I was feeling bereft about the election results and the direction the country and the world are going in. I was in anguish about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine. I couldn’t understand why people and families and towns and counties and states and nations weren’t doing all they could to slow and reverse global warming. I was so dismayed I barely slept for three days. Then yesterday I was drowsing in the living room and I heard a voice.
“You may not remember steeping in timeless cosmic ferment prior to entering quantum transmogrifier beaming you into just-fertilized egg in mother’s womb. Few do remember. Nevertheless, it happened and I have come to remind you: regardless of the outer machinations of the human species, you are here to carry out the mission you and your co-creators devised for you. Carry on.”
I don’t usually write abut politics, but today I will in response to many of my friends wondering how anyone, let alone a majority of Americans, could vote for such a deplorable person. My answer is to take a little trip down memory lane.
I was thirty-one when my hero Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, another deplorable person. Jimmy, in his one term as President, launched the solar power revolution and might very well have ushered in the age of high-speed rail and other environmental-helping policies had he been re-elected. Jimmy was the only President we’ve ever had who really cared about the environment and made our government care about it, too. He spoke the truth about the need to live within our environmental means and was ousted by the corporate oligarchs who made sure we’d never see the likes of Jimmy as President again.
One of the ways the corporate oligarchs (the so-called 1%) have maintained control of our government since the ouster of Jimmy is to elect Democrats who are Republicans in every way save by party affiliation. The prime example of this in my lifetime is Bill Clinton.
Bill shoved NAFTA through Congress after his Republican predecessor and good friend George Bush Sr. failed repeatedly to do so. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement, virtually overnight wiped out the American automobile industry and hundreds of other manufacturing mainstays of the economy, and this wipe-out finished off the American steel industry. These collapses directly created the Rust Belt (can you say Swing States?) where tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were lost because of NAFTA.
But Clinton was just getting his Republican agenda underway with NAFTA. He then abruptly and cruelly ended Welfare, throwing millions of people into even deeper poverty and fueling the homeless crisis while doing nothing to mitigate the suffering.
As for the environment, when Clinton came into office, the American fleet (all our cars) had a collective MPG (miles per gallon) well over 20 mpg. Clinton then gave massive tax breaks to people buying SUVs, and when he and Al Gore, the famous self-proclaimed environmentalist, left office eight years later the nation’s mpg was less than ten. That’s right. Less than ten miles per gallon. (Can you say huge profits for fossil fuel producers and a vast acceleration in global warming?)
Then for his most egregious act, Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act restricting affiliations between commercial and investment banks, which launched the era of Ponzi Scheme Economics run by the big banks and Goldman Sachs to create the stock market and real estate bubbles that enriched the 1% further. And less than a decade later America and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Crash of 2008 that caused over TEN MILLION American families to lose their homes.
And did the great Republican, I mean Democrat, Barack Obama help those ten million American families, roughly 40 million Americans who lost their homes? No. He bailed out the corrupt banks and Goldman Sachs and left those tens of millions in deep trouble. If you think I’m wrongly castigating Obama, remember he KEPT Bush’s Treasury Secretary Timmy Geithner as his Treasury Secretary to oversee the bailing out of the crooks and the abandonment of the American people.
So if you’re still wondering why so many people voted for Trump, please remember it was the Democrats who pushed through NAFTA, ended Welfare, replaced it with nothing, and launched Ponzi Scheme economics, all of which resulted in destroying huge sectors of our economy along with the lives of tens of millions of Americans, many of whom had been union members and loyal Democrats.
I certainly didn’t want Trump to win. If his election wakes people up to what’s really going on in our country that will be great. However, I don’t think it will wake many up because the truth is we the people elected these deplorable people instead of electing Bernie Sanders who would have trounced Trump in 2016, given us Single Payer Healthcare, and birthed a national renaissance as did FDR before him. Instead we ran Clinton 2.0 and roused the ire of all those who Clinton and Obama and the Democrats so terribly wronged and abandoned. And Trump tapped the anger of those who suffered under Clinton and Obama, and tapped their children’s inherited anger, too.
And that, I think, is a big part of why so many people could have voted for such a deplorable person.
We recently changed the name of our two-acre place from Skunk Hollow to Hummingbird Hollow. Why the name change? First an anniversary update.
As reported on October 17, I turned 75 on October 17. No, that’s not a typo. Then on October 26, I celebrated what would have been my mother’s 102nd birthday. On October 31 I celebrated the 19th anniversary of my moving to Mendocino. I’ve now lived here longer than anywhere in my life. Then came the national election that made me glad I live in California. And on November 10, Marcia and I will celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary.
Fun fact: Marcia and I have forgotten our anniversary twice now in those seventeen years. We’re just so busy.
Now back to the name change. What didn’t we like about Skunk Hollow?
Well… when we first moved here to these two acres a mile inland from the coast (making it impossible to grow tomatoes, eggplant, or corn) we were delighted to find a family of foxes sharing the land with us. There was a mama fox, a papa fox, and every year they had kits, sometimes two, sometimes three. So cute!
Thus when we made our first batch of blackberry jam and I made the labels for the jars, we decided to call our little dip in the terrain Fox Hollow. And for some years that was what we called our place.
Then… no more foxes. We still used Fox Hollow on our labels for a couple more years, but we began to feel disingenuous referencing an animal that didn’t live here anymore. This feeling coincided with a plethora of skunks traversing our deck every day at dusk, these handsome beings stopping to drink from the water bowl in front of our statue of Ganesh.
And since we didn’t want to call our place Raven Hollow or Deer Hollow, though we have lots of both, we chose Skunk Hollow for our new name despite the stereotypical and only sometimes correct belief that skunks stink.
And then the foxes returned! For a year. So we switched back to Fox Hollow. And then the foxes vanished and so did the skunks.
Which brings us to the story of our lemon trees, two of which grow magnificently in two big tubs outside my office windows. These two lemon trees were some of the first trees I planted when we moved here twelve years ago. And because I planted those lemon trees (and two others) in the ground rife with redwood roots as all our ground is, they did not thrive. In fact, two of the lemon trees simply died and the other two grew into wimpy little bushes that never made fruit, though I lavished them with food and water and sweet words.
Finally after seven years I heeded the advice of local gardeners who had warned me I could never grow lemon trees in the ground here. I dug up the little survivors and transferred them into hundred-gallon tubs filled with beautiful soil and they grew into big robust specimens, set hundreds of blossoms, and made lots of glorious delicious lemons and became the favorite haunt of local honeybees.
And then the honeybees disappeared. Pollinators became scarce, lemons few. But we still got some lemons every year because one breed of pollinator did not disappear: hummingbirds.
Every day, several times a day, hummingbirds visit the lemon trees to sip from the few or many blossoms, depending on the time of year and the exigencies of fate. And this year, for the first time in five years, honeybees have been visiting the blossoms and there are dozens of juicy lemons to be had.
Not long ago, I took a break from writing and went out to the orchard to see how the apples were faring, and a great cloud of ravens rose from the trees, the ravens having pillaged those trees and carried away hundreds of the delectable orbs.
We saved enough apples to make two big batches of Apple Yum (delicious apple sauce), and the labels this time, for the first time in our tenure here, read Hummingbird Hollow Apple Yum.
The 2024 election is over. Donald Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College totals and will be the next President of the United States. And what first came to mind when I woke into this new reality was that when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement (The Vietnam War), and had I been a college student in 2024 I would surely have been among those protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. And though I’m Jewish, I would never have voted for anyone supporting Israel’s crime against humanity.
I doubt Trump won because of Kamala Harris’s solidarity with Biden in supporting the Israeli slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless people, but I do feel there is a karmic connection to that ongoing genocide and Harris’s loss.
In my musings this morning about the election, I was reminded of something I wrote and posted five years ago when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for President. I thought I’d include that post herein, recalling that it was the strategy of the Democratic Party to make sure Bernie did not win the nomination for President.
May 2, 2020
Bernie and Precious Dream
I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and contributing to his campaign because he is the second person in my lifetime (Jimmy Carter the first) who wants what I want for our society and the world and has a chance, however slim, of becoming President of the United States. I hope you vote for him, too.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called ‘Precious Dream’. Marcia and I recorded the song on our CD So Not Jazz ten years ago. When the CD came out, we gave some concerts and ended each of our shows with a performance of ‘Precious Dream’.
Many people said the song would make a good campaign song for a dream candidate yet to materialize. And now Bernie Sanders has materialized and here’s hoping our precious dream can at least start to come true.
Yesterday was Halloween. In a few days there will be an election I believe will either mark the beginning of a major disaster for America and the world, or will give us one more chance to make some substantive changes to help the country and the world move back from the brink of war and unimaginably terrible climate disasters.
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I’ve been giving a little money to candidates I admire who are involved in very close elections for House seats and Senate seats around the country. When you give candidates money online with a credit card, you hear from those candidates again and again asking for more money. And because I feel this election is so crucial, I gave a little more money to those candidates, hoping to make a difference in the outcomes of their races. I’ve now given way more than I intended to, but then I’ve always been a soft touch when it comes to trying to help save the world.
In their follow-up pleas for more money, much is revealed about these candidates and the states where they live. It seems all the people I’ve given to are decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent, and dedicated to helping everyone, not just wealthy people. None of the candidates I support are racist misogynists, and all of them are running against racist misogynists being funded by… you guessed it… racist misogynist billionaires.
The choice has never been clearer, yet apparently lots of people want to be represented by racist misogynists who say climate change is a hoax and all our problems are caused by women, people of color, gay people, poor people, and environmentalists.
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My mother was a devout member of The League of Women Voters and was the first person to point out to me that polls do not measure voter turnout, which is the main determinant of who wins or loses elections. When turnout is big, the kinds of candidates I’ve given money to tend to win. When fewer people vote, racist misogynists funded by billionaires tend to win.
This is all to say I hope you’ll vote and encourage your friends (especially those in swing states) to vote for decent, hardworking, patient, open, idealistic, intelligent people dedicated to helping everyone, and not to vote for horrid self-serving schmucks funded by… you guessed it… horrid self-serving schmucks.
Amidst the uproar of a world in chaos, I was born seventy-five years ago. Now in these more peaceful times… no, wait. Other way around. In those peaceful times in 1949, I was born, and seventy-five years later…
So, yeah, I’m seventy-five. I’m writing a book and composing piano tunes, and today Marcia and I schlepped ten wheelbarrow loads of oak into the woodshed and put out the garbage cans and tied the lids down to dissuade the bears, and I’ll bake some cod for supper to have with quinoa.
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I remember when it became possible to make a recording of my music on a cassette tape recorder and give a cassette of my music to someone else, and it was a miracle. I remember when the very first photocopy shop opened, maybe the first one in the whole world, and I made ten copies of a collection of short stories and gave the collection to ten people, and that was a miracle, too.
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I was born at Saint Luke’s hospital in San Francisco at 6:33 AM on October 17, 1949. I was ten months in my mother’s womb. Otherwise I would not be the double Libra I am, whatever a double Libra is. My parents took me home from Saint Luke’s to the little house they’d just finished building in Mill Valley, which in 1949 still had an active mill turning redwood logs into lumber. My parents bought their lot and built their house in Mill Valley for 7000 dollars.
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I make a point of asking people on their birthdays if they have any words of wisdom they’d like to share, or if not wisdom then something to chew on. Since I am the birthday person today I asked myself if I had any words of wisdom to share. What came to mind was the upcoming election and the many other elections in my lifetime won by horrible people who did all they could to enrich a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everybody else while doing nothing to slow the ruination of our planet. And I remember the days after those elections feeling sad and distressed and wondering why we keep choosing avaricious dishonest people as our leaders, and then I got back to writing and playing the piano and schlepping firewood and cooking supper and being a good friend and trying to live lightly on the earth.
I’ve reached an interesting phase in my writing of the novel currently occupying much of my psyche, a phase in which my acting chops come more and more into play. By acting chops I mean my facility as an actor, specifically an actor who enjoys becoming many characters simultaneously.
When I was a little boy I was fascinated by what made people funny or not funny, and by funny I mean humorous not weird. My Jewish grandparents were funny, my WASP grandparents were not, my mother could be funny if she was in the mood, my father told us bedtime stories with funny parts, and a few kids at school were funny and I studied their every word and gesture.
When I was six my humorous stories were popular with my peers, so much so that my First Grade teacher Mrs. Bushnell had me up in front of the class to tell stories while she rested i.e. took naps. I’d spin silly tales, play all the parts with great gusto, and most importantly make my classmates laugh.
One of the first things I learned from performing for an audience was that things I thought would be funny might not be, and things I never suspected were funny might be hilarious. The collective mind is very different than the individual mind, and once I’d gotten the collective laughing, almost anything I said would be perceived as funny by most of the individuals composing the collective. I also learned that relentless humor was unsustainable. Occasional excursions into more serious realms enhanced the eventual return to the funny stuff, as did well-timed pauses and silences.
And though learning to be a good stand-up comic storyteller was immensely satisfying, it was not until Sixth Grade that I experienced what it was to be an actor. That was the year a new girl appeared in our midst – Helen Reid. A comely young adult, light years more sophisticated than the rest of us, Helen was immediately beloved by many boys and a few girls. I had a crush on Helen, but the field was so crowded I dared not pursue her, not that I would have known how to pursue her.
Helen aspired to be an actress and was eager to put on plays. Had she continued to live in our school district and gone on with us to junior high, she could have tried out for after-school plays and certainly would have gotten leading roles, but Helen moved away after one momentous year with us, and for that year putting on plays at our school consisted entirely of what Helen could scare up on her own.
She enticed a few girls to dramatize with her, but boys were either disinterested or so inept Helen wouldn’t use them. And I was disinterested because I couldn’t conceive of having anything to do with Helen except to gawk at her from afar and hold my breath whenever she spoke aloud in class.
Then one day at recess Helen approached me and said, “Todd. I’ve found a marvelous little play I’d like to put on with you. It’s very funny and shrewd, and given your inherent charm, I think you’d be perfect opposite me.”
I remember wondering what inherent meant and smiling at the word shrewd, which I kind of knew the meaning of. And I remember how her sophistication washed over me and the delicious nuances of her speech and the exquisite grace of her gestures were so alluring I couldn’t help but stick my finger up my nose and say, “Me?”
She laughed her gorgeous sophisticated laugh and said, “Yeah you. We can rehearse at my house after school. Say yes.”
I must have agreed because soon thereafter I went to Helen’s house three afternoons in a row and we had cookies and hot cocoa and a marvelous sophisticated time rehearsing a short shrewd comedy in which we were a young married couple shopping together, and no matter what my young bride wanted I couldn’t deny her.
The slapstick component of the play was that Helen’s character kept buying things and my character had to schlep the ever-growing stack of packages until the stack reached such ridiculous proportions I was staggering under the weight and barely able to keep the edifice of packages from falling over.
Helen had most of the lines in the play, I was her adoring Yes man, and in the end I did drop all the packages, she was hilariously outraged, then eloquently forgiving, and the play ended with her… wait for it… kissing me on the lips!
Of course the play was a hit with our class and we were asked to perform it for the other Sixth Grade class and two Fifth Grade classes, after which for a few days I was a minor celebrity on campus and imagined Helen and I would run off to New York together and conquer Broadway, except I was eleven.
I was not in another play until my sophomore year in high school, after which I was in lots of plays and thought I might become a professional actor. After high school I spent some years exploring that option and chose to go another way, though I continued to act through my fiction. And the interesting phase I’m in with the current opus involves refining the scenes by acting them out with gusto.
Several drafts from now I will record the book for the audio edition, and during the recording process I will have an audience – Peter Temple, our wonderful recording engineer, and me – as we review the recording to hear if any lines want to be retaken or rewritten.
I’ve just completed the third draft of my novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel. I printed out the three-hundred-page manuscript last night and I’ll let the tome rest on my writing table for a week before I return to the saga with pen in hand to discover what wants clarifying.
During this week of letting the pile cool, so to speak, I will give the editing department in my brain a vacation.
However, I know my unconscious self will stay on the job night and day interacting with magnetic electric sonic vibratory synaptic currents coming from hither and yon, so when I do take up the physical manuscript again I will be a different person, neurologically speaking, than he who wrote the book so far.
This is one of my favorite things – the work that gets done in realms beyond conscious knowing.
Last night at quarter-to-nine, I got a call from Jamie Roberts who has the long-running show Radiogram on our local public radio station KZYX. He was calling to say that in fifteen minutes he would be airing my reading of my short story Of Water and Melons, something he’s done several times since I moved to Mendocino in 2006.
“It’s such a beautiful story,” said Jamie. “I think it’s your best… well, it’s my favorite story of yours. I think it’s a masterpiece and I like to share it with my listeners this time of year.”
I thanked Jamie, alerted a few friends, and Marcia listened on her computer in her office while I continued scribbling away on my new novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel.
*
Jamie has aired many of my stories on his show over the years, and I can say with certainty that Jamie is the ONLY DJ in the world who airs my stories, though I’ve sent my spoken-word CDs to many spoken-word radio shows around the country. Those stories can be streamed and downloaded from Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Marcia loved hearing Of Water and Melons again and had a good cry at the end, and a couple of peeps wrote to say they enjoyed hearing the tale, which is why I decided to recount the story of the story.
*
If memory serves, and mine sort of does, I wrote Of Water and Melons in 1979 when I was thirty. I wrote it longhand in a single sitting on unlined white paper as I still write my first drafts today.
The narrator began to speak and I wrote down what he said. A few hours later I had a pile of pages I set aside to read the next day. As is often the case with my first drafts, I only had a vague sense of what I’d written.
I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, and because of the very recent success of my novel Inside Moves, I was free to write without having to work at another job for the first time in my life.
Though I hoped this freedom would continue, I was fairly certain it would not. My success with Inside Moves was the result of a series of highly improbable miracles, and I was keenly aware that such miracles might not befall me again. I had already been dropped by the publisher of the very successful Inside Moves because I refused to write another “sports novel” which is what they were calling Inside Moves, a novel that is as much a sports novel as Moby Dick is a whale-hunting novel. “Come on Herman. Whip out another whale-hunting novel.”
All to say, I treated those days of freedom as precious and finite, and in the early days of my freedom I wrote Of Water and Melons.
When I read my pile of pages I was amazed. For one thing, the story was set in the past during the Great Depression. Never before and never since have I written fiction set in the past. For another, the story needed no editing. I always rewrite my stories many times. Not this story.
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A year or so later I was living in Sacramento and was asked to open for a well-known fiction writer who was on a reading tour touting her new bestseller. The reading took place in a large room at a school converted into a community center.
There were a hundred and fifty people there to hear The Famous One, and maybe a few of those folks were curious to hear the new writer in town: moi. The woman who had invited me said I was to read for the first forty-five minutes, there would be an intermission, and then The Famous One would read for another forty-five. However, the Famous One said she’d rather I didn’t read at all, but if I must, make it fifteen minutes max.
I made it twenty-two minutes and premiered Of Water and Melons, the audience was enthralled, and The Famous One was Highly Displeased she had to follow my act.
*
For some years thereafter I gave many performances combining stories and music, and my surefire showstopper was Of Water and Melons.
When I performed the story for an audience of several hundred in a gorgeous theater at Cal Arts in southern California, I was approached afterward by two filmmakers who thought the story would make a wonderful one-hour movie. “A Hallmark Thanksgiving Special,” they pitched me. I said, “Mahvelous” and gave them a copy of the story and never heard from them again.
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Nothing I’ve written since Of Water and Melons has been so beloved. I took to having piles of photocopies on hand to give away after my performances to the many people requesting them, and eventually my friend Quinton Duval, the great California poet, brought out a lovely chapbook edition of Of Water and Melons with touching illustrations by Vance Lawry.
Yet I could never convince any magazine, large or small, to publish the story, though I submitted it to literally hundreds of publications. And though countless people urged me to send a reading of the story to This American Life, which I did twice, as well as to other audio-fiction radio shows, I had no takers.
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In 2003 I recorded three short stories for my CD I Steal My Bicycle and other stories composed of the title story along with Of Water and Melons and The Dreidel in Rudolph’s Manger, a very funny story originally published in The Sacramento News & Review and then syndicated and published in several dozen free weekly newspapers AND some large daily newspapers, for which I earned thousands of dollars! You can listen to these stories on YouTube and download/stream them from Apple, Amazon, etc.
When I moved to Mendocino in 2006, I sent my story CDs to Jamie and he’s been playing them for his listeners ever since. Thank you Jamie!
Fin
Todd’s latest creations Good With Dogs and Cats and the sequel Pooches and Kiddies are orderable as paperbacks from any good bookstore, and available online as paperbacks, audio books, and e-books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many others.
In a way, we are what we do. Or what we’re doing. When I’m chopping kindling and making a functional sculpture, I’m a kindling chopper sculptor.
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In another way, we are what we are born as, and depending on what we experience thereafter, and how we respond to what we experience, we become who we turn into.
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Then there’s the matter of eating, and the matter we eat. We are eaters. Unless we eat, we die. In this way we are no different than banana slugs or giraffes or each other. And eventually we die even if we keep eating right up until the last moment of our lives.
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We decide to do things and wear certain clothes or not wear clothes or to worry about the horrible things humans are doing to each other and to the planet, or not to worry unless something horrible happens to us. Or we’re afraid to make decisions, afraid to change, afraid to take chances. Or we’re not afraid, but indecisive. Or we’re marvels of brave decisiveness.
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We believe things. Some of us love politicians others of us hate. Some of us believe anything certain people tell us and never believe anything certain other people tell us. Our beliefs don’t necessarily have anything to do with truth, but come from wanting things to be a certain way even if things aren’t really that way. Most of the biggest problems facing us today are caused by people with power over others wanting things to be how they aren’t.
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We are generous or not generous. We can’t be both. When did we become one or the other? Can ungenerousness be reversed?
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Why did I want to write these words and share them with you? Because lately I’ve been feeling every living thing on earth, consciously or unconsciously, senses impending disaster, and I think this feeling of impending disaster is the Universe asking us to examine who we are and to see if we can do something, even the smallest thing, to help each other right now.