The beach at the mouth of the Mercy River is cloaked in fog as it often is on summer mornings on the far north coast of California, though soon the fog will move offshore and allow the sun to warm the sand.
A little electric car arrives in the empty beach parking lot,
and Natalia emerges wearing a puffy down jacket over two shirts, baggy
trousers, hiking boots, and a ski cap covering her ears and short auburn hair –
her destination a particular place on the sand a half-mile to the north.
She checks the contents of her basket – phone, sunscreen, dark glasses, murder mystery, book of Buddhist aphorisms, apple, muffin, jug of water, beach towel, clipboard with notecards and pen attached, chocolate bar – and is about to sally forth when she hears ravens squawking furiously overhead.
Gazing skyward she sees two ravens in furious pursuit of a
small Red-shouldered hawk, the roseate raptor winging away to the north, the ravens
circling over the parking lot before returning to the south.
“I wonder what that means,” says Natalia, who believes in
omens, though she’s never certain what the omens portend.
Trudging westward along the shore, the air warming quickly in
the sudden absence of fog, Natalia longs for her dog Stormy, a gregarious
Golden Lab who died seven months ago. Natalia plans to get a pup, another
Golden Lab, as soon as she gets back from visiting her parents in Denmark in
October, but that won’t be for six months and she’s terribly lonely without a
dog.
When she moved to this small town seven years ago, Stormy was four, and his friendliness ignited several lasting friendships for Natalia that otherwise might never have been.
As she nears her favorite sunbathing spot, Natalia’s heart
sinks when she sees a young man with a knapsack sitting on the driftwood log where
Natalia always sets her basket before unfurling her towel.
“With thousands of places to choose from,” she whispers
bitterly, “he would choose this one.”
The young man raises his hand in greeting, and Natalia
stiffens in fear. Nevertheless, she makes a slight answering gesture and walks
on, hoping he doesn’t follow her.
“Excuse me,” says the young man, getting up from the log, his
accent German. “I’m looking for the campground. I was told there is a good campground
here. I’m sorry to bother you, but I am lost.”
Realizing the young man is a tourist, Natalia feels less
afraid, though still wary of him.
“You go under the bridge,” she says, pointing back the way
she came. “Walk through the parking lot and follow the road inland a half-mile
to the campground.”
“Oh thank you,” he says, nodding and smiling. “You are
Danish. My mother is Danish, my father German. I’m from Leipzig. On holiday. Do
you live here or are you on holiday, too?”
“I live here,” she says, walking on. “Enjoy.”
When she’s gone another hundred yards, she looks back and
sees the man tiny in the distance heading for the campground.
“Oh good,” she says, sighing with relief and returning to her favorite sunbathing spot.
Lying on her towel in her bikini, deliciously warm in the sun, Natalia falls asleep and dreams she is in the café where she works when the young man from Leipzig comes in wearing a gossamer yellow dress, his lips painted red, a white rose in his hair. A lovely samba begins to play and Natalia and the young man dance together, the music mingling with the sound of waves breaking on the shore.
Natalia wakes with a start fearing the young man has returned,
and finding she is alone in the vastness she takes off her bathing suit and
lies naked in the sun until she grows hungry.
Between bites of her chocolate bar, she inserts her ear buds,
cues up a favorite samba, and thinks about the young man from Leipzig and the
ravens chasing the hawk.
Now she smiles out at the shining sea and decides not to wait any longer to get a puppy.
Bertram is on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. Tall and gangly with a mop of graying red hair, Bertram works for a large Internet Technology company in Cupertino and spends eight hours a day writing code to solve problems presented to him on a large computer screen. Most of the code he writes will soon be written by artificial intelligence apps, but for now Bertram makes his living solving problems this way.
“I’m forty-four,” says Bertram, answering a question from the woman he’s having a drink with on the terrace of the luxury hotel where Bertram is spending his five-day vacation. “May I ask how old you are?”
Cecily, a striking brunette wearing short shorts and a bikini
top, is staying at a nearby luxury hotel for her seven-day vacation. She works
for a media company in Sunnyvale specializing in staging Internet Technology
conferences around the world.
“I’m thirty-seven,” she says, wishing she hadn’t tapped YES on the get-together app she
sometimes uses when she gets lonely while traveling. “Your first time in Cabo?”
“No,” says Bertram, sipping his margarita. “I’ve come here
every year for the last ten years.”
“Wow,” says Cecily, who thinks she is much too beautiful and
hip for Bertram. “You must really know your way around.”
“Not really,” he says with a self-effacing shrug. “I mostly
play pickleball when I’m here. Cabo is a pickleball hotspot. And I love
swimming in the ocean and I love
Mexican food. So… never a dull moment.”
“I never knew Cabo was a pickleball hotspot,” says Cecily,
feigning interest. “I’m going fishing tomorrow. For marlin.”
“Wow,” says Bertram, thinking Cecily is by far the most
beautiful woman he’s ever connected with. “Exciting.”
“I love being out on the water,” she says, sipping her piña
colada. “The fishing is just a fun excuse for a boat ride. Even if I do catch a
marlin, we’ll let it go. They’re kind of endangered. This will be my third
time. I just love it.”
Silence falls.
Bertram remembers his mother telling him before his first
date in high school, “If silence falls when you’re talking, don’t feel you have
to say something right away. And then say something complimentary. Works
wonders. Believe me.”
“I love your earrings,” says Bertram, smiling as he thinks of
his mother who lives in Arizona with her third husband and is a pickleball
fanatic. In fact, it was Bertram’s mother who got him playing pickleball.
“Oh thanks,” says Cecily, touching one of her earrings.
“Turquoise is my favorite color.”
“Mine, too,” says Bertram, who never had a favorite color
until now.
“Really?” says Cecily, warming to him. “What’s your favorite
kind of music?”
“I listen to classical music, mostly Bach, when I’m writing
code,” he says, growing serious. “And Latin jazz for pleasure. How about you?”
Cecily frowns in surprise. “I love Latin jazz. Like who do you like?”
Bertram reels off a dozen names of Latin jazz artists he admires
and Cecily seems pleasantly impressed.
They talk for a few more minutes, finish their drinks, and
Bertram knows Cecily thinks she is too beautiful and hip for him.
“Another drink?” he asks politely, knowing she’ll say No.
“I’d love one,” she says, sighing as if disappointed, “but I
have to be at the boat at seven in the morning.”
“Understood,” says Bertram, beckoning the waitress to bring
the bill. “It was wonderful meeting you, Cecily. You’re by far the most
beautiful woman who ever met me for a drink. My lucky night. Have a great rest
of your time in Cabo.”
“Enjoy your pickleball,” says Cecily, rising to go.
“Oh,” says Bertram before Cecily can walk away. “Could I get
the name of the company you use for marlin fishing? I think I’d like to try
that.”
Cecily gets out her phone and brings up the web site of the
sport fishing company she uses. Bertram holds out his phone to her. She taps
his phone with hers and the information is transferred.
“Ask for Roberto,” says Cecily, smiling at Bertram. “He’s great.”
“Thanks I will,” says Bertram, watching her walk away and
admiring everything about her.
*
Alone in his room, Bertram puts in his ear-buds, cues up The Girl From Ipanema, closes his eyes,
and imagines Cecily is dancing with him.
A fox family lived on the edge of our property for our first
few years in this house a mile inland from the town of Mendocino, so we decided
to call our place Fox Hollow. The labels for jars of jam and pesto we made boasted
Fox Hollow.
Then the foxes went elsewhere and we didn’t see a fox for a
couple years. The name Fox Hollow began to feel erroneous. So we decided to
call our place Skunk Hollow because we had lots of skunks and thought their
babies especially cute.
We briefly considered calling our place Deer Hollow because
deer abound here, but Deer Hollow doesn’t pack much poetic punch, so we stuck
with skunk.
Several ravens nest hereabouts, but we were not inclined to
call the place Ravenswood or Ravens’ Hollow. Too dark and foreboding. We prefer
a more upbeat moniker.
We do have a beautiful feral cat who includes our acres in
her hunting grounds, but she’s only rarely here so Cat Hollow would be
misleading.
Recently a second feral cat started hunting here. How do we
know these cats are feral? Because various neighbors have tried unsuccessfully
to trap them, and no one in the neighborhood will admit to feeding them.
Now that we no longer have a domestic cat living with us, the
lizard and snake and little bird populations have rebounded, so I suppose we
could call our place Lizard Hollow or Snake Hollow or Little Bird Hollow, but
those names don’t sing to us.
Then there are the chipmunks. Until recently, we enjoyed the
occasional chipmunk scurrying around the place. We were glad not to have a cat
or cats slaughtering the little cuties. But now, for the first time in our
twelve years here, a new chipmunk has
started coming into the house whenever we leave a door ajar. She boldly helps
herself to whatever she can find to carry away from the kitchen, and she seems
barely phased by our fits of rage when we catch her with a cookie.
Gone are the delicious summer days of leaving the doors open.
This little demon is lurking in the ferns and waiting for her chance to get
inside and steal our food. How about Chipmunk Hollow? Not a chance.
The foxes have returned, so we are Fox Hollow again and will
remain so.
This gull was obviously having fun goofing around with the little wavelets rippling over the big flat expanse of stone. Was he/she simultaneously looking for something to eat? A good bet.
*
Estuary Gull
This gull on a post in Big River’s estuary is so accustomed to humans, I had the feeling he/she would have allowed me to pet her/him. However, I wanted to make sure to get a good picture, so I stopped ten feet away and he/she graciously allowed me to make this portrait.
*
New Leaves On River Trees
I take pictures of these trees on the south side of Big River’s estuary every winter when the white branches are dramatically naked of leaves. Here the trees are leafing anew.
*
Historic Blossom Set
When Marcia and I bought our house twelve years ago, one of
the very first things we did was to have a sturdy deer fence installed around
half our property to keep the ravenous ungulates from eating everything except
the rhododendrons and huckleberry bushes. However, I did not extend the fence
to include the apple tree in this picture because the little tree was hidden in
a dense tangle of vines. I only discovered the apple tree after the deer fence was complete.
I have several times since then considered digging up the tree and transplanting her inside the deer fence. However, that would mean planting her in soil infested by voraciously thirsty redwood roots, and without her taproot, chances of survival would be nil.
During our twelve-year tenure here, the little tree has been
harshly pruned by browsing deer, and with each passing year more and more of her
branches and blossoms form higher than all but the biggest and most ambitious
(starving) deer can reach.
However, despite this year’s amazing blossom set, the continuing absence of pollinators, notably bees, means the valiant little tree may not produce many or any apples. The bees are absent because our misguided local, state, and national governments continue to allow the use of pesticides and herbicides containing neonicotinoids that are the proven cause of honeybee and general insect decline in America and around the world. Don’t use Roundup!
*
Gull Perch Rock
This rock in Mendocino Bay is extremely attractive to my eye. I’ve looked at this stone thousands of time in the last eighteen years, photographed it hundreds of times, and there is always a gull standing on the peak of the rock. I believe the eternal presence of a gull atop this rock explains everything.
*
Fallen Icon
This mighty tree came down recently from her place on the
headlands where she grew for a very long time. Countless photographs and
paintings of Mendocino and Big River Beach dating back to the early 20th
Century feature this tree standing above all the others. A defining feature of
this stretch of the Mendocino headlands is no more.
A reader recently wrote to say she enjoyed hearing about my beginnings as a writer. This got me musing, and as I mused I remembered that most people, including people in their seventies as I am, are unaware that before television took over the world in the 1950s, there were several hundred mainstream magazines and thousands of newspapers in America publishing short stories and poetry. Thousands!
Which is to say, before televisions were installed in every home, there was an enormous demand for short stories in our culture, with high-end magazines such as Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s Magazine paying very good money for short stories, with many movies made in those days based on short stories.
For instance, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life is based on a
story first published as a pamphlet in the 1940s by Philip Van Doren Stern and
subsequently published in Reader’s Scope
and Good Housekeeping before Capra
bought the movie rights for 50,000 dollars. Yes, Good Housekeeping published short stories!
Then television conquered American society and culture, and within a decade the golden era of short stories was over. The time people used to spend reading short stories was now given to watching the tube. By the early 1970s, when I was in my twenties, there were only a few dozen magazines left that paid well for stories, mostly Men’s and Women’s magazines, and nearly all the stories they published were by established writers.
Nevertheless, in those days before
the internet, before there were affordable ways to self-publish and distribute stories
and books, thousands of aspiring writers bought The Writer’s Market every year, a volume listing all the magazines supposedly
open to considering unsolicited (non-agented) stories and articles. This mighty
tome, updated annually, was something of a fraud since most of the magazines listed
therein would only consider stories sent to them by established literary agents,
though many of the listings said otherwise.
I sent my stories to magazines large and small, collected rejection letters galore, and then in 1972, through a series of seeming coincidences and lucky breaks, a New York literary agent asked if she might represent me. Her name was Dorothy Pittman and she was among the very last literary agents in America who would gladly submit short stories to magazines for her known and unknown clients.
Even more remarkably, she was
eager to represent what is now known as Literary Fiction, which has come to
mean non-genre fiction. Sci-fi, Mystery, Young Adult, Fantasy, and Historical
Romance are some of the most popular genres. By the 1970s non-genre fiction was
becoming less and less saleable, and today Literary Fiction is a genre most
publishers shudder to consider.
All the editors to whom Dorothy submitted my stories and books were middle-aged, extremely well read, and interested in unique writers, not copycats. None of them lasted long in the biz after the giant multi-national corporations completed their takeover of the publishing industry by the early 1980s.
In her first two years as my agent, Dorothy marketed my novella that had drawn her to represent me, two of my novels, and dozens of my short stories. She got several nibbles, but no takers.
One day Dorothy called the
commune where I was living in Santa Cruz and said in her charming Georgia
drawl, “Dahlin’, I’m getting so frustrated not selling anything of yours. I’ve
got several editors who love your writing, but you’re not famous and your
stories are a bit edgy, if you know what I mean.” She paused. “Have you sent me
everything you’ve written?”
“Except for my stories in a
folder labeled No Way,” I said
despondently. “Otherwise, yes.”
“Send me those,” she said, and I did.
Fast-forward a year. By then I’d
left Santa Cruz for Menlo Park where I worked as a janitor and teacher’s aide
in a Day Care Center before moving to Eugene, Oregon where I was living in a
converted garage with my girlfriend and desperately looking for a job. Out of
the blue, Dorothy called from New York to say Cosmopolitan Magazine wanted to buy my short story Willow for a thousand dollars. Dorothy
would take her 10% commission and I would get nine hundred dollars upon
publication. For someone who just quit his job cleaning kiddy toilets for
three-bucks-an-hour this was a mind-boggling sum.
I frowned. “Willow? The story about the black woman
boxer who through a series of implausible flukes gets a chance to box against professional
male boxers? Cosmopolitan? Really?”
A month later, down to my last few dollars, a check for nine hundred dollars came in the mail. My monthly nut was fifty dollars. I was rich! Over the next year I completed two novels, one of which was Inside Moves, my first published novel.
However, three years would pass before that miracle occurred. In the meantime, I worked as a landscaper in Medford, Oregon and did very little writing. Then Dorothy sold a story of mine entitled The Swami and the Surfer to Seventeen for five hundred dollars, and Seventeen commissioned me to write a Christmas story for seven hundred dollars.
While I worked on the Christmas story, I continued to labor as landscaper until I saved enough money to travel to New York to meet Dorothy in-person for the first time and meet the magazine editors who had taken a chance on my edgy stories.
I spent four months on the East Coast, thought about relocating there, ran out of money, returned to Oregon, and then moved to Seattle where I fell on very hard times until Doubleday bought Inside Moves for a pittance and Dorothy sold a few more stories for me. Then right before Inside Moves was to be published, New American Library acquired the paperback rights for a large sum, the movie deal was made, and I was lifted out of poverty for several years.
At the publication party for Inside Moves in New York, the editors from Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Seventeen, and Young Miss who had bought my stories were there to celebrate with me, as were editors from Redbook, Penthouse, and Esquire who had never bought a story from me. They came to let me to know they loved my stories and would have published them had I been better known.
Virtually every successful writer in America and England for the hundred years prior to 1970 published short stories in magazines en route to publishing a novel. In those bygone days, writing short stories was the training ground for becoming a professional writer. Striving to publish short stories was the gauntlet writers had to run if they wanted to one day enter the Promised Land of being a published author.
In 1980 I was on a radio show
in Sacramento talking about the movie based on Inside Moves that was about to be released. The interviewer asked
me how I got started as a writer and I mentioned publishing my first story in Cosmopolitan.
I think I must have sounded slightly
embarrassed about my first commercial success coming via a Women’s magazine and
not Esquire or The New Yorker, because a few minutes later an elderly woman called
into the show and said, “I want you to know, Mr. Walton, you are in fine
company having your first story published in Cosmopolitan.” Then she paused for effect. “For Ernest Hemmingway
published his first short story in Cosmopolitan, too.”
I have never confirmed this,
preferring to believe the delightful caller knew what she was talking about.
I subscribe to the Buddhist idea that happiness arises from living
fully in the present moment. Yet as a subscriber to this idea, which I know to
be true, everything I see and do, and virtually anything anyone says to me,
triggers an avalanche of memories, which I then have to dig out from under in
order to get back to living fully in the present moment.
Einstein wrote: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. This suggests that the past must be part of the present moment, in which case living fully in the present moment must entail simultaneously living in the past.
Of course the Buddhist idea about living fully in the present moment is an idea, an ideal, a practice. Even the most advanced enlightened Buddhist occasionally dwells on events and feelings from the past. In fact, neurologically speaking, we are the end results of our past actions.
I’m not speaking of karma – our actions determining the courses of our lives – a notion I also subscribe to. I’m speaking about Brain Maps. Having read a bunch of fairly up-to-date books about neuroscience, it is now understood that every time we do something or think something or see something, our brains make a little synaptic map of that something. If we repeat the action or thought, or see the same view out the kitchen window over and over again, those synaptic maps get etched deeper in our brains.
And if we repeat an action or a thought or see the same thing thousands of times, those brain maps dictate responses in us so automatic they resemble innate reflexes. This is why when you play a piece of music once, your playing will be tentative compared to the hundredth time you play that same piece of music. The brain map directing your body/mind/spirit for the playing of that piece gets etched more deeply into your neurological system with each playing, and your fingers/body/actions in that regard become vastly more proficient as a result.
Thus: we become what we do over and over again.
So here we are aspiring to live fully in the present moment while being, in large part, made of what we were, because what we were created the mechanics of how we operate in the present moment. By the same token, if we spend lots of time thinking about the future, those thoughts will shape who we are now!
So when I’m schlepping firewood from the woodshed to the north porch, practicing being mindful as I place those pieces of wood into the wheelbarrow, and as I gaze in wonder at the leaves and clouds and blades of grass as I wheel my wheelbarrow along the path, and a memory of a girl I was too shy to pursue when I was sixteen drifts into the matrix of my brain maps, I can’t help but feel her appearance as part of the totality of the present moment.
And now the time has come to make my list of things I’ll buy at the grocery store in the near future. To make this list I will pay close attention to what we no longer have because we ate those things in the past. Thus past, present, and future collide in the kitchen and reverberate throughout the universe in every direction and in myriad other dimensions, too. Caramba!
Todd in 1996 at his writing table in Berkeley with Ruby & Spear
The year was 1995, a mere twenty-nine years ago when I was but an overgrown child of forty-six. Recently divorced and settling into my new digs in Berkeley, the universe bestowed a large (relatively speaking) chunk of money on me: a modest advance from a publisher for my novel Ruby & Spear and eye-popping option money for the movie rights to my novel Forgotten Impulses. Thus ended a decade of month-to-month barely squeaking by, and thus began a couple years of having sufficient funds to work on my writing and music full time.
To celebrate this joyful turn of events, I purchased a few
things I’d always wanted: a writing table, a dining table, and a medium-sized
green vase. Not far from the house I rented in Berkeley was a woodshop
specializing in furniture made from recycled lumber, and in their little
storefront I found the writing table of my dreams and the expandable dining
table of my dreams, both made of reclaimed pine. The dining table is our dining
table to this day, and the writing table is the subject of this missive. I
found a marvelous green vase a few weeks after moving to Berkeley and it is
still our go-to vase for fleurs from the garden here in Mendocino.
Unbeknownst to me, I arrived in Berkeley during the last year of rent control and so was able to rent my old three-bedroom house for 1100 dollars a month. A year later the dot.com revolution exploded in synch with the demise of rent control, at which time my house would have rented for 4000 dollars a month. Fortunately I was grandfathered in and my rent could not be increased. So I was able to stay there.
I let one of my bedrooms to a series of housemates, one of
the bedrooms became my office/guestroom, and the third bedroom was my bedroom.
The new writing table became the centerpiece of my office, and for my first two
years in Berkeley I used my writing table for… writing.
Then money became scarce, I became the sole support of two needy dependents, and the days of month-to-month squeaking by resumed. And ere long the writing table became a storage area rather than a writing surface.
As I’m sure you are aware, any flat surface elevated a few feet off the ground is a magnet for mail, bills, glasses, wallets, earplugs, postal scales, computers, printers, car keys, flashlights, guitar picks, pens, pencils, dishes, mugs, sheets of paper, scraps of paper, silverware, half-eaten cookies, snapshots, cameras, phones, statuary, rocks, driftwood, lip balm, address books, change jars, crystals, and bowls of sage, to name but a fraction of the things we humans collect and stack on flat surfaces (and on top of each other.) It’s just how we are. I’m sure this propensity to stack things on elevated flat surfaces is genetic.
Near the end of my eleven-year stay in Berkeley, my mother
died and I inherited enough money to make the move to Mendocino and rent a
place where I could start anew and use the surface of my writing table for
writing and drawing again, which I did for a while, and I was glad.
Then my old iMac died and I got a new one with a long bubble backside (strange design) that was so long the only surface in my office wide enough to accommodate the thing was my beloved writing table. As I’m sure you know, a computer of any size, let alone a big bulbous one, immediately and thoroughly negates the beauty and spaciousness and je ne sais quoi of a good writing table. Yet despite the warnings and pleas from my higher self, I surrendered my writing table to the elongated computer and made do with other surfaces for writing.
Then twelve years ago Marcia and I bought our house in which
we each have an office studio, and in my new office I gave my newer and less
bulbous iMac domain over a standing desk and freed my writing table to be a spacious
writing surface once more.
However, my office is not large, and having recently launched
my career as a self-publisher and self-music producer, the office and writing table
soon became functionaries of a laughably inefficient shipping operation in
which my writing table assumed the identity of a multi-layered quagmire of easy-to-misplace
and easy-to-overlook and easy-to-forget stuff.
I did my longhand writing on the dining table or I sat in chairs writing on a clipboard, and for the last twelve years my table desk has been a clutter hell, a stack of woe, a mechanism of self-sabotage.
Looking back over my life, psychoanalytically speaking, I can recall many Large Instances of Self-Sabotage, many Lesser Instances of Self-Sabotage, and myriad Minor Instances of Self-Sabotage. Large instances include teaming up with negative, critical partners who undermined me at every turn, drinking too much coffee, and going barefoot on nail-infested construction sites. Lesser Instances include waiting too long to fill the gas tank and running out on a remote highway during a tempest, renting a room in my house to a psychic leech, and eating too much popcorn in one sitting. Minor instances include tripping over shoes I should have put away and leaving the door open so clouds of mosquitoes come into the house.
But perhaps worse than those instances of self-sabotage identifiable after-the-fact are Unconscious Instances of Self-Sabotage, one of which is rendering the heart, if you will, of my creative process unusable by covering my wonderful writing table with detritus that should never be put there, and certainly not left there for days and weeks and months and, yes, years!
Also psychoanalytically speaking, while acknowledging that some percentage of mess-making can be blamed on human nature, I think it important to acknowledge that most self-sabotaging behavior is LEARNED. And here’s the thing about Unconscious Self-Sabotage; though I (We) may have consciously decided not to emulate my (our) profoundly neurotic parents, and in many ways we have been successful in not emulating them, they are still inside us influencing our neurological operating systems. Yes they are.
Only eternal vigilance can keep us from repeating behavior our primary caretakers relentlessly modeled for our wildly receptive psyches throughout the formative years of our childhoods.
Now that I no longer sell books or music CDs from my web
site, and my office is no longer a shipping depot, I finally got around to making
my writing table a table for writing again. Hurray!
I hereby vow to strive to keep my writing table free of stuff
that shouldn’t be there. I know there will be setbacks in the days and weeks
ahead (there are already minor incursions underway) but for now I have tasted
the fruits of clearing the boards, and those fruits are sweet and nutritious
and fill me with joy.
A reader inquired about Good With Dogs Cats, “How did you come to write this book?”
Here is a long-winded answer.
I began making up and writing down short stories sixty-five
years ago when I was in First Grade at Las Lomitas Elementary School in Menlo
Park, California. My first successful short story was entitled Albert the Alligator and Billy Brown
about a talking alligator who befriends a little boy.
I say successful
because one day my First Grade teacher Mrs. Bushnell, desperate for a nap, had
me up in front of the class to tell the kids my latest version of Albert the Alligator and Billy Brown. My
classmates enjoyed the tale, especially my silly voices for the characters, and
laughed throughout the telling. Mrs. Bushnell woke refreshed and thereafter had
me tell stories to the class on several other occasions.
Word spread among the teachers and I was asked to appear as a guest performer for the other First Grade class, for both Second Grade classes, and so on up through the Fourth Grade classes. Heady stuff for little Todd, performing for giant kids who had a separate playground from us little kids lest the big kids trample us at recess.
My older sister was in one of those Third Grade classes I performed for. You may imagine her chagrin as her annoying little brother held sway over her classmates and garnered big laughs. I can still see her squirming in her seat and rolling her eyes as I babbled and cavorted.
I think it fair to say the adulation of those kids in elementary school emboldened me to continue making up stories for the rest of my life.
As a reader I have always favored short stories over novels.
As a writer of fiction, several of my novels are composed of interconnected short
stories. Now and then one of my stories will beget a related story that begets
another related story, and so on until those related stories amount to a novella
or novel.
This is what happened with Good With Dogs and Cats. Two years ago I published Why You Are Here, my first book of interconnected stories set in the mythical town of Mercy on the far north coast of California – Mercy being a mythical version of Mendocino where I live. Readers let me know they enjoyed Why You Are Here, and, having grown enamored of Mercy, I was glad when The Muse sent more stories set in the delightful little town.
Several characters who debut in Why You Are Here appear again in Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub as well as in the soon-to-be published sequel Raaz and Oz: the further adventures of Healing Weintraub. Those characters include the poet Helen Morningstar, her very tall husband Justin Oglethorpe, Ruben Higuera the unflappable Sheriff of Mercy, and Eliana Levine, a musician and actor.
When I penned the first of the Healing adventures, I had no idea the story would create such a frisson of appreciation in readers (a dozen encouraging emails!) nor did I imagine I would eventually write another fifty stories featuring Healing Weintraub, his family and friends, and the many fascinating dogs and cats he helps, but that’s what happened.
So that’s part of the answer to how I came to writeGood With Dogs and Cats. However, I think the questioner was also curious about why I chose to write about a person who helps dogs and cats with problems they’re having with humans.
The answer to that part of the question is: I don’t know.
And the reason I don’t know is that I never know what I’m going to write before
I write whatever comes out on the page. I have never successfully had a
conscious idea for a story and then
written that story. Whenever I try to do that, the result is poo-poo. Better
for me to write down what my inner storyteller has to say and then see what
I’ve got.
Which is to say, I didn’t consciously choose to write about a person who helps dogs and cats with their people, but once that switch was flipped, so to speak, I kept writing until stories in that vein stopped coming.
Several people have asked me if the Healing stories are
autobiographical. The answer is no, though it is true I love cats and dogs,
they love me, and I do communicate clairvoyantly with animals, but that’s where
the similarities end.
Today is a glorious day, sunny and cloudy and sunny. The storms that besieged us for the last few weeks are behind us, power restored after a few annoying outages. I had my teeth cleaned this morning by our cheerful hygienist and told my teeth were looking well. On my way home from the dentist, after a short walk on the headlands to revel in the sunlit beauty, I stopped at our tiny town library to get a book Marcia wanted, and to my enormous delight found my new book Good With Dogs and Cats: the adventures of Healing Weintraub on the New Books shelf.
I pointed at my book and
gurgled, “That’s my book.”
The librarian replied,
“We got a request for it, so we bought a copy.”
“Thank you so much,” I
said, resisting my impulse to hug her. “I’m thrilled. By the way, the book is
set in a mythical version of Mendocino.”
The librarian laughed.
“Mendocino is a mythical version of
Mendocino.”
“I changed the name of
Mendocino to Mercy.”
The librarian rolled her
eyes. “If only.”
Continuing homeward, I
stopped at the tamale stand and got three scrumptious tamales for eleven
dollars – such a deal! – and drove home thinking I made it. My book is in the Mendocino library. And I wasn’t
kidding.
*
There was a time from 1978 to 2000 when several of my books were in libraries all over America, and I was glad, but not thrilled. Nor did I think I’d made it because those books were in libraries. Indeed, I felt strongly that I had not made it, despite the availability of those books to anyone lucky enough to stumble upon them.
For reasons far too complex (multi-generational, societal, delusional) to spend precious hours writing about, for most of my life I thought making it was to be world famous, to make boatloads of money, to have my books made into movies and my songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt and used as soundtracks for major motion pictures.
Then there came a time (coinciding with my turning 60 and the advent of social media platforms on the internet which I eschew) when no one in the movie business and no one in publishing would even take a peek at my creations. After several years of adjusting to my exile from the mainstream, I embarked on a path of self-publishing and producing my own albums of music with minimal success in terms of sales, but vast success in terms of enjoying the process and feeling I was giving my best to the world, such as I can.
Finding my book in the Mendocino Library today took me back to a moment in 1978 when I was twenty-eight and had just published my first novel Inside Moves. I was standing on a corner in San Francisco waiting for the light to change when I noticed the woman standing next to me reading a book, her eyes wide with delight as she read. Then the light turned green and the woman closed the book so I was able to see the cover.Inside Moves.
