Category: being human

The landscape of our adventures

I was in email conversation with my friend Angelique recently about a visit she made to Florida, and found myself quite unexpectedly overcome by memories of the Tampa that was, strong sense-memories that came so fast I could scarcely keep up with typing them.

I asked Angelique if she would mind my sharing them on the blog, since they started as a private email. And she said no, she did not mind. She said, Everyone’s landscape is an adventure.

Here are some of my adventures:

I remember wandering barefoot in summers (the soles of my feet were like elephant hide back then!) and always getting sandspurs. I remember relentless white heat and the rattling of palm fronds in hurricanes. I remember the two weeks in December when the temperature went below 50 F and all the rich women dragged out their fur coats.

I had a friend who lived out in the wilds beyond Tampa, in a house right on the Alafia River (pronounced AL-a-phi). I spent many nights and weekends with her. She had a withered arm due to polio, but she was stronger and tougher than me and did everything that I was too scared to do. She taught me how to jump on a trampoline and how to climb a tree, and we often took her canoe out onto the river by ourselves for hours (those were the days when parents didn’t think to put GPS or leashes on kids). One day on the river, we were chased for probably a half mile by an enormous alligator. Scary. We paddled very very fast (three-handed)… but I’m not sure if we even told her parents about it.

The ants! We called the little red ones fire ants, and the black ones were sugar ants, and the big ones were carpenter ants (I don’t know if they really were or not, but that’s what we called them). And the ginormous grasshoppers, oh lord, they terrified me because they jumped. I would cross the street to avoid them.

Tampa was lovely in parts when I was growing up, and rowdy and unruly in others. Sleepy but quietly vibrant, if that makes sense. I lived at a nexus in terms of class/culture — I was educated beyond my station and hung out with a lot of wealthy kids as well as kids like my friend Diane (on the Alafia) or my friend Holly who was the Baddest Girl in 4th grade and the first of our school to have divorced parents. Her father was No Good, as everyone knew, but he was always really nice to me.

One of my favorite places as a kid was Ayres Diner, where you could get Southern breakfast 24/7. It was a favorite haunt of truckers and prostitutes and night-shift workers from the hospital.

I wrote my first poem at the age of about 7 (? maybe a bit later) in the back seat of the car driving across the Gandy Bridge at night — the long causeway and bridge that runs between Tampa and St. Petersburg. My idea of the ocean was warm and salty and full of jellyfish. I have danced like a lunatic on those white sand beaches at night while heat lightning poured across the sky like drip icing.

I have seen more roadkill than you can shake a stick at.

There used to be buzzards nesting on top of the Barnett Bank building when I was a kid. It was the tallest building downtown (9 stories? 12, maybe?). The buzzards would fly around in the noon heat while office workers sat in the shade with their lunches.

I have been to old-South juke joints and biker bars and tiny Mexican restaurants in cinderblock buildings. I’ve been to stately Southern homes. I still adore Spanish moss — to me, Spanish moss, warm dark nights, and palm trees are Florida, in a particular way. And that great big sky.

—–

Tampa is not like this anymore. None of our childhood places are, except in the space between imagination and memory and whatever strong feelings we have taken away from our beginnings. Love. Rage. Fear. Curiosity. Determination. Hope. If we could go back and make things different in our lives, these lost places are where most of us would begin, I suspect.

When I told these memories to Angelique, she responded with this:

      We shall not cease from exploration
      And the end of all our exploring
      Will be to arrive where we started
      And know the place for the first time.
            (from “Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot)

To which I say, yes. I hope I will not cease from exploration for a great long while yet, because the lost places aren’t really so lost, are they? They are within us, and we are finding them all the time.

Memories are maps. There’s a whole comment section here just waiting to be filled: so please, won’t you tell me your landscapes?

Enjoy your day.

Give a little bit

Yes, it is a Coca Cola commercial. No, I don’t drink it anymore, although I used to have a small bottle of Coke (remember those little class bottles?) and about a half a pack of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies for breakfast as a young “adult.” It’s a wonder I have any brain cells left at all, between that and…ah, well, stories for another day (smile).

Here’s the story today:
 

 

I am a sucker for goodness and kindness in the world. People are being particularly kind to me right now: thank you, thank you to all the wonderful folks who have signed up so far to sponsor me in the Write-a-thon. I’m honored and deeply touched by the support I’ve received so far, and we haven’t even started yet! First, we have to have a party.

I hope some of you will join me tonight at the Clarion West party for the Locus Awards, at the Best Western Executive Inn near Seattle Center. The fun starts at 8 PM and ends when the last science fiction writer or reader falls over sideways. And that, my friends, can take a while, trust me…. We’ll be celebrating the Locus Award recipients and the kickoff tomorrow of the 29th Annual Clarion West Writers workshop, and the Write-a-thon. Join us if you can!

And thank you all for giving me a little bit of your life, your time and your love to support me and so many other writers in the Write-a-thon. Thank you.

Enjoy your day.

Drowning

When I was two or three, I nearly drowned in a California swimming pool with adults probably no more than 10 feet away. By the time they reached me, I was floating face down in the deep end. When they picked me up, my face was blue from holding my breath.

No one had any idea there was anything wrong with me. And here’s a post that explains why you can’t always tell when people are drowning (thanks to Dianne Cameron for the link). If you ever even once in your life plan to be near water, please read it.

I don’t remember that day in the pool, except maybe in dreams. But I was afraid to learn to swim for a long time, and one of the most powerful lessons of my childhood was that adults I trusted (the wonderful counselors at my day camp when I was seven or eight) would jerk me around for my own good. You know the drill: I promise I’ll stand right here. Now swim to me! And then once I was committed, once I was thrashing toward them as if getting there fast was the same thing as learning to swim, they would move back step by step.

Between this and the teacher who pulled out my tooth in the bathroom one day, I was deeply cynical about adults by the age of nine.

I get why the grownups made me learn to swim. I would have done it too. I don’t get the teacher in the bathroom at all, although I have my theories. What interests me now, from this distance, is that they all thought it was for my own good. What interests me is that the counselors lied to me over and over, and I let them because I loved them. I hated my teacher, but you know, she never lied to me once.

And yet, I will still swim to the people I love, until I turn blue in the face. Go figure.

Enjoy your day. Don’t drown.

A story for tomorrow

I’ve been inviting people this week to come with me on a writing journey. Today I offer you a different kind of journey… except, well, really it’s no different at all.

Here’s the description from the filmmaker: “This video was written and produced while traveling through Chile & Patagonia with my girlfriend. We spent 5 weeks exploring this amazing country, and this is how we chose to document it.”

It’s a lovely journey, and towards the end are two questions. I answer yes, yes, absolutely yes. Even on the days that cry out for a no. I hope you do too.
 

a story for tomorrow. from gnarly bay productions, Inc. on Vimeo.

Enjoy your day.

Ray Bradbury, who was alive

Ray Bradbury is dead. I love his work so much that I can’t imagine how the mind, heart, soul that created it could no longer be alive with stories that still take me home.

I am republishing today a post I wrote in 2008. And my question for you, and for me, today, every day, is Do you know?

August 3, 2008

Dandelion Wine is a summer book, every word rich with summer-ness like ice cream and hot sun, and soft heavy evenings full of tree frogs and parents laughing quietly in the other room and screen doors slamming in the distance.

I first read it in high school, and it didn’t really speak to me. It wasn’t weird enough, and the boy in the book was too young for me to care about, and it was set in 1928 — you may imagine the roll of teenage eyes, god, that was like a thousand years ago…

I was in my 30’s before I understood the deep richness of this book, the joy and the sadness and the absolute brilliance with which Bradbury captures a summer that I never had and yet remember so well. Summer as a state of mind. Summer as a collection of moments out of usual time in which we may, if we choose, live slow and do mundane things and find at bedtime that it has been one of the richest days…

We’ve had very unsatisfactory weather in Seattle these last couple weeks, restless laughing autumn weather that I love, but am not yet ready for. But we are promised summer again this week, and although outside my window it’s hazy and 50 degrees, I see sun and hints of blue sky behind the gray smoke. And today, when the sun comes out (and I know it will, I know), I will stretch out in it with iced tea and Dandelion Wine and remember what it’s like when everything in one’s world is exciting and new and so full of possibility. I’ll remember that from my little deck, a place familiar and known and not so much about possibility as it is about perspective and the considered choice to throw myself into things or not, to be new or not, to sit in the sun or go inside. Because I’m no longer twelve, and I need my twelve-year-old summer days more than ever.

In the first eight pages of the book, Douglas Spaulding, age 12, is out in the woods with his father and younger brother Tom. Doug and Tom are wrestling. And Douglas discovers something amazing:

And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.
 
And everything, absolutely everything, was there.
 
The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.
 
And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.
 
I’m alive, he thought.
 
[…]
 
The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing in his wrists, the real heart pounding in his chest. The million pores on his body opened.
 
I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!
 
He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.
 
“Doug, you okay?”
 
Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled.
 
“Doug, you’re crazy!”
 
“Crazy!”
 
They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried.
 
“Doug, you’re not mad?”
 
“No, no, no, no, no!”
 
Douglas, eyes shut, saw spotted leopards pad in the dark.
 
“Tom!” Then, quieter. “Tom… does everyone in the world… know he’s alive?”
 
“Sure. Heck, yes!”
 
The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow.
 
“I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, I sure hope they know.”
 
— from Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Well, now

The Washington State senate voted tonight to approve marriage equality. The bill passed with more votes than expected, because several Republican senators who were uncommitted made the choice to support it.

The State house votes next week, and unless the universe turns inside out, there are more than enough votes there to pass the bill. The Governor has said that she will sign it into law immediately.

Opponents of marriage equality have until sometime in June to gather enough petition votes to put a referendum on the November ballot. I expect that will happen. And then we’ll see what we’re all made of out here in the Pacific Northwest, where we pride ourselves so much on civility and the common good.

Here’s what Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark NJ, has to say about putting questions of equal rights to public referendum: “No minority should have their rights subject to the passions and the sentiments of the majority.”

Period.


 

Enjoy your day. Mine’s been pretty interesting so far.

Peace out, G-Scout

Last fall, the Girl Scouts of America accepted a trans kid into a Colorado troop. And thus apparently began the Decline of Western Civilization, if you believe some of the responses. Some Girl Scouts and their parents began calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in protest. Because keeping dollars out of your own local community in California or Ohio (where two of the protests are based) is a great way to punish those uppity Colorado folks with their practically-left-coast values. Oh, wait, California is the left coast too. Oops. Well, never mind, let’s just punish EVERYONE and then go have some iced tea.

A 14-year-old girl decided to take her boycott national and posted a heavily scripted video on YouTube, complete with signs. I am not linking to that video because I have no wish to promote the content. And because she’s a kid, she has an opinion, she put it out there and it will forever be on The Google to haunt her through her entire life. She doesn’t need any more shit from me.

Nope, today I am here to bring you a passionate, graceful and thoroughly beautiful response from a young woman in college. Who is also expressing her opinion, and who is being an ally to trans Girl Scouts everywhere. It’s coherent, powerful and it has by god doubled the amount I plan to spend on cookies this year.


 

I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout back in the Stone Age when we had the full uniforms, including socks with the logos (I swear I am not making this up). I did not have this young woman’s experience of encouragement and support and community in my troop. I wish I had. I would give a lot to have been this clear, direct, articulate and fearless in my late teens and early twenties. And if the Girls Scouts have become the kind of organization that help to shape women like this one, then they are welcome to my cookie money.

If a girl with a sash and an order form knocks on your door and asks you to buy some Samoas, don’t ask her how she pees. Buy some cookies and tell her she’s doing a great job.

Enjoy your day. Peace out.

The wonder

— Oh my god, Martha, that Kelley Eskridge is throwing up words on the internet again.
— I know, George. Go get a bucket and a mop.

Incoherence alert: I don’t really know how to talk about wonder, which is a hell of a thing for a writer, but there you go. Sometimes things are bigger than words.

Today is not about wondering, not about the verb of it all. Today is about the noun, when wonder turns from questioning into an answer. Isn’t that the coolest thing, to get a blast-your-soul-open answer to a question you didn’t even know you had? Or to meet an old answer anew and find it has the same power to move you? That is the wonder of stories, for me. I read, and when it is good, whsshh, there I go into the story; and inside it I find a place which is also inside me. Perhaps it is a part of myself I have never before seen in the light. Or maybe it is an utterly familiar internal space, one of the places of dancing or thorns or nothing but sky. You know those places. We all have them. We explore them through our own experience, and through the stories we tell each other. Stories open doors inside us where we find ourselves.

So before the guy gets here with the mop, let me point you to the source of today’s holy shit, stories are amazing meditation on wonder. There’s a guy named Mark Oshiro who, among other things, reads and writes about it. And Mark is the Best Reader Evah in my opinion right now, because oh my god he is all about the wonder of it all. He blogs about each chapter of the book as he reads it, and he does his best to avoid being spoiled about the book before he reads. So he’s coming to it fresh with a critical mind and an exuberant heart. Mark Oshiro comes to reading ready for joy, sorrow, fear, hope and love. Ready to find the world in a book.

And right now he is reading — for the first time — The Lord of the Rings.

So do yourself a favor and go share the wonder of that. (Follow the links back to the Chapter One post and work your way forward).

I am enjoying it so much that I actually find myself saving the posts as rewards. I want to reach through the internet and give this guy a hug for loving stories so much that he gives himself to them and finds the wonder.

Because wonder is good, my friends. To be astonished into sorrow or joy. To go on a journey with people who aren’t real except they by god are, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the magic, this ability we have to make them come alive inside us? Story is real, it is, it is, I don’t care what people say because I know. I have lived so many of them. I am stuffed full of Frodo and Sam, Morgon and Raederle, Gil and Rudy, Harry Crewe and Aerin, Candy Smith, Travis McGee, Jack Reacher, Johnny Smith and Danny Torrance and Stu Redman, Jack and Stephen, Hazel and Fiver, Alexander, Ged, Mia Havero, ‘Glory’ Conway, Lazarus Long, Aud and Lore and yowsa, just you wait for Hild…

Edited to add: And not just books: the novels of television and the novellas of film, whose people also inhabit me: Mal and Zoe and River, Buffy, Al Swearengen and Trixie, Stringer Bell and Bubbles, Ripley, Sarah Connor, Ree Dolly, Raylan Givens… Oh my goodness, it’s crowded in here. But somehow there is always room for more. (end edit)

And then there are all the stories of my own that tumble inside me like the surf. I am deep and restless these days with story, teeming with characters that only I have met, moments that only I have known, that are every bit as real to me even though they are only mine. So much of what story does to us is private, don’t you find? Almost inexplicable.

And there you go, I just took 650 words to not explain the inexplicable. Ah, well, incoherent for sure, but you know what? I will let it stand, and perhaps do better some other time. Or maybe just let the stories I love speak to me, and the ones I write speak for me. And I think it’s time to take a trip with Tolkien again.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you all who share my love of story. Enjoy your day. Go read something wonderful!