My blog for 9/27/2012 VANISHED Serial

VANISHED PART V

 

Cherrie couldn’t handle just standing around the office looking at paperwork she couldn’t get her mind around.  She put on her light jacket and walked outside.  If she stayed within sight of the office she could at least help look for the box.  Trees and shrubs were not dense on the peninsula except in the wilderness area and it was blocked off by the chainlink fence.  The fog was beginning to break up so she could work her way to the fence and still see if anybody approached the buildiing.  The normal function of the office had ceased anyway, as if the world suddenly waited to exhale.  Whoever had moved the box had moved her heart with it.  The missing urn box could have been that of her father or her husband.  She, in fact, could be interred with her husband’s location in the columbarium, which is what she’d planned.  Her life had mostly died with him anyway.  If she didn’t have four children to raise, she had no idea of what her purpose would be.

Looking for the box was not the same as looking for missing car keys.

 

            Vincent seemed to get more angry as he walked.  How stupid that everybody was out wandering around eighty acres of cemetery looking for a little ten inch box.  Whoever had taken it surely had an agenda.  Could one of the workers there removed it?  But why would they do that?  He counted the ones he knew had family buried there--only three of them he could recall.   If he eliminated those people, the number of suspects was cut down to the Mexicans and the crazies.  He always wondered about Harold.  The guy was single with no relatives.  So there were actually five of them.  Harold would be his choice.

But why would he do that?  Vincent would have to take matters into his own hands and go over to the maintenance barn to search it.

 

            Jose was certain that since he’d found that the urn was missing, he’d be the one to find it again and return it to its proper place.  To restore order.  The job at this cemetery was the only stable thing that had ever happened in his life of chaos.  His wife and their six children, his wife’s mother and Jose’s brother and his wife and their two children all lived together forty miles east away toward El Centro, California.  Some of them had sometimes jobs.  The children would soon be old enough to have jobs too, if they didn’t get involved in gangs.  But the world was a new place and the children all wanted cellphones and ipods and cars and clothes.  He could not give them everything they wanted.  And now he didn’t want to give them anything at all.  But he didn’t know how to tell them these things existed, but not for them.  Because it’s not good for you didn’t fly any longer.  His wife thought he was too hard on the children.  All Jose had ever really wanted was peace.  The cemetery was all about peace.  Peace earned for the fighting men and women.  But also peace for those taking care of them in this city of the dead.  If the cemetery closed because the workers were not responsible enough to take better care of their charges, then there would never be peace for Jose again.

 

            Waiting was stressful.  Natalie was grateful for the cushion she could sit on now that they’d been distributed.  The concrete bench was cold.  With the fog rolling back toward the west, the sky had begun to clear in the east and turn the clouds red. Her very curly dark hair tumbled onto her forehead, which made her look six years old and took away her credibility.  She rethought her plans.

 

            Jerrold walked through the commitment shelter, looking for the lone woman, preparing for the first funeral, that nothing was out of place, looking for a lone box perhaps abandoned under a shrub.

            When he found her he introduced himself.  “I see you are here early.  It’s good the fog is lifting.”

            She nodded to him.

            “We’ve had a little difficulty and I’m not sure the funeral will be on time today.”

He watched her closely for a response.

            “That’s okay.  I can wait.  Did the minister not come?  What has happened?”

            “Just an issue has arisen.  It should be taken care of right away.”  He learned nothing.  He didn’t know what to look for, had never been an interrogator.  He excused himself and returned to his office to look for his little bottle of nitroglycerin.

My blog for 9/26/2012 VANISHED Serial

VANISHED PART IV

 

Alejandro finally found Mitchie’s crew over the bayside hill on the lighthouse end of the cemetery. They had just finished trying to mow, but the fog had saturated the grass to the point that it clung to the hardware in clumps and clogged the blades in low areas.  They spent the allocated time moving rocks out of the way for new grass to be rolled along the fenceline while they waited for the fog to burn off as the sun rose higher in the sky.   The four men stood with their mouths open while he explained about the missing urn box.  “No, no, no, no,” one of them said.  Another whispered, “This cannot be.”

            For his part, Mitchie, who was parallel crew chief with Alejandro, in charge of four men, felt anger burn words inside his brain.  He knew better than to explode them into the atmosphere, because his men expected more from him.  If he did not have their respect, then he would make a very poor crew chief.  He’d been taught this by his father, who had been a crew chief before Mitchie.  It was a prestigious job to walk among the dead every day, to care for their eternal resting place.  This resting place after all, was a place of honor in the country that had dedicated itself to freedom.  Mitchie’s family was not of America.  He’d been born Miguelito Antonio Lucas, the son of a Mexican family that could not survive in its own country.  His father had made his way into the United States before Mitchie was born.  Mitchie was a citizen, of which he was very proud.  He felt as if the missing urn box belonged to his family alone.  Anger was the best substitute for tears.

            So Mitchie tamped down his anger.  “We will find this urn box.  We will stop working our job and search every inch of this peninsula until we find it,” he said between his clenched teeth.

            Alejandro was relieved to hear this edict.  It gave him faith that all would be restored.  His crew, too, vowed to begin the search for the vanished box.

            The men divided up the peninsula into equal search areas and began to comb every inch of grass and shrubs and rocks in different directions. They began the search to  empty trash cans, look at the fronts and backs of every single tombstone, monument and marker.  They would search the lighthouse and the gatehouse.

            Jerrold MacDonald got the message that his wife was down at the gate, not being permitted to pass the guard.  He didn’t want to tell Janet that he’d failed the Veteran’s Administration, his position as director.  She’d already lost her respect for him somewhere along the way of their marriage, and now he’d lost it for himself.  Michael Stanley Smith could easily have been Jerrold’s father, or even his son.  He could be a decorated hero in a battle to save the United States from a war played out right here at home.  The loss of his ashes was more than Jerrold could bear.  He would have to deal with Janet later.

            If they did not find Michael Stanley Smith’s box soon, he would have to tell the VA in Washington D.C. it was missing.  Worse yet, the family would have to be told.  In just over an hour the gate would have to be opened for the mourners to arrive for the first funeral.  There had been no precedent set for delaying funerals at a national cemetery.  Even if he called every one of the mortuaries bringing deceased military veterans here today, the logistics of delaying eighteen funerals was an impossible task.  And he would be at first humiliated and ultimately fired because it happened under his watch.  He understood perfectly how the military worked.  In his dreams he’d been able to fly and knew just how it would feel... quiet, wind rushing through his hair.  Thrilling.

            Harold Greevy could see a little bit of blue sky through the fog now as the desert air coming over the moutaintops overpowered its moisture.  Soon the fog would be relegated to stand like a fortress over the edge of the California beach, and the sun would have control of the land for another day.  He took in a big breath of air as he walked along the columbarium walls and pushed on each of the doors.  He felt so bad for Cherrie, whose husband was buried right there on the grounds.  The missing urn may just as well have been her husband’s.  He’d always admired her for taking on the world alone with four children as she had done, but never thought she would notice him.  It was good to be emotionally helpful to her.

            Janet MacDonald, still stuck at the gate was frantic for news of Jerrold.  The guard told her it wouldn’t be much longer of a wait, even though he didn’t know what the problem was.  There would be a funeral in just over an hour, with seventeen more to follow.  Whatever it was would have to be rectified soon.  Janet drove back into town and picked up some food and flowers for Jerrold.  He loved flowers.  And food always helped in a trying circumstance, whatever it was.  Jerrold was such a little child in some ways.  It’s what she’d found attractive about him twenty years ago.  She didn’t know when he’d stopped needing her to take care of him.  On her way back to the gate, she thought about how he looked when he was sleeping.  Like an angel with his eyelashes soft against his cheek.

 

           Natalie Christophson checked her purse again to make sure she'd brought everything.  She glanced at her watch.  Not long now.

 

 

 

 

 

My blog 9/25/2012 VANISHED serial

VANISHED PART III

 

Harold Greevy slammed the door to the Cemetery office as he hurried inside and looked around for Jerrold.  “Where’s the boss?”  The maintenance supervisor was dressed in a golf shirt he’d apparently slept in and the same dark khaki pants and boots he wore every day.

            Cherrie turned to him in her gray slacks and white blouse with little pink flowers dotted on it.  Her youngest daughter learned her numbers by sitting on Cherrie’s lap and counting the blossoms on that blouse.  “He’s still looking for Mitchie’s crew, I think.  What in the world has happened?”

            “Jerrold didn’t tell you?”

            “He was so upset I didn’t want to ask.”

            Harold scanned the small room as if anybody could be standing where he could not see them, and lowered his voice.  “An urn box is missing from the columbarium.  The door was standing open.”

            A violent oven seemed to ignite in her chest.  “But how can that be?  It’s a mistake.”  Her eyes welled up and tears ran down her cheeks so quickly she didn’t know it was happening till drops fell on the papers she was holding.

            He walked around the desk and held her close.  “We’ll find it.  You’re right, this is a mistake.  I’ll go check it again.”

            Cherrie hadn’t been held like that since a complete stranger had done the same thing in his sympathy at their father’s funeral.  She was surprised it meant so much and wanted to stand there wrapped in Harold’s arms for as long as possible.  As it was, he appeared to not be anxious to turn loose of her either.  They’d worked at the cemetery for four years together and had never touched.  Now she didn’t understand how that could have happened, along with confusion about how an urn box could go missing.  Her head spun and life as she knew it no longer made sense.  Even her desk looked odd from Harold’s shoulder.

            The last Cherrie had heard, Harold was seeing somebody.  But that was how many months ago?  Her professional side made her pull back from his arms.  Her father, now buried outside in the green carpet of conventional plots, had been a lifer in the Marines.  Cherrie understood protocol.  And standing in the middle of her office in Harold’s arms was not protocol.

            Harold’s face turned red right up including his ears.   He asked Cherrie to let Jerrold know he would check all of the columbarium walls in person.  In fact, he would test each door to see if any were open, though that had never happened in the years he’d been associated with the cemetery.  He hurried back out to his four wheeler and started toward the southeastern columbarium.

            Cherrie tried to watch him go, but the fog had settled into a wall of tin plastered against the office windows.

            Jerrold had driven to the extreme southwestern end of the columbarium wall.  His grandfather was buried in a laydown urn plot near that end.   He stopped and read the headstone marker for the ten thousandth time as he passed it. Walter Lawrence Greevy, May 6, 1962 - November 17, 1952. He took the footpath that ran between the lawn graves and the wall, checking for anything odd, somehow hoping to find the missing urn box. But found only a couple of weeds that were not there yesterday.  When he got to the end he walked west toward the sea, around the perimeter of the lawn graves.  He rolled down hill remembering the feel of his legs on the lurching ships he’d been assigned to as an ensign in the navy.  Flying was what he’d really wanted to do, but that didn’t happen.  Now, at the bottom of the cemetery where the chain link fence separated wilderness growth from manicured lawn, Jerrold gazed over the three hundred foot cliff, tried to see the ocean.  He heard it below him, the surf rolling in, softly pounding against the sand with a kind of breaker thunder.  If he only had wings, he’d soar out to the beautiful expanse that he knew was there.  Fifteen miles north, hang gliders peeled off the same type cliffs at UC San Diego’s Glider Port above La Jolla. He should have been born ten years later.  Or a hundred years later when men will be able to fly on their own.  He'd almost bought a hang glider once.  Now he was too old.

            He still couldn’t see fifty feet in front of him but he’d been there so many times before he could walk it blindfolded, with or without the fog.  He’d memorized the headstones nearest the ocean and silently nodded to Peter, to Jim, to Sancho, to Nathaniel and all the rest as he continued to walk.  The tour of his “friends,” calmed him as he silently made a vow to find Michael Stanley Smith.

            When he returned to the office, Cherrie began to hover.  Did he want a drink?  Did he want to go to breakfast, take a break, call home?  One message on his desk was from Harold and one said he should call his wife.  He picked up the receiver and dialed his home number, though there were strict instructions to make no personal calls.  Janet had never called him at work before today.  The message machine picked up.   Could this day get any worse?

            Janet MacDonald, the funeral director’s wife, was stopped at the gate at the land end of the Point Loma peninsula.  The navy guard would not raise the cross bar for her to continue to the cemetery, though he would not explain why.  Alarm rose in her breast.  Was the base on alert?  She frantically dialed through her Lexus’ radio stations for news of some disaster.

            She hadn’t treated Jerrold very well lately.  He’d become remote, she’d become petulant.  He hadn’t noticed.  So she started making emergency plans in case he was going to leave her.  She was insulted he didn’t care enough about her to see she needed more attention.  If he loved her, he’d notice, wouldn’t he?  Of course he would.  But why did Cherrie call from Jerrold’s office?  Why had Jerrold called and left no message?  Only out for an hour for her standard bi-monthly pedicure, what could have happened in one hour?  Jerrold had decided there was no point in having a cell phone he couldn’t use.  She hadn’t known she would not be permitted on the cemetery grounds when she drove over from their retirement home just three miles away.  It may as well be a hundred miles.

            She’d noticed the man reading the newspaper looked at her several times while she drank her latte at Starbucks on her way to her pedicure.  He didn’t have as much hair as Jerrold, wasn’t as good looking.  But he smiled at her.

            The woman named Natalie Christophsen who’d arrived very early for the first funeral walked to the USS Bennington Memorial to get out of the way of the cemetery staff who were distributing the leather seat cushions for mourners to sit on during the funeral services today.  She read about the 62 sailors who were killed in 1905 when their ship blew up, perused their names.   Then she walked up hill toward the grave locator kiosk to find where her uncle was buried.  As she walked with her new found resentment, she planned the steps she would take today.

My blog for 9/23/2012 Vanished--Serial Part I

                                                      

                                                                     VANISHED

 

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be like that,” Jose told his crew chief.  The two men stared at the open door of the empty columbarium crypt. The vacant hole detracted from the stoic stack of burial crypts at Fort

            Morning fog obliterated the world that lay beyond fifty feet.  Its soft insulation cocooned them against sounds of the Navy base activities two hundred feet below them in the harbor.

            “Maybe Mr. MacDonald forgot to lock it,” Alejandro replied.

            “Maybe it is a new tomb, with nobody in it yet.”

            “But it has a name on the door--Michael Stanley Smith, February 2, 1916 - June 14, 1954.”  He reached in his jacket pocket for his cell phone, but remembered the cone of silence the military had placed over the peninsula. Electronics were blocked out over the strategic military base grounds.   “I better go get Mr. MacDonald.”  He walked quickly toward his truck parked on the roadway of the cemetery, got inside and started it up. 

            Jose, an intent worker bee, picked up his shovel and carried it to the flower bed where a dead azalea plant crouched on the grassy floor.  A little breeze swept damp gray cotton up into his face.  He squinted.

            Alejandro drove back a half mile through rows of headstones that followed the flow of land over the cliff to the Pacific Ocean on the west and the bay into San Diego Harbor on the east.  The low-ceiling 1950’s style block building housing the office of the funeral director, Jerrold MacDonald, had just been painted the color of desert sand.

            MacDonald, a military retiree with a full head of gray hair that matched his eyes double timed over to the columbarium wall clutching a printout of the remains for that section of the huge wall.  With over a thousand deceased veteran graves spread over eighty acres, keeping track of where each of them lay was his responsibility.  Having one misplaced bordered on heresy and could mean the end of his tenure as director. 

By time he arrived, the maintenance superintendent, Harold Greevy, the beefy maintenance supervisor stepped out of the truck with Alejandro.  “Did you look around the ground for an urn or a burial box?” Greevy asked. “We can check with the rest of the crew for why this is open.  Maybe the door was damaged by a piece of equipment.”  His burr-cut hair contained drops of dew.  He sipped from an insulated Starbuck’s coffee cup he’d brought with him on the way into work.

            MacDonald verified the crypt number with the sheet he held, then examined the door.  He found no evidence of tampering or damage.  His heart beats pushed his blood pressure up to 180.

            “It wasn’t like that when we got here at five thirty,” Alejandro said, with tears in his eyes.  The enormity of the situation overwhelmed him.  “Jose would have told me if he’d seen it earlier.”

            Jose stood leaning on his shovel handle. He’d finished removing the azalea plant and replaced it with a one-galleon hibiscus.  He suspected a vole had eaten the azalea roots and killed the plant. But he was not an agronomist.  “That is true.  It was not open earlier.”  He’d been born across the Tijuana border in Mexico, fifteen miles southeast and had never been further north than San Diego, California.  Small boned, he stood inches shorter than any man there and weighed 130 pounds.  He could lift three fifty pound sacks of mulch, and he knew he could shovel for three days straight because he’d filled sandbags that long when rain had fallen on his town in Mexico during a hurricane ten years ago.

            “Drive down toward the lighthouse and find the irrigation crew,” Greevy said to Alejandro.  “Ask if anybody knows why this door is open.”  He didn’t add and where the remains are.  “I’ll go to the commitment shelter and find Mitchie’s crew.  They’re working on tree limbs in that section.  How far did the mowers get this morning?”  He couldn’t hear mowers over the entire two miles from the gate to the lighthouse.

            Nobody knew where the mowers were.  Greevy took off at a run, tossing his coffee cup into the trash can near the vase watering station nearby.  He found his electric cart at the maintenance shed and drove to the commitment shelter.

My blog for 9/18/2012 Travel by RV or Plane

My own personal 2200 mile travel experience was a good one, since I flew a US Airways flight with a layover at the Phoenix airport for only one hour.  San Diego's airport is a little daunting when it's full, especially since there is absolutely no parking anywhere at the airport.  Somebody has to let you out at the curb and kiss you good bye because the new parking buildings they're constructing are still not finished and they've blocked every other access to cars.  Then you're on your own to find your way.  Fortunately it's not difficult if you've ever flown before.  Meanwhile the Phoenix Airport is a lot of fun and not hard to find your way through to whatever gate you need.  But an hour is a good layover because it's quite a distance between gates.

Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport is daunting, even for a seasoned traveler, especially if you've never been there.  I advise studying a map of the place before trying your hand at finding your way around.  The only way from the plane to the terminal is underground tram (unless you want to walk four miles).
And when you understand how it works it makes a lot of sense.

OR, like the Darrel and Abby, you could drive 2300 miles, spend the first day going across the desert in blowing sand storms that threaten to tear off your skin and sandblast your vehicle.  The second day, as you cross from New Mexico into Texas the monsoon fall rains begin to pelt you for the two days it takes to get across Texas.  The Mississippi roads are so bad they can flip a bowl out of the sink in a trailer onto the floor.  Then, from Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta the freeway is  under permanent construction and is cut to one 9-ft. lane which includes all the 18-wheelers, cars, RVs and motor bikes snailing along in the wind, rain and pitch dark.  It takes more courage than I have.  Of course, if one knew it was going to stay like that for 20 years, maybe it would not have been attempted.  It just stands to reason it won't happen absolutely every time you try the drive over 20 years.  But I'm here to tell you it does.

I got to do that a few times with Darrel and a trailer and stressed out so badly that I can't face it again. Highway 10 to Highway 20 across this great nation is caustic and scary.  We had occasion to run into the same thing on Highway 40 coming from the west to home twice too.  Equally awful--and it always seems to happen in the dark and wind and rain.  No wonder I have gray hair.

My blog for 9/7/2012 Going Home

California, it’s been nice, but I miss my fireflies that twinkle through the evening mists like fairies in their silent miniature world.  I miss the slow quiet peace that somehow thunders through the heavy air that yearns for--anticipates even--the rainclouds blooming off somewhere overhead waiting for a chance to flood my driveway and fill the creek out back.

I miss slow lazy smiles of friends who tease so inconspicuously that I have to think twice to catch up to the underlying meaning of their wit.  I even miss their baffled faces when I blather on about nothing in particular.  Their tolerance of me.  I still have remnants of the wild west about me.  I still talk too fast.  I still glaze over when I have to sit still, my mind running on tomorrow.

Most of all, I miss the eighty shades of green coloring the gazillion leaves of prehistoric hardwood trees--graceful oaks spread 100 feet wide to shade the red and yellow mushrooms swollen with spores waiting to burst.  Hickory trees filled with rodents scampering like acrobats blessed with no gravity.  The dinner-plate size leaves that look like cut outs from a kindergarten class.

I miss the free use of those woods, of launch ramps and islands and lakes and the surprise of streams that run through neighborhoods.

I anticipate Fall this year, and am grateful I won’t miss seeing the trees like ladies at a ball trying to outdo each other with their flagrant colors.   I even miss the orbweaver’s webs spread a yard wide thankfully made conspicuous by water drops along their guywires.

I’m going home this week, California.  You’re like a previous marriage--an ex-spouse I know so intimately, but has faded into my past.  You’re kind of colorless, actually, in your granite and sage.  Appropriately soft colors for a faded past.

My blog for 8/26/2012 Song Of The Chattahoochee

Song of the Chattahoochee

by Sidney Lanier

Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.

All down the hills of Habersham,
All through the valleys of Hall,
The rushes cried Abide, abide,
The wilful waterweeds held me thrall,
The laving laurel turned my tide,
The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay,
The dewberry dipped for to work delay,
And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide,
Here in the hills of Habersham,
Here in the valleys of Hall.

High o'er the hills of Habersham,
Veiling the valleys of Hall,
The hickory told me manifold
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall
**Wrought me her shadowy self to hold,
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine,
Overleaning with flickering meaning and sign,
Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold
Deep shades of the hills of Habersham,
**These glades in the valleys of Hall.

And oft in the hills of Habersham,
And oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
-Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet, and amethyst-
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
**In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call-
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.

My blog for 8/25/2012 72 Truths About Writing

72 Truths About Writing

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf

“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
—Stephen King, WD

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal

“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
—Samuel Johnson

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
—Larry L. King, WD

“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
—Allegra Goodman

“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
—Jules Renard

“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard

“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy, WD

“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty, WD

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
—Lawrence Block, WD

“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD

“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
—Fred East, WD

“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
—Leigh Brackett, WD

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, WD

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
—Stephen King, WD

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”
–Jack Kerouac, WD

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
—Jim Tully, October 1923

“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life, 15 inches.”
—Gene Weingarten, WD

“Beware of advice—even this.”
—Carl Sandburg, WD

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee, WD

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
—Andre Dubus, WD

“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”
—R.L. Stine, WD

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
—Joan Didion

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
—George Singleton

“There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.”
—Jim Thompson

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”
—May Sarton

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard

“You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H₂O. The reader will get it.”
—George Singleton

“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
—Mark Twain

“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
—Patrick Dennis

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter

“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”
—William Zinsser

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
—Henry David Thoreau

“You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”
—Marie de Nervaud, WD

“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”
—James Alexander Thom

“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg

My blog for 8/15/2012 Short Story

The Devolvement 

     "Well, where the hell is she?" Harmony asked, just in from his construction job. “Her car’s gone.”  His raisin pupils were tucked into slits passing for eyelids. He dipped his head under the cold water tap, shook it, and mopped it with the dishtowel.

     “She’s on the flat rock out back.” Delia took the misused dishtowel from her husband's hand and chose a folded replacement from a drawer.

     “Hell, it’s a couple of football fields to that rock. Delia, she’s sitting in the desert on a rock!” 

     “I can see her just fine with my binoculars.  She drove herself out there.  Since you fixed her truck in four wheel low, it only goes five miles per hour.  Why are you so angry?  You don't even like my mother."

     "What the hell is with your family?  How are you going to feel if something happens to her?”

     Your family.

     "Look, I can't help that she decided it was time to die.  You’re the one who said it was you or my mother.  She's eighty-eight years old and wants to die.  Anyway, she's got her car if she changes her mind."  Besides, I really don't care what she does any more. 

     She answered the ringing phone.  "Delia!  Hi, George.  Yes, I want to let you know that our mother is...” she explained, paused. "Bye." 

     "That was doubtless your monosyllabic brother?" Harmony said.

     "I can't help it if he doesn't talk."  Is this pick on Delia day?

     The phone rang again. "Delia!"

     Harmony rubbed the top of his graying crewcut and walked out the back door.

     "Hi, Aunt Dottie.  Yep, Mom’s on the rock...” she explained. “Yep, George just called.  No, your sisters don't know yet. I'll call you tomorrow."

     She looked down.  No shoes.  She searched for them briefly, knowing she was late for her art class.  She ran to her Toyota.

     The changeling flipflops materialized from under the driver seat after she slammed on the brake at the art center.  Jamming her toes in them, she dashed off.

*                         *                *                       

     Planes of back musculature on white paper snapped into focus as she drew with charcoal.  Next time she wanted a model who looked like a God!  She wanted definition--a  workout junkie.  Could she be a voyeur? She giggled.

     Her cell phone rang. The instructor glared. She fished in her purse with charcoal blackened fingers.

     "Delia, where's your mother?"  Cousin Chloe asked.

     "On that rock out back,” she almost whispered. “Yes, I know it’s hot.  She’s got a parasol. How's your dad?"

     “Oh my God, Delia, he got mad and left his wicked witch second wife, but forgot why he was mad at her before he got here. We've got to get her out of his house.  Uh, is your mom okay?"

     "Yes.  I tried to talk her out of going so I'd have some time to get her some Prozac or something, but she got in her car.  I followed.”

     The other artists stared.

     "Oh boy, and I thought we had problems with my dad."

     "I've gotta go. Sorry," Delia said.

     "What are we going to do with these senile siblings?" 

     “Good question.”  Delia turned back to her drawing.

     Later at home, she glided into her kitchen’s drifting fragrances.  Cool tile met her bare feet.  “I smell tacos?”

     "And pretty good ones, too." Harmony relayed a bite of taco meat from his simmering skillet to her mouth.

     "These may be the best tacos you ever made.” 

     He smiled.  "Yep, I think so, too."

     "Magic meat?  Exotic spices?  How'd you do it?"  She pressed her front against his side.

     "That's my little secret, and you are SOL."  He grinned and slipped his arm around her shoulders.

     Delia snuggled into his black T shirt which smelled like cologne and cumin.

     He planted a kiss on her forehead then turned to his stovetop.

     She grabbed her binoculars and looked outside. Mom still on the rock, a portable canopy over her head.  I wonder how that got there.

     She left Harmony with his taco meat and tiptoed into the master suite where she found a demolition project.  "Eerk," she yelled to the kitchen. "What happened to my fireplace in here?"

     "Oh, yeah.  It never looked right anyway.  Should have been lower!” 

     She stared at the empty hole.  "Shucks.  I liked my fireplace."

     "Don't worry, I'll build you a better one," he hollered.

     So. Gain a taco, lose a fireplace.  She mouthed to her image in her vanity mirror, "If he wants to go through all that work, I guess I shouldn't complain."  She took a deep breath and changed into a pair of Mexican peon pants and orange shirt.  I liked my fireplace.

     "Tacos for dinner?  Alright!"  Her grandson, Christopher had arrived from the basement with his tuba slung over his shoulder.  He wore an emblazoned band-of-the-week shirt. 

     "Why do you have that monster at home?"  Some day he would discover women and forget the tuba.  His bold copper hair, shocking blue eyes and chiseled chin would cause trouble soon enough. Meanwhile he had his tuba.

     "Huh? Oh.  Gotta practice new liplocks."  He sidled down the hallway like a sandcrab with its shell.

     Of course you do.

*                       *                    *

     Delia attacked her new commissioned painting. The client had seen one of Delia’s pictures at a local art show she liked, but wanted a larger one.  It wasn’t Delia’s normal impressionistic type of thing, had in fact been an experiment into abstract painting but she was determined to give the woman what she wanted.

     She worked from dark to light, all soft edges on vibrant colors.  The gesso undercoating held well but the whole picture seemed to shimmer.  Fluorescent confetti.

     Sonesta stuck her head into the loft. "Hi, Mom.  Aunt Arlene and I went to see grandma this afternoon."

     "That's nice dear," Delia was thinking purple but glanced up at her daughter.

     "She's doing OK, in case you want to know."

     "Hmmm."  How'd I do that anyway? A pool of color had  made its own shadow under a marquee she’d added to the city street scene.

     "She's not dead yet," Sonesta tested.  "I think it's going to take a few more days."

     "Of course it is, dear," Delia mumbled, eyes on a drip.

     "Mom!"

     Delia looked up. "Why are you yelling at me?”  

     "Because you're not listening!"

     Delia set her brushes down, wiped the paint drip off her the canvas with her pinkie.  "OK, I'm listening now.  What is it?” 

     “I thought you should know she'd like to see you some time."

     "She's only been out there for one day." 

     "Yeah, but she didn't remember that.  She thought you took her out there last week.”

     Delia blanched.  “Strange." A gray ball of guilt grew quickly in her stomach.

     “Maybe you should go get her."

     "I don't want to go get her yet," Delia said.  The guilt ball vibrated. “Remember last month when she told the family that I stole all her money, that I was going to make her go stay in an old folk’s home?  She said she’d keep it up until I took her out to sit on her stupid rock?  Well, I figure if she sits on that rock for a couple days, she'll get over it.  She’s got plenty of food."

     "It might rain.”

"The desert rain table is about two inches per year." 

     “But it could rain."

     "You don't want me to leave her out there, do you?"

     "It is a little weird, Mom."

     "Well, you're right, of course, but the woman is not insane."

     "Daddy thinks she is.  Aunt Clarice thinks she is.  Uncle James says you should put her in an assisted care facility."

     "Honey, your grandmother hates “nursing homes,” but is not crazy.  I have to respect her wishes.  She loves the desert—its heat, its dirt.  Delia crossed to her window, picked up her binoculars, checked her mother. A large dog sat next to the woman under the canopy. Where did he come from?

     "But she's a really old woman! She shouldn't be driving either."

     "Yes, she should—but only in the open desert. Should I tell her she's useless and take away all her independence?"

     "No, but I wish she would act like a grandmother is supposed to."

     Delia gulped. "Like sitting in a rocking chair and knitting, maybe?" How she had longed for a normal mother.  Not one who painted her house rooms vivid fuchsia then bordered them with wild rose wallpaper that had made Delia gasp when she was five.

     Sonesta’s blue eyes softened a little.  "Well, wouldn't it be nice to have just one normal person in this family?"  A halo formed around the top of her wavy red hair.

     "Your hair looks like red gold right now.  And the answer is, I'd get that for you if I knew how."

     "I love you, Mom."

     A faint roar grew louder outside.  Stopped.  Door slammed.  Grandma entered the kitchen with a large dog.  “Me and my dog want some ice.”