Month: February 2026

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Etchings in the Sand

For our first seven years here in the redwoods of Mendocino I stubbornly tried to grow things in the actual ground and failed bitterly. I would prepare the ground for planting vegetables by digging out all the redwood roots in a sunny locale, adding compost and aged manure, and then growing one iteration of cool-weather quick-germinating vegetables before the bed became a solid mass of redwood roots again within just a few months.

Eventually I moved my strangled lemon trees from the ground into tubs and they have since flourished, and a few years ago I moved the struggling Daphne plants our friend Deb gave us into a large ceramic pot and they are big and healthy now, though they have yet to flower. I apologize to the lemon trees and Daphne every day for my unwillingness to accept the truth for all those frustrating years.

We’ve had lots of rain of late, hurray, and every blade of grass is adorned with jewels.

One of our Buddha statues holds a smaller Buddha statue, and seeing this parent-child relationship always makes me happy, perhaps because I identify with the smaller statue and feel held in the embrace of a Buddha consciousness much larger than my own ego-bound mind.

Our Ganesh, remover of obstacles and patron of the arts, is gray from months of rain and lack of direct sunlight. Much of Ganesh’s gray coating will burn off in the warmer sunnier days fast approaching. I have tried washing Ganesh with soap and a scrub brush during the winter, an endeavor as futile as trying to grow vegetables and lemon trees and Daphne in ground clogged with redwood roots.

Today there was a minus tide, and since this was the first sunny day in over a week, and feeling jaunty, I drove down to Big River Beach and walked as far as the sand stretched to the north. Felt wonderful to walk barefoot on the sand after weeks of confining my feet to socks and shoes.

One of several enormous driftwood logs reminded me of Pinocchio had he been a sea monster.

There were etchings in the sand, messages from the universe reminding me that everything is in flux always, and everything means something, though most of what everything means is unfathomable.

The sky was full of various kinds and colors of clouds. I imagined this was an audition, a heavenly cattle call for a juicy role as the clouds in an upcoming sky show drama, and clouds from all walks of cloud life had come to hang in the sky over Mendocino Bay hoping to be among the chosen. I just happened to be walking by, saw what was going on, and took a picture or two.

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Just Love from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven with Gwyneth Moreland

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News We’re Tracking

We’ve been having lots of rain this week, much needed, and the potholes on our street are now little muddy pools. I write to the Mendocino County Department of Transportation a couple times a year and send pictures of our street that badly needs to be paved anew, but in fifteen years we have only managed to get someone to come out once and do a little patching that lasted but a few months. Oh well. I guess they’re using our property taxes for other things.

This is the blowhole on the headlands just to the west of Portuguese Beach. The big storm swells rolling into that cave have been making some spectacular water explosions. Endlessly fun to watch.

Marcia cooked a feast for her birthday, which conveniently falls on Valentine’s Day so I rarely forget her birthday. Phew. She made baked beets and carrots to go with a scrumptious chicken tagine. I helped chop things and stir things and eat things.

I take lots of pictures of dogs because dogs abound in Mendocino. One sunny hour between rain storms recently a beautiful cat who hangs out at a yoga studio in the village posed for me, and later that day a cat came to flirt with me on my walk in the neighborhood.

Speaking of dogs, our friends Doug and Roxana who live in Withee, Wisconsin gave a copy of my new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person to the town library and there we are. If you haven’t read the book yet or listened to the audio book you’re missing some really big fun. Trust me. By the way, breaking news: the audio edition is now available from Apple for just 5 bucks! (as well as being available from Audible.)

And speaking of great books, I’m in the middle of narrating the audio version of my book Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and other stories at Peter Temple’s studio. What an intriguing collection of stories! I’ll let you know when the audio version comes out.

This morning it hailed like mad for the third day in a row, and shortly after the hail stopped, the sun came out.

On my way down from the post office to see the raucous ocean, I came upon this cool-looking truck and thought, “The person who created this vehicle has thought long and hard about what you need to go truck adventuring.”

Moments later I stood on the cliff overlooking Mendocino Bay and snapped some pictures that might have been painted by Maxfield Parrish. What an amazing world this is.

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Nothing Anybody Says from Todd’s album Dream of You featuring Gwyneth Moreland singing so beautifully.

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Cyrano De Nerderac

So last night I heard from my friend Jamie Roberts that he was going to be airing my story Cyrano De Nerderac on his show Radiogram on our local community radio station KZYX in a couple hours.

At the appointed hour I listened to the very funny story for the first time since I recorded the tale in 2007, nearly twenty years ago. I laughed and laughed and laughed and cried at the end. What a great story!

I made that recording to go with several other stories on an album entitled I Remember You that was one of my first collaborations with my wife Marcia Sloane. I read stories and she played cello interludes between the stories. We sent out hundreds of copies of the CD to Spoken Word shows on radio stations all over America and no one, except Jamie, ever played any of the stories. Oh well.

Twenty years is a long time ago. However, I wrote Cyrano De Nerderac almost fifty years ago and published it in either Seventeen magazine or Young Miss. My memory fails me in this regard and I no longer have a copy of whichever magazine my agent sold the story to. I do remember I was paid 500 dollars for the story, which fifty years ago was some nice coin, as we used to say.

Before I succeeded in publishing a novel, I sold short stories to Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss through the efforts of my first and most excellent literary agent Dorothy Pittman who took me on as her client in 1973 after reading an early novel of mine entitled Suicide Notes From My Friends and a collection of short stories entitled What Shall the Monster Sing and other stories.

The first story she sold for me was entitled Willow about a female boxer. She sold the story to Cosmopolitan in 1975 for a thousand dollars, a dizzying sum for a hippy living in a garage in Eugene, Oregon. And over the next eight years she sold several more stories of mine to Cosmopolitan (for two thousand each!) as well as three or four stories to Seventeen, and a couple to Young Miss.

In 1977 she sold my novel Inside Moves to Doubleday and the subsequent paperback sale and movie sale launched my career as a successful writer, which career was essentially over a decade later for reasons I will not bore you with.

In any case, Cyrano De Nerderac got written, published, recorded, and you can listen to it gratis and maybe have a laugh or three.

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What Comes Around piano solo by Todd from his album Incongroovity

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Things On My Mind

When we moved into this house on these two acres fourteen years ago there were so many deer in the neighborhood one of the very first things we did was have a sturdy deer fence put in around one of our two acres so we could grow fruit and vegetables and roses. We left the other acre open to the deer and enjoyed the daily visits of several does and their offspring. In the fall, bucks would arrive to impregnate those does they could catch up with.

Our neighbor across the street fed the deer. He put out large quantities of feed (cob) for them every day and as a result he had a resident herd of eight to fifteen deer, depending on the survival rate of the fawns born that year. In drought years, the mountain lions would severely cull the herd and few fawns survived the summer. This herd of deer foraged for miles around here to supplement the food our neighbor fed them.

I think it fair to say our neighbor loved the deer he fed, though every year he traveled to Montana or Idaho for a month to hunt deer and elk, and he always killed a deer or two every year. Yet he never harmed the deer who hung around his house, and for generations depended on his feeding them for a large part of their daily food intake.

A few years ago our neighbor died and no one continued feeding the neighborhood deer. Within a couple months of our neighbor’s death, most of the herd had scattered and we only had three does and their progeny visiting our property. This year only a single doe and her two yearling offspring come by every few days to browse the acre of our property accessible to them.

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Today I’m going to plant potatoes in two of our orchard tubs. Our little deer-fenced orchard gets the most sun of any place on our property that is mostly surrounded by big redwoods. Had I known we’d have such a long run of sunny days this winter, I would have planted potatoes a couple weeks ago. With luck, we should be harvesting some nice spuds in April when I’ll be planting the annual crop of lettuce, chard, peas, beets (for the greens mainly), carrots, arugula; and in May a zucchini plant or two.

Growing potatoes is fun and easy, and digging up potatoes always reminds me of hunting for Easter eggs when I was a kid.

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I’m about to start narrating the audio book edition of a book I published in 2020. Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and other stories. I think it will make a wonderful addition to the nine other books of mine available from Audible/Amazon, yours truly the narrator of eight of those. I don’t have a large following of readers and listeners, but I enjoy making my work available to the larger world.

And soon I’ll be recording songs and music for a new album, always an exciting adventure for me.

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Here is an excerpt from an essay by Philip Whalen speaking about where his poems come from:

“Some poems arrive as dreams. Others begin from memories. Some start out in the middle of a conversation I’m involved in or words that I overhear other people speaking. An imagination of the life of some historical person may occur to me: I may suddenly suppose I understand what it felt like to be Johannes Brahms on a particular morning of his life. A landscape, a cat, a relative, a friend, a letter (or the act of answering a letter), walking, the unexpected receipt of a new poetry magazine full of work by new young writers, the arrival of a new book of poems by a friend or somebody I don’t know personally; re-reading Shakespeare or reading Emily Dickinson on the streetcar and suddenly moved to tears; shopping for vegetables, making love, looking at pictures, taking dope, sitting still and looking at whatever is happening in front of me, getting a haircut, being afraid of everybody and everything, hating everybody, playing music, going to parties, visiting relatives, riding in trains, buses, taxis, steamboats, riding horses, getting drunk, dancing, praying, practicing meditation, singing, rolling on the floor, losing my temper, looking for agates, arguing, washing sox, teaching, sweeping the floor, operating this typewriter right now (bought in Berkeley 12 years ago and wrote ten books on it) while the cicadas and taxis all sing in ravening hot Japanese summer 1967…all this is how to write, all this is where poems are to be found. Writing them is a delight.”

Fin

What You Do In Ireland piano solo from Todd’s album Nature of Love