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

“When we express our true nature, we are human beings. When we do not, we do not know what we are.” Shunryu Suzuki

Planting sugar snap pea seeds yesterday, I was thrilled to find the raised bed rife with earthworms, young and old. We garden in soil known hereabouts as pygmy, which left to it’s own devices will not grow vegetables or much of anything except bonsai pines and huckleberries and the nefarious Scotch Broom. Thus we have eight raised beds in boxes and four beds in the ground, all requiring manure and compost in addition to the local soil to give us a decent harvest.

This past fall I scored a truckload of rabbit manure and I surmise it is this precious poop that has proven such an elixir to the worms. When I moved here six and a half years ago and set up my above-ground composting bin (and before the bears demolished that flimsy plastic thing) I was dismayed to find nary a worm coming up out of the ground and through the slots in the floor of the bin to gobble the tasty leftovers and give birth to myriad wormlets. In Berkeley where I gardened a small plot for eleven years, my composting bin (a gift from the city to encourage us to do the rot thing), produced gazillions of worms in collaboration with the local ground. But in pure pygmy soil, earthworms are as scarce as pumas, and it took a good three years of feeding massive amounts of worm food to the soil before any sort of worm population took hold.

This rabbit poop is apparently some sort of earthworm Viagra, for now when I turn the soil, the good earth literally dances with hundreds of little wigglers. May they grow large and happy, and may our vegetables and flowers and herbs thrive on their castings.

“Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion.” Shunryu Suzuki 

One sunny day in my Berkeley garden, about ten years ago, I was enjoying eavesdropping on the conversation raging among three teenaged boys and one seventeen-year-old girl gathered around a table on the deck that jutted out from our house and looked down on my garden, the girl being my de facto daughter Ginger, a beautiful and sociable young woman who attracted males as catnip attracts cats and pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds. As a consequence of Ginger’s charms and sociability, our house was frequently overrun by young men, many of them from good Berkeley homes and heading for college, if they were not already in college. Of these three on the deck that day, one was bound for Harvard, one for Stanford, and the third had recently matriculated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

When Ginger sashayed into the house to fetch drinks for the thirsty lads, two of them came to the railing of the deck and peered down at me as I thinned carrot seedlings in ground next to my verdant broccoli.

“Is that…” began Jeremy, the Harvard-bound Physics major, “…um…hey, excuse me. Is that like broccoli in those little bushes?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, smiling up at him.

“Oh my God,” he said, his jaw dropping. “Jason, you gotta come see this. Broccoli is like growing on a little bush right in their garden.”

Soon to be studying politics at Stanford pursuant to becoming a lawyer, Jason joined Jeremy and Raul at the railing. “Where?” he said, looking down on the mass of greenery. “I don’t see anything.”

“There,” said Jeremy, pointing emphatically at a head of broccoli. “Right fucking there, man. I never knew it grew like that.”

“Me neither,” said Jason, shaking his head. “Jesus. Look at all that food. Is that like lettuce?”

“Indeed,” I replied, wondering if perhaps they were spoofing me. “Would you like a garden tour?”

“I would,” said Jeremy, skipping down the stairs, “but those guys are like totally fixated on you-know-who.”

So I gave Jeremy a ten-minute tour of my patch of vegetables and herbs. He pulled a carrot for the first time in his life, washed it in the hose while watering the parsley, took a bite and declared, “God, that is so sweet I never would have known it was a carrot.” Then he smiled beatifically. “I’m blown away. I never knew how any of this stuff got here. What a trip.” Then he frowned and shook his head. “Hey, not to change the subject, but we were just arguing about the Vietnam War. Jason said it was kind of an extension of World War II and was about trying to get their resources, and Raul said, ‘Like what resources?’ and I thought it was like to stop the communists. But was it the Russians or the Chinese we were trying to stop? Or…like…do they have oil in Vietnam? I mean, if they had oil wouldn’t they be like rich today?”

“Buddha was more concerned about how he himself existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing.” Shunryu Suzuki

I just returned from the farmers’ market in Mendocino with two vibrant young tomato plants, Sun Golds, orange cherry tomatoes with delicious flavor; cherry tomatoes being the only kind of tomato we can grow in our cool clime without the sheltering warmth of a greenhouse. Buying Sun Golds at the Mendocino farmers’ market has become a tradition for me, five years running now, and though I could easily start my own Sun Golds from seed, I prefer to buy my starts from a grower at the market. I suppose if I had a greenhouse, I would be more likely to start my own tomato plants from seed, but maybe not. I like the tradition of going to market to get plants, and I look forward to hunting for the most promising ones, speaking to the growers as I search, maybe sharing a tomato growing story or two. All of which begs the question: why don’t I have a greenhouse, even just a little one, to enhance my gardening experience?

I have now been a renter for eighteen years following fifteen years as a homeowner following ten years as a renter, and for all twenty-eight years of my life as a renter some part of me expected to become a homeowner any day now. When I rented my house in Berkeley for eleven years, I did not plant a lemon tree for the first five years because I was convinced that if I were destined to live in Berkeley for more than a few years, surely I would find a way to buy a place and plant a lemon tree there. And now I have lived for six years in this wonderful house we rent on a piece of paradise a few miles from the village of Mendocino, and though my rational mind knows we may never own a house in this kingdom of expensive houses, I have yet to plant blueberries or grapes or fruit trees, or to build a small greenhouse because of that same expectation of possibly owning a home one day. Of course, what makes my reluctance to build a greenhouse entirely silly is that I could easily build the greenhouse to use in our garden now and take the blessed thing with us should we ever fulfill our dream of owning our own place.

“When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything. Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent.” Shunryu Suzuki

I vow to be more consciously a swinging door, to do the things I want to do now and with much less care for what may or may not happen in the future. I vow to plant a lemon tree if a place in the ground calls out to me and says, “Hey you with the arms and legs and shovel. We could use a lemon tree right here, whether you stick around after you plant it or not.” I vow to live in this house we rent as if we may never leave here until we die. The moment, as Shunryu Suzuki would say, is what we’ve got. The rest is illusion.

I’ve been here before and made similar vows, which I am just now remembering. Five years ago I was quite ill and wondering if I would be around in this body much longer. I had long been planning to publish my book of short stories Buddha In A Teacup, and I kept saying to Marcia, “I will, I will…after I’m completely well.”

Marcia was wonderfully patient with me through my long ordeal, but one evening she said, “By waiting until you think you are completely well, might you be suggesting to your body and the universe that you don’t entirely believe you will get well? Why not go ahead and publish your book and trust that in doing so you will speed the process of your healing?”

So with great trepidation, I followed her counsel and published my book, and in the process of bringing forth Buddha In A Teacup my health improved and life became rosy again, rosy and suffused with the energy of no longer waiting around for some other moment than this one. And because everything is connected, I have since received a good many letters from people who read Buddha In A Teacup and wanted to thank me for reminding them that when we live in the past or dwell in the future, we aren’t really here; and what fun is that?

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

“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” Mel Brooks

Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and in the hallowed tradition of kittens, they played and slept and mewed and ate and clawed things and were wonderfully cute.

When they were about four months old, Boy and Girl played a particular game that made me laugh until I cried. No matter how many times I watched them play this game, I laughed until I cried. Sometimes other people would watch with me as the kittens played this particular game, and some of these people laughed, too, and a few of them even laughed until they cried; but there were other people who watched the game and did not laugh at all, which was amazing to me, and troubling. Here is the game the kittens played.

A heavy brown ceramic vase about fourteen-inches high, round at the bottom and narrowing somewhat at the top, stood on a brick terrace. Girl would chase Boy onto the terrace and Boy would jump into the vase. Girl would sit next to the vase, listening to Boy inside, and when Boy would pop his head up out of the vase, Girl would leap up and try to catch him, and Boy would drop back down into the vase. Then Girl would stand on her hind legs and reach into the vase with her forepaws and Boy would shoot his paws up to fight Girl’s paws, or Boy might leap out of the vase and the chase would resume. Or Girl would be inside the vase with Boy outside and the vase would tip over in the midst of their roughhousing and out would spill Girl.

Why were their antics so hilarious to me? Was it because their play was an enactment of the essential mammalian drama of fright and flight and fight—the thrill and danger of the hunt mixed with the suspense and terror of hiding in order to survive? Yes, I think so. But what’s so funny about that?

“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” Sid Caesar

I don’t have many memories of my mother laughing. My brother and I were forever telling jokes, honing our techniques, and our mother usually responded with a droll, “Very funny,” even if everyone else was howling with laughter.

But there was a time, one glorious time, when my mother and I laughed together so hard and for so long that we literally fell out of our seats and went temporarily blind with laughter. I was fourteen when my mother procured tickets for just the two of us to attend the musical Little Me at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, with the Broadway cast starring Sid Caesar in a dizzying number of roles opposite the ravishingly sexy Virginia Martin, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, a script by Neil Simon, and choreography by Bob Fosse.

As far as I can remember this was the only time in my life my mother took just the two of us to anything. Even more impressive, she splurged on fantastic seats, tenth row, center, which was also highly uncharacteristic of her. What I realize now after almost fifty years was that my mother was giving me the message that though she officially agreed with my father’s opposition to my pursuing a career in music and theater and writing, she unofficially supported my passion for these things.

The success of Little Me depended entirely on the genius of Sid Caesar and his ability to play myriad comedic roles convincingly, not to mention sing well, too. The same play performed with several different actors essaying Sid’s half-dozen parts wouldn’t have worked at all because the point of the play, in a way, is that all these extremely different men are essentially the same guy falling in love with the same woman over and over again. Try as I may, I cannot imagine anyone other than Sid Caesar successfully playing all those parts without becoming tiresome or silly. I knew that was Sid again and again—stumbling off the stage as one character and racing back on as someone else—yet I always believed he was an entirely new character—an astonishing feat. The songs were great, the dancing was fabulous, Virginia Martin was luscious, the chorus girls were gorgeous, the dialogue was snappy and funny, and young Todd was in heaven.

I can still recite whole scenes from the play and sing several of the songs, though I only saw and heard the musical once all those decades ago; but I cannot remember which scene it was that made my mother and I laugh so hard that we fell out of our seats, laughing along with hundreds of other people laughing so uproariously that Sid and his fellow actors froze for a time to let us get through our delirium before they came back to life and carried on with the show. That play and Sid Caesar and Virginia Martin and laughing so stupendously with my mother are burned into my memory more indelibly than almost anything else I have ever experienced.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Kurt Vonnegut


When I saw Little Me with my mother, I was a freshman at Woodside High School attempting to fulfill my father’s wish that I become a medical doctor. To that end, I was slaving away in an accelerated program for scientifically ambitious students, something I most definitely was not. Nevertheless, I had yet to work up the courage to defy my father and so was following the prescribed steps on the path he wanted me to follow. As a consequence, I was one of only four ninth graders in a biology class for upper classmen, and we four sat huddled together in a far corner of the big classroom, though we otherwise had little in common.

There came the day of the big mid-term exam, the results to account for half our grade. Everyone in the class was on edge, we youngsters especially so. Our teacher was not a good one, I was badly prepared, poorly motivated, and certain I would botch the test. As we waited for our teacher to arrive with the tests, the four of us began to free associate, someone saying osmosis, someone replying mitochondria, another adding messenger RNA, and so on until we left science behind and were reeling off the names of pretty girls and sports heroes and anything and everything until one of us said something—the ultimate non sequitur?—that proved to be the verbal straw that broke our collective camel’s back, so that just as our teacher entered the room we four began to laugh hysterically.

Our laughter spread to others in the room, but eventually everyone, save for the four freshmen, regained control and prepared to take the test. But we had gone beyond some line none of us had ever gone beyond before, and we could not stop laughing. Our teacher sent us out into the hallway where we fell to the concrete and laughed until our bellies ached. And finally, one by one, we stopped laughing, caught our breaths, and returned to the classroom. But the moment we entered that place of the test, hysteria caught us again and sent us hurtling back outside, our teacher following us out to threaten and cajole, to no avail.

Because we were thought of as good boys, our temporary insanity was forgiven and we took the test the following day, though we were never allowed to sit en masse again. One of us became a professor of Biology, one a conservative federal judge, one a professor of Art, the fourth a writer and musician and the author of this essay. We were as different as four people could be, yet in that moment of youthful hysterics, the pressures of the world too much for us to bear, we escaped into laughter—together.

(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.”                        

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

When my father died five years ago, my siblings and I did not hold a memorial service in his honor. We were each of us so wounded by our father’s incessant criticism and disapproval of us that his death unleashed our long suppressed anger toward him, and being so angry we could not see our way to put on a show of loving memories. But now I wish to speak of his goodness and the gifts he gave me. I wish to propitiate his ghost, something my father would have scoffed at, and to communicate my gratitude for his presence in my life.

When my sisters and brother and I were little kids, my father told us the most wonderful bedtime stories, and sometimes we would be the characters in those stories, which was especially thrilling to me. Imagine being a character in a story! My father would just make up the stories without the help of a book, and my brother and sisters and I marveled that he could do that. I am certain that my fascination with stories and story telling began with listening to my father invent those magical stories for us.

My father taught me how to plant trees when I was six-years-old, and we planted many trees together over the years—fruit trees, redwoods, birches, and pines. He would show me where to dig the hole, and I would dig as big and deep a hole as I could. Then he would deepen and widen the hole considerably; and I would admire how strong he was and how easily the ground yielded to him. Then we would refill the hole halfway with a mixture of peat moss and compost and soil. I remember we stirred this mixture in the hole with our bare hands, and then we would place the baby tree atop this mixture and fill in the hole. With the leftover soil, we would construct a circular basin around the tree and I would fetch the hose to fill this basin with water again and again until the ground around the tree was saturated. And thereafter my weekly chores included watering the young trees.

Speaking of trees, one day when I was ten, my father and I were in a nursery and he saw a little olive tree selling for what he thought an exorbitant price. Our house was surrounded by huge old olive trees that dropped thousands of olives every year, many of which subsequently sunk into the soil and were covered with leaves and eventually sprouted into baby olive trees. My father spoke to the nurseryman and learned that the nursery would pay three dollars each for hearty one-year-old olive trees, as many as they could get.

“Now there’s a great way for you to make money,” said my father. “Pot up olive seedlings, tend them for a year, and sell them to this nursery. Fifty times three is 150 dollars!”

So we got fifty one-gallon pots and I eagerly potted up fifty olive seedlings, placed them in the dappled shade under one of our ancient olive trees, and cared for them diligently for a few months until life intervened and I forgot all about them.

Ten years later while visiting my parents for Christmas, I was wandering around their overgrown yard and came upon the sole survivor of those fifty seedlings, now a tiny bonsai olive tree which I potted in a long shallow bonsai pot, adorned with a miniature granite boulder, and gave to my father to add to his collection of a dozen bonsais. My father was most delighted with that miniature olive tree.

My father loved to body surf and taught me to body surf not long after I learned to swim. Our family went to Los Angeles for a week every summer when I was a boy, and we always went to the beach for a few of those days. The water was warm, the waves perfectly formed, and we would shout for joy when we got good rides. Body surfing was truly my father’s bliss, and after he spent a couple hours in the water he was always so sweet and happy.

My father took our family camping and backpacking every summer. He taught us how to pitch a tent, build a fire, light a Coleman lantern, and many other things a person needs to know to be a good camper. He also taught me how to fish, how to prepare my pole and reel and line, how to bait a hook, how to cast, how to set the hook when a fish strikes, how to play the fish, how to kill the fish, how to clean the fish, and how to dip the fish in cornmeal and fry it on a skillet over a campfire.

When I was in my twenties and became a vagabond for a few years, I was essentially a highway backpacker, and virtually everything I needed to know in order to survive I had learned from my father, including mending my clothes with needle and thread and repairing my backpack and boots with an awl.

Some of my fondest memories of my father are of him fishing for trout in the high Sierras. He was an avid fly fisherman and for some years he even made his own flies. We often had our camps on the shores of small lakes at the base of granite peaks, and it was my father’s particular delight to set out from camp and try his luck all the way around the lake. When he hooked a trout, he would let out a musical hoot that resounded in the otherwise silent wilderness, and I would watch him play the fish, his slender pole bending, his face alight with delight.

I was crazy for ballgames from the moment I could walk, and though my father wasn’t the least interested in sports, he would sometimes play catch with me on the lawn when he came home from work. He was left-handed and I loved watching him throw the baseball—a perfectly natural curve ball. I was tireless and my father was often tired after a long day of work, so he would set a limit on how many throws he would make, a number we would count down together. When we got down to one, my father would call out a new number, and we would play a while longer, and I was overjoyed by his generosity.

When I was twelve, I helped my father install a backboard and basketball hoop atop a tall pole on the edge of our sloping driveway, and every day for the next five years, rain or shine, I shot hoops out there for hours on end. I was often out there shooting hoops when my father got home from work, and sometimes he would watch me shoot a few before going inside. When he was in a good mood, my father would compliment me on my skill and maybe try a shot or two; and I always loved it when he gave my favorite game a try.

My father was a successful psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he taught clinical psychology to psychiatric fellows at Stanford Medical School. He also helped found a ward for psychosomatically ill adolescents at Stanford Children’s Hospital, an accomplishment he was very proud of.

I wrote and published several books while my father was alive, and he was extremely critical of all of them. As for my music, my father barely acknowledged that I was a musician and once asked me, “Why do you write such sad music? You should write music that makes people happy.”

I didn’t think my father would ever like anything I created. But a few months before he died, I sent him the manuscript of my novel Under the Table Books, and he wrote me a letter in which he praised the book and predicted it would one day be a great success. I read his words over and over again because I could hardly believe my eyes. And even more astonishing to me was how he signed his letter,

My son! Love, Dad

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

“Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.” Albert Einstein

A wintry April day—rain, cold, our two woodstoves hard at work translating matter into energy so we may carry on in comfort. Yesterday we celebrated the idea of spring, if not the reality, with the delivery of four cords of firewood from Frank’s Firewood of Boonville, so now several days of stacking wood are upon us. I am graduating from my seventh Mendocino winter, and Frank’s fantastic firewood has kept me snug and warm through every one of them. Thank you, Frank!

Yesterday also brought an email from a friend with the subject heading Data Plague, with a link to an article from the New York Times about Big Data, a hot topic in the world of computer science and technology. Big Data is the incomprehensibly large amount of raw data piling up from all electronic activities that leave digital traces, including scientific research and social media. For instance, every minute of every day some forty-eight hours of video are uploaded to YouTube: the equivalent of eight years of content each day.

According to the Big Data article, many people in government and academia and private industry are interested in mining this rapidly growing data universe, and President Obama has earmarked 200 million dollars for his Big Data Research and Development Initiative. And just last month the National Science Foundation awarded 10 million dollars to Berkeley’s A.M.P. Expedition, which stands for “algorithms machines people,” a team of U.C. Berkeley professors and graduate students working to advance Big Data analysis.

As usual, no one asked my opinion about any of this, but here are my thoughts on the intrinsic and extrinsic value of Big Data. Once upon a time there was this emperor, see, and he wasn’t actually wearing any clothes, but because he was the emperor everyone had to pretend he was wearing clothes even though he wasn’t.

“The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.” John Kemeny

Stacking firewood, one might surmise, is something like trying to make sense of Big Data. There on the driveway (in cyber space) is a huge jumble of firewood (pile of data) composed of many separate pieces of wood (bits of data). Over time, I will get all that wood neatly organized in eight or nine stacks in the woodshed, and over more time I will burn those stacks to heat our home. Meanwhile, the Big Data geeks will try to organize their ever-expanding pile of data bits (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, and exabytes, one billion gigabytes) and then…and then nothing.

“Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.” Gregory Bateson

Eight years of Youtube video uploaded every day? That’s 240 years per month! Joe points his phone camera out the bus window as we make our way through Chinatown. Okay. Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are Margaret and Binny eating ice cream. Good. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Ralph’s three-legged cat named Popsicle is eating a mouse. Ew! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Becky’s Great Dane Buffy rolls on something dead. Hardee har har. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are millions of videos of people looking into their cameras and making silly faces. Yes! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. And here is Zigmund Olafson, pulling down two hundred grand a year (of taxpayers’ money) as Permanently Visiting Professor of Theoretical Cyber Whatever at U.C. Berkeley running 1700 centuries of such stuff through a super computer in the basement of ADE (Algorithms Digest Emptiness) and after nine months of data digestion and crunching and analysis discovering that…kittens and puppies are cuter than heck!

“We’ll judge our success by whether we build a new paradigm of data.” Michael Franklin, director of A.M.P. Expedition.

A new paradigm of data? Puh-leez. How about a new paradigm of excellent and affordable healthcare for everybody? How about a new paradigm of equitable taxation? How about a new paradigm of funding our parks and schools? How about a new paradigm of peaceful resolution of conflicts? How about a new paradigm of closing all the insanely dangerous nuclear power plants and insulating our homes and solarizing every viable rooftop? How about a new paradigm of generosity and love? Oh, no. What we need is a new paradigm of data. And just what might that new paradigm of data look like? We have absolutely no idea, but we’ll let you know if we think we’re successful in building that paradigm after we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, feeding digital stuff into really fast computers. Okay? Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube.

“I don’t agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.” Stanislaw J. Lec

Of my many unhappy experiences with publishers, one of the saddest had to do with a chunk of data that followed me around like the Hound of the Baskervilles and is no doubt following me still. This chunk of data suggests that my second, third, fourth, and fifth novels did not sell many copies. Never mind that the various publishers involved did absolutely nothing to promote or distribute my books, and in most cases suspended all support for the books before they were published. No, the data says the books did not sell, which translates in corporate parlance to “Todd does not sell.”

Being reminded of this damning data every time I approached an agent or publisher, I nevertheless continued to try to interest mainstream publishers in my work for many years, with and without the services of literary agents. Of course, agents are privy to this same database, and so I was a pariah to most of them. But eight years ago, shortly before moving to Mendocino, I succeeded in interesting an agent in representing my novel Bender’s Lover, a metaphysical love story comedy thriller set in San Francisco and having to do with music, friendship, and power. I warned this agent about the damning data that was following me, but she seemed undaunted. “After all,” she said, “those sales figures are over twenty years old and this book is so good that…”

She sent copies of my tome to fourteen editors in New York, eleven declining to consider the manuscript because of the aforementioned database. Three said they would give the book a read, and lo a miracle occurred (or so we thought.) A senior editor at Viking went mad for the book, called my agent with a fat offer, and asked that we all get together for a conference call the next day, which we did. My oh my, did we have fun, a ménage á trois love fest during which we designed the cover and cast the movie and read aloud our favorite parts from Bender’s Lover; and for the next forty-eight hours I believed the curse had finally been lifted from my career and I would at last be allowed to ascend to my rightful place in the pantheon of American novelists.

This delightful editor’s last words to me were, “I don’t anticipate any problems, since I have carte blanche here, but as a formality I do have to run this by a couple people in Sales and then I’ll call you with my formal offer. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be getting this book. It’s going to be huge.”

Alas, Sales nixed the deal because the data says Todd doesn’t sell, never mind how old the data or what the data is based on. Never mind anything except the raw little numbers, which in truth are miraculous for being more than zeros.

My agent’s voice was trembling as she gave me the sorry news, and then she took a deep breath and said, “So…under the circumstances, I don’t think there’s really any point in our continuing to work together. Do you?”

Cue the howling hound!

And that is just one of many reasons I do not care much for data, big or small.

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

“If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.” Pearl S. Buck

Reading Bruce McEwen’s tragic Hug A Kid, Go To Jail, I thought, “My God, there but for the grace of luck and chance and (in my system of belief) the intervention of angels, I, too, might have been arrested for child molestation and been sent to prison and labeled a sex offender for the rest of my life—on several different occasions. What? How?

When I was in my late thirties and living in Sacramento, I played basketball every morning at a neighborhood park. Three days a week I met my friend Bob there for rousing games of one-on-one, and two days a week I shot around by myself. Along with the basketball court, the park featured a big lawn and a swing set and a public bathroom. So one morning I was shooting hoops and these two moms showed up, each with a cute kid in tow, and they wandered to the far end of the park and spread out a big blanket for playtime and snacking and reading and whatnot.

As I continued shooting hoops, one of the kids, a girl, skipped across the lawn to the restroom adjacent to the basketball court and entered the little cinderblock building on the side marked WOMEN. A moment later she let out a blood-curdling scream, and in the next moment I was on my way into the restroom to rescue her. But some unseen power grabbed hold of me, and a loud inner voice said, “Don’t go in there. Whatever you do, don’t go in there!”

The girl screamed again—bloody murder!—and I turned on my heels and sprinted across the lawn toward the moms, waving my arms and shouting, “Your little girl is screaming in the bathroom.”

One of the mothers jumped up and raced to the restroom and found her daughter bruised and bleeding from a head wound sustained when she slipped on the wet floor and smacked into the ceramic sink. The mom carried her daughter out into the sun and said to me, “Thanks so much. We couldn’t hear a thing over the leaf blowers. We’ve got ice. She’ll be fine. You know kids. Always falling down.”

Then the mom and I exchanged long looks, her look saying, “I understand why you didn’t go in there,” and my look saying, “I didn’t go in there because I was afraid I might be accused of trying to harm her.”

But what if I had gone in there and picked up that little girl and…well, I didn’t, though she might have been bleeding to death. Or she might have been in the clutches of a child molester. I was furious for days after, thinking about how if I had tried to help a hurt child I might have…I mean, what if she had said to her mother, “He touched me.”

“I am fond of children—except boys.” Lewis Carroll

In 1969, twenty years before that Sacramento restroom incident, I was traveling around America in an old GMC panel truck with my friend Dick Mead. On a blistering hot August day we pulled into Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, got a camping spot, and went exploring. That was when I saw fireflies for the first time. There was a huge old swing set overlooking a beautiful meadow, and I was swinging on a swing, marveling at the hundreds of little blobs of light floating and flitting over the meadow in the waning light of day, when suddenly a cute little pigtailed girl took the swing next to mine.

“I can go higher than you can,” she said, kicking off and swinging hard.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, being twenty. “We’ll see about that.”

So we swung together, going higher and higher, and she laughed and I laughed, and then we stopped pumping and allowed our swings to go lower and lower until we were barely swinging, and then she started pumping again and going higher, and I pumped, too, and caught up to her. Then we let ourselves swing to a stop and she said, “Hey, you want to do the spider? Me and my dad do it all the time. It’s so fun.”

“What’s the spider?” I asked.

And before I could blink, that cute little pigtailed girl was straddling my legs, facing me, gripping my wrists and shouting, “Okay, go!”

And I was instantaneously consumed with terror. “Uh, no,” I said, standing up and shaking free of her. “I have to go now. Nice meeting you.”

“But it’s so fun,” she said plaintively. “You’ll love it.”

What if I’d gone ahead and done the spider with her and her father had come looking for her and caught us in the act? What if a park ranger had seen the longhaired stranger from California spidering with that little girl? Or what if that little girl had gone back to her family and when her mother asked, “Where were you, honey?” the little girl had replied, “Oh, I was playing with a nice man on the swings.”

And during further questioning the little girl had admitted, “Yes, we were touching there because we were doing the spider.”

“What is a home without children? Quiet.” Henny Youngman

I worked in a Day Care Center when I was in my twenties and again when I was in my fifties. There are many truths about little kids, but one of the largest truths about them is that they are keenly interested in genitals, their own and those of others. They, the children, are particularly interested in the genitals of adult males, which are the most obvious of adult human genitals. Little boys are particularly interested in these larger versions because little boys possess smaller versions and are fascinated by the size discrepancy and the possibility that they, too, might one day have larger equipment.

I remember during my initial indoctrination as an employee of the day care center, how we were told that when a child touched us “there”, it was imperative to instantly put an end to such touching, and to make sure the children knew that such touching was absolutely verboten. Never mind that a large part of my job was helping kids pull their pants down so I could wipe their butts and then help them pull their pants up. Never mind that when the kiddies wet their pants or spilled paint or juice over themselves, it was my job to strip off their sodden poopy pissy clothes, to render them naked and wash them clean and clothe them anew. Never mind that any one of those delightful creatures at any time might have reported to a parent, “He touched me,” which report might have led to my arrest.

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” Helen Keller

For five years in the 1990’s I ran the Creative Writing department for a summer school for the arts. Ambitious and talented teenagers fifteen to nineteen-years-old were my charges, and among these teens were many sexy young women. I had never taught at any level before then and so had not previously been on the receiving end of the romantic crushes of students.

I will never forget one particular summer evening on the campus of Mills College where our school was being held, a one-month intensive wherein the students lived and breathed their art and the influence of mentor artists. I was walking across the greensward on my way to the music building to find a piano to play, when someone called, “Todd,” and I recognized the voice of Dawn, one of my students.

I stopped, and a moment later Dawn was beside me. I thought her the most beautiful and alluring of my students, and I knew of her crush on me because when I worked with her group of writers she responded to nearly everything I said as if she might at any moment have an orgasm. Then, too, she would linger after class and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me as I tried to concentrate objectively on the excellent erotica she’d written and about which she very much wanted my feedback.

“Hey,” she whispered on that memorable evening, her honeyed breath warm on my cheek. “You and me alone in the dark. Finally.”

“Hey, Dawn,” I said, trying to be cool. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is I want you,” she said, pressing close. “And you want me. And you know it. And I know it. And I’m way over eighteen and I’m on the pill so we’ve got nothing to worry about. Please? Please take me somewhere and make love to me? Please? Or we can do it right here and I’ll make you feel so good you won’t believe it.”

“Nope,” I said, breaking away and running for my life.

And had she been crazy or vindictive, she might easily have gone to the school administrators and said, “He followed me last night and touched me.”

Thankfully she was not crazy or vindictive, though she did show up the next morning for our short story section wearing practically nothing, and brazenly handed me a note—crimson ink on lilac-scented stationery—that said, “Any time, any place. I am so ready for you.”

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

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Henry David Thoreau

The calendar says it is springtime, but the temperature and relentless rain say winter continues apace, this being the second year in a row that a very wet March will save Mendocino and Northern California from terrible drought. Yes, we are starved for sunlight and the woodpile is shrinking at an alarming rate, but the ongoing deluge bodes well for salmon and redwoods and huckleberries and forest frogs, so we shall not complain.

On Sunday we attended a gathering at the home of a recently deceased friend of Marcia’s, his children and grandchildren and ex-wives and friends filling his moldy old house and spilling outside to honor his memory. I was impressed by his large collection of paperback books from the 1950’s and 60’s, many of them stuck to various shelves and to each other with the mysterious glue of time. When I pulled on a volume of Kazantzakis, the book broke into several pieces, ditto a Kerouac tome, so thereafter I contented myself with reading the spines and forming an impression of the person from the books he read.

But I was most impressed by the dust that coated everything in the house and gathered in drifts in corners and indentations—dust as a measure of many years passing wherein the man left large parts of his life untouched. And I have been thinking about this dust ever since and seeing it on the surfaces of things at our house, particularly on books we will almost surely never look at again.

So on Tuesday, housebound by the pouring rain, I emerged from my den to find Marcia confronting several shelves of CDs and books in the living room, shelves of things we still love and things we once loved and things we never loved but kept because someone gave them to us or because we couldn’t think where else to put them. Now, however, inspired by the dead man’s dust and the coming of spring, we emptied the shelves, mopped up the dust, and put back only those books and recordings we wanted to keep for the next leg of our journey. The rest we will give away and never think about again.

“Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.” Lily Tomlin

In 1971, having only recently learned to play the guitar, I felt certain that if I could convince a record producer at Columbia or Warner Brothers to listen to me sing my jazzy folk songs I would be the next big thing—James Taylor meets Bob Dylan meets Carlos Jobim—or so I fantasized. A highly impressionable teen growing up in the San Francisco Folk Rock scene of the 1960’s, I watched dozens of obscure musicians vault from garage bands and cafés onto the world stage and saw no reason why I couldn’t achieve the same kind of success. Yes, I was delusional, but without delusions I never would have done most of the things I tried to do.

I found, however, that my ears and psyche could not tolerate Really Loud Music, so Acoustic Folk Rock became my genre. The record companies were in Los Angeles, so that’s where I went, my Aunt Dolly providing a base of operations for me in the living room of her cluttered home. For money I sought work as a gardener, papering Dolly’s neighborhood with flyers and receiving an unexpected response that created a whole new career trajectory for me.

“I don’t need a gardener,” said a woman most definitely from New York and certainly Jewish. “But I’ve got a garage full of stuff I need to sort through and my back is not so good, so…”

Elaine had a two-car garage packed to the rafters with boxes of books, clothing, barbells, golf clubs, photographs, paintings, suitcases, furniture—tons of stuff she and her deceased husband had been stacking in there and forgetting about for thirty years. Now she wanted to go through everything and see if there was anything she wanted to keep. I would carry her things out into the light of day and she would decide what would stay and what would go and what would come into the house to live with her. She paid me two-fifty-an-hour plus lunch, and I could keep anything she didn’t want.

On my second day of working for Elaine, an elderly British fellow stopped by, chatted with Elaine, and then asked me if I might do the same kind of work for him, only in his case it was an attic he wanted to explore. “More of a crawl space, actually,” he said, bowing politely. “Accessible by ladder. What’s wanted is a strong back and good balance. To bring things down and take them back up. Boxes of books mostly. Rugs. And I’m not sure what else.”

So began two months of helping elderly people sort through piles of stuff in their garages and attics and spare bedrooms, with my evenings devoted to recording songs on a neighbor’s reel-to-reel tape recorder pursuant to my becoming a rich and famous troubadour. My most profitable find in those two months of excavation was a mint condition Danny Kaye album, a massive book-like thing containing eight 78-rpm records, each in a separate sleeve. I made a trip to a famous used record store in downtown Los Angeles and sold Danny for sixty dollars! I probably could have gotten more, but sixty was a fortune to me.

The work was one part schlepping and five parts listening to the oldsters tell stories about their various things. Some people wanted to throw everything away, others were more interested in discovering what they had kept. Everyone I worked for was a unique individual, yet to me there was a sameness to everybody’s stuff, and a sameness to their feelings about the stuff—regret and annoyance larded with nostalgia. So I vowed never to accumulate more than I could carry with me on a train, even when I became famous and wealthy. So much for vows we make at twenty-two.

Miracle of miracles, I did actually talk my way into a meeting with a record producer at Columbia, a kindly longhaired guy with gold records on the walls of his office who listened patiently to three of my songs before stopping the tape player and saying, “You’ve got a beautiful voice. What say we stay in touch and see how you’re doing a couple years from now? I wish I could sign you, but you’re just learning, you know? No offense, but you need time to develop your talent. Maybe start a group. Imagine some guy with a really rough voice harmonizing with your sweet tenor. Could be great. Think about it. You’ve got potential. And I’m not just saying that.”

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” Joseph Campbell

Fast-forward forty years to Todd and Marcia creating stuff we hope people will buy from us—CDs, books, and note cards—Marcia vastly more successful than I, and with far fewer products. Her Cello Drones for Tuning and Improvisation sells like hotcakes, whereas my creations…well, let us just say that as I peruse the many boxes in my office full of my creations that hardly sell, I, too, experience regret and annoyance, but not larded with nostalgia. No, my regret and annoyance are larded with amazement at the audacity (delusion?) of hope.

photo by Marcia Sloane

(This story appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser March 2012)

I was the only child of elderly parents. They both died the year before I evolved out of puberty, and I was left in the care of a diminutive maiden aunt. She had absolutely no short term memory and even less money. My bedroom was my haven, my black and white television my constant companion. I was an uninspired student, a mediocre athlete, and I think it fair to say that I had no real friends, no one to confide in, no one to discuss my fears and fantasies with.

I cannot remember when I first became aware of the feeling I am about to describe. I know that I felt it when my parents were still alive, and before I could read, which means I may have been as young as four. I suppose it is even possible that I was born feeling this way, but my memory only stretches back to my late twos, when our big dark tabby cat killed a huge rat, and I saw him eating the rodent, staining the kitchen linoleum with bright blood.

And yet, even now, after all these years of living by and for this belief, I hesitate to reveal my secret. I fear it may sound trite and stupid to you. I fear you will think it little more than a poor excuse for a life poorly lived, a delusional, idiotic notion. But I must risk your contempt. It is my duty.

All my life I have been convinced that something spectacularly good was going to happen to me, though not necessarily through any particular effort on my part. That, in a nutshell, is my system of belief.

Perhaps, from this, you will make the guess that I am a lazy person. I must admit that “lacks motivation” has appeared on every report card and job evaluation I have ever received, save for the one from Mrs. Rhodes, my fourth grade teacher, who preferred her males docile. But was it laziness that made me eschew competition for quietude, or was it my philosophy? Did I survive the first fifty-seven years of a sadly uninteresting life because almost anyone can survive fifty-seven years somehow? Or did I remain a moderate optimist, despite the grotesque redundancy of my days and months and years, because I was anticipating with ever fiber of my being an unknowable event that would set me free and allow me to become whatever I was supposed to be?

It is true that over the years I passed up several higher paying jobs because I could simply not convince myself that doing so was worth the effort of relocating or re-educating myself. I never believed I could be one of those people who succeed through hard work and purposeful determination.

I did buy lottery tickets and enter sweepstakes (if they came to me in the mail), hoping, naturally, that I would win, yet knowing all the while that the winning of money was not what awaited me. No, I was certain I was going to be given something.

I never had a vision of what that something would be, but I knew it would be incredibly good, and that once I had it, I would be content. I occasionally fantasized about fabulous gifts arriving from surprising patrons, but even the effort of fantasizing seemed futile. Go along until it happens, I told myself. Don’t look for it. You won’t know it until it falls on you. Those were the guiding slogans of my life, such as it was.

So, I’m walking home from my tedious, not very difficult, fairly low stress job with the telephone company. My rather drab, comfortable, average-sized one-bedroom apartment is within six blocks of the transmission facility wherein I supervise twenty-five operators and spend my copious free time reading historical romances. The day has been a day like any other, long and uneventful, save for the obstreperous old lady who threatened to unleash the forces of evil upon me if I didn’t refund the money she claimed the pay phone ate, which I did, not wanting to take any chances with the cosmic balance, in case there is one.

I am exactly one and half blocks from home and television and reheated pizza and cold beer, when I feel something click. Do you know what I mean by click? Something both inside and outside me falls absolutely and undeniably and perfectly into place—or into various places simultaneously. Click. And I know, as surely as I have ever known anything, that the universe or whatever you wish to call this dimension we inhabit, has suddenly, or finally, lined up, synchronized all its various parts, and is now ready for whatever I’ve been waiting for all my life—a fabulous feeling, like a sudden cool breeze on a blazing hot day. All my senses are heightened. My heart picks up the pace and I feel like dancing.

I arrive home. There are two police cars, lights flashing, parked in front of the Big Tree apartments, named for our two scrawny redwoods. I am greeted by my landlord, Mr. Lester, a small man with a penchant for absurdly big white belts. He is sweating profusely, his toupee slipping.

“Try to remain calm,” he says, touching my hand. “There’s been a robbery.”  He takes his hand away. “You’ve been cleaned out.”

As I make my way through the small crowd of curious onlookers, Mr. Lester calls out to me, “And they got away in your car.”

My telephone is ringing as I enter my otherwise empty apartment. The refrigerator door is open, revealing only a glaring emptiness. I find myself missing the beer more than any of my other possessions.

“Hello,” says a voice, as I pick up the phone. “This is Jenkins. Am I speaking to operator supervisor four six nine eight dash eleven seven nine six dash four one one oh one?”

“That’s me,” I reply, hearing myself as if from a great distance, realizing I must be in shock.

“Well, I’m sorry to have to break this to you so suddenly, but…”

I’ve been terminated. Twenty-nine years. Done. Major cutbacks due to competition engendered by deregulation. No desk to clean out. No security badge to return. That’s all been taken care of. They’ve changed the locks, the codes, the special procedures. Any personal belongings I may have left in the facility will be waiting for me in a brown bag at the receptionist’s desk. Thank you very much. Click. Drone. Beep beep beep.

Mr. Lester enters. “Listen,” he says, frowning at me, adjusting his wig, “I hate to do this to you, but the police feel, and I have to agree, that it’s pretty strange that only you were robbed. It’s as if you were selected for a reason. And I’m not making any assumptions, but the other tenants, as you can imagine, are very concerned, and since your lease has expired anyway, would you mind…”

I walk out into the last few moments of sunlight—jobless and homeless and without possessions. All I have are the clothes I’m wearing and the money in my…

I feel all my pockets. My wallet is gone—my identification, money, everything—gone. I remember being jostled by a slender young man in the liquor store. I had just bought a Lotto ticket.

In my confusion, it occurs to me that I have probably picked the winning numbers. The jackpot currently stands at seventy-five million dollars. But the ticket is in my wallet. My wallet is gone.

I walk down the street to the nearest pay phone. I have a friend, well, more of an acquaintance really, who might allow me to stay at his place until I can get new identification and begin collecting unemployment. I have seven cents in my pocket. I look in the change slot, hoping for a quarter. No such luck.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn. It is a policeman. He is frowning at me. “See some ID, bud?”

I begin to tell him my story. His frown deepens. “Are you saying you don’t have any ID?” he asks. “Because if you don’t…”

On the way to jail, sitting in the back seat of the police car, I try to think of someone to call for help. I can think of no close friends, no casual date, no relative, no one I am certain will help me. I have never done a consciously bad thing to anyone, but neither have I ever been much of a friend to anyone. I decide to not call anyone right away and see what happens. You might say I surrender.

I find that I don’t mind my night in jail. No one tries to hurt me, the food is edible, and the bed has a new mattress, much firmer than the one I had at the place I so recently called home. I sleep like a babe and wake up refreshed. My sense that everything is in place and ready for spectacular change is more tangible than ever. I thrill from head to toe when they unlock my cell and lead me down the hall.

I am brought into a room and told to walk out on a narrow stage with four other men. A glaring white light shining in our eyes makes it impossible to see who or what is in the audience.

“That’s him,” someone says. “Number four.”

I am taken to another building. The guard treats me roughly. He shoves me into a dark cell. I ask to make my phone call now. He ignores me. I shout at him, protesting my innocence. He continues to ignore me. I panic and call him a filthy name. He opens my door and hits my arm with his club. The pain is greater than anything I have ever experienced. I decide not to make a fuss.

A few hours later, I am taken out of the cell and shoved along a narrow hallway to a small, stuffy room. I am left in the company of three unsmiling detectives. One of them asks me if I know why I’m here. I begin to tell my story, expecting to be interrupted, but they listen to me until I can think of nothing more to say. They look at each other, communicating in a strange silent way that reminds me of something out of a horror movie. One of them clears his throat and asks me where I was on such and such a night.

“Home watching television, most likely,” I reply, shrugging. “That’s what I do every night, except…”

“Except what?”

“Volleyball nights at the Y.”

“And what nights of the week would that be?”

“Tuesday and Friday,” I say, suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that without volleyball nights at the Y, I would have no social life whatsoever.

“This was a Wednesday,” says one of the men. “The night we’re interested in was a Wednesday.”

“Well, then…television,” I say, hearing how terribly sad I sound.

“Any witnesses to that?” asks another of the men.

“I live alone.”

The words reverberate in the empty chambers of my heart. I live alone. I am alone. I have always been alone. I have never known how not to be alone. Is this so strange? Am I a human aberration? Or am I more typical than any of us cares to admit? Am I not quite normal? Am I not Everyman, minus a few special acquaintances, a disenchanted wife, an alien child or two?

I open myself to the silent communication of my interrogators. I hear the hum of their desire. I hear gears meshing, teeth gnashing, bile gurgling. They are in no way concerned with my innocence or guilt. They are hungry for my death. I am a solitary rat in a dirty little corner of modern times. They are a gang of alley cats. They only know how to do one thing.

My court appointed attorney, a sweaty little man who resembles my ex-landlord to an annoying degree, tries to convince me to plead insanity.

“To what?” I ask. “They never did tell me what I was charged with.”

“Well…murder,” he says, frowning at my file. “Two people. It says here you practically confessed.”

I go into deep shock. My attorney summons a guard and I am taken to the infirmary where I am given an anti-shock shot. I fall into a deep sleep and dream I am standing on the threshold of the place where something spectacularly good is about to happen to me. I stand on the threshold for the entire dream and wake up sick as a dog, my legs aching, my head about to explode.

Two days later, at our next meeting, my attorney once again begs me to plead insanity. “The evidence,” he explains, “is overwhelming.”

Eye witnesses, massive circumstantial evidence, no alibi, no character references, no job, no home, a desperate situation, a motive.

“What motive?” I ask, coming out of my latest stupor.

“You’re penniless, homeless, bereft. You feel that society is responsible for your misery and so you decided to strike back.”

“No!” I scream. “I was happy for the first time in my life. Everything was finally, once and for all, perfectly arranged for the occurrence of spectacular good. I was in a state of pure bliss.”

“So you did it for the thrill,” he whispers. “I thought so.”

The judge rolls his eyes and the prosecuting attorneys snicker at each other when I announce my intention to defend myself. But I am determined to tell my story. I honestly feel that only I can do justice to the details of my life. I am determined to prove to the jury that I am not only sane and innocent, but that our so-called society is breaking down and they are all in as much danger as I am of losing their lives.

I am given six weeks to prepare my case. I write and rewrite the story of my life. I state and restate the philosophy that has guided me all these uneventful years. I practice in front of my cellmate until he asks to be transferred to another cell. I know that my coming moment in the spotlight is not the spectacular good awaiting me, but I am beginning to think my defense may lead me to that long awaited moment. I realize I am on the verge of modifying my belief system, of taking my actions seriously. The proximity of doom is a powerful agent of change.

I am eloquent. I am impassioned. I remind myself of every great attorney I have ever seen in a movie or on television, only I am even better because I am three dimensional. I move the jurors to tears.

I am sentenced to death.

But still, still, I do not doubt that very soon, a truly great good thing will happen to me.

In my cell on death row, I find it impossible, for the first time in my life, to watch television. But the moment I make the decision to have the set removed from my cell, I become suicidal.

Four months and three days before the date of my execution, I have my first session with a therapist, a Freudian. Two days later, I request a Jungian. Two weeks later, I wake up from a vivid dream and am shocked to find that I am in prison, on death row, awaiting my grossly premature death. I understand myself too well now for this to be a reasonable way to spend this brief flickering we call human existence. I try to harmonize my lifelong beliefs with the coming of my death, but all I get is atonal dribble.

I recall the story of Job and the stories of Kafka. I think of archetypes and heroes and the three times in my life when I turned down the opportunity to have sex with really terrific women. I think of black men lynched for being black, Jews slaughtered for being Jews, wars being waged for corporate gain, and me, a passive white man being murdered for being a passive white man with no alibis and a belief in something other than a vengeful God.

I begin to dream of escaping. But in these dreams escape is always secondary to where I escape to. I invariably find myself in an alpine meadow, hiking uphill toward the summit of a snow-covered peak. I have a child on my back and he or she is whispering in my ear.

Two months to go. I attack a guard in an attempt to actualize my dreams—the first overtly aggressive act of my life. I am severely beaten and thrown into a lightless confinement cell. After three weeks of near total sensory deprivation, I begin to believe that maybe I did murder those two people, whoever they were. I know I did not, I know I have never broken a law, but the brutality and senselessness of my ordeal demands of my wounded psyche that it come up with a reason for this hellish turn of events. Surely, a voice cries within me, torture and death are not prerequisites to the happiness we have postponed for so many years.

Two weeks to go. I am on the verge of accepting that I am insane. I am sticky with the feeling that my twenty-nine years with the phone company was all a vividly boring hallucination. What if my lack of ambition and my absolute belief in impending spectacular goodness is nothing more than a misfiring synapse in an otherwise perverse and murderous brain? What if I am a murderer? What if I only know the very surface of things seen on television?

I ask to go to the library. I am escorted there by two heavily armed guards. The selection is small. I close my eyes, reach out, and touch the spine of a small book. It is an account of the life and trial of Joan of Arc.

The day of my execution arrives. Joan is with me now, not so much in me, but riding lightly on my shoulder. She gives me good courage. I feel, as a matter of fact, quite calm.

And yes, it occurs to me that death may be that spectacular good I have been awaiting, that my moment of release will be the best thing that ever happened to me in my otherwise unnecessary existence. But I still don’t believe I’m going to die. I continue to believe in…well, divine intervention.

The warden arrives to tell me that my request for a pardon from the governor has been denied. For some reason, this doesn’t surprise or upset me.

A priest is admitted to my cell. We are left alone, the door closed. This is unusual, but I don’t question it. I surrender. I give myself, body and soul, to the glorious principles of Universe.

The priest is a terribly skinny man with sunken cheeks. He does not look at all well. He asks me to confess. I tell him I am not a Catholic. He asks me to confess anyway. I tell him everything I just told you, only in much greater detail. I lose all sense of time. The past and present merge.

At the end of my story, the priest smiles faintly and says, “We thought so. Our evidence corroborates everything you’ve just told me.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, the back of my neck tingling.

“I mean that we have known of your innocence all along,” he explains, coughing into a handkerchief.

He shows me the handkerchief. It is stained with blood.

Quickly, he explains that he belongs to a secret organization fighting inhumanity and needless violence around the world. He has been chosen, because he is about to die of an incurable disease, to die in my place. We exchange clothes. He gives me his realistic fake moustache and heavy framed dark glasses. Before I leave the cell, he tells me exactly what to say and when and where to say it. We embrace, and in our embrace I feel the first stirrings of love.

Moments later, I am outside the prison walls, opening the door of a late model car. As I roll along the highway, making sure not to speed, I activate the tape player.

“Welcome. It is our pleasure to save you. You will find your new identification, a valid passport and one million Swiss francs in unmarked bills in the glove compartment, along with a first class airline ticket to Zurich. Don’t worry. All will be well.”

I drive to the airport, park the car, check my suitcase, and make my way to the departure gate. My reservation is confirmed. I am handed a boarding pass. I walk down the sloping hallway to the softly purring jet. I take my spacious window seat in the first class section, and buckle my safety belt, though I have every reason to believe I won’t need it.

How do I feel? I feel fantastic, swollen with life. Everything I see is sharply focused. Every sound is rich with meaning. Every moment is bursting with opportunity. I am free of the doubt that enslaved me. Every moment is now.

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

“Pleasure is spread through the earth in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.” William Wordsworth

Long ago in the Santa Cruz of 1972, I was a member of a large commune occupying a grand old abode on the edge of the sea. A former stagecoach stop, hotel, brothel, and motel, the three-story main house shared a two-acre plot with four one-room cottages and a large barn that had once been a carriage house and served us as woodshop and garage. I am convinced that my vow to plant and maintain a big vegetable and flower garden was what decided the communards to vote me in, but it may also have been that they liked me.

In any case, I did plant a big vegetable and flower garden, roughly a fifth of an acre, and I not only grew enough vegetables to feed our twelve members and myriad guests throughout the year, but I frequently traded surplus vegetables for eggs and fruit produced by other communes in the area, and I made a bit of extra money for the communal pot from passersby attracted to my Pick-Your-Own-Bouquet sign affixed to the trunk of a fallen but still-living cypress at the mouth of our driveway. Our soil was sandy loam and needed help in the way of manure, most of which we got from a horse ranch on Trout Gulch Road out of Soquel, but there was one spectacular load of manure that came to us as a most surprising gift.

I made my money in those days as a laborer and musician. The minimum wage circa 1972 paid to Santa Cruz hippies for physical labor was two dollars an hour. Being a prideful sort, I would never work for less than two-fifty, and some people paid me three. This may not seem like much by today’s standards, but when you consider that cheese in those days, good cheese, was twenty-nine cents a pound, a loaf of fantastic organic bread made at our local bakery was eighty-nine cents (and half that a day old), and a towering glass of draft beer was fifty cents, then three dollars an hour was serious money.

But even living frugally, I was always low on cash, and so when I landed a four-days-a-week job as an estate gardener at four dollars an hour, I was suddenly a wealthy man, riding my bike six miles up into the mountains to a five-hundred acre estate of redwood forest surrounding rolling hills of wild grasses and poison oak transected by a narrow asphalt road leading to a spectacular house of stone and wood perched on a bluff overlooking Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, an eagle’s eye view of what once was surely paradise.

My employers were an exceedingly wealthy middle-aged couple, he from Boston, she from Cincinnati, with one child, a bearded man of twenty-seven who still lived at home, their fortune inherited from the wife’s predecessors who had established one of the world’s largest oil companies. The husband had an office and a townhouse in San Francisco and would go there for days at a time to venture capital, I suppose, but more probably to get away from his wife who was phenomenally bossy and intrusive and sour.

They had lived in the Philippines for many years, which is where their bearded son had developed his great passion for polo, and where they had employed legions of servants and kept dozens of polo ponies and had a mansion on the outskirts of Manila and a beach house on Puerto Galera Bay and a mountain chalet near Baguio City; and they had loved living there. However, two failed but terrifying attempts by guerillas or crime lords (they were never sure which) to kidnap the bearded son convinced them to return to America, to build a house overlooking the Pacific on one of their many landholdings, and to live in peace and safety. They missed their legions of servants and days of splendor at the polo club, and the sweet warm evenings on various verandahs, and the divine luxury of having anything they wanted at any time, but they did not miss masked gunmen trying to kidnap them.

Since returning to America, the wife had taken to raising champion Saint Bernards, which pastime was the centerpiece of her life. The sire was a massive champion weighing well over two hundred pounds, the bitch a champion, too, weighing a petite one hundred and seventy. When I began working there, the champion pair had nine yearling male pups yet to be sold, each pup destined to surpass his father in size. These enormous dogs roamed free during the day and spent their nights in a quarter-acre pen ringed by a ten-foot-high cyclone fence. They were beautiful beasts, friendly and full of fun, and God help anyone they decided to have fun with.

The first thing I did every morning when I arrived (following my strenuous forty-five minute bike ride) was to release the pups from their pen. Why, you might ask, didn’t the wife or her bearded son or the German housekeeper or the Mexican cook release the pups? Because releasing the pups was a downright dangerous and heroic act, and here’s why.

Imagine nine two-hundred pound dogs, albeit friendly and full of fun, each possessed of frightening strength, hurling themselves against a cyclone fence in a frenzy to be released to go running over the hills and through the forest, sniffing and peeing and chasing deer and all other living things. Imagine the large outward-swinging gate needing to be unlatched, the person doing the unlatching directly in the path of the nine exuberant monsters who wished to show their gratitude to their brave savior by jumping on him and breaking his bones while licking him to death.

Further imagine that some fifteen feet directly in front of the gate was the thick trunk of a sprawling old live oak, a trunk wide enough, and ascending at such an angle, that an agile human could run up the trunk some seven or eight feet before needing to use his or her hands to climb another ten feet up into the tree. Now imagine a person, me, using a very long pole to flip up the latch on the gate, dropping the pole, running up the tree trunk, and then climbing high into the tree while eighteen hundred pounds of Saint Bernard came crashing out of the pen, and six or eight hundred of those pounds came running up the trunk of the oak in joyful pursuit of me. Eventually the colossal pups would leave me treed and rush away and I would climb down, sorely regretting that I had taken this job, yet counting myself lucky to have it.

Oh, the stories I could tell about those crazy rich people; but this is a story about manure, so I will cut to the chase. One day the wife and I were doing what we did every afternoon after lunch, which was to sit in the dappled shade of an oak on the hillside overlooking the flower garden I was forever repairing and replanting because of the rampaging pups. There in that dappled shade we would comb the coats of the huge dogs in search of burrs and wild oats the dogs had collected while rampaging over the hills, some of those oats having corkscrewed into the flesh of the dogs which required us to unscrew the oats and pluck them out—a painful procedure eliciting growls and yips and sometimes snaps from the behemoth canines.

I hated this part of my job more than any other part because I knew that the moment I released the burr-free dog, he would wander into the high grass and invite more oats to jump on for a ride. Or he would traipse down the hill and roll around on the newly planted petunias or begin digging furiously in the just-repaired tulip bed, uprooting bulbs and plants in search of gophers that were never to be unearthed. And the wife would smile at the demolition of my morning’s work and say things like, “They certainly love to dig, don’t they?” or “Where do they get so much energy?”

And the wife confided in me. She told me everything about her life, her husband’s life, and her son’s life; and on this one day, for the first time in the many months I’d worked for her, she asked me about my life. I told her I was a writer and hoped one day to publish stories and novels.

“Well,” said the wife, arching an aristocratic eyebrow, “then you’ll be interested to know that we were good friends with William Faulkner. We visited him three times in Mississippi and the last time we saw him he sold us the desk on which he wrote The Sound and the Fury. Do remind me to show it to you next time you come to the house for your pay.”

“Wow,” I replied, feigning enthusiasm. “The actual desk,” though the idea of these obscenely wealthy people buying Faulkner’s desk ignited a rage in me that spawned the fantasy of my stealing the desk and fleeing with the blessed thing to Oregon. Why should they have Faulkner’s desk? If anyone should have Faulkner’s desk, it should be me, not them. I had, after all, read As I Lay Dying twice!

And as I was having my silly fantasy of stealing her desk, my usually brash and bossy employer said in the sweetest way, “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?”

In retrospect, I think she may have been asking me to say “Faulkner’s desk.” But at the time, her question seemed so ridiculous and insensitive—I, the struggling artist unscrewing wild oats from her huge dogs, she the billionaire heiress unscrewing wild oats from her huge dogs—that I almost said, “If I could have anything in the world it would be for you to hire someone to install an electric gate opener you can activate from the safety of your house so I won’t have to risk my life every day,” but instead I said, “I’d like a huge truckload of well-aged horse manure delivered to my garden.”

And two days later, as I was planting lettuce in the commune garden, a big old dump truck heaped high with well-aged horse manure came backing down the drive and hissing to a halt, the driver jumping out to ask where I wanted the glorious stuff dumped.

There should probably be a moral to this story. I dunno. I quit that job a couple weeks after the manure was delivered because a woman I was crazy about started dating the bearded son and changed overnight from a sweet hippie gal who used to come to my gigs and sing along to my songs and gift me with scintillating smiles and congratulatory hugs and kisses bordering on sex, into a snazzy club-hopping fashion plate. And she and the bearded son would come zooming up in his spanking new convertible Porsche to the fabulous house of stone and wood on the bluff overlooking Monterey Bay, dressed like movie stars at an opening night gala, while I was kneeling in the dog piss dirt replanting the flower bed for the umpteenth time under the watchful eyes of gigantic dogs…and I just couldn’t handle it anymore, though the money was awfully good.

Rabbit Manure Garlic Mulch photo by Marcia Sloane

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

“You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.” Hank Williams

Sandy calls to say she’s gotten permission to harvest rabbit manure from her friend’s rabbit barn. So I load my wheelbarrow and a big shovel into my little old pickup and head for Fort Bragg. A sunny spring morning, the angry winds of the past few days in abeyance, I roll along the Comptche-Ukiah Road at forty miles per and try to remember if over the decades of gathering manure for my various gardens, I have ever scored more than a baggy of rabbit manure. Horse, mule, cow, sheep, goat, chicken…but never a truckload of rabbit poop, until today.

At the intersection of Little Lake Road and Highway One, I pull over to pick up two scruffy humans, their formidable backpacks, and three large dogs. Before I can announce how far I’m going, the humans and dogs scramble into the back of the pickup and hunker down around my big blue wheelbarrow, a smile on every face. I roll down my window and say, “I’m going to Fort Bragg. Please keep a good hold on your dogs.”

To which the taller human rejoins, “No worries, man. No worries.”

And I think to myself No worries. Why not? Sure. Let’s go with that.

As we near the new roundabout at Simpson Lane, one of the humans taps on my window to let me know, I think, that they want to disembark. Blessedly, I navigate the roundabout without incident and pull off to the side of the road, expecting humans and dogs to jump out with the same zeal and alacrity with which they jumped in, but both species remain onboard. I roll down my window and ask, “Is this not where you wished to get out?”

“Sorry, man,” says the shorter of the humans. “Can we have a minute to figure something out?”

“Sure,” I say, being free of worries and in no great hurry.

The humans confer for a moment—a fine moment full of cars and trucks and buses rumbling by on the ribbon of highway (cue the Woody Guthrie.)

“Can you drop us at the post office?” asks the taller human.

So on we trundle, I and my cargo of humans and happy dogs; and I am reminded of my favorite Sufi tales, the ones in which God speaks to a person stuck in some quandary or another and tells that person to go forth into the world, to stop fretting and fly the coop, to go on a quest, or at the very least take a long walk, and in so doing the person becomes available for interactions and experiences he or she never would have had staying home; and through these interactions and experiences, the person’s quandary is transformed into a deeper appreciation of the miracle of life.

“We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.” Arnold Toynbee

We arrive at the rabbit barn, an L-shaped windowless building containing some sixty cages, each wire cage containing a single white rabbit. The rows of large square cages sit atop platforms some three feet above the ground, rabbit poop falling freely down through the spacious weave of wire into earthen troughs we find heaped with hundreds of thousands of grape-sized pellets, some freshly dropped, some several weeks old. Concrete walkways crisscross the room and are hosed off several times a day. Florescent lights give the room the feel of a factory, and that’s what this is, a rabbit growing factory, the end product being slaughtered and dressed rabbits for the restaurant trade.

Indeed, rabbits are being butchered just around the corner from where we are busily filling my wheelbarrow with rabbit manure, the rabbits in the cages near us sitting quietly, eating and defecating and waiting to die. There are no flies in here, no life really, other than the white rabbits and the man around the corner killing the rabbits and skinning them and dressing them, and Sandy and Todd, eager gardeners glad to be getting so much good shit for free.

I return home with my pickup brimming with rabbit pellets, Sandy having needed only enough to dress her two small raised beds; and the first thing I do with my bounty is mulch my burgeoning garlic. When I water down my beds, the thousands of silver gray pellets glisten in the sun, my garlic appearing to be growing in pea gravel.

But as I wheel my wheelbarrow back and forth from truck to garden, and the pile of pretty pellets grows into a goodly pyramid atop the patch of ground that last year yielded a bushel of potatoes, I keep thinking of those white rabbits, small, medium, and large, growing inexorably to the size of slaughter. They never know sunlight or grass or sex, never stand on terra firma, and never even enjoy movement because their feet are forever pressing down against the subtly cutting wire.

And thinking of what I imagine to be the constant sorrow of those rabbits, I find I am less happy about this manure than I am about the manure I bring home from Kathy Mooney’s corral, her magnificent horse Paloma so well-loved, the apples she eats from my hand becoming the manure I dig into my soil. Yes, Paloma’s crap seems imbued with love, and…I don’t eat horses.

“A lovely horse is always an experience…an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.” Beryl Markham

When I lived in Sacramento I had a huge backyard vegetable and flower and herb garden, and for three of the fifteen years I tended that soil, my manure came from a champion pony (a breed, not a young horse), a slender white pony too small to be ridden by adult humans, though children could ride her and she pulled some sort of cart in her performances. This horse had won so many trophies and ribbons in competitions all over America that her owner had dedicated a gigantic room in his house solely for the exhibition of the pony’s myriad prizes, as well as dozens of framed photographs of the pony adorned with victory wreaths and standing with her owner as he accepted trophies on her behalf.

I always went to the pony ranch with my friend Doug because he knew the pony’s owner, I’m not sure how, and because Doug had access to a pickup truck. Those were the days when I did not own a vehicle and so depended on the kindness of friends. We’d get a truckload for Doug and a truckload for me, an excellent blend of horse manure and sawdust, nicely aged in a spacious old barn so the rich mixture was not disempowered by hard winter rains.

The only drawback to this source of manure was that every time we went to get our loads, we had to pay obeisance to the horse’s owner, an elderly fellow with a terrible case of logorrhea, by going with him into the vast trophy room where he would tell us his champion pony’s life story, beginning with lengthy biographies of the pony’s champion father and champion mother, which biographies set the stage for a riveting account of the pony’s birth and her remarkable childhood full of startling exhibitions of her extraordinary intelligence and innate talent leading to her first triumphs as a young adult pony doing whatever such ponies do to win whatever they win, and moving along to stirring tales of her multiple and consecutive championships at state and national levels, culminating with her tour of England and France where she was hailed by the pony people of those nations as a visiting god.

Then we would go out to the champion pony’s barn adjacent to the barn wherein was piled the poop we sought, and we would have a look at the champion and feed her sugar and scratch her muzzle, and her owner would command her to do things, and she would bow and paw and spin around and sit on her haunches like a polar bear. Amazing knee-slapping wow kind of stuff.

Finally, before this verbal blitzkrieg of a man would let us get on with our shoveling, he would ask us each to think of a number between one and ten, and to look into the pony’s eyes as we thought about our number. And then the pony would paw the ground as many times as it took to paw the number she thought we were thinking.

Now the first time I went through this lengthy rigmarole to get the manure, I found the ordeal tolerable and even kind of interesting, though an hour and a half seemed excessive to me. But the second time through was pure torture, and the third time I had to excuse myself when the old fellow began to recount the pony’s remarkable childhood. I hurried to the bathroom where I stayed for as long as I could, humming to drown out the sound of the blitzkrieg’s voice while leafing through an excellent collection of vintage Playboys. And the following year I got my manure somewhere else.

No, the pony did not correctly guess the number I was thinking. I was thinking four all three times, and she always guessed seven. Then again, Doug was always thinking seven, and she always guessed seven, so maybe Doug’s thought waves threw her off when it came to guessing my number. I dunno.

Coming soon: The Manure Chronicles, Part Two.