Seven years ago

Posted on August 15, 2024 by doradueck

Well beyond time to show up here if I’m going to call myself a blogger, but honestly, nothing original is urging itself upon me to say. How about a few days of my journal from seven years ago then? The prose is a bit loopy in places, but it’s a journal — one is talking to oneself! My words from the past often seem strange to me, events already over and long forgotten, but there I was, in those days. (Do you remember these episodes in “the news”?)

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

8 p.m. Enjoying cool air of balcony. Fallen flower petals litter the floor, cherry tomatoes now eager to ripen. Helmut at Habitat [for Humanity work site] today and I did revisions [to a story and essay].

Per David Brooks, who opined at NYT that he was trying to divest his brain of Trump, and Garrison Keillor who had a great column about his high school reunion and how the man’s name didn’t come up at all, and then how what’s (more) important is tomatoes, I didn’t watch news in the afternoon hour I often allow myself to puzzle, but listened instead to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with Edna O’Brien. “Oh wow,” I said to myself when it was done, “that was good.” Truly rich in ideas, emotion, compassion-capacity. – So all good, and turns out I have an Edna O’Brien short fiction collection on my shelves. –

But during my brief victory away from the news, there is a new “development” that occurs. Bombast from North Korea, bombast from D.T. who promises “fire and fury…and force,” “like the world has never seen.” Shock, for he sounds just like Kim Jong Un. It’s really quite frightening, this build-up of tension, both of them nuclear powers.

Friday, Aug. 11, 2017

Two quite opposite emotions today—one a sense of fear/sick/disgust/worry—who knows how to describe it, as the rhetoric continues, and continues—ON THE U.S. SIDE. It’s quite frightening really, and as leaders urge the rhetoric be lowered, D.T. carries right on. His poll #s continue to drop, as markets are too, and it’s as if he thinks he’ll gain people back by talking tough. “People like it,” he says…. It really did quite bother me. I bleat it all Godward, yes, but am mostly bothered by piety [when someone says] well we’re in the last days, we don’t understand, just “watch and pray.” That is good advice, but are we really in the last days? I think we have to resist warmongering like that. Poor Koreans and others in Asia, Guam, etc. Lord have mercy.

But, the world is coming to an end, so why not buy a painting? Was compelled by a “R. Lake” I saw in the thrift shop yesterday, a landscape, flat though low mountains on horizon, a large tree centre, some small buildings. It’s not like real detailed, you have to stand back, but there’s something about the blues. Anyways, it was still there this morning, had in the meanwhile looked up R. Lake, which is Randall Lake, born 1947, of Utah, ex-Mormon, his paintings recently more political—gay man, taking on Mormon Church for their damage to LGBTQ etc. $65. So happy with this acquisition, now in our bedroom.

Haircut today too, some puzzle fun, and some work (revisions), though not as much as I should have, if I wasn’t so anxious about nuclear war or busy rearranging our walls.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

So yesterday I posted my feelings on FB—re North Korea, my cries for Korean people, opinion that DT brought world to brink—….quite a few comments, which is always a little surprising… Karla B. alerts me to tomorrow’s Sunday of Prayer for Peaceful Reunification of Korean Pen. Betty B. says Australia feels very close. John L. proposes how both leaders will spin this. Carol Ann W. recalls Cuban Missile Crisis, how she played Bach. Dayna D. shares Anne Lamott:

What to do in the face of Locked and Loaded? The usual: Help! Thanks. Wow. Radical self-care. Trust & surrender. Serve the poor. Breathe.

So, interesting conversations that FB provokes. I just “like” everyone and leave it at that.

BUT, End of the World is so yesterday, she says (to herself) sarcastically. Who’s even thinking about that?! Today it’s Charlottesville, VA. Neo-Nazis, KKK, Alt Right gathering, violence and counter protests. A car rams counter-protestors, a woman killed, 3 deaths in all. DT generically calls for unity and condemns violence “from many sides, from many sides.” Dos not condemn white supremacists who chant Heil Trump and wear MAGA hats, David Duke who reminds who elected him. I listened to the statement and agree, it was tepid, he who can be so specific in his criticisms. He… can’t name it for what it is.

Someday, maybe 10-20-30 year from now, if someone reads this, they may say, well is she just hyperventilating, worrying… Believe me, it is this bad on this continent, this sense of division, this sense of something terrible unleashed from the top. “Blood and soil,” they chanted, as they walked with their tiki torches. And “Jews will not replace us.”

Well, the Sabbath nears. Breathe, dear heart. Read your Edna O’Brien book. Think of your new painting-print. Your kids and grands… [Gratitude] for this day. For the blackberries we picked this morning. For the Staples store that opened nearby today. For a pot of yellow mums. For Helmut.

The mysterious Irene P., etc.

Posted on April 30, 2024 by doradueck

Earlier this month, I was a panelist at a Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS) event here in Tsawwassen, with writers Raoul Fernandez, Debra Purdy Kong, and S.J. Kootz. Along with an honorarium, each of us was gifted a book from “the abandoned library” of a woman known as Irene P.; mine was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. “Do books long for a new owner?” asks a note pasted into the flyleaf. Assuming they do, “Just such a case has brought this book to you… once one of thousands in a collection owned by one Irene P.”

I asked the event organizer about her. She didn’t know much beyond the fact that when the woman’s house sold, there were thousands (6000, did she say?) books left behind, and hundreds about writing which somehow came to the DLAS and are used as unique thank yous. With all that advice on her shelves, did Irene P. write? I don’t know that either; hers is a story still to be told perhaps, but at any rate, I now have her 1995 edition of the Lamott classic, and it gives me pleasure. Since I already own the book, I’ll pass my copy on to someone else. And I think I’ll see if I can’t get more information about our mysterious donor.

Speaking of writing advice, I recently read a small (80 pages) book by Stephen Marche called On Writing and Failure. Marche is no slouch, he’s written books and essays for all kinds of prestigious magazines, but he’s honest about the reality of the life: rejection. He kept track of them, he says, until they reached 2000, and hardly notices any more. He offers examples from other writers, and the point of it is not the promise of some inevitable arc to success, but his subtitle: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. The book is full of quotable quotes:

English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: Submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.

In an environment where some 300,000 books are printed yearly in the U.S. alone, and only a few hundred of those are what could be called creative or financial successes, there’s certainly no urgency for anyone to join the ranks. But if one’s there already, nothing for it, he says, 81l-0zGg3GL._SY522_ but to keep at it, to keep submitting the work. “No whining,” he insists repeatedly. “The desire to make meaning…is a valid desire despite the inevitability of defeat.”

And, speaking of small but profound books, Sue Sorensen’s new poetry book, Acutely Life (At Bay Press), is an absolute delight. Whether she’s considering Freud or a musician or art or gardening/marriage or Mary the mother of Jesus, Sorensen registers on the page with both brilliant wit and deep emotional insight. Somewhere I read (though I can’t find the exact quote), one doesn’t interpret poetry as much as experience it. That’s how it’s been reading this book. I intend to read/experience it again. AcutleyLifeCover_(1)_800_1257_90

Did you turn into someone else?

Posted on March 4, 2024 by doradueck

When my eldest granddaughter was 3-something, I showed her our wedding photo, which happened to stand on the family mantel in her home. I said it was Grandpa and me. Obviously she’d never made the connection, for she looked back and forth from the photo to me, comparing the young woman with long dark hair inside the frame to the woman with short grey hair and glasses who was holding her.

“Grandma,” she finally said, earnestly, “did you turn into someone else?”

I can’t remember what I said in reply, though I chuckled. I still chuckle, thinking of it more than a a decade and a half later. What a great question.

I could have said Absolutely, yes, I’ve turned into someone else, in fact I’ve been a number of “elses” over my lifetime, at the cellular level for sure, but in other ways too, in awareness, knowledge, thinking, views on matters theological, political, and otherwise. Change is the stuff of life and I’ve tried to be open to changes and conversions of all kinds Here’s hoping it shows.

But no surprise my granddaughter was confused. I get confused about myself too. I shopped for pants this week. Strolling the mall, seeing the window displays, I realized that when I look at the mannequins, in some weird way I still inhabit the sense of being a teen, assume myself slender and taut. Once inside the change room then, with my items to try on and it’s Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s that you’re looking at? and it’s someone with soft belly, soft thighs. With a sigh, recognition realigns with reality.

On the other hand, I could have said, No, no, no, same me, or better said, same old me. Surface is surface, and underneath is the me I’ve always been. It seems to me that there’s something basic in personality and sense of self that threads back as far as memory can take one and furthermore, that this thread, at least for a child with a reasonably happy childhood, doesn’t want to break. Shouldn’t.

I was struck by something I heard at an online funeral recently: the deceased person, on getting their terminal diagnosis, had said, “I’ve enjoyed being alive.”

Me too, I thought, I enjoy being alive.

Joy and wonder. That’s the part that feels unchanged, or when lost, can be recovered. It’s the entering the kingdom like a child. Being four or maybe five or six, the wonder of hearing exquisite music come out of a huge tape player above my head on the table. The wonder of fields and hills we played in, the wonder of “swimming” in a foot of creek water, the wonder of those letters on a page that make up words and can be read, the wonder of God is love.

Oh you sweet, bright grandchild of mine, did I turn into someone else? Yes and no. No and yes.

And you, what about you? Did you turn into someone else?