Month: April 2014

Categories
Uncategorized

Tribe Of Giants

Tribe of Giants

Giants Jacket photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2014)

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” Roger Hornsby

For my birthday last October my brother gave me the coolest warmest San Francisco Giants jacket, a stylish melding of orange and black fabric with a smallish team insignia on the chest directly over my heart, and a grandiose insignia on the back, centered under the word GIANTS writ in large white capital letters outlined in orange. Little did I suspect that this jacket would prove to be a magical loosener of the tongues of countless men and women who had previously looked upon me with suspicion or indifference.

I have never owned or worn anything that so many people, strangers and friends, have praised me for, as if I had designed and sewed the marvelous thing myself. Men, women, boy, girls, homeless people, rich people, old people, teenagers, black, brown, and white people, Russians and Pakistanis and Germans and French and Jews and Muslims and atheists and Americans see my Giants jacket and exclaim, “Great coat! Great jacket! Nice jacket, man. Love your jacket! Go Giants! Right on, Brother!” And when I smile in thanks for their approval of my coat of three colors, they gaze at me with admiration and understanding and, dare I say it, love?

True, the occasional Oakland Athletics fan will glare at my Giants jacket and snort, but even these misguided folk seem disarmed by my cloak because, well, it’s magical.

 “One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something.” Nolan Ryan

I have been a devout San Francisco Giants fan since the team came to San Francisco in 1958. And as an avid baseball player from age six until my late teens, my choice to play in the outfield, and preferably center field, was entirely attributable to my adoration of the ultimate Giant, Willie Mays, the greatest center fielder in the history of the game, which also explained my penchant for attempting basket catches, a Willie Mays trademark, much to the dismay of my coaches along the way.

When I attended La Entrada junior high school in Menlo Park in the mid 1960’s, I played centerfield on the school softball team and my best friend Colin Vogel, another diehard Giants fan, played left field. We were good players, Colin and I, both of us quick to react to the ball off the bat and both of us decent hitters, though we lacked the power of our star shortstop Don Bunce, who would one day quarterback the Stanford University football team to a Rose Bowl victory. Gene Dark, son of the Giants manager Alvin Dark, pitched for our junior high team, and though Gene was an average player at best, we considered him a minor god because of his association with our major gods.

Fast-forward fifty-three years, Colin now a psychotherapist living in Los Angeles, I a Mendocino scribbler and piano player. And because we have never ceased to be diehard Giants fans, Colin and I are still in touch—Colin braving the slings and arrows of publicly rooting for the Giants in the very lair of the hated Dodgers. Several times a season we exchange emails sharing our hopes and fears for our team, and if our boys make the playoffs, we talk on the phone. When the Giants won the World Series in 2010, Colin called, and we hooted and shouted and wept together.

“Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.” Babe Ruth

Today, walking through the village wearing my magical Giants jacket, I passed in front of a truck piled high with firewood, the grizzled guy in the driver’s seat wearing a faded orange Giants cap with white insignia. He glared at me, so I looked away, but then he said, “Vogelsang goes tonight.”

Vogelsang is one of our starting pitchers, and so despite the grizzled guy’s glare, I looked at him and said, “Yeah, he’s been iffy this year, but…”

“They’ve all been iffy,” he said, launching into a diatribe that identified him as a serious student of the game and a bona fide member of my tribe, and therefore worthy of my attention.

“Lincecum was better last night, but he only gave us five. All his mistakes this year have been up and it only takes a couple jacks to put us in a hole. Cain, too. They’re both still trying to transition from power pitchers to finesse and only time will tell if they can master the shift. Fortunately our middle relievers have been stellar, but we’ve got to get more innings from the starters or the pen will be in shreds by mid-season.”

“Hudson…” I ventured to say, before the grizzled guy cut me off.

“So far. Hasn’t walked anybody in twenty-three innings. Amazing. Keeps the ball down. Still has some gas when he needs it. You can hope the young guns learn from him, but they’re stubborn, which is part of what makes them great so…” He looked at his watch. “Gotta go.”

 “It’s fun—baseball’s fun.” Yogi Berra

Weighing a package for me in the village post office, the admirable Robin, wearing orange and black Giants earrings, waxes euphoric about our new left fielder Michael Morse who has hit two home runs so far this year, each a monster shot. “He’s a man,” says Robin, nodding appreciatively. “A real man.”

“Baseball is 90 per cent mental and the other half is physical.” Yogi Berra

And speaking of baseball and the tribe of Giants, here is a pertinent excerpt from my novel Under The Table Books in which ten-year-old Derek learns a valuable lesson about tribalism.

Derek and Lord Bellmaster are sitting twelve rows behind first base at Willy Mays Park watching the Giants clobber the Dodgers. This is the first professional baseball game Derek has ever attended and he is so deeply thrilled by the experience, he keeps forgetting to breathe. Their highly prized tickets were acquired in exchange for a battered first edition (1938) of Larousse Gastronomique. Jenny made the trade, but finding baseball baffling and boring she gave the tickets to Lord. He, in turn, offered them to Carl Klein who actually played outfield in the Giants minor league system for three years in the 1950’s and would almost certainly have made it to the majors but for his tendency to strike out and misjudge line drives. Carl stared at the tickets for a long time—untold memories flooding the forefront of his consciousness—and finally declared, “Take the kid. He’s never seen the real thing.”

Derek had heard of Willy Mays, but until Lord gave him a brief history of baseball on the train ride to the ballpark, he had no idea that Willy Mays was a baseball player. Now, having memorized Lord’s every word about the game, Derek knows that Willy Mays was the greatest baseball player of all time, and “anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.”

Everything about the day has been a thrill for Derek: the train ride, the majestic ballpark on the shores of San Francisco Bay, the brilliant green field beneath a cerulean sky, the bold and graceful players, the fabulous electricity of the gathering crowd, and best of all—getting to spend a whole day with Lord, just the two of them.

In the fifth inning, the Giants leading nine to nothing, the Dodger shortstop dives to snag the hurtling orb, leaps to his feet from full sprawl, and throws out the hustling Giant by a hair. Derek is so moved by the sheer beauty of the play, he leaps to his feet and shouts, “Wow!”

In response to Derek’s enthusiasm, a grizzled man sitting in front of them turns around and says, “You should be ashamed to wear those hats.” He is referring to the Giants caps Lord and Derek are sporting—vintage black and orange ones from the 1950’s loaned to them by Carl Klein for the day, one of the caps autographed by Willy McCovey, the other by Felipe Alou.

Derek feels the man’s rebuke as a physical blow—tears of hurt and confusion springing to his eyes.

Lord puts his arm around Derek and whispers in his ear, “It was a marvelous play. Very possibly one of the most astonishing plays I’ve ever seen. The impossible made plausible. Physical genius of the highest order. Blue-collar ballet. But see, kiddo, most die-hard Giants fans, I among them, hate the Dodgers with such a burning irrational cave man stupidity we are incapable of appreciating them even when they do something transcendent of mere rivalry. So don’t take it personally, okay?”

Derek sniffles back his tears and says to the man in front of them, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m only just now for the first time in my life learning about this game. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to cheer the other guys when they did something incredible.”

The man turns around again, his scowl changing to a smile. “It was an excellent grab, I must admit. Reminds me of what Omar Vizquel used to do routinely three or four times a game way back when. Hey, where’d you get those cool old hats?”

Categories
Uncategorized

Curse Lifted

eggs & roots

Eggs In Hands photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2014)

“You didn’t have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.” Marian Wright Edelman

The curse that shaped the life of my grandmother, the lives of my mother and her brother, the life of my brother, and my own life, has finally been lifted. My brother and his wife lifted the curse, and their daughter Olivia, my charming niece, is the prime beneficiary of their heroic reversal of our family pattern, though I feel gifted by that reversal, too.

With the blessings and support of her parents, Olivia is now living in Los Angeles and embarking on a career as an actor. Whether she succeeds in her chosen profession remains to be seen, but the active support of her parents is the force that dispelled the multi-generational curse. Let me explain.

My mother’s mother Goody was born Gertrude Borenstein in the Jewish ghetto of Detroit in 1899. Her father’s last name was actually Baruchstein, but was changed to Borenstein by hasty immigration officials at Ellis Island. Goody’s parents were orthodox Yiddish-speaking Jews fearful of the machinations of the secular world of America. Goody’s father was a cantor reputed to have a voice so beautiful that whenever he sang even the cynics wept tears of joy. Goody not only inherited a beautiful voice from her father, she was such a talented and beguiling little actress and dancer, that when she was seven-years-old her schoolteacher invited a wealthy Jewish matron to come watch Goody sing and dance and act in the school variety show.

The wealthy matron was so taken with Goody’s talent and charm that she went to visit Goody’s penniless parents and told them she wanted to pay for Goody to study with the best music and dance and drama teachers in Detroit until Goody was old enough to go abroad to continue her studies with European masters of those arts, all to be paid for by this generous matron.

Alas, Goody’s parents thought the wealthy matron was an emissary of the devil, for they believed all actors and dancers and practitioners of non-religious music were vile sinners. So they sent the wealthy woman away and forbade Goody to even dabble in music and drama and dance or any combination thereof.

Fast-forward fifteen years to Los Angeles where Goody gave birth to my mother Avis in 1922 and my uncle Howard in 1926. Avis, as her mother before her, was a fine singer, dancer and actress, and my uncle Howard was a marvelous actor and singer and comedian. Both of them starred in plays at Beverly Hills High, both were Drama majors at UCLA, and both intended to pursue careers as actors despite their parents repeatedly warning them that show biz was a terribly iffy business, the life of an actor no picnic, and it would be a much wiser course for my mother to marry a doctor and for Howard to become a lawyer.

When World War II intervened, Howard joined the Army and served in the Pacific and in the occupation of Japan, while my mother abandoned Drama school the day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, went to law school, married my father (a non-Jewish doctor), graduated from law school and started having babies. When Howard returned from Japan, he entered law school and eventually became a big shot entertainment lawyer.

Family legend has it that my brother and I both started singing and dancing and telling jokes a few minutes after we learned to walk, and in actual fact, both of us were high school thespians and singers, and both of us aspired to be actors despite the fierce objections and interventions of our parents. My brother persevered as an actor in college and beyond, but eventually gave up the stage to become an Internet Technology wizard while I abandoned the footlights fantastic a few years after high school and became a writer and musician and pruner of fruit trees.

At last we come to Olivia, the fourth generation of talented performers in our line yearning to become actors, and for the first time in over a hundred years there are no parental objections or obstructions to one of us at least trying to make a go of acting, with Olivia’s parents actually helping her make that go. Hallelujah.

“I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.” Mahatma Gandhi

Can you imagine being the parent of a gifted artist or musician or actor or singer and doing everything in your power to stop your child from using her gifts? Seems diabolical, doesn’t it? Yet if you believed that art and music and theatre were evil, truly evil, how could you not try to save your child from such evil? If you believed that artists and musicians and actors were sexual predators who used their arts to seduce and molest innocent young people, how could you not try to keep your child away from such monsters?

“We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.” Ethel Waters

In 1980 I was given a big chunk of cash (big by my standards) for the movie rights to my first novel Inside Moves and I used a chunk of that chunk to make a short movie Bums At A Grave, which I wrote and directed and acted in with my brother (you can watch Bums gratis on my web site.) At the world premiere of the movie—a party at my house in Sacramento—the guests were asked to come as their favorite movie stars. To my chagrin, my parents made the long trip to attend the party, and to my surprise and delight my mother came as Gloria Swanson.

Gloria Swanson was born in Chicago in 1899, the same year my grandmother Goody was born in Detroit. Gloria Swanson’s mother was Jewish and married a Lutheran. Gloria was married six times and had several high-profile affairs with powerful men. She was a fiercely independent person best known as an actress, but was also a groundbreaking movie producer, writer, artist, and social activist, as well as a staunch Republican.

My mother’s choice to impersonate Gloria Swanson at the premiere of her sons’ movie puzzled me for many years, and by the time I got around to asking her why she came as Gloria Swanson, my mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and did not remember Bums At A Grave or the party, let alone that she came as Gloria Swanson.

But now I think I know why she chose to impersonate Gloria Swanson. For one thing, my mother’s middle name was Gloria, and for all I know Goody gave her that name in honor of Gloria Swanson. But beyond the name, Gloria Swanson was the kind of woman my mother might have been if not for the family curse. Gloria Swanson’s family helped and encouraged her to get into show biz, and once she was in the biz she succeeded despite a thousand obstacles.

“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.” Arthur Miller

I will never forget the night my mother came backstage after our high school production of The Diary of Anne Frank, speaking of Jews in hiding, in which I played Mr. van Daan, the character most disapproving of the high-spirited Anne Frank. My parents had come to the play the previous night and damned the performance with their faint and phony praise, but the night of which I speak my mother came alone to see the play.

My mother was always much more present and grounded and warm and relaxed and happy in the absence of my father—so much more honest and forthcoming.

Taking my hands in hers, she looked into my eyes and said, “You were great, Todd. Amazing. I don’t know where you learned all those subtle things you do, but…you’re a great actor.” Then she looked around the stage and out at the hundreds of now empty seats and added, “But you do know, don’t you, that all the other boys are homosexuals and all the girls are whores.”

“Mom,” I said, squeezing her hands, “that’s not true. Some of the boys are homosexuals and some of the girls like sex, but I’m not a homosexual and I’m not a whore.”

“You’re a child,” she said, sadly. “And school is not the real world. The real world is those Nazis coming at the end of the play and killing all the good people.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Underlying Problem

For Underlying problem

Globular Warming photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2014)

“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.” Bill Watterson

I walk to town most every day rather than drive my truck for the same reason I decided in 1967 to create a life for myself independent of automobiles, something I’ve managed to do for most of the last forty-seven years. And my reason for eschewing cars as much as possible had and has to do with my awareness of the destructive nature of auto-centric gas-using systems of transportation, housing and economics, and by destructive I mean earth-killing, and by earth-killing I mean the death of the planet.

Many people share my awareness that cars are bad for children and other living things, as those famous posters of the Sixties summed up our collective antipathy to War, but most people I know do not walk to town or live largely independent of automobiles. Why should they? Our systems of transportation, housing and economics were designed to accommodate automobiles first and foremost, so to not use a car is highly inconvenient, and by highly inconvenient I mean impossible if one is in any sort of hurry, which most of us are.

The United Nations just released their first big global climate report since 2007, and one of the maps included in the report shows areas of the world circa 2050 where agriculture will either be out of the question or still possible. According to this map, when I am scheduled to be one-hundred-years-old, only Canada, Scandinavia and parts of Russia might still be habitable and arable, assuming there is air left to breathe, a bold assumption. The rest of the globe, including all but a few acres in the United States of America, will be too hot and too dry to grow anything. Is there a way to reverse the probability of this prediction coming true? Yes. There is one way. Everyone on earth needs to start walking to town most days and living independently of automobiles. Are we ready to do that?

 “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Mark Twain

In related news, I just read a hysterical (and I don’t mean funny) article about the state governments of New York and New Jersey studying the feasibility of constructing artificial islands off their coasts to blunt the destructive force of storm surges similar to those caused by Hurricane Sandy. Climatologists are 100% certain more hurricanes at least as powerful as Sandy are coming soon, so folks in the governments of New Jersey and New York are seriously considering spending many billions of dollars and burning jillions of gallons of fossil fuels to rip up thousands of acres of land to procure the dirt and rocks to create islands off the New Jersey and New York coasts to, you know, blunt the storm surges.

The denial of the underlying problem by these wannabe island builders seems laughable to me, and by laughable I mean sad. And, yes, there are days when I want to flag down my friends who drive their cars to and from the village multiple times a day to get their mail and buy potato chips and meet friends for coffee, and I want to say, ‘Please. Don’t build artificial islands. Just stop driving so fucking much!” But my friends wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about, and they would resent my holier-than-thou attitude, so I do not flag them down and shout incomprehensible things. Instead, I wave to them as they zoom back and forth between their houses and the village in our globe-heating mammoths known as cars.

 “We live in a world of denial, and we don’t know what the truth is anymore.” Javier Bardem

I can honestly say that mostly walking and rarely driving doesn’t make me feel holier than anyone. I don’t walk to feel holy, though I do enjoy how life unfolds at the speed of walking. I walk more than drive because the population of Kittiwakes in the Orkney and Shetland Islands has plummeted eighty-seven (87) per cent since 2000 and those once plentiful birds may soon vanish entirely. Imagine all the sea gulls suddenly disappearing from the coast of California. Why are the Kittiwakes vanishing? Well, the sandeel (a kind of small fish, not an eel) is the main food for most of the seabirds of the North Sea, and sandeels are vanishing as plankton thereabouts disappear, plankton being what the sandeels eat so they can proliferate and be eaten by the Kittiwakes. And plankton are disappearing around the Orkneys and the Shetlands because of climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

The bird lovers of England and Scotland are terribly concerned, of course, that Kittiwakes may soon go the way of the dodo, but there’s nothing they can do about the Kittiwake Crisis because the vanishing is caused by billions of people the world over driving cars instead of walking or taking the bus etc. The Orkney and Shetland bird lovers are hoping to create artificial sanctuaries for the vanishing birds, except the birds aren’t disappearing from lack of places to live and breed. They are dying from climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“I have a very highly developed sense of denial.” Gwyneth Paltrow

Looking at that United Nations climate map of how the world is going to be circa 2050, it occurs to me that if I was twenty-five or even thirty-five instead of sixty-five, I might consider moving to Canada (where they really don’t want me) and getting some land way up in the northern regions that are currently next to unlivable, but in another twenty years might be positively Californian. Of course, in another twenty years, if things go as the United Nations is predicting, hoards of desperate people will be heading for those swiftly dwindling cooler climes, so maybe moving to Canada isn’t a better idea than staying here and mostly walking to town.

Speaking of walking to town, I was in Corners of the Mouth a few days ago buying some edible ballast for my knapsack, and when I got to the bulk grains, my jaw dropped because the price for long grain brown rice, a main staple at our house, had jumped in one week from $1.85 per pound to $2.35 per pound. Knowing that 800,000 acres (so far) of California farmland previously under cultivation are being left fallow this year due to the drought, I’ve been expecting increases in food prices, but not thirty per cent in one week. Rice, I should note, is a main ingredient in many food items, including the gluten-free bread I depend on. Which is to say, be prepared to do some gasping at the grocery store in the months ahead.

“Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.” Germaine Greer

In the 1960’s, when I first got religion about what fossil fuel burning was doing and would do to the earth, I preached with fervor to friends and neighbors and relatives about the virtues of not driving and not traveling in jets, and how we needed to work together (what a concept) to create car-free lifestyles and solar and wind-powered energy systems. My fervor, however, seemed to mostly piss people off, and soon thereafter most of my hippie colleagues bought big cars and drove off into various sunsets. Our short-lived utopian dreams and schemes—based on the principle of Take No More Than We Give—went the way of the dodo.

I continued to live without a car, which was not terribly difficult when I lived in cities with decent public transit in those halcyon days when roomy Greyhound buses made daily stops in towns large and small everywhere in America. But as the bus and train systems disintegrated, I started renting cars to go on the few long trips I took each year and confirmed that absolutely everything in America is designed for the use of automobiles, and nothing else.

Oh I would love to blame evil people and evil corporations and corrupt governments and criminal bankers for the dire situation we find ourselves in today but evil corrupt criminals are not the problem. No, the underlying problem is…

Long ago there was a little band of humans wandering the earth looking for things to eat. Human existence was, at best, a few short years of uninterrupted grubbing for tubers and killing little mammals, with a few fleeting moments of sex to produce more humans. At worst, human existence was being attacked by someone trying to get your scrap of dried rat meat, and then being eaten by a tiger.

One day the little band of humans came upon a pile of grape-sized golden orbs. Not knowing what the orbs were, but hoping they were food, the strongest human in the band made the weakest human eat one of the orbs. Upon swallowing the orb, the weakest human became highly intelligent and could fly like a bird. So everybody else in the band ate an orb, and they all became intelligent and could fly like birds. And every time they felt the need to boost their intelligence and flying abilities, they would eat more of the golden orbs.

Just when it began to dawn on the humans that they might want to use their higher intelligence and flying abilities to create a better future for themselves and their children, they ate the last of the golden orbs. Shortly thereafter, their intelligence and ability to fly went the way of the dodo, and they resumed wandering the earth looking for things to eat and killing each other and being eaten by tigers.

They were human beings and could not overcome the underlying problem—their essential nature.

Categories
Uncategorized

Finishing Things

Bound By Certain Forces Nolan Winkler Oil on Canvas

Bound By Certain Forces oil on canvas by Nolan Winkler

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2014)

“The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.” Theodor Adorno

In his famous essay on parenting, Punishment Versus Discipline, Bruno Bettelheim wrote that children do what their parents do, not what their parents say to do. My father, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was a big fan of Bettelheim, but he did not heed Bruno’s advice in rearing my siblings and me. On the contrary, my father rigorously did the opposite of what he said we should do, and the results were as Bettelheim predicted: we ignored most of what my father said and imitated many of his repeated actions. My mother also modeled behavior that contradicted her spoken directives, and we generally imitated her behavior rather than the dictates of her speeches. Thus we were initially formed.

My father loved to talk about things he was going to do, and once in a great while he would start something, but only rarely finish what he started. I made several determined efforts in my teens not to follow in my father’s footsteps, especially when it came to the completion of tasks, and thought I had succeeded in not imitating my father in this regard, but later discovered I had followed his example in many ways.

Because school was easy for me, one of the ways I imitated my father that escaped my attention and the attention of my teachers was my reluctance to complete tests and homework. I would answer eight of ten questions on a quiz, and three-fourths of the questions on big tests, but never all the questions. I rarely completed my math homework or essays for English, but I still managed to get B and C grades, my teachers would tell my mother I needed to make more of an effort, and life went on.

By the time I took (and didn’t finish) the SAT exam my senior year of high school pursuant to going to college, I was aware of my quirk of not finishing school things and told myself it was because tests and essays and homework were stupid and irrelevant and I was so smart I didn’t need to finish things. But the truth was I could not finish things, and I didn’t know why.

A few years after dropping out of college—speaking of not finishing things—I thought I’d try to get a job with the United State Postal Service. Two-thirds of the way through their employee exam, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, and my only recourse was to rush out of the building without finishing the test. I remember getting home and explaining to my girlfriend that I hadn’t finished the test because “I just wasn’t into it,” though many years later in therapy I saw my failure to complete the postal exam as part of a larger pattern of not being able to finish things I started.

“If your kid needs a role model and you ain’t it, you’re both fucked.” George Carlin

When I was in my early twenties, I went to work for a man who had no trouble finishing what he started. I will never forget the day, early in our friendship, when this man and his four children and I took our sandwiches and drinks outside for an impromptu picnic and one of the kids said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a picnic table like that big one in the park with the benches and top all connected?”

And moments after finishing our lunch, we were building that table. Three hours later we were sitting at that beautiful six-person table drinking lemonade. The tools had been cleaned and put away, the sawdust swept up and added to the compost pile, and one of my boss’s children was sitting at the brand new table doing her homework. Making that picnic table was nothing out of the ordinary in the life of my boss and his family, but for me it was a cataclysmic event and the beginning of my transformation into someone who finishes what he starts.

For you see, my father spoke of building that very same table from the time I was a little boy until I left home at eighteen. He doodled countless sketches of that table over the years, and when I was twelve he and I went to buy the wood for such a table only to have him declare the people running the lumberyard crooks, so the project went no further. And now, with joy and ease, this confident man and his children and I had made this handsome sturdy table that would serve them wonderfully well for the rest of their lives. That which had been an impossible dream for my entire childhood and teenage years turned out to be no big deal.

“Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” E.B.White

I am in the midst of creating a multi-volume work of fiction under the primary title Ida’s Place, and I am currently birthing Book Two. A couple days ago on Big River Beach, I found a comfortable perch on a driftwood log, watched a line of seventeen pelicans glide northward over the sparkling water, and then I commenced to write. After I covered a few pages with hopeful scrawl, I read what I’d written and realized my epic had jumped ahead to Book Three or possibly Book Four.

I gazed toward Japan and said, “I’m onto your tricks. Back off. First we finish Book Two, and then you may bring me Book Three. Not before. Agreed?”

Two ravens materialized in the proscenium of my vision and performed a breathtaking aerial pas de deux before winging away to the south, a performance I took as Universe and Subconscious acquiescing to my request.

When I was in my late twenties, over and over again, just as I was about to finish writing a book or play, my psyche would be invaded by a fantastically compelling idea for a new novel or play, and I would put aside the nearly completed work because this new thing was just too thrilling not to pursue. And there came a moment when every surface of my hovel was stacked with the pages of four nearly completed novels and two nearly completed plays…and when a fifth novel began to speak itself I finally realized what was going on: I was a prisoner of the imperative Never Finish Anything.

“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.” Marshall McLuhan

When I was in my mid-thirties I visited my parents at the house where I lived from six to eighteen, and my mother begged me to finish something my father had started building several years before—a small deck adjacent to their redwood hot tub. Soaking in that tub was one of my mother’s few unmitigated pleasures, and the unfinished deck was a minefield of accidents waiting to happen to anyone getting in and out of the tub, especially at night. So I informed my father that I was going to compete the job, and he huffed and puffed and said he would go to the hardware store later that day and get the things we needed.

My father’s tone of voice implied he had no intention of going to the hardware store, so I said I would be happy to get whatever was needed and do the job without him. Having built several decks by then, I calculated the work, including a trip to the hardware store, would take about two hours. My father then suddenly remembered he already had everything we needed to complete the job, and we got to work.

After an hour of my father telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, he said, “That’s enough. Let’s have a drink. I’ll finish this after you leave. You didn’t come home to work, did you?”

And I looked at him and said, “But all we have left to do is screw down these last few boards and put up a railing along the side there. I’m enjoying this and I want to finish in time for Mom’s evening soak.”

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said, sneering at me. “You want be the hero, don’t you? Save the day.”

“Right, Dad,” I said, mystified as always by his contempt for me. “I want to be the hero and save the day.”