A List of Recent Simple Joys

NSP Meditations

Visiting a strange dilapidated antique store where it was raining inside, and whose owner had a vice-like handshake. There were canned goods everywhere, too.

Seeing a relief wood carving of a beaver from 1973 that cost $12.

Drinking an excellent homemade plumb brandy with a cheeky description of its provenance on the back label.

Attending a winter solstice party where most people in attendance believed in God.

Scoring dozens and dozens of colored and decorated enveloped from the 1970s for a buck.

An espresso from Earl’s Coffee Shop.

Meeting someone on a mountain.

Watching a John Garfield film.

Drinking a creamy porter in an ocean of Bud Light.

Listening to quail soft shoe on the roof.

Shaving without bleeding (too much).

Walking in rain.

More letters from an incarcerated soul with tremendous promise.

Holding out an offer of rapprochement to someone dear to me.

Reading a Western and delighting in its sheer artifice and lack of affectation. An interesting combination that only a good Western provides.

Reading a poetry chapbook from a friend that contained a wonderful poem about Ken Kesey.

Hearing a story from an OTA woman who used a pink angora sweater as “bait.”

What Excites My Mind

NSP Meditations

What excites my mind these days:

Receiving letters written in three colors of ink from someone struggling. I know the writing will help.

Helping writers publish their first books.

Amassing the greatest collection of beaverwood in Oregon.

Constructing a beaverwood raft and floating down a river.

Freedom of movement. Freedom of mind.

Working with the incarcerated.

Writing novels.

Having met someone on a mountain.

Building driftwood forts.

Writing about Oregon City.

The prospect of rescuing a dog.

The prospect of working a blue collar job.

Reading Dawn Powell novels.

Listening to old radio programs.

Building community through unique creative collaborations.

Publishing and distributing the OTA stories in an unprecedented Oregon literary format.

Drinking espresso at Earl’s Coffee Shop.

People offering me opportunities.

Exploring rivers.

Rallying.

Reunions.

A Fort Challenge

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

I returned to the beach where the previous morning I had a built a magisterial fort and left behind a tin with writing materials to inaugurate a new fort message project.

Three new forts stood a few feet away from mine. Three! They were sturdy as frontier stockades. Someone knew what they were doing. These were pro jobs. There were beaverwood accents.

One was decorated ingeniously with tires. I’d never seen that before.

I investigated them. I went inside and poked around.

On the roof of one fort, wedged between pieces of beaverwood, was a post card of a William Blake engraving! In recent years, I had left behind similar Blake post cards in the fort message tins. They had always disappeared.

I knew there was a master fort builder at work in the area. I am not making this up.

I went to my fort and opened the message tin. I read the challenge. I smiled and laughed aloud like Errol Flynn in one of his swashbuckling movies.

It’s on. I have no idea who you are, or your motives, but let the building begin. Touche with the tires.

This isn’t a competition. This is bliss.

The Reconsideration of Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , ,

It’s one of those days when you must embrace record rain or surrender.

You can walk into it, like I did earlier, and reconsider this and that. Rain is good for the act of reconsideration, an act of the heart and mind that feels like a lost American art these days. Doesn’t everyone want someone to reconsider them? Someone even wrote a song about it…and Warren Zevon covered it well.

This kind of rain requires some good rain reading material. Of course, in moments like these, I go to Simenon and Maigret and immortal lines of rain from an author who never treats rain with cliché. It is a character in his murder mysteries.

I have only a few copies of my rain book left. I wonder who is reading it?

I much prefer the phrase, “It came out of the rain,” rather than, “It came out of the blue.”

There is tiny river running outside my window. I just saw a garden gnome float by.

I can’t get the image of a homeless man I saw recently out of my mind. There he was, in the shoulder of a rural road, miles from anywhere dry, standing under some conifers, it was raining with prodigious force, and he wore nothing but a blue tarp and yellow booties. He posed like Christ on the cross.

I set aside Maigret and return to Jill Lepore’s magisterial new one-volume history of the United States, These Truths. I’ve read dozens of these kind of American histories, but hers is unique. She doesn’t come out and say it directly, because professional historians aren’t accustomed to making huge metaphorical leaps in their thinking when it comes to understanding our nation’s past, but I intuit she knows slavery, which rooted and prospered in the sunny climes of the South, led to a nakedly unjust Constitution that favored the South and built them into a power disproportionate to their free peoples, an equal power that still undermines our nation today. We’ve yet to truly live up to the ideal. Not even close. I wonder if I’ll see another effort in my lifetime? I so wanted to Lepore to digress and think: Had there been rainy climes in our South, no slavery, a better nation. Had we been a nation of rain instead of the sun, well, things would have turned out much differently, much better. No sun. No slavery. Rain. Equality.

Dogs Raining (Reign) in My Mind (part 14)

NSP Meditations , , , ,

An adolescent Charles Bukowski once baptized a stray dog inside a Catholic church. He sneaked the dog past a priest and sprinkled holy water on its forehead. “He deserves a chance to go to heaven,” said Charles.

In his collection of essays, Frank Conroy writes, “Dog as human observer. I’ve got no problem with that.” He also speculates what the proverb, “Dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on,” possibly Arabian or Proustian in origin, means. Obviously, dogs are stand-ins for humans. According to Conroy, humans love to bark and more humans bark in anger than dogs, (and this was written before social media) but human barkers are soon forgotten and the caravan of life, if a person has one, moves on. My caravan is moving again, thanks to dogs and humans who don’t bark. Aren’t we all tired of barking in our culture?

The television documentary that broke my heart is about American servicemen who trained and handled dogs in the Vietnam War. Once their tour of duty ended, soldiers weren’t allowed to bring their dogs home and had to have them destroyed. Many servicemen were destroyed by this. You can see it on camera when they talk about their dogs and how many lives they saved.

Random Scenes

NSP Meditations

A man kneeling on the floor of a locked thrift store applies deodorant under his left arm. He left hand is clutching a cigarette.

A man pushes an ancient wheelchair through a thrift store, out the front door, and throws it in the back of a pickup.

A very large man sits down on a green, velvety recliner in the middle of a thrift store. It breaks apart and he falls to the floor.

A man pulls his decrepit blue sports car over to a curb, gets out with a spray bottle of cleanser, sprays cleanser on a splatter of gull shit staining the convertible top, wipes away the stain with several intense strokes, gets back in the car, and drives away.

A man successfully answers a rock trivia question and wins a free beer. The answer was Australia.

A man writes a Christmas story where macrame plays a prominent role in the plot.

Don Ho croons a carol over the speakers.

A man toasts his wife at the bar with a shot of vodka, thanking her for putting up with him for 21 years because he knows he’s a dick.

A man marvels at recently falling in love at first site when he helped a woman carry her garbage bag to a dumpster. There is a beautiful metaphor in there somewhere.

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