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Early December Mendocino 2024

Sunny and cold, the big rains of November behind us. Yesterday an earthquake shook the coast from Oregon down to San Francisco and beaches and harbors were evacuated for a few hours until the tsunami warnings were lifted.

The town is an actual town again right now as opposed to a tourist depot, and though I know the many visitors support local businesses, I prefer life in a town full of people who actually live here and move at a pace more akin to mine – slowly.

Today I did a little shopping at Corners and picked up the mail at the post office, then walked around on the headlands, the weather balmy, Canadian Geese browsing the field on the south side of Main Street, gulls and ravens circling over the bay, and not another human in sight for the duration of my twenty-minute ramble on the edge of the sea.

These last days leading up to the enthronement of Trump and his cronies have the feel of a lull before a storm. And speaking of storms we are very glad for the good rain at the end of November and we’re hoping for more rain ere long, though I must say the old bones like these warm days.

I start the fire in the woodstove in the early afternoon and it keeps the house warm until bedtime. My dreams of late have been even more absurd than usual. Not quite nightmares, but leaning that way.

The pomegranates have been stellar of late, as have the Brussels Sprouts. I only recently figured out how to cook Brussels Sprouts to my liking, and now I prepare them all the time. I cut off the tough ends, cut them in half, douse a pile of these halves with olive oil, toss them with good curry powder until well coated, and then bake them on a cookie sheet face down in the oven at 425° for eight to ten minutes, flip them with a spatula, bake another five minutes. Voila.

Work on the new novel goes well. I will begin narrating the audio book version later this month and hope to publish the book in all modalities in March, barring bothersome societal/economic upheavals.

I pruned the trees in our little apple orchard yesterday, an easy fun job because the trees are all small and I don’t need a ladder to do the snipping. Some of the trees are small because they are dwarf varieties, and some are small because they are growing in ground dense with redwood roots and thus cannot grow large. In any case, they produce enough apples most years for us to make a big batch of our yummy Hummingbird Hollow Apple Yum.

This is my report.

fin

Mystery Pastiche piano/bass duet from Todd’s CD Mystery Inventions

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Tooting Own Horn Gift Suggestions

Just wanted to remind you that if you are looking for wonderful gifts for your fiction loving friends, for your dog and/or cat loving friends, for your friends who like stories about dogs and cats and their people, for friends who love great short stories, I highly recommend my books Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub and the delightful sequel Pooches and Kiddies: the further adventures of Healing Weintraub, as well as my story collections Little Movies and Why You Are Here.

Of Good With Dogs and Cats a recent reviewer wrote: “I didn’t want this book to end. Both the story and the narrator were captivating. I experienced such deep, profound and peaceful joy with each chapter.”

And another reviewer wrote: “More wonderful stories from one of my favorite authors. In the Northern California coastal town of Mercy, Healing Weintraub is the go-to guy for anyone experiencing difficulties with their companion animal. Healing understands dogs and cats, hence he knows that most problems are actually people problems. But the short stories of how Healing helps others with their dog and cat issues are actually part of and seamlessly woven into the larger story of Healing’s own life and the lives of those he loves. Often humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, always warmly engaging.”

You can order these and other books of mine from your favorite actual bookstores or from many online sellers.

Here are some helpful links to use and share with your friends. Rave reviews posted online by you are hugely appreciated.

My books at Copperfield’s

My books at Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino

My books at Alibris

My books at Bookshop.org

Good With Dogs and Cats Amazon

Good With Dogs and Cats Barnes & Noble

Pooches and Kiddies Amazon

Pooches and Kiddies Barnes & Noble

Little Movies Amazon

Little Movies Barnes & Noble

Thanks!

Todd

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Reminder

I was feeling bereft about the election results and the direction the country and the world are going in. I was in anguish about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine. I couldn’t understand why people and families and towns and counties and states and nations weren’t doing all they could to slow and reverse global warming. I was so dismayed I barely slept for three days. Then yesterday I was drowsing in the living room and I heard a voice.

“You may not remember steeping in timeless cosmic ferment prior to entering quantum transmogrifier beaming you into just-fertilized egg in mother’s womb. Few do remember. Nevertheless, it happened and I have come to remind you: regardless of the outer machinations of the human species, you are here to carry out the mission you and your co-creators devised for you. Carry on.”

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Why We Lost

I don’t usually write abut politics, but today I will in response to many of my friends wondering how anyone, let alone a majority of Americans, could vote for such a deplorable person. My answer is to take a little trip down memory lane.

I was thirty-one when my hero Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, another deplorable person. Jimmy, in his one term as President, launched the solar power revolution and might very well have ushered in the age of high-speed rail and other environmental-helping policies had he been re-elected. Jimmy was the only President we’ve ever had who really cared about the environment and made our government care about it, too. He spoke the truth about the need to live within our environmental means and was ousted by the corporate oligarchs who made sure we’d never see the likes of Jimmy as President again.

One of the ways the corporate oligarchs (the so-called 1%) have maintained control of our government since the ouster of Jimmy is to elect Democrats who are Republicans in every way save by party affiliation. The prime example of this in my lifetime is Bill Clinton.

Bill shoved NAFTA through Congress after his Republican predecessor and good friend George Bush Sr. failed repeatedly to do so. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement, virtually overnight wiped out the American automobile industry and hundreds of other manufacturing mainstays of the economy, and this wipe-out finished off the American steel industry. These collapses directly created the Rust Belt (can you say Swing States?) where tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were lost because of NAFTA.

But Clinton was just getting his Republican agenda underway with NAFTA. He then abruptly and cruelly ended Welfare, throwing millions of people into even deeper poverty and fueling the homeless crisis while doing nothing to mitigate the suffering.

As for the environment, when Clinton came into office, the American fleet (all our cars) had a collective MPG (miles per gallon) well over 20 mpg. Clinton then gave massive tax breaks to people buying SUVs, and when he and Al Gore, the famous self-proclaimed environmentalist, left office eight years later the nation’s mpg was less than ten. That’s right. Less than ten miles per gallon. (Can you say huge profits for fossil fuel producers and a vast acceleration in global warming?)

Then for his most egregious act, Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act restricting affiliations between commercial and investment banks, which launched the era of Ponzi Scheme Economics run by the big banks and Goldman Sachs to create the stock market and real estate bubbles that enriched the 1% further. And less than a decade later America and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Crash of 2008 that caused over TEN MILLION American families to lose their homes.

And did the great Republican, I mean Democrat, Barack Obama help those ten million American families, roughly 40 million Americans who lost their homes? No. He bailed out the corrupt banks and Goldman Sachs and left those tens of millions in deep trouble. If you think I’m wrongly castigating Obama, remember he KEPT Bush’s Treasury Secretary Timmy Geithner as his Treasury Secretary to oversee the bailing out of the crooks and the abandonment of the American people.

So if you’re still wondering why so many people voted for Trump, please remember it was the Democrats who pushed through NAFTA, ended Welfare, replaced it with nothing, and launched Ponzi Scheme economics, all of which resulted in destroying huge sectors of our economy along with the lives of tens of millions of Americans, many of whom had been union members and loyal Democrats.

I certainly didn’t want Trump to win. If his election wakes people up to what’s really going on in our country that will be great. However, I don’t think it will wake many up because the truth is we the people elected these deplorable people instead of electing Bernie Sanders who would have trounced Trump in 2016, given us Single Payer Healthcare, and birthed a national renaissance as did FDR before him. Instead we ran Clinton 2.0 and roused the ire of all those who Clinton and Obama and the Democrats so terribly wronged and abandoned. And Trump tapped the anger of those who suffered under Clinton and Obama, and tapped their children’s inherited anger, too.

And that, I think, is a big part of why so many people could have voted for such a deplorable person.

fin

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Hummingbird Yum

We recently changed the name of our two-acre place from Skunk Hollow to Hummingbird Hollow. Why the name change? First an anniversary update.

As reported on October 17, I turned 75 on October 17. No, that’s not a typo. Then on October 26, I celebrated what would have been my mother’s 102nd birthday. On October 31 I celebrated the 19th anniversary of my moving to Mendocino. I’ve now lived here longer than anywhere in my life. Then came the national election that made me glad I live in California. And on November 10, Marcia and I will celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary.

Fun fact: Marcia and I have forgotten our anniversary twice now in those seventeen years. We’re just so busy.

Now back to the name change. What didn’t we like about Skunk Hollow?

Well… when we first moved here to these two acres a mile inland from the coast (making it impossible to grow tomatoes, eggplant, or corn) we were delighted to find a family of foxes sharing the land with us. There was a mama fox, a papa fox, and every year they had kits, sometimes two, sometimes three. So cute!

Thus when we made our first batch of blackberry jam and I made the labels for the jars, we decided to call our little dip in the terrain Fox Hollow. And for some years that was what we called our place.

Then… no more foxes. We still used Fox Hollow on our labels for a couple more years, but we began to feel disingenuous referencing an animal that didn’t live here anymore. This feeling coincided with a plethora of skunks traversing our deck every day at dusk, these handsome beings stopping to drink from the water bowl in front of our statue of Ganesh.

And since we didn’t want to call our place Raven Hollow or Deer Hollow, though we have lots of both, we chose Skunk Hollow for our new name despite the stereotypical and only sometimes correct belief that skunks stink.

And then the foxes returned! For a year. So we switched back to Fox Hollow. And then the foxes vanished and so did the skunks.

Which brings us to the story of our lemon trees, two of which grow magnificently in two big tubs outside my office windows. These two lemon trees were some of the first trees I planted when we moved here twelve years ago. And because I planted those lemon trees (and two others) in the ground rife with redwood roots as all our ground is, they did not thrive. In fact, two of the lemon trees simply died and the other two grew into wimpy little bushes that never made fruit, though I lavished them with food and water and sweet words.

Finally after seven years I heeded the advice of local gardeners who had warned me I could never grow lemon trees in the ground here. I dug up the little survivors and transferred them into hundred-gallon tubs filled with beautiful soil and they grew into big robust specimens, set hundreds of blossoms, and made lots of glorious delicious lemons and became the favorite haunt of local honeybees.

And then the honeybees disappeared. Pollinators became scarce, lemons few. But we still got some lemons every year because one breed of pollinator did not disappear: hummingbirds.

Every day, several times a day, hummingbirds visit the lemon trees to sip from the few or many blossoms, depending on the time of year and the exigencies of fate. And this year, for the first time in five years, honeybees have been visiting the blossoms and there are dozens of juicy lemons to be had.

Not long ago, I took a break from writing and went out to the orchard to see how the apples were faring, and a great cloud of ravens rose from the trees, the ravens having pillaged those trees and carried away hundreds of the delectable orbs.

We saved enough apples to make two big batches of Apple Yum (delicious apple sauce), and the labels this time, for the first time in our tenure here, read Hummingbird Hollow Apple Yum.

fin

Speaking of yum, you might enjoy my books and music. They make neato gifts, too.

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On We Go

The 2024 election is over. Donald Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College totals and will be the next President of the United States. And what first came to mind when I woke into this new reality was that when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement (The Vietnam War), and had I been a college student in 2024 I would surely have been among those protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. And though I’m Jewish, I would never have voted for anyone supporting Israel’s crime against humanity.

I doubt Trump won because of Kamala Harris’s solidarity with Biden in supporting the Israeli slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless people, but I do feel there is a karmic connection to that ongoing genocide and Harris’s loss.

In my musings this morning about the election, I was reminded of something I wrote and posted five years ago when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for President. I thought I’d include that post herein, recalling that it was the strategy of the Democratic Party to make sure Bernie did not win the nomination for President.

May 2, 2020

Bernie and Precious Dream

I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and contributing to his campaign because he is the second person in my lifetime (Jimmy Carter the first) who wants what I want for our society and the world and has a chance, however slim, of becoming President of the United States. I hope you vote for him, too.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called ‘Precious Dream’. Marcia and I recorded the song on our CD So Not Jazz ten years ago. When the CD came out, we gave some concerts and ended each of our shows with a performance of ‘Precious Dream’.

Many people said the song would make a good campaign song for a dream candidate yet to materialize. And now Bernie Sanders has materialized and here’s hoping our precious dream can at least start to come true.

You can hear our rendition of ‘Precious Dream’ on YouTube.

Precious Dream

Last night I had a precious dream, dreamt I woke into the dawn,

walked out of my little cottage, found a newspaper on the lawn

When I picked up that morning tribune

it opened to the very front page

and the headlines they told me

it was the dawning of a brand new age

Yeah the rich folks had all decided

to share their money with the poor

and the leaders had disbanded all the armies,

not another dollar to be spent on war.

They’d stopped building prisons,

put that money in our schools and neighborhoods

and instead of building bombs and things we don’t need

we were all of us working for the greater good

Yes they stopped clear-cutting the forests,

killing all the animals,

stopped dumping poison in the ground

and the rivers and the sea.

Oh the cars ran clean, trains ran smooth and fast,

the air was clear,

food and shelter, health-care guaranteed

And the movies were about fascinating people

with real problems, you know, the real stuff

and our heroes were bright and generous,

pioneers of truth and love

When I woke up, my heart was pounding,

and I prayed my dream had all come true,

but I knew as well as you do

that that’s really up to me and you

Yes, we have it in our power to change the way we live

we have it in our power to take no more than we give

we have it in our power to love instead of hate

we have it in our power to make these changes

before it’s all too late

fin

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Mom and the Election

Yesterday was Halloween. In a few days there will be an election I believe will either mark the beginning of a major disaster for America and the world, or will give us one more chance to make some substantive changes to help the country and the world move back from the brink of war and unimaginably terrible climate disasters.

*

I’ve been giving a little money to candidates I admire who are involved in very close elections for House seats and Senate seats around the country. When you give candidates money online with a credit card, you hear from those candidates again and again asking for more money. And because I feel this election is so crucial, I gave a little more money to those candidates, hoping to make a difference in the outcomes of their races. I’ve now given way more than I intended to, but then I’ve always been a soft touch when it comes to trying to help save the world.

In their follow-up pleas for more money, much is revealed about these candidates and the states where they live. It seems all the people I’ve given to are decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent, and dedicated to helping everyone, not just wealthy people. None of the candidates I support are racist misogynists, and all of them are running against racist misogynists being funded by… you guessed it… racist misogynist billionaires.

The choice has never been clearer, yet apparently lots of people want to be represented by racist misogynists who say climate change is a hoax and all our problems are caused by women, people of color, gay people, poor people, and environmentalists.

*

My mother was a devout member of The League of Women Voters and was the first person to point out to me that polls do not measure voter turnout, which is the main determinant of who wins or loses elections. When turnout is big, the kinds of candidates I’ve given money to tend to win. When fewer people vote, racist misogynists funded by billionaires tend to win.

This is all to say I hope you’ll vote and encourage your friends (especially those in swing states) to vote for decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent people dedicated to helping everyone, and not to vote for horrid self-serving schmucks funded by… you guessed it… horrid self-serving schmucks.

See you on the other side, so to speak.

fin

Precious Dream (Todd’s campaign song for Kamala)

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75

Amidst the uproar of a world in chaos, I was born seventy-five years ago. Now in these more peaceful times… no, wait. Other way around. In those peaceful times in 1949, I was born, and seventy-five years later…

So, yeah, I’m seventy-five. I’m writing a book and composing piano tunes, and today Marcia and I schlepped ten wheelbarrow loads of oak into the woodshed and put out the garbage cans and tied the lids down to dissuade the bears, and I’ll bake some cod for supper to have with quinoa.

*

I remember when it became possible to make a recording of my music on a cassette tape recorder and give a cassette of my music to someone else, and it was a miracle. I remember when the very first photocopy shop opened, maybe the first one in the whole world, and I made ten copies of a collection of short stories and gave the collection to ten people, and that was a miracle, too.

*

I was born at Saint Luke’s hospital in San Francisco at 6:33 AM on October 17, 1949. I was ten months in my mother’s womb. Otherwise I would not be the double Libra I am, whatever a double Libra is. My parents took me home from Saint Luke’s to the little house they’d just finished building in Mill Valley, which in 1949 still had an active mill turning redwood logs into lumber. My parents bought their lot and built their house in Mill Valley for 7000 dollars.

*

I make a point of asking people on their birthdays if they have any words of wisdom they’d like to share, or if not wisdom then something to chew on. Since I am the birthday person today I asked myself if I had any words of wisdom to share. What came to mind was the upcoming election and the many other elections in my lifetime won by horrible people who did all they could to enrich a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everybody else while doing nothing to slow the ruination of our planet. And I remember the days after those elections feeling sad and distressed and wondering why we keep choosing avaricious dishonest people as our leaders, and then I got back to writing and playing the piano and schlepping firewood and cooking supper and being a good friend and trying to live lightly on the earth.

fin

Mystery Music Box piano song by Todd

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Acting Chops

I’ve reached an interesting phase in my writing of the novel currently occupying much of my psyche, a phase in which my acting chops come more and more into play. By acting chops I mean my facility as an actor, specifically an actor who enjoys becoming many characters simultaneously.

When I was a little boy I was fascinated by what made people funny or not funny, and by funny I mean humorous not weird. My Jewish grandparents were funny, my WASP grandparents were not, my mother could be funny if she was in the mood, my father told us bedtime stories with funny parts, and a few kids at school were funny and I studied their every word and gesture.

When I was six my humorous stories were popular with my peers, so much so that my First Grade teacher Mrs. Bushnell had me up in front of the class to tell stories while she rested i.e. took naps. I’d spin silly tales, play all the parts with great gusto, and most importantly make my classmates laugh.

One of the first things I learned from performing for an audience was that things I thought would be funny might not be, and things I never suspected were funny might be hilarious. The collective mind is very different than the individual mind, and once I’d gotten the collective laughing, almost anything I said would be perceived as funny by most of the individuals composing the collective. I also learned that relentless humor was unsustainable. Occasional excursions into more serious realms enhanced the eventual return to the funny stuff, as did well-timed pauses and silences.

And though learning to be a good stand-up comic storyteller was immensely satisfying, it was not until Sixth Grade that I experienced what it was to be an actor. That was the year a new girl appeared in our midst – Helen Reid. A comely young adult, light years more sophisticated than the rest of us, Helen was immediately beloved by many boys and a few girls. I had a crush on Helen, but the field was so crowded I dared not pursue her, not that I would have known how to pursue her.

Helen aspired to be an actress and was eager to put on plays. Had she continued to live in our school district and gone on with us to junior high, she could have tried out for after-school plays and certainly would have gotten leading roles, but Helen moved away after one momentous year with us, and for that year putting on plays at our school consisted entirely of what Helen could scare up on her own.

She enticed a few girls to dramatize with her, but boys were either disinterested or so inept Helen wouldn’t use them. And I was disinterested because I couldn’t conceive of having anything to do with Helen except to gawk at her from afar and hold my breath whenever she spoke aloud in class.

Then one day at recess Helen approached me and said, “Todd. I’ve found a marvelous little play I’d like to put on with you. It’s very funny and shrewd, and given your inherent charm, I think you’d be perfect opposite me.”

I remember wondering what inherent meant and smiling at the word shrewd, which I kind of knew the meaning of. And I remember how her sophistication washed over me and the delicious nuances of her speech and the exquisite grace of her gestures were so alluring I couldn’t help but stick my finger up my nose and say, “Me?”

She laughed her gorgeous sophisticated laugh and said, “Yeah you. We can rehearse at my house after school. Say yes.”

I must have agreed because soon thereafter I went to Helen’s house three afternoons in a row and we had cookies and hot cocoa and a marvelous sophisticated time rehearsing a short shrewd comedy in which we were a young married couple shopping together, and no matter what my young bride wanted I couldn’t deny her.

The slapstick component of the play was that Helen’s character kept buying things and my character had to schlep the ever-growing stack of packages until the stack reached such ridiculous proportions I was staggering under the weight and barely able to keep the edifice of packages from falling over.

Helen had most of the lines in the play, I was her adoring Yes man, and in the end I did drop all the packages, she was hilariously outraged, then eloquently forgiving, and the play ended with her… wait for it… kissing me on the lips!

Of course the play was a hit with our class and we were asked to perform it for the other Sixth Grade class and two Fifth Grade classes, after which for a few days I was a minor celebrity on campus and imagined Helen and I would run off to New York together and conquer Broadway, except I was eleven.

I was not in another play until my sophomore year in high school, after which I was in lots of plays and thought I might become a professional actor. After high school I spent some years exploring that option and chose to go another way, though I continued to act through my fiction. And the interesting phase I’m in with the current opus involves refining the scenes by acting them out with gusto.

Several drafts from now I will record the book for the audio edition, and during the recording process I will have an audience – Peter Temple, our wonderful recording engineer, and me – as we review the recording to hear if any lines want to be retaken or rewritten.

Until then I will hone the lines until they sing.

fin

Todd’s many audio books featuring his acting chops can be found at Audible.

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Gestation

I’ve just completed the third draft of my novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel. I printed out the three-hundred-page manuscript last night and I’ll let the tome rest on my writing table for a week before I return to the saga with pen in hand to discover what wants clarifying.

During this week of letting the pile cool, so to speak, I will give the editing department in my brain a vacation.

However, I know my unconscious self will stay on the job night and day interacting with magnetic electric sonic vibratory synaptic currents coming from hither and yon, so when I do take up the physical manuscript again I will be a different person, neurologically speaking, than he who wrote the book so far.

This is one of my favorite things – the work that gets done in realms beyond conscious knowing.

fin

Todd’s books at Amazon

Todd’s music at Apple