Last night I couldn't sleep and began to think about people and events in my life, and I wandered back nearly sixty years to my high school buddy, Joe. Joe died in a headon collision when he was seventeen years old. Headed back to the naval base in San Diego after a trip home for Christmas. He stopped by the radio station to say so long, then later that night I pulled the AP newswire and read his name in a story that broke my heart.
I still have his face stored somewhere in my head. How he looked, how he soared over a pole vault bar, how he sounded when he talked. All of it, still with me. Most of all, how he sounded when he talked. I can hear it exactly. If he walked in the room right now and said something I would recognize his voice.
I thought of all the people who've touched my life. Family, friends, enemies, TV news anchors; many of them still around, some of them gone on to wherever it is we go. Every single one of them left their voice with me.
My brain, without my consent or participation, has somehow catalogued all those voices, matched them with faces and stored the whole shebang. Your brain does it, too. Don't you think that's wonderful? I do.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
A rejection from The New Yorker
I think this is a pretty good poem. They obviously don't agree. I wonder how many rejections that makes in my long life.
What I Would Say
She asked me what I'd do
if she smoked cigarettes.
I said I wasn't
sure.
But had she lived,
and if she loved me
still
and if she asked
again
I would say
I'll carry matches.
What I Would Say
She asked me what I'd do
if she smoked cigarettes.
I said I wasn't
sure.
But had she lived,
and if she loved me
still
and if she asked
again
I would say
I'll carry matches.
Friday, September 30, 2011
LETTER FROM 1948
They stand before their fireplace, logs cut in summer from the eastern woods and split in measured lengths burning hot behind the clasp of hands, the offered backs of trousers.
There is humor, always humor, even when the crops come up wrong, when rain neglects the sandy land. Words like grass burrs stuck in old socks fall softly to the wood of the floor—springy wood unevenly sawed twenty years before. It holds the words and it holds the walk toward the door, toward feeding time and milking time and time to slop the hogs.
Oh, the oaks at the gate, the porch that catches wind no matter how the summer heats. The red dirt and the brick chimney boys hide behind at night, the well and the bucket you raise the water in. The burn of shadows, secret joys in the bottom lands you know are there. Know feeling, know laughing, know running, are.
Spicewood, May, 2003
There is humor, always humor, even when the crops come up wrong, when rain neglects the sandy land. Words like grass burrs stuck in old socks fall softly to the wood of the floor—springy wood unevenly sawed twenty years before. It holds the words and it holds the walk toward the door, toward feeding time and milking time and time to slop the hogs.
Oh, the oaks at the gate, the porch that catches wind no matter how the summer heats. The red dirt and the brick chimney boys hide behind at night, the well and the bucket you raise the water in. The burn of shadows, secret joys in the bottom lands you know are there. Know feeling, know laughing, know running, are.
Spicewood, May, 2003
Saturday, August 13, 2011
THE SEEDLING GROWN
The flowered bush beside my door
has climbed a dozen summers and
grown tall. I stood beneath it just
this morning, in its shadow watched
the bees harvest its powdered gold,
the fall of petals reaching for my face
like children and old friends who loved
me yet, inviting me to stay.
The pull of earth, cool morning wind
too new, too full of promise, honeybees
and winking dew. And me turned gray
under a dozen summers while I trimmed
its shooting branch and damped its
drying root. They passed by me like
hummingbirds, too fast to catch,
almost too fast to see til here I stand
with only words and an empty hand.
Perhaps a little more—
the sweet white flowers at my feet
and the bush beside my door.
Spicewood 6/15/09
has climbed a dozen summers and
grown tall. I stood beneath it just
this morning, in its shadow watched
the bees harvest its powdered gold,
the fall of petals reaching for my face
like children and old friends who loved
me yet, inviting me to stay.
The pull of earth, cool morning wind
too new, too full of promise, honeybees
and winking dew. And me turned gray
under a dozen summers while I trimmed
its shooting branch and damped its
drying root. They passed by me like
hummingbirds, too fast to catch,
almost too fast to see til here I stand
with only words and an empty hand.
Perhaps a little more—
the sweet white flowers at my feet
and the bush beside my door.
Spicewood 6/15/09
Monday, August 1, 2011
Bullies and Barbed Wire
A death in my family last week sent me on a 500 mile road trip. Ceremonies ended just a hop and skip from my old elementary school, so I drove past it, remembering kids and teachers and events. It was a big part of my young life.
Losing my cousin and spending a couple of days with family I don't often see had me in a nostalgic mood which only intensified as I drove along the road past the school.
Something occurred there many decades ago that I've never forgotten and often wish I could go back and change. Since I can't do that, maybe the next best thing is to think of it as hard-earned experience and write a little about it.
If you have a child who is bullied, who lives under threat, I have some advice for you. I know it is good advice, and here is how I know:
I was a very young six my first day of school in that little brick building. Skinny and clueless. Almost all my life so far had been spent on a farm among adoring family. I was pretty smart. My mother had taught me the alphabet using nickel match boxes. Lots of color and big letters. And I could add and subtract. Feats that had gotten me applause on the farm.
The teacher asked a lot of questions, to all of which I knew the answers. So, of course, my hand was up a lot, probably waving in the air for attention. Nobody applauded and the teacher got tired of me and finally just ignored my hand and called on other kids. At lunch time a little pile of muscle in the second row told me that after lunch he intended kicking my butt for showing off.
I'll call him Blackie. He is probably a retired east coast mob boss by now. My defense was that I didn't know I was showing off. He didn't care. Things had to be put right.
I lived less than a quarter mile from the school and walked home for lunch. Afterward I tried to convince my mother I had a stomach ache. She didn't buy it and sent me out the door. I could see a pack of boys in the road running back and forth around a central figure. Blackie.
I did not want to fight. Innate cowardice? Possibly. More likely a lifetime of admonitions about turning the other cheek and being a good boy.
At a bend in the road, I slipped through a barbed wire fence into an empty field and circled around to the schoolyard from another direction.
Class resumed.
Never, from that moment, during the many years we spent as classmates, did Blackie ever repeat the threat. In fact, we became friends of a sort. But I knew better than to raise my hand much, and I kept my head down.
Here's the advice: Do not counsel your child to avoid confrontation. Do not tell them to turn the other cheek. Urge them to walk right up the middle of the road and fight. Getting hit does not hurt that much. Whether the fight is won or lost does not matter. Not at all. Confronting the threat is what matters. Confronting the threat instead of sliding through the fence will make all the difference. They'll keep on raising their hand and not caring much if someone doesn't like it.
Losing my cousin and spending a couple of days with family I don't often see had me in a nostalgic mood which only intensified as I drove along the road past the school.
Something occurred there many decades ago that I've never forgotten and often wish I could go back and change. Since I can't do that, maybe the next best thing is to think of it as hard-earned experience and write a little about it.
If you have a child who is bullied, who lives under threat, I have some advice for you. I know it is good advice, and here is how I know:
I was a very young six my first day of school in that little brick building. Skinny and clueless. Almost all my life so far had been spent on a farm among adoring family. I was pretty smart. My mother had taught me the alphabet using nickel match boxes. Lots of color and big letters. And I could add and subtract. Feats that had gotten me applause on the farm.
The teacher asked a lot of questions, to all of which I knew the answers. So, of course, my hand was up a lot, probably waving in the air for attention. Nobody applauded and the teacher got tired of me and finally just ignored my hand and called on other kids. At lunch time a little pile of muscle in the second row told me that after lunch he intended kicking my butt for showing off.
I'll call him Blackie. He is probably a retired east coast mob boss by now. My defense was that I didn't know I was showing off. He didn't care. Things had to be put right.
I lived less than a quarter mile from the school and walked home for lunch. Afterward I tried to convince my mother I had a stomach ache. She didn't buy it and sent me out the door. I could see a pack of boys in the road running back and forth around a central figure. Blackie.
I did not want to fight. Innate cowardice? Possibly. More likely a lifetime of admonitions about turning the other cheek and being a good boy.
At a bend in the road, I slipped through a barbed wire fence into an empty field and circled around to the schoolyard from another direction.
Class resumed.
Never, from that moment, during the many years we spent as classmates, did Blackie ever repeat the threat. In fact, we became friends of a sort. But I knew better than to raise my hand much, and I kept my head down.
Here's the advice: Do not counsel your child to avoid confrontation. Do not tell them to turn the other cheek. Urge them to walk right up the middle of the road and fight. Getting hit does not hurt that much. Whether the fight is won or lost does not matter. Not at all. Confronting the threat is what matters. Confronting the threat instead of sliding through the fence will make all the difference. They'll keep on raising their hand and not caring much if someone doesn't like it.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Cussing and the Western Novel
I don't indulge much. A mild four-letter one slips through now and then, but I am not one of your constant cussers. Recently, however, I did take the Lord's name in vain twice and also threw a fly swatter at the television set..
The words and the swatter were aimed at a fellow identified as one of the Florida jury that turned loose a woman who killed her baby daughter. Everybody in America knows she is guilty, but there he was, carefully explaining all the reasoning behind the verdict when I chunked the swatter and turned off the TV.
I've known many talented cussers. My Uncle Maurice, however, was the one I most admired. He was a tall, laughing farmer who cussed in delight as well as anger. In accusation and in forgiveness. He was darned good at it.
I was just a kid when I overheard him tell another uncle, "Why that was forty years a – goddamned – go."
See where I'm going with this? He realized as he was completing the sentence that he had forgotten to cuss. So he slipped it in BETWEEN SYLLABLES!
Cussing has always been a problem in western genre books. Publishers banned it long ago along with sex and common sense. Readers have sort of given up on westerns. I've asked myself more than once why I keep on writing them.
Now we have e-books and it is possible to go around all that. Now a writer can publish his or her own work and make it available through Amazon Kindle and the other e-book publishers. A guy named John Locke is the current star and has sold bushels of e-books, including westerns, that would probably never have been published through the old gatekeepers.
In my western novels I've just left out profanity completely because it has never seemed to me that my stories need it. I've also left out the silly substitutes. I think they're just fine without it, and I like to think that anybody can read one of them without trauma.
As to why I write them, it's because I need them. In fact, we all need those characters, the word-as-bond people who worked hard, raised their families, and took care of each other. Writing and reading about them might help us to regain ourselves.
The words and the swatter were aimed at a fellow identified as one of the Florida jury that turned loose a woman who killed her baby daughter. Everybody in America knows she is guilty, but there he was, carefully explaining all the reasoning behind the verdict when I chunked the swatter and turned off the TV.
I've known many talented cussers. My Uncle Maurice, however, was the one I most admired. He was a tall, laughing farmer who cussed in delight as well as anger. In accusation and in forgiveness. He was darned good at it.
I was just a kid when I overheard him tell another uncle, "Why that was forty years a – goddamned – go."
See where I'm going with this? He realized as he was completing the sentence that he had forgotten to cuss. So he slipped it in BETWEEN SYLLABLES!
Cussing has always been a problem in western genre books. Publishers banned it long ago along with sex and common sense. Readers have sort of given up on westerns. I've asked myself more than once why I keep on writing them.
Now we have e-books and it is possible to go around all that. Now a writer can publish his or her own work and make it available through Amazon Kindle and the other e-book publishers. A guy named John Locke is the current star and has sold bushels of e-books, including westerns, that would probably never have been published through the old gatekeepers.
In my western novels I've just left out profanity completely because it has never seemed to me that my stories need it. I've also left out the silly substitutes. I think they're just fine without it, and I like to think that anybody can read one of them without trauma.
As to why I write them, it's because I need them. In fact, we all need those characters, the word-as-bond people who worked hard, raised their families, and took care of each other. Writing and reading about them might help us to regain ourselves.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Thoreau, my daddy and me
I read Walden when I was ten or eleven and loved it. What I loved most at the time was when he said that in all his travels he'd never seen a man building his own house. I loved it because my daddy had done that, and I'd helped. It was a hoot to know that had Henry Thoreau come walking down Massey-Tompkins Road he'd have seen our little house set back in the pines and very likely have been proud of us.
My daddy only completed the eighth grade and never heard of Henry David Thoreau, and I didn't tell him. He was a skinny man, short and dark like an Indian. His quarter Cherokee blood showed all over him, and he was hard as split oak with muscles he could raise high when we begged him to do it. I heard it said once that he'd been a brawler in his youth. Years later I was shown a man with a bent arm and a limp and was told that a knife in my dad's hand had done it. I felt bad about it then, and still do.
By the time we set fire to the underbrush and burned off the briers and scrub saplings on our two acres, he was the man who said prayers with me at night and rode me piggyback. My brother, my mother, my daddy and I were just who we were, neither good nor bad, merely us.
When the house was finished we painted it green and moved in. I thought it a fine place, out in the country east of Houston near a sluggish bowel of water called Cedar Bayou, nested among tall pines and guarded by about ten-thousand copperhead snakes.
At the rear kitchen door he neglected to build steps, but put a wooden box there temporarily. The box was still there the last time I saw it in the headlights of a car, leaving in the middle of a hard night a few years later.
I'm writing these words sitting inside a house I, like Thoreau and like my daddy, built with my own hands. My son-in-law helped me do it. He held onto the other end of many a long board and went with me on trips to a ranch from which we hauled twenty tons of limestone rock. The house has treated me well. Its pipes hold water and its electric wiring behaves as it should. When I began, I didn't know how to build it, but I found some books at the library, and I took my time.
After I moved in I started trying again to write books, something I put on pause long ago because my typewriter kept waking up my baby girl. The pause lasted a lot of years.
Writing came hard, but I had some stories I wanted to tell and I figured that doing it was like building the house. Word on word, like stone on stone, day on day. And that is how it has been.
My daddy only completed the eighth grade and never heard of Henry David Thoreau, and I didn't tell him. He was a skinny man, short and dark like an Indian. His quarter Cherokee blood showed all over him, and he was hard as split oak with muscles he could raise high when we begged him to do it. I heard it said once that he'd been a brawler in his youth. Years later I was shown a man with a bent arm and a limp and was told that a knife in my dad's hand had done it. I felt bad about it then, and still do.
By the time we set fire to the underbrush and burned off the briers and scrub saplings on our two acres, he was the man who said prayers with me at night and rode me piggyback. My brother, my mother, my daddy and I were just who we were, neither good nor bad, merely us.
When the house was finished we painted it green and moved in. I thought it a fine place, out in the country east of Houston near a sluggish bowel of water called Cedar Bayou, nested among tall pines and guarded by about ten-thousand copperhead snakes.
At the rear kitchen door he neglected to build steps, but put a wooden box there temporarily. The box was still there the last time I saw it in the headlights of a car, leaving in the middle of a hard night a few years later.
I'm writing these words sitting inside a house I, like Thoreau and like my daddy, built with my own hands. My son-in-law helped me do it. He held onto the other end of many a long board and went with me on trips to a ranch from which we hauled twenty tons of limestone rock. The house has treated me well. Its pipes hold water and its electric wiring behaves as it should. When I began, I didn't know how to build it, but I found some books at the library, and I took my time.
After I moved in I started trying again to write books, something I put on pause long ago because my typewriter kept waking up my baby girl. The pause lasted a lot of years.
Writing came hard, but I had some stories I wanted to tell and I figured that doing it was like building the house. Word on word, like stone on stone, day on day. And that is how it has been.
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