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Terrible Chairs

Four Brits and a Yank

Four Brits and a Yank photo by Todd (click on photo to see larger)

“There are some terrible chairs in the world,” said Ruth, Abi’s sister, as we were enjoying afternoon tea on the deck in the blessed fulgent sunshine.

“That’s a great line,” I exclaimed, jumping up to get pen and paper. “I must write it down.”

Ruth and her partner Jeff were visiting from England, staying for a week at the Mendocino Hotel and watching Abi perform with the Mendocino Music Festival orchestra. Abi stays with us when she comes to the coast from Forestville to play the annual festival, she and Marcia among the local players filling out the cello section. Ruth had never seen Abi perform on her cello, so this was a big deal for both sisters—Ruth nearing sixty, Abi fifty-three and a longtime California resident.

There were six of us having fruit salad and cheese and crackers and tea, Abi, Jeff, Ruth, and Marion the Brits, Marcia and Todd the Yanks.

We got on the subject of words and figures of speech specific to England shortly after Ruth told us about meeting people in Mendocino who, when they heard Jeff and Ruth’s British accents, felt the need to apologize for our president.

Lest we sink into group despair, I changed the subject by saying to Ruth and Jeff, “Marion recently used the word chuntering in an email to me. We don’t have that word in American English as far as I know. Do you use it, too?”

They said they did. One might say, “The washing machine was chuntering along.” But one might also say, “He was often chuntering to himself about one thing or another.” So there was not a set meaning to chuntering, but the four Brits knew what chuntering meant by the context in which it was used.

Then Marion asked Ruth and Jeff, “Do you ever use the expression scurryfunging?”

Ruth and Jeff didn’t know that one, and Abi suggested it might be specific to Oxford where Marion hails from.

“What does it mean?” Marcia wondered.

“When you’ve got guests arriving any minute and the place isn’t presentable,” explained Marion, “you do some scurryfunging to give the place a semblance of order.”

“Scurryfunging,” I said, writing it down. “Hurried house cleaning and putting things away before the guests arrive.”

This talk of words specific to British English put me in mind of one of the most enjoyable editing jobs I ever had. I was hired by a publisher to help them bring out the first American edition of a massive English gardening book, a classic in the field that had been revised and reissued several times in England over the past hundred years. The editor who hired me had taken one of my writing workshops and knew me as both a competent writer and a zealous gardener.

My job was to carefully read the massive tome and note any words or expressions I thought should be replaced by American equivalents to make the book less confusing for American readers. I would be working with a British editor who knew oodles of gardening terminology.

I found hundreds of words in that encyclopedic tome that needed translating to American English, and this charming British editor and I had three long telephone conversations during which we went through my list and came up with appropriate replacement words for the originals. Being a hopeless mimic, after a few minutes on the phone with this learned fellow, I had a British accent rahther like his.

So the British say green fly, Americans say aphid.

Americans say hand clippers, the British say secateurs.

The British use the word turf for what Americans mean by sod. The Brits use sod to mean soil, not the grass attached to the soil.

In other linguistic news, I’ve been having fun employing the expression I know. Right? in my recent communications with my pal Max. If you were a teenager or adult in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, you probably knew people who used this response…all the time. Here is my initial exchange with Max that inspired me to trot out the old expression.

Todd: Abi has agreed to teach me how to make my own granola, something I’ve always wanted to do.

Max: I’m amazed you’ve never made your own granola. A funny little hole in your history—soon to be filled.

Todd: I know. Right?

I’m fairly certain I know. Right? pre-dates, yet is somehow connected to, the ubiquitous phenomenon in America of teenagers and young adults, predominantly females, who make every sentence into a question?

“I went shopping yesterday? At Whole Foods? And I wanted to get bananas? But they were out of the organic ones? And I was just devastated?”

I know. Right?

I mentioned I know. Right? to Marion, and she was quite familiar with that particular expression.

“It’s not at all defensive,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s just a British thing, but if someone said, ‘I’m amazed you never learned to make your own granola,’ the British reply would probably be something like, ‘Well, I didn’t have time to learn. I was busy with more important things.’ Whereas, saying ‘I know. Right?’ is to nicely agree.”

Which is true, but what used to bother me about the expression was that the initial confidence implied by I know felt diminished by Right? as if the confidence was false.

Max pointed out that the correct reply to I know. Right? is Right!

But I always bridled at making that reply because I wanted to say, “Oh stop equivocating,” only I never said that because I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

right

We had so much fun at tea with Jeff and Ruth and Abi and Marion, we did a bit of scurryfunging and had them over for Sunday brunch; and as I was giving Abi a copy of my book Calliope of Hope because she had very much enjoyed The Recipes of Alexander Skåll, she asked, “What is a calliope?”

I was surprised she didn’t know what a calliope was, being a pianist and cellist and whatnot. Then Jeff joined us, and he, too, didn’t know what a calliope was, which surprised me anew. The Brits apparently don’t use the word calliope.

So I described a calliope as best I could and Jeff said, “Oh…like a barrel organ, only bigger.”

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Two Love Stories

love story

love story photo by Todd

Here are two brief love stories from my new novel Magenta.

Henry’s Story

When I was a senior in high school at Fort Orford High and causing my God-fearing parents great distress by playing the guitar, I fell in love with Iriana Ceja, a beautiful Mexican woman three years older than I.

Iriana was a waitress at the North End Café, now Dave’s Donuts, and believe me, Iriana was the only reason anyone knowingly went to the North End Café. The food was bad, the coffee uniformly bitter, the décor ugly and uncomfortable. But Iriana was so lovely, so friendly, and such a sparkling conversationalist, hundreds of people made the North End Café a daily part of their lives, and I was one of those people.

I went there after school to gawk at Iriana and listen to her talk and laugh. I would buy a stale cookie and a cup of bitter coffee and stay for hours, supposedly doing my homework, but really just reveling in Iriana. My life at home was torture because my parents were so fiercely opposed to everything I loved, especially my playing the guitar and writing songs. School was drudgery and my peers were largely disinterested in the poets and artists I admired.

Iriana was my solace.

She called me Hank—no one else did—and when I finally got up the courage to ask her why she called me Hank, she gave me one of her darling smiles and said, “Como Hank Williams, por supuesto. I heard you playing your guitar at the beach. I love your music. Why don’t you bring your guitar here and play for us?”

Us meant Iriana to me, so I started bringing my guitar to the café and playing for her when she took her breaks. She would sit at the picnic table under the oak tree behind the café, smoke a cigarette, and listen to me play. She sang harmony if she knew the song and hummed harmony if she didn’t know the words.

After every song, she would say, “So beautiful, Hank,” or “I love that song, Hank,” or “You’re so good, Hank. Bueno bueno.”

So of course I wrote songs for her, and after I played her the third song I’d written for her, she kissed me and we were officially a dyad.

We had a hundred passionate tussles under that oak tree and at the beach, but whenever I asked her to make love with me, she would say so sweetly, “When we are married, I will make love with you every day.” So I vowed to her that when I turned twenty-one, if she hadn’t found someone else, I would marry her.

My parents were terrified I would fulfill my vow to marry Iriana. They were racists, not violently so, but they wanted me to marry a white woman, not a Mexican. I graduated from high school, turned nineteen, and went on a hitchhiking trip to Canada with my pal Gunnar Digs. Not long after we got back, I joined the Army.

When I came home from Germany two years later, the North End Café had turned into Dave’s Donuts and Iriana was married to Fernando Viramontes and pregnant with the first of their two kids. She was working at Stuyvesant’s by then and would work there for the next forty years. It was Iriana who encouraged me to go to Nashville and try to sell my songs.

“You have to go and try, Hank,” she said, sitting across the table from me at Stuyvesant’s, just a few weeks before she gave birth to her daughter Veronica. “God gave you a special gift. Maybe you won’t succeed, but you will never be happy if you don’t try.”

When I came home from Nashville three years later and hid my guitar away and took up the chainsaw, I ate at Stuyvesant’s three or four times a week. The food was good, but that’s not why I went there.

I went to be in the presence of Iriana, my dear friend who never stopped believing my music was beautiful.

Theodore’s Story

When I was living in Santa Cruz and working in a bookstore, my greatest joy was attending poetry readings in San Francisco. I enjoyed the adventure of hitchhiking up the coast to that great metropolis, but more than the journey, I loved the atmosphere of those readings and how everyone was so curious about new and original ways of using words to convey feelings and ideas. And I was most intrigued by the couples who came to these readings, for they often seemed, at first glance, to be fantastically mismatched.

One such couple was Janice Cleveland and Rufus Borenstein. Janice was a buxom black woman in her forties with short hair and red glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She wore blouses made of colorful fabric from Nigeria, tight slacks, and high heels. Rufus was a tall slender white guy in his fifties with a pointy white goatee and a monocle that was forever falling out of his eye. He wore a gray tweed jacket over a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and white high-top tennis shoes decorated with red and yellow polka dots.

I first met Janice and Rufus at the intermission of a poetry reading starring two of my idols, Kate Fetherston and D.R. Wagner. Janice came up to me and said, “We heard you read at the open mike after Jane Blue’s reading last month. We totally dug your poems. You gonna read tonight?”

“I am,” I said gleefully. “And I want to kiss you.”

So she puckered up and we kissed.

“What’s going on here?” asked Rufus, joining us with two glasses of cheap white wine, one for him and one for Janice. “Hey, it’s you. Your poem about waiting for a ride on the coast highway. Brilliant. Can we get a copy?”

“Of course,” I said, giddy from their flattery. “Where do I send it?”

“You got one of our cards, Rufe?” said Janice to Rufus.

He fished in the pocket of his tweed jacket and brought forth two volumes of poetry—Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth—a rubber band, three small crystals, and a somewhat banged up business card:

Janice Cleveland & Rufus Borenstein  Tarot & Psychotherapy

I took the card and said, “If only I could afford you.”

“You can,” said Janice, laughing. “You give us some poems, we give you tarot and psychotherapy.”

So I sent them some poems and the next time I was in San Francisco, I had a fantastic tarot reading from Rufus and some incredibly helpful talk therapy with Janice, after which we went out for spaghetti. They became my good friends and remain my friends to this day, though sadly they got priced out of San Francisco and moved to Victoria, Canada five years ago.

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Calliope of Hope

calliope-coverD1

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2016)

On Saturday February 20 at 6:30 PM, I will be at Gallery Books in Mendocino reading from the new Counterpoint Press edition of my book Buddha In A Teacup. I self-published the book seven years ago, and now the book will have a life in the larger world, so to speak. The paperback of Buddha In A Teacup from Counterpoint is beautifully designed and fits well in the hand.

Speaking of self-publishing, I just completed my first large work of fiction since finishing the four volumes of the Ida’s Place saga, and the new tome is now available from my web site. As with the Ida’s Place quartet, I present Calliope of Hope tales of the road in a handsome coil-bound photocopy edition, each copy signed and colorfully numbered by yours truly.

Calliope of Hope—tales of the road is both a collection of short stories and a novel. Any of these stories may be read as a stand-alone work, or you may read the book from start to finish and experience the stories as chapters of a novel.

Part of the inspiration for Calliope of Hope came from the late poet and translator Taylor Stoehr who was keen for me to write a companion collection to Buddha In A Teacup with a Sufi bent, which many of the stories in Calliope of Hope have, and many of the stories involve hitchhiking.

Here is the beginning of one of the stories/chapters from Calliope of Hope entitled Henry’s Expotition.

On a sunny morning in April, Henry Abbot, fifty-nine, tall and sturdy, his sandy brown hair cut short, his brown eyes full of mischief, stands on the east side of the coast highway at the north end of Fort Orford, hitchhiking to Portland, Oregon. Henry, who was born and raised in this town of three thousand hearty souls on the far north coast of California, is so well-liked, if he ever ran for mayor—which he will never do—he would win by a landslide, no matter who ran against him.

The last time Henry hitchhiked was forty years ago when he and his pal Gunnar Diggs, who was also born in Fort Orford, made it all the way to northern British Columbia before turning around and heading back to Fort Orford. Shortly after they got home, Henry joined the Army and spent two years in Germany fixing trucks, while Gunnar got a job driving a bulldozer for a local paving contractor, a job he still has today.

A few weeks after coming home from the Army, Henry moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he spent three years working as a truck mechanic and peddling his heartfelt ballads to record companies and recording artists large and small, to no avail. Upon his return to Fort Orford at the age of twenty-five, Henry embarked on a twenty-year career as a lumberjack, and for the last fifteen years he has been the manager of Dorfman’s Hardware, the one and only hardware store in town.

A widower with two teenaged daughters, Henry has never spent a night away from his girls, and though he only intends to be gone a few nights, this trip to Portland feels to him like the biggest adventure of his life.

Henry is dressed exactly as he does for work: brown work boots, red plaid socks, khaki pants, a black T-shirt, a blue jacket with a zipper, and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap. His luggage consists of a blue canvas knapsack and a large brown leather briefcase, and per the suggestion of the woman he is going to visit, he is holding a neatly-lettered sign: Portland.

Ten minutes after Henry takes his stand, who should pull up beside him in an old blue pickup but Arnold Collison, Henry’s neighbor.

Arnold leans across the seat and says out the passenger window, “Where you going, Henry? Car break down?”

“No,” says Henry, showing his Portland sign to Arnold. “I’m going to visit Jolene. Remember Jolene? Stayed with us for ten days last November?”

“Sure, I remember her. Pretty gal. Played the mandolin and sang like a bird. Why aren’t you driving?”

“Marie Louise is staying with the girls while I’m gone,” says Henry, laughing at Arnold’s stupefied expression. “Her car died and I want her to have my truck while I’m gone in case she needs to take the girls somewhere.”

“Borrow our car,” says Arnold, wondering why Henry didn’t think of that. “We hardly ever drive the damn thing. Practically new. We can get by with the pickup until you get back. How long you going for?”

“A few days.”
“Get in,” says Arnold, authoritatively. “I’ll drive you up to the house and you can take our car.”

“Well, actually, Arnold, I want to hitchhike.” Henry waits a moment for this to sink into Arnold’s famously thick skull. “I want to see how Jolene has been getting around for the last several years, and…I want the adventure.”

Arnold frowns. “Sounds pretty weird, Henry. You never know what kind of nut might pick you up. Better to drive. You’re almost sixty.”

“If I’m still here this afternoon, I’ll borrow your car,” says Henry, holding up his sign as a fancy sports car speeds by. “How does that sound, Arnie?”

“Sounds nuts,” says Arnold, shaking his head. “Seems like visiting Jolene in Portland would be adventure enough. Don’t you think?”

“Apparently not,” says Henry, losing patience with Arnold. “I’ll see you this afternoon or in a few days.”

Arnold drives away and Carlos Gomez pulls up in his ancient brown Malibu. “You hitchhiking, Henry?”

“I am, Carlos,” says Henry, nodding.

“Car break down?” asks Carlos, the longtime chef at Rosa’s, the best Mexican restaurant in Fort Orford.

“No, I’m going on an adventure.”

Carlos nods. “That’s cool. I was in Stuyvesant’s having breakfast and Pablo came in saying you were out here with your sign, so I came to see if you were okay. You okay?”

“I am, Carlos,” says Henry, realizing half the town will soon be parading by to get a look at him standing by the road. “Can I ask a huge favor?”

“Of course,” says Carlos, nodding. “What do you need?”

“I need you drive me to Gecko?”

“Sure. When you want to go?”

“Now.”

Carlos smiles. “I get it, Henry. Get in.”