Dear Readers; The lilies I bought yesterday are opening and I can smell them two rooms away. Periods of sun flash into this room during the past hour or so, but heavy snow squalls have come across the bay on and off most of the day too, and I can see tops of the big trees a few blocks away rocking in the wind. It was close to 70 degrees yesterday. I met a friend for coffee and when we left the coffee shop, we saw a fellow jogging down the street: no shirt, running shorts, ear buds. I shouted over to him as he bounced along “I bet you won’t try that tomorrow”. I thought it was friendly and funny. He didn’t respond at all. Maybe it was the ear buds. Or maybe I’ve been binging on too much Larry David lately. Hmmm. When I went down to the kitchen this morning, right after I got out of bed, the dog indicated in his usual impatient way that he needed to pee. It was urgent, I guess, or so he seemed to wish to convey to me, so I followed him to the back door in my robe (a truly ugly, saggy, blue and black plaid velour thing I got cheap at Aldis. One of the pockets is partially detaching from the robe, but it works and its ugliness is more than made up for by its surprising comfort) and let him out. He hurried over the fallow flower bed that he routinely fertilizes, overseen by a bathtub madonna that has been tipped and leaned by the heaving ground against the inside of the old clawfoot tub I’d put there years ago after we remodeled the bathroom. A thin coating of snow covered everything and the wind, frigid and hissing, was stronger that I’d imagined. The bird feeders were empty, so I decided on the spot that I should fill them. I was becoming more convinced of the wickedness of the morning. I get a bit of a kick out of getting blown around only partially dressed in a frigid snowy wind for such tasks (this is, after all one of the very few normal winter mornings we’ve had all winter) … and I was sure the birds would be grateful in their own imperturbable manner. They had already mobbed the feeder closest to the house with its very small remaining amount of black sunflower seed, much of it on the ground for a clutch of juncos that peck through what the picky finches pick through and throw off. The parts to the feeders were frozen together. It was clear that the snow that was falling had been preceded by freezing rain (again a normal occurrence any other winter) and after I had yanked them apart, filled them and re-hung them I went inside and called up to Susan, who was getting ready to go to work at the college where she teaches a composition class, that she might want to check out the school cancellations for the day. She did, and it turned out the college and every other school north of the 45th parallel was closed for the day. She reported, a little gleefully, that she was going back to bed for a while. Belly-up, our Lhasa Apso, and I were on our own in the kitchen. I broke his morning glucosamine pill in half and retrieved a piece of salami from the fridge. He’s gotten quite good at swallowing the damn pill after I put it on the back of his tongue, if I have that slice of salami folded up and very near his nose… though this morning he dropped the pill from his maw, so we had to go through the whole ritual again. What can I say? The pills work. His breed is susceptible to luxating patella. We learned, when the dollar store stopped carrying a chewable glucosamine that he relished as a treat, and nothing comparable and considerably more expensive was to his satisfaction, that his patella luxated quite a bit more frequently after a week or two without it. So, we’ve settled for this other brand that he does not like but tolerates as long as the salami is close by. It is supremely disconcerting to me that I have found almost no oral medicines for dogs that he likes and will willingly chew and swallow… and the more expensive the less he likes them.
Anyway, I went on to squeeze a bunch of oranges and modify a failed buttermilk biscuit recipe we found on Facebook that looked promising to see if it could be made into something nearly as good as the person who demonstrated it on Facebook insisted it was. The first try a week ago following the original recipe was a fail. The proportions of the main ingredients seemed way out of whack and the biscuits were heavy even after we tried to fix it on the spot. This time the biscuits turned out okay, though Susan didn’t like the purposefully crusty top (an egg wash sprinkled with salt) and I really did. I warmed up some chicken pan gravy from dinner a few nights ago, sliced a polish sausage, fried it and put it in the gravy, scrambled some eggs and finished them off with cheese. Susan’s not a gravy person but I like it on biscuits from time to time and this was a success. I have to say. That’s how the day started. I intended to get to this little missive to you, my dear readers, immediately after breakfast, but I got stuck on a few episodes of the TV series “Picard”, the second season when that damned “Q” returns along with the fucking borg queen ( can you believe it? A different actor portrays her in the series than in the movie where she was a central plot device… the movie borg queen, I have to say, was hot… I’ve been a Trekkie since I was friggin’ 13 or 14 when I faithfully watched the original series. Could you guess?), so I’m just now getting to it. Getting to this letter to you all. That’s okay. I find much of what is called procrastination is actually quite useful. I mean, the whole bit about how my morning got started was a product of today’s procrastination. So, I try to be patient with myself. You know, procrastination as a productive part of the creative process and all that bullshit. But I’ve been contemplating this idea of writing my readers a letter all week, actually. And that kind of ruminating is very much a part of my creative process… is, I think, actual writing… to me anyway. It occurs to me that one of the ways I’ve written, one of the “genres” as it were, I’ve most enjoyed were letters. You know (or maybe you don’t) the pre-email/texting/twitter mode of written communication between friends and family. Letter writing of that type is very nearly extinct I’m afraid, but for a good number of years, even decades, in my life it was the primary method I employed to communicate with people I liked and people I adored and treasured. I don’t doubt that a few of you out there (dear dear readers) have been around long enough in my life to be a recipient of any number of my habitually long and shaggy… interminable even… letters, way back when. Just as I am sure I have received letters from a number of you. Remember? Mine were often on legal paper and stuffed in business sized envelopes… often with a poem or two. Man… I looked forward to letters. And enjoyed writing them. Currently, nothing in the least compares with them. When I first went away to college my little mailbox was often stuffed with letters from my favorite people and family members. I’ve got this painting in my mind: an extreme kind of minimalist closeup of my college dorm mailbox stuffed with fat envelopes. A variety of colors and envelop shapes and sizes, stamps, and return address stickers or styles. I was rich with friends who liked to write. And it went on for years. Emails don’t cut it, too often turned into tools for airing passive aggressive gripes and preternaturally unable to allow an opening for an authentic heartful reply, and only really good at relaying plans and arranging meeting times, they aren’t nearly as comfortable and warm as letters were at conveying thoughtfulness and pouring out one’s hopes, dreams, catastrophes… love… or day-to-day, week-to-week life review. I think it has a little to do with letters being primarily composed by handwriting and cursive as opposed to arial or times new roman. Don’t even talk to me about texting… not completely useless, I guess, still I can’t quite understand why people consider it an easier method of contacting someone than dialing and leaving a voice message. But that’s just me. I’m old. And I remember how a rambling handwritten letter from a distant friend could carry me through the most rugged day.
It is very possible that this project, this Compendium, is directly related to my letter writing habit of old. Like I said, when I started writing poems, they almost always found their way into letters; folded separately from the body of the letter itself. I wanted to honor that evolution and connection in my writing here. Though I admit that most people are hesitant to make any response to this substack publishing thing as lengthy and detailed. That’s okay, though I would be very open to similar outpourings, venting, and opinion from my readers… and should I get anything of the kind I might even be tempted to put some together for one of the “issues”. Just an idea. So many of you are my favorite writers! Life’s a little tough right now, to tell you the truth. Susan’s still in recovery mode from some major surgery she underwent last Fall to restore blood flow to her foot (she was in danger of losing a toe or two, at least!) and this process has been even more difficult I think than her recovery from her open-heart bypass surgery a few years ago. She’s such an inspiration, truly. But it is, by its very nature, disheartening and sometimes heart breaking… but fucking A, she keeps plugging along. She teaches her classes at the college and is a mainstay at the college basketball games, largely because a good number of her students have been on the team. I go with her and enjoy the games, and she is quite instructive about the rules and plays while I always confer with her when I yell out support to our team to make sure what I yell is appropriate. My favorite is “Focus!”. My natural tendency is more a writer’s prompt kind of shouting I’m afraid, maybe something like… um… “too many details!!” “be more concrete!!” or even “More! More! What were his hands doing!”, “make that mixed metaphor really count! Bravo!”, though I’ve grown very fond of the game especially as it is played at this community college level. No one’s fucking around preening and showing off unless a situation ripe for it is in the making. Anyway, our primary goal is to get her back in the kayak this summer. We’ve found a number of secluded and relatively undeveloped, unpopulated waters where we love to paddle and I got this dandy two-seater that converts easily into a solo kayak. We live in such a perfect area for it, too. We’re thinking getting her out of the kayak will be the greater challenge, though I’ve already put my patient-care skills in transferring to work and have perfected reaching down, grabbing her by her waistband and pulling her up from the boat that way. I’ve got a part-time gig at the college as well. I work with student nurses in the mental health simulation classes. It’s a good fit for a kind of unusual combination of my expertise in mental health treatment strategies and communication and my acting chops. This past week I played a gentleman with an amputated leg who shows up in the hospital after what appears to be a passive attempt at suicide by not using his diabetes meds (or actually storing them up to overdose on them). His wife, who managed his diet and the household finances, divorced him not long after the amputation. It’s pretty exciting all around when I start sobbing. These classes are for first year RN students and I get the feeling for many of them, as these classes are more focused on communication skills and observational know-how, they are somewhat more challenging than the skill and task-based stuff they must gain expertise in when training in, say, med-surg classes. Next week we start the schizophrenia section… then after three weeks of that, we move on to death and dying and hospice stuff. I’m also a part of what is being called a Success and Resilience Coaching program in the nursing program. This is a new approach that hopes to address the alarming flight of nurses from the field and to increase the number of nurses that successfully complete the very challenging nursing program. It’s fun and challenging. My cohorts are all primarily nurses and my perspective has been honed by counseling/social work culture… and there is a difference. I am accustomed to dealing with that difference, but it does get clunky in terms of expectations and the kinds of details that nurses are most concerned with and the kinds that counselors and social workers are.
My own health is pretty excellent as I close in on my 70th year. I feel very fortunate. I had a little scare recently when my PSA numbers were elevated beyond what my doc was comfortable with, but my cancer screening was negative so…. I keep up the swim workouts. In the past two years I’ve added more rigorous sprinting laps to the workout with the result being a significantly improved lipid panel. My blood pressure remains a niggling issue. And what about those Lions, eh? I’m not sure how much I can go into, or what angle I can take here, regarding the alarming circumstances in the country and the world. So many of my concerns are repeatedly verbalized and vented in the pages and from different angles and genres in this Compendium, so… do I need to get into it all in this “letter to my readers”? Maybe there would be some worth to it. But really, my opinions and thoughts aren’t worth much in the overall scheme of things. My circle is small, and I definitely exist outside of the class that does most of the talking, the class that most cultural conversation, the media etc., is addressed to, for, and about. They have access to the resources required by those who do the selling. The rest of us are merely dragged along with the side effect being that the “sellers” hope we don’t bug them too much about the disparities and can be manipulated into coveting what those sellers have to sell. More and more I am alerted to how little of the public discourse is addressed to people in my socio-economic class via the media. Certainly, the largest proportion of what is being sold via the webpages and airways and cloud content is being directed toward people who have resources beyond my own and interests and access that are nowhere in the vicinity of my own. It’s been weird being a very well read and informed lower income working person in the past thirty or forty years as the class divide became more entrenched and razor-wired, gated. At a certain point, and from my own perspective, even being white doesn’t really buy me much in that swelling world of privilege and access short of the usual racist historical delusional construct of the pretense of superiority. Well… it doesn’t buy me much other than the nebulous and false offerings from white supremacists who would like to convince me to covet their alleged social standing and power to continue to suppress and oppress. I am sickened by all of this and certainly happy that any habitual mainstream TV or newsprint consumption died for me a long time ago. I prefer to look for places in the marketplace of cultural offerings, those largely hidden, outlier, subterranean offerings, where I can feel a sense of belonging. They come fewer and further between… and even some of my bases of thought and belief that I relied upon in the past are more and more overwhelmingly defined by stories told by and for the privileged. I do miss newspapers. I miss the fat Sunday papers that could last all morning and much of the afternoon, accompanied by some strong coffee and a bagel. But the stories and story tellers, fiction and nonfiction, seem to have an ability to avoid or forget, or be unable in any experiential and real sense, to tell stories from the perspective of those outside of their own class boundaries. They speak about those others, aka: me, or to and around them in barely concealed condescension. It’s largely a liberal habit born out of a class of people who have never been challenged by want, have afforded advanced degrees in prestigious degree granting institutions and who insist on them from almost any other emerging or dominant voices in the cultural conversation. It is also, of course, the predisposition of the outright fascists who call themselves conservatives… but they make no bones about it, kindness and inclusion being antithetical to, not a desired characteristic of, the way they walk through the world.
So my promise to myself, (and to you I fear) as I proceed to produce “content” (this emerging use of the word “content” is so bizarre, to me at least), fictional and nonfictional content, is to present my own world as I know it, the people and heroes and lovers and tragic but ineffably strong victims, and to refrain from coveting or even shining what might be considered a perpetually happy-ending money-infused success story light on any of the characters I present in my stories and plays and chatty asides. You know, I started writing, some 50 years ago, thinking I would primarily be a short story writer. The poetry came not long afterward and came on strong when it did. I quit college, way back in ‘74, or took an informal open-ended sabbatical from it to get some life experience, break out of the misfit life plan that I had inherited, and to write stories. I soon found out that I didn’t have much junk to write stories about and that I was a poor student, though a better one if I had a job while I took classes… and then an even better one when I could find a way, a kind of Montessori way, to follow my own nose as far as what I read and learned and how I quite naturally integrated all the disparate directions of my interest areas and reading and life experiences. It was an exciting time and continues to be. It’s a joy. I really appreciate you all, by the way. I get enough positive feedback and comments via email and on the pages of Compendium: The Kitchen Sink itself to keep me going and am grateful for that. Besides, many of you are fine writers yourselves, and many are among my favorite poets. I pretty much ignore reports I get from the generous Substack people the day after I send something out that tell me how many people have read that most recent offering in the first 24 hours. I know I can barely keep up in any way that could be considered immediate with all the material, the fucking “content”, that comes my way on a day-to-day basis, so, from the beginning I was adverse to the idea of judging my success on how many people read what I had written within the first 24 hour period after I sent it out. It’s a lousy way to measure success… at least for what I write and how I think it is best approached and appreciated. I’ve said this here before, and so I get pretty excited to see that over the longer term the pieces that are stored here, in the archive of my substack writings, consistently gain more readers over time. That is cool. It is a library of my work and I want to continue to encourage people to browse when and if they have time to do so. That’s not saying I disapprove at all of those of you who prefer to read pieces as they are delivered. I hate this phrase but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: “It’s all good” I thought I might ruminate a bit here about the coming election and the heartbreaking continuation…. of… well, shit… of so many inhumane and bloody spectacles and horrors the world over. And I refrain from doing so not to avoid, or to lessen, censor, my own expressions of terror and fear, or to deny the very real possibility that these swelling abominable circumstances are likely to spread as opposed to be actively forbidden and limited effectively, but only to admit that all of us here, in this room, in this exchange of words and even a kind of love, are feeling the same things in many of the same ways, with the same heartbreak and real tears, bewilderment and feelings of powerlessness and impotence and rage. Many of us are doing what we can and will continue. I’ve the great gift of knowing, personally, some extraordinarily committed and right-thinking people whose lives, each in their own way, contribute valuable and meaningful strategies and goodness (yes, goodness) every day.
I often hear it said of my generation that we have deliberately ushered in the catastrophic unfolding of events that our younger kin and all our relation will have to suffer through and find a way to combat and resolve and survive. But it seems important to me to think about my own contribution over the years and how focused it has been on doing good and meaningful acts in the world. That it was motivated by very strongly held values and dearly embraced beliefs about the inherent worth of the systems of life and living over the globe and in my communities and circle of intimates. I believe that many many of us in my generation, and certainly those represented among this little group of readers, have made it a personal focus to make the world better. There are, of course, dark characters and contingencies in my generation, as there have always been in every generation and as there will continue to be. But I look at the accomplishment of my generation, if only in committed art and political action and the very real mindful non-monetary wealth it has contributed to the global conversation as it is passed down to coming generations, and I think it has been a high point in the culture of a humankind that is too often steered toward its own doom by forces that are not bound by mere generational concerns, values and perspective, but by creating false divisions between those they wish to profit from, deceive and control. Remember who the true opposition is. Thanks everyone.
Thank you for your heartfelt contribution to Life, to standing in the face of truth and sharing your love of the world with us through your words and art of gardening and photography Bob.
Bob, I am terribly behind in reading all of your wonderful posts and especially your poems. They always delight and inspire me. I do feel overwhelmed at times, with all that arrives in my inbox and sometimes I feel all of this random reading is interfering with my own creative process. I then just need to withdraw, but find myself even more overwhelmed trying to catch up.
I loved this letter and getting a little glimpse into your world now. I hope things get easier for Susan too.