever changing, though girls tend to hang out with girls, and boys with boys, especially among four and five-year olds. Two and three-year olds tend to be more gender polyrhythmic, if you know what I mean.

Stella: (makes a note) We’ll come back to gender aggregates, but for now I’m curious to know what specific actions you took to precipitate this particular distribution of individuals and groups, and if you employed any specific techniques for settling the children into these successful play actions?

Todd: Are you serious?

Stella: Yes. I have noted zero incidents of crying, fighting, or moping in the entire population for over fifteen minutes now, which defines these play actions and this particular population distribution as successful.

Todd: Could you repeat the question?

Stella: (reading) What techniques did you employ for settling the children into these successful play actions?

Todd: Let me think about that for a minute. (shouting across the playground at a five-year-old boy about to destroy a sand castle just completed by a four-year-old girl) Don’t do it, Lance.

Stella: Wow. (flips to a new page) Would you characterize that as a tone-based warning or a content-based warning?

Todd: Both. And now if you’ll excuse me, Megan is about to slug Bianca and I would like to intervene before their play action becomes highly unsuccessful.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Yogi Berra

I want to be helpful to people who aspire to write, so I will try to come up with an inspiring keynote address—because inspiration can sometimes get the ball rolling—though in truth there is no “the creative process.” Each of us has to roll our own ball our own way, and that’s all there is to it: rolling your own creative ball. I use rolling to mean doing, acting, working—everything else is just talking about rolling, which is not the same as rolling, believe you me.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” W.H. Auden

Thirteen years ago I published The Writer’s Path, a book of my original writing exercises, and before the silly publisher took the book out-of-print, The Writer’s Path sold ten thousand copies with never a penny spent to promote that most helpful tome. Excellent used copies of The Writer’s Path can be found on the interweb for mere pennies plus the dreaded shipping charge.

I designed each exercise in the book to be a non-analytical way to practice a particular aspect of the writing process (not to be confused with the creative process.) For instance, many writers (as in most writers) have big trouble rewriting their initial drafts. Among the many underlying causes of this big trouble are: 1) rewriting skills are developed through thousands of hours of practice, and very few people are willing to work so hard for so little in return 2) rewriting is all about change, and most people are deathly afraid of change 3) rewriting reveals the inadequacies of the original drafts, and such revelations, especially for beginning writers, can be huge bummers.

So I came up with a series of exercises involving the swift creation and destruction and re-creation and re-destruction and re-creation of lines of words, intuitive processes that obviate fear and short-circuit analytical thinking—the great enemy of spontaneous word flow—to give writers invigorating rewriting workouts.

Writing, drawing, and playing music are muscular activities as well as mental processes, and I have no doubt that all original stories, pictures, and songs result from synergetic collaborations of our physical muscles with our cerebral muscles, along with valuable input from unseen agents of the unknowable, if you believe, as I do, in such fantastic nonsense.

“The world is a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” Sean O’Casey

When at nineteen I embarked on a vagabond’s life and could not take a piano with me, I bought a guitar in the sprawling mercado of Guadalajara and taught myself how to play. A year later, having spent a good thousand hours developing a thumb-dominant style of picking and strumming, I stood on a sidewalk in Toronto, strumming and singing. And lo a miracle befell me. Yea verily, dozens of smiling Canadians threw coins and paper money into my dilapidated cardboard guitar case and thenceforth I was a professional musician. Not long after that initial sprinkle of heavenly largesse, I bought a much better guitar and for a time made a minimalist living as a troubadour.

Eventually my piano regained supremacy in my musical life and my guitar became (and remains) a sometimes friend. Two years ago, Marcia and I produced two groovacious CDs of instrumentals and songs featuring guitar and cello (When Light Is Your Garden and So Not Jazz), though of late my focus is on piano improvisations and Marcia is happily immersed in various classical music pursuits. But I digress.  

What I set out to say was that I became a highly functional guitarist through thousands of hours of practice, and I always—this is key—used a thumb pick (on my right thumb) when I played the guitar. And then a few years ago I made a startling discovery, which was that unless my right thumb was actively involved in the playing of a tune, I (this body brain spirit consortium) had no idea where to put the fingers of my left hand to make the chords for any of the songs I knew. That is to say, my right thumb, for all intents and purposes, is the only part of me that really knows how to play my songs.

“People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball.” Sandy Koufax

Marcia’s mother Opal is ninety-three and still drives her car all over Santa Rosa where she lives in her own apartment in a commodious retirement community. Two years ago, Opal took up pocket billiards, otherwise known as pool, playing twice a week with friends in the billiards room across the hall from the ping-pong room. When Marcia and I go to visit Opal, we play three or four games of pool with her every night, Marcia and Opal teamed up against Todd, their dyad getting two turns for every one of mine, which makes for a fairly even contest.

What I find most inspiring about Opal learning to play pool so late in life is that every time we play with her, she not only plays better than when we last played, she plays much better.

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Revenooers

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

“What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.” Thomas Paine

A mile inland from Highway One, the Comptche-Ukiah Road becomes a two-mile straightaway traversing rolling hills of pine and huckleberry and manzanita. There are no speed limit signs on this straightaway, no reminders of the legal maximum, and this absence of warnings combined with the sudden end to constrictive curves at either end of the straightaway tempts many a driver to go really fast.

The house we rent is set back a hundred yards from the straightaway, the sounds of passing cars and motorcycles muffled by intervening trees, with traffic after midnight rare. Of late, the California Highway Patrol has been a daily presence on the straightaway, the rise and fall of the road over hill and dale creating a perfect spot mid-straightaway for a CHP vehicle to sit by the side of the road and snag the unwary zoomster. This turnout is invisible from either direction until just before you come upon the gravel outlay, and by then there is simply no denying how fast you’re going.

I have lived on the straightaway for five years now, and this is the first time in my residency that the state gendarmes have roosted here so frequently. Whatever for? “The primary mission of the California Highway Patrol is the management and regulation of traffic to achieve safe, lawful, and efficient use of the highway transportation system.” Oh, really? Then why post one and sometimes two officers and their expensive chariots day after day on this lightly traveled country road far from the madding crowd? Surely these centurions are needed more desperately elsewhere? Isn’t the state bankrupt? Aren’t services being cut and curtailed everywhere? What’s all the fuss about a road that carries almost no one anywhere? I’ll tell you what’s the fuss: revenue.

When I lived in Sacramento, I had a neighbor who worked for the California Highway Patrol. He did not drive a patrol car, but toiled in the hive of the vast bureaucracy supporting the army of thousands of road warriors employed in managing the aftermaths of collisions, assisting folks lost and stranded on our highways, and bringing in boatloads of revenue to feed the ravenous coffers of the state.

My neighbor, a forklift operator in a CHP warehouse, arrived home from his job every day at 5:19, save for Fridays when he would stop for drinks at a local bar favored by patrolmen and their ilk. I know this because I was often in my garden when my neighbor emerged from his battered Volkswagen, gazed fondly at his faux Rolex, and Monday through Thursday proclaimed, “5:19 on the nose.” We would exchange pleasantries, and he would sometimes say, “Watch your speed this weekend. Big quota increase came down this morning.” Translation: patrolmen have been ordered to greatly increase the number of speeding tickets they issue.

Thus I imagine the current generals of the CHP receiving the orders from their desperate higher ups to command their buccaneers to go forth and bag whatever galleons come their way, and make no mistake about it, bagging speeders is the only reason the CHP is lurking on the Comptche-Ukiah straightaway. Drivers beware.

“The only difference between a taxman and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” Mark Twain

These daily sightings of black and white pursuit vehicles put me in mind of those other government revenooers, the valiant auditors of the Internal Revenue Service. I have been audited twice in the course of my long and genteel pauperdom, both audits triggered by dramatic (a relative term) spikes in my income resulting from movie options of now ancient novels, spikes that lifted me for shimmering moments into a realm where my government gleefully claimed half my earnings, as opposed to this more familiar realm I occupy where I barely make enough to tax at any rate.

I suffered through my first audit in 1981, a series of meetings with people in frightening little cubicles, people who honestly didn’t know what they were doing. Having for the first time in my life earned more than a few thousand dollars in a year, I knew perfectly well I had done nothing wrong, yet I was made to feel suspect for achieving a modest success. Never mind the clearly documented reasons for the sudden influx of dollars, the revenooers smelled a rat, and they deduced I was that rat. Happily, the audit resulted in the startling discovery that the government owed me money, plus a little interest, but I still felt mistreated.

The second audit took place seventeen years after the first and involved an investigator coming to my house to go through every scrap of paper I had relating to my income for the year in question, 1995, and the years immediately before and after that questionable year. I was on crutches at the time, having blown out my knee. I had long since spent the money earned in that halcyon year subject to audit, I was lonely and pissed off and approaching the muddy bottom of a veritable Grand Canyon of a depression, and so was not at all in a good mood.

The poor Internal Revenue Service agent had just come in the door when I barked, “Look, I’m afraid of you, though I haven’t done anything wrong. So tell me in plain English why I’m being audited.”

A stout lad of twenty-five with a full black beard, the agent set his portable computer (pre-laptop) on my kitchen table, opened his briefcase, withdrew a manila folder, opened the folder, scowled at the top page, and said, “Abnormal income spike and you issued seventeen 1099’s.”

“I sold a novel and somebody optioned the movie rights to another novel. The multiple 1099’s were issued to people I was long overdue rewarding for helping me with my work through thick and thin, mostly thin.”

“I have no problem with that,” he said sincerely. “Please don’t be afraid of me.”

Seven hours later he said, “Well, my boss is not going to be happy. A whole day spent for nothing.” He shrugged. “He was guessing drug dealer.”

“Oh, right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “A drug dealer is going to report a big upswing in his income and issue 1099’s to his cronies? Puh-leez.”

“Good point,” said the young man. “Even so, ninety-nine days out of a hundred I bring in considerably more than my salary.”

“So why not go after the real crooks? The corporations. The rich people with phony shelters and Ponzi scheme hedge scams? Why waste your time going after self-employed artists making peanuts?”

He smiled a knowing smile. “The corporations and rich people have the best accountants and tax attorneys money can buy. Their tax returns are hermetic masterpieces. You artists fill out your own ledgers. By hand. Do it yourselfers. You’re…vulnerable.”

“There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” Celia Thaxter

In the company of poor people and rich people and everybody in between, I have heard it said a thousand times, “I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if the money was spent on something I believed in. But most of our tax dollars go for bombs and guns and corporate tax breaks and paying interest on the national debt to people who already have all the money and seem hell bent on ruining the world as fast as they possibly can.” Or words to that effect.

Well, I’ve got good news about where some of our tax dollars are being spent. On my way home from the village yesterday, the sun broke through the fog at Big River beach for the first time in weeks, so I drove down there to stroll the sand and count the unleashed dogs and get my feet wet. And lo, the big portable handicapped accessible lavatory was back where it never should have not been, full to the brim with public piss and poo, the powers that be seeing fit to give a little something back to the huddled masses. I’m guessing at least through Labor Day. Amen.

(This piece originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2010)

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

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Big River Spring (2010)

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

(This essay first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2010)

The copious rains of 2010 made Big River the big muddy for much of the winter, the beach in late April grandiloquent with new sand. The probable summer beachscape is shaping up to be quite different than last year’s when a large shallow lagoon featured prominently and made a perfect swimming hole for kids to play in. I’m guessing we won’t have more than a puddle this year. Summer is the only time when the beach at the mouth of Big River holds its form for weeks on end, whereas the rest of the year the beachscape changes dramatically from day to day.

This will be the first summer, and therefore the first tourist season, since the dunderheads absconded with the Big River porta-potty and moved it to Heeser Drive where a perfectly good brick and mortar bathroom already exists but has been deemed too costly to operate. Let it be known that whichever candidate for the Board of Supervisors representing my neck of the Mendocino woods promises to put the potty back in the Big River beach parking lot not only gets my vote but I will be happy to appear on their campaign brochures standing beside the potty in question holding a placard reading

Candidate’s Name

Knows What Matters Most

But seriously folks, I smell (pun intended) a minor disaster looming as the annual thousands of tourists and locals descend upon our gorgeous beach to swill beer and soda and buckets of bowel-loosening dips and salsas, only to find there is no place to relieve themselves except in the peripheral poison oak-infested shrubbery. Yucko. I can see it now. Driftwood outhouses erected by capitalist vagrants to service the desperate turistas and their hysterical children, the stinky spillage perfuming the beach until the next high tide saves the day.

I have noticed a definite decline in beach usage by humanoids since our blessed outhouse was carted away. Not only do fewer people visit the beach nowadays, but those middle-aged and older visitors tend not to tarry as long as they used to in our pampered past. I, and others of my ilk, can be seen leaping up from our angles of repose and striking out purposefully for the far northern end of the beach where various caves and propitious indentations in the cliff face provide cover for the quick piss. Thus we emulate the myriad dogs running free on Big River beach contrary to the rarely enforced leash law, the dogs and we hoping no one catches us.

In other beach news, resident surfers tell me that this year’s sand bar promises excellent summer wave sets for surfers unable to afford trips to warmer climes. And birdwatchers (identifiable by their binoculars and bird books and furrowed brows) have confirmed my suspicions that this is a stellar year for the birds of Big River.

The resident ospreys (I counted seven overhead just yesterday) are happy and fat and in fine voice as they mingle with the legions of ravens and gulls composing the avian cyclone to be seen for much of nearly every day in the sky directly above the place where the river meets the sea. I assume this confluence of waters is rich with tiny organisms to be eaten by little fish to be eaten by bigger fish to be eaten by even bigger fish and seabirds and seals, and this abundance of foodstuffs explains why so many fish-eating birds congregate here. But why do the gulls and ravens and osprey (and occasional hawks) spend so many hours of their lives spiraling en masse above this collision of waters?

Yesterday, with the avian whirly gig in full swing and fulgent sunshine having brought several dozen humans to the sands at low tide, I asked my brethren why they thought the ravens and gulls spend so much time spiraling around in that particular place in the sky. Here are a few of their answers.

“Oh, wow, I never noticed those birds. Hmm. I don’t know.”

“There must be an updraft there caused by some sort of temperature exchange. You know, inland heat meets ocean cool. Birds love updrafts.”

“It’s a power spot.”

“It’s a magnetic thing.”

“Birds enjoy flying without having to flap their wings. People think animals do everything for some sort of survival reason, but they like to have fun as much as we do.”

“They’re exchanging information about, you know, weather and food and, you know, things of interest to birds.”

In other bird news, pelicans are more prevalent over Mendocino Bay than in any of the previous four years, and our cormorants are wonderfully fat these days as they share their islets off the headlands with platoons of visiting Canadian geese. The headlands themselves, soggy after years of drought, are verdant with mustard and wild roses and calla lilies, the multitudes of swallows and finches and hummingbirds zipping around in high spirits.

And then there are the humans. I was sitting on the beach yesterday, my back against a driftwood log, watching ravens perform the most amazing aerial acrobatics, when a woman walked by followed by a little boy with a bucket filled with rocks and shells.

“My bucket’s full,” said the boy, his sorrow palpable, “but there’s so much more to get.”

“Maybe you could just select the very best ones to take home,” suggested the woman.

“No,” said the boy, adamantly shaking his head. “I need more buckets.”

“But what are you going to do with all those rocks and shells, honey?”

“Keep them,” he said fiercely. “In the backyard.”

As they passed out of earshot, a big black Lab trotted up to me and dropped a soggy tennis ball at my feet. A man yelled to me from the shallows where he was filming ripples with his cell phone.

“If you throw it for him,” said the man, “he’ll never leave you alone.”

So I ignored the ball. The dog barked at me, a piercing bark.

“Leave him alone, Sam,” shouted the man, aiming his phone at me to record the funny scene of his dog harassing a guy on the beach.

But Sam continued to bark. And then Sam picked up the ball and dropped it in my lap, which inspired the following haiku.

Birds wheeling in the heavens

Dog saliva

Time to go

Todd’s novel Under the Table Books and his collection of short stories Buddha In A Teacup just won awards from the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, the former for Best Fiction, the latter for Best Short Story Collection. Yay!

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