Grieving with my Father

NSP Meditations

A few days ago, it was approximately 24 hours after my beloved 73-year old stepmother of 30 years. Pauline, passed away after a grueling and heroic 18-month battle against cancer, that I sat with my father in his living room and tried to console him in his darkest moment.

We were having a glass of red wine and talking and talking, about anything.

I no longer recall how or why our conversation drifted toward poetry, but it did.

He quoted Tennyson and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and recounted the incredible story of how he met Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil in the late 1960s at a party and complimented her concerning “The Fish. She replied, “Oh that old thing.”

Then he launched into a stanza from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” :

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

This quote was prompted by our discussion of the soulless henchmen who don’t put their country first, but rather their political party, their greed, their racism, their fear, their anger. Country always last.

I just marveled as my father finished this quote. Surely at that moment, he was the only man in America quoting Sir Walter Scott!

And in defense of his nation and the working class people my father so dearly loves.

After Sir Walter, we segued into the current state of American political affairs and Dad launched into the Gettysburg Address and stopped here and there and we took apart points that now seem utterly lost on so many Americans and quite obviously those is the White House and the upper echelons of power.

Later, I put him to bed and picked up a book, reading but not reading, wondering where we’ll go from here.

A Thompson Twins Moment

NSP Meditations

I was paying for groceries at the counter. A friendly female checker was ringing me up. A song was playing from the rafters. It was the Thompson Twins’ “King for a Day.” I laughed. I hadn’t heard the song in 35 years.

The Thompson Twins for chrissakes! Two or three English hit wonders from the MTV 80s! Other hits? Lies? Hold Me Now?

I asked the clerk if she knew the group. She was a decade younger than the birth of grunge. She had no idea who the Thompson Twins were. That’s probably a good thing.

I suggested she look them up on YouTube for the costumes and hair alone. She said she would. I told her they were not twins and there were three members of the group. She didn’t get it. Neither did I.

A man behind me ordering lotto tickets called out. “I saw the Thompson Twins in El Cortez, California.”

I whipped around and asked him how the show was.

He said it was good for what it was. I think that was a compliment.

December 15, 2020, Noon, Rural Oregon Grocery Store

NSP Meditations, Poetry

I stand in line for stamps.

An old woman buys sausage tubes the size of shotguns and carries them to the counter like firewood.

The local meth mascot buys a root beer and tub of macaroni salad he could bathe in later.

An old woman in a bathrobe behind me holds only a six pack of Hamm’s talls.

Crack one open please! Make my day!

A single mom drags her screaming shoplifter from the store.

A young man buys a double burrito and energy drink.

An old woman in blinking antlers bolts by with a cart full of wine and pies.

The clerk closes his eyes. He may never wake up.

I buy my stamps. I’m thinking about about buying some scratch-offs, some Christmas scratch-offs.

CRAAAAAAAACKKKKKKKKKK!

The woman behind me cracked open a cold cracklin’ Hamm’s. She couldn’t wait. The line was too goddamn long and the world was ending anyway.

If I turn around and behold an old woman wearing a bathrobe in line at a grocery store drinking a can of Hamm’s during the middle of Pandemic and Christmas is coming…Well, you Christmas Scrooge sons-of-bitches, I am going to burst into “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and bring down the house!

To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
When we were gone astray

I’ll be holding out my hand for a Hamm’s when I sing that line.

Of Walking in Winter Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain

Sunday. Early. Rain falls. I don the pea coat and walk to the beach, past the holiday decorations and hummingbirds feeding from the feeders the hummingbird nuts keep filled year round. I love these hummingbird nuts.

As I walk down the road, I think about another Christmas tale I want to write, even though the book of Christmas Tales is already out. It’s about a Vietnam veteran who runs a Christmas tree lot in Coos Bay and meets another veteran, a younger man very down on his luck, and the older vet enlists his help to run the tree lot. I find these days that I am writing almost everything in my head as a I walk.

Speaking of books, I sold a copy of the rain book. That means I have one left. One!

I’ve thought about writing more about the Pandemic but just can’t seem to muster the energy for it. Two more of my friends contracted the virus. They survived but felt waylaid by it.

I hit the beach and the piles of dead kelp continue to mount. I have never seen such a die off, if that’s what it is, of this much kelp. Usually it piles up after a big storm, but for the past two months the kelp just keep coming and coming ashore on calm seas.

It has been several days since I visited my complex of 17 forts. In the distance, as I approach, I can see most of them have been obliterated by natural causes.

Only one remains intact. Why this fort survived when others around it were blown out, is a Zen koan.

I’ll start over later this week. There is some great new wood washed ashore.

I am still somewhat at a loss at what writing project to take up in 2021. I have two books already in the can. I have some ideas but nothing seems pressing, more like I am considering and letting the interest build.

Declarative Oregon Sentences

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

Ernest Hemingway once wrote somewhere that he liked to warm up before writing novels and stories by writing ten or so simple declarative sentences. He didn’t say if they were fiction or nonfiction sentences. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

I want to warm up this morning by writing some simple declarative sentences before I start in on a story. Their subject is an impromptu and grand hike I took with friends a couple days ago.

We walked an old logging trail into a federal wilderness area.

The wilderness was the result of an old man who loved the area.

Mist drifted through the forest.

Wind whipped the tree tops.

I wore my pea coat.

My friends toked out.

One friend gathered lichen.

We would later drink hot sake with the lichen.

I saw a slug.

We marveled at the Oregon grape and bent hemlock branches.

The road ended at a rocky top.

There would have been a fine view of the hills and ocean had not fog obscured it.

This place had the feel of a fort.

Many years ago, men manned this fort looking for Japanese planes that might bomb Oregon.

I imagined they were always drunk while on duty.

I often feel lucky to have such friends as these two.

As we talked, I pitched ideas to them for a new novel.

I often feel lucky to live on the Oregon Coast.

On the way back, I picked up beer cans.

I also found an old flyswatter placed in a tree branch.

A flyswatter there made no sense.

It must be a clue to some kind of crime or foraging expedition.

Corona Virus Thoughts #20

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

The vaccine is rolling out all over the country. I wonder when I’ll have access to it.

Conspiracies about the vaccine run rampant. I can’t bear to write about the stupidity of them and many of my fellow Americans.

I read recently that a throng of Trump Supporters marched around the Supreme Court building after their refusal to approve his attempted coup and were blowing replicas of the Jewish horns used by Joshua and his army that brought down the walls of Jericho. Apparently the idea was that the Supreme Court building would collapse. It did not.

We passed 310,000 deaths and yet many states have little or no restrictions. I would think the Governors of these states will face an avalanche of lawsuits for dereliction of duty from people who have lost family members because of the virus because little to nothing was done.

I still can’t believe they are playing college and high school football games in this country and in many venues with fans!

Another Oregon lockdown begins Friday and lasts through the end of the year. It all seems haphazard to me. I mean, they shut down THIS and THAT but the University of Oregon football team is still traveling to play in the Pac 12 Championship Game.

Congress has yet to come up with a deal for another relief or stimulus package or whatever you want to call it. This directly affects me.

Christmas during a Pandemic. I doubt in future years they’ll be making any Hallmark movies on the subject.

More homeless people appear and they are doing even more bizarre things, like walking in rain in flip flops and pajama bottoms and drinking cans of Keystone Light.

They’ve never stopped logging since everything hit the fan. In fact, I have seen more loaded log trucks the past couple of months than I have in many years.

My local paper’s news content contains three stories every issue: 1) death notices for Covid victims around the state; 2) minutes of the absurd County Commissioner meetings; 3) Police reports. That’s it.

It occurs to me that the American response to the Pandemic might have been dramatically different if some very profile people had died from it. Yes, even celebrities, which of course contradicts all my previous writing bemoaning the use of celebrities to enact/promote/signify social justice or mental health causes.

Here is the list of people in my life who have contracted the virus:

Cousin in Los Angeles

Cousin’s wife in Seattle

Good friend in Washington and her boyfriend

Friend in Portland

Step brother’s wife’s father (he died in Mexico)

Landlord’s son in California

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