Traveling with Crows

Pulitzer Dreams

You know I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy on the way to the Associated Writing Programs in Atlanta.  While I was there, I got out of bed, The Road in my hands, to answer a text message from a friend inviting me to the bar, again.  Typical bar scene, talking fiction, I expounded on my fantasy of meeting McCarthy, my words blending with menthols.  It's not that I get much chance to love fiction, so the book has to be good. 

Over email at the hotel, I kept writing to friends, quoting lines from McCarthy.  The Pulitzer is enough, but also not enough.  I have already told people that "The Road is a book that will change your life."  I imagine the paperback version will allow you to mark it up more than I did.  I washed through the pages thirsty for more.  Post-apocalyptic, the critics call it.  I call it the father-son book that matters.

"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities" (McCarthy 75).

Ground Hog Day and Choices Not Quite on the Page

Coming up on Ground Hog Day, the repetition of old suffering in a face of a drought seems the oddest confrontation for this former Pennsylvanian.  I remember the year of terrible drought in Pennsylvania, 1995, the year my father died.  All these younger years later, Martin J. Downey has died in Bucks County, PA.  We are facing the worst drought of my life in California, which isn't to say there haven't been worse droughts.  My students argued over drinking habits and socioeconomic station in our creative writing workshop; I sipped Moroccan mint tea at Bad Ass Coffee in the late afternoon sun and wished for a reprieve from the inevitable truth; the truth was, my son might not pass the fourth grade, and of course, it will be my fault.  In this kind of environment, I turned my mind to the moonrise, clear and evident as a slice-through sky before sundown where there are no clouds and I could be celebrating my good luck, a dog-walk without a raincoat on the last days of January.  Instead, I acknowledge the high pressure and expectation in clear blue, and the suffering that is to come.

Martin J. Downey quietly transported me here.  When I was lost in adolescence, he stepped in, gave free makeovers, fashion advice, romantic tips, important books to read, and expensive haircuts.  For a ninth grader, a fifty dollar hairdo was excessive, but I came to value those two hours more than almost any other time in my monotonous life.  He taught me to use K-Y jelly as a setting gel before setting gels were marketable ("that vaginal jelly," he said, with ease, to my young ears), and much later, when I was nineteen and had quit college, he got me a job as the secretary to ten psychiatrists at the Princeton House Unit of the Medical Center of Princeton, even though I had no experience.  Whenever I type, something I can do with extreme speed, I think of Martin.  When I save time teaching online or answer a score of emails in fifteen minutes, my typing fingers smokin' across the keyboard, I thank Martin.  He took no credit, because he wasn't technically there.  He just knew I could learn fast, and I did, because he knew I could.

His death was two weeks ago.  Ground Hog Day is coming.  My son will have to learn his multiplication tables.  That's the way it goes.  I will sit on the bank of the Sacramento, watching the salmon, itching for rain, in the warmth of an uncommon January sun.  Some ice chunk crushed a car in Florida today.  Martin, what would he say now?

Resolutions

Asked what we're giving up, what we're making up for the New Year, and I have no pat answers this time.  I have decided to limit myself to a word, vulnerability.  The word becomes a statement, Be vulnerability.  I think about the trees in my yard, standing maple against the onslaught of winter storm.  Their armor is their woody essence, and their essence is their vulnerability.  Though they are hardwoods, they do not think "hardwood" into the wind.  I know I have.  I have bound myself to hardness, to creating a shell, and leaned into the wind defiantly.  Yesterday, among the tidepools of La Jolla, I admired the delicate fronds of sea kelp waving into the currents that rose through shallow rocks from open ocean, and I found hermit crabs.  They gather a shell to live in, pull it on and gently rock it toward debris good enough to eat.  Their antennae are delicate and accurate.  But the shell they put on, hard as it is, is not part of their thoughts.  It will be discarded soon enough, when the eating and the molting make it cramped and difficult to maneuver.  I think of all my old shells, and my similar taste for them, and the ways I thought myself into them, letting my thoughts run through the shells, animating them.  Now I want to discard the need for all of that for 2007 and beyond.  There is warmth enough here to do it.  I let my thoughts ride out with the tide.