--I'VE BEEN YOUNG AND I'VE BEEN OLD BUT I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE RIGHTEOUS FORSAKEN


…I have two interviews up at Scribophile that had somehow slipped by me. They were posted late October. Anyway, they’re here listed as “Scribophile Interview, Part 1” and “Scribophile Interview, Part 2” under “Words in Print.”

…Today is Veteran’s Day. 11/11.
Veteran’s Day is an important occasion in my family. Four of my brothers went into the miltary. One is still serving.
Their experiences changed their lives. You can see the way it’s been worked into the fabric of who they are. Sometimes it’s very obvious—a broke down body, a flag tattoo spread across the entire expanse of a back. Other times it’s a subtle hitch of the eye when a certain word is said.
My oldest brother got sent to Vietnam when I was ten. I remember watching the news, Walter Cronkite, reporting on various battles, showing the black body sacks being lifted, airborne into helicopters. You could tell Walter didn’t approve. A small film camouflaged the fact that he was more than a little bit fed up and disgusted with the war. News people were supposed to be unbiased when reporting, but Walter was always like that gentle Grandfather who was strong yet not afraid to cry in front of you.
I wrote a paper called, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, or Does He?” I was in 7th Grade and the teacher made a big fuss over it. At first she questioned whether I really wrote it. She told me I was saying things adults said. She asked how I could write something without having experienced it firsthand (which is what people would continue to ask me to this day.)
My brother, Charlie, served on the demilitarized zone, the line drawn between North and South Vietnam. However, it was anything but “demilitarized.”
His squad came under attack the first week they were there and a buddy of my brother’s got hit with a missile while in a trench. (CAUTION: READ THE NEXT LINE AT YOUR OWN RISK). The explosion blew my brother’s buddy’s body apart, his head flew through the air, through smoke and haze, dirt and splattered blood, before landing my brother’s lap like some horrifying fruit.
That’s one of a few stories my brother told. There were others that were worse. I know, how can there be worse? But there were.
Eventually my brother won The Bronze Star. It’s the fourth highest award a service man or woman can receive for distinguished bravery, heroism and meritorious participation. My brother carried a severely wounded solider over five miles on his back. Every day since then, he’s paid for that act physically. He walks with a cane and some mornings—all these years later--the pain is so severe that he doesn’t get out of bed.
Last week when I was home for my mother’s funeral, I asked if he’d do it over again knowing what he knows now and without hesitation, he said, “I’d do it in a second.”
I am not that brave. In fact, it’s difficult for me to comprehend that kind of daring and courage.
--When I was a boy, my parents somehow got a hold of a stash of military rations. They felt it important that we know what our brother was feasting on each day in the muggy jungles of Nam, so they pried open the tins and sliced up the coagulated globs. Everything came out of a can and was a combination of pasty and dry, like Elmer’s glue rolled in sawdust, like dog food dusted with someone’s cremated ashes.
That night I studied the only picture we had of him in Nam. In it, he’s stacking mortar shells into a massive pyramid taller than himself. Each copper-colored shell looked double the size of a king Salmon. My brother was smiling and shirtless.
It was raining that night, and after dinner I felt very strange—proud of my brother yet guilty for not being in the service myself, even if I was only 10 at the time. I remember (and this is going to sound really stupid, but it’s the truth) taking my shirt off, going into the rocky hills behind out trailer and walking bare-chested in the icy rain for several hours until I could no longer stand it. I guess I thought by doing so, I was somehow proving I could sacrifice as well as my brother, that I had gumption and moxie.
--When I lived in Virginia, my brothers all came back for a reunion. It was a touching time. At dinner I heard them tell raucous tales. They spoke a common language, employing some terms that meant nothing to me unless I asked for clarification.
I heard some heart-searing stories about the Vietnam War, ones I’d never heard before, ones I’m sure I will never hear again, stories I won’t ever forget.
The second day we went to the Mall, to the Vietnam Memorial. It’s a long black marble wall built into the ground, sort of like a retaining wall. The names of every dead service man and woman, plus those still missing, are etched into the stone. No one spoke. Not my brothers and not any of the other dozens of people. Most touched their fingers against the names carved there. Some had tracing paper and would pencil a reverse stencil and lift a name off. There was a book on a pedestal there were a person could look up someone. My oldest brother spent a lot of time flipping through the pages, his breath catching every so often. He cried but didn’t speak a word.
5,604 Americans have died fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars since November 3, 2011.
58,794 Americans died fighting in Vietnam.
My third oldest brother is a Colonel. While we were in DC that time, I got to see him in full uniform. Everywhere we went that day, if a soldier was passing, they stopped at once, pivoted, clicked their heels and saluted. It was a startling thing to witness.
When I was in the corporate world, I more or less gave up my life for my job. I sacrificed time with my kids and special events. But I wasn’t literally sacrificing my life. I was just walking in the rain, without a shirt, getting very cold and frost-bitten.
…Obviously I’m a bit in awe of my brothers, just as I am any service person. I hope we do right by them. I hope we get out of the wars soon. I hope we don’t cut their benefits. I hope we help them find jobs and transition back into society. Those things seem like the bare minimum.
Here are three poems I wrote that were published last year at Rusty Truck. Each is more or less nonfiction:

The Wall
We went as brothers
from different towns to this one,
meeting at the memorial,
our pasts broken down by
slab after slab of gray granite.
People moved like solemn shapes
no one speaking.
Black rain pecked our skins
but those were tears on Charlie’s face.
There might have been a million names.
There might have been but one.
War is an unscrupulous host.
A young boy my son’s age
Dragged his fingers across rows of engraved letters
I thought my brothers might be angered by the child’s act
but instead my eldest grinned and said,
“That’s why I went.
For him.”

For Those
For those born later
they would only know it as the bad war
the mistake
the one they made so many movies about.
At the time, protesters received more attention
and history may never right that wrong
or the ignorance of a new generation
but to the men
to the women
to the souls who went there,
I bow down
and I say,
“God bless you.”

Veteran
His brother took him to a pool hall,
bought him tequila and beer chasers,
farted out loud and
commented over the texture and vibrato of each.
His brother laughed at anything—
his own jokes,
the old geezer with a chin stuck inside his mug,
the skipping juke box saying, “You give love a bad naye-naye-naye-naye.”
This place had the classic arcade games—Pac Man and Space Invaders.
Around 2:00 am,
Stucky threw them the keys and said to close up,
as if it was something he’d done a lot of times before.
He studied the homemade tattoos on his brother’s forearms.
Everything was short, choppy and to the point,
no word or ink mark wasting time on being clever:
Nam
R.I.P.
JayDed
Old Glory Hole
The little gray bug men
marched across the screen in neat rows.
His brother shot them down with his finger beating the sweaty red button.
He killed as many as he could.
He seemed happy.
_______________________

--I DON’T BELIEVE THAT ANYBODY FEELS THE WAY I DO ABOUT YOU NOW

…Is there anything that makes you feel more vulnerable than sitting/laying in the dentist chair while two people poke inside your numbed mouth using needles and electric drills that screech and smoke?
Can’t be, can there?
Perhaps gynecology visits for women. That would be unnerving. Just the thought is more than a little unsettling to me.
Yesterday I was fitted for a crown. I’d much rather have been fitted for a tux or even a bra.
Thankfully my son wisely suggested that I bring an iPod to squelch the drilling cacophony. I put on Ryan Adams and kept my thumb on the volume path slide and would turn it up as loud as I could take it without making my ears bleed.
Yikes.
I went through 23 Ryan Adams songs during the time I was there.
Afterward the left side of my face was numb until the afternoon. I felt like Elephant Man.
What’s funny (is that the right word? Probably not) is I didn’t go to the dentist until I was 23 years old. Yep.
My mother didn’t believe in dentists, or so she said. Really, I think it was just that we couldn’t afford it.
On my first trip to a dentist, he told me I had no cavities and the first thing he asked me was if I grew up in North Dakota. I said, “How did you know?” He said, there’s in fluoride in the water there that shields the teeth from cavities.
So there’s at least one thing good about North Dakota.
I remember flossing once and my mother later telling my dad, “You should see it; he cleans his teeth with a string.”
Anyway, getting fitted for a crown isn’t much fun and though it wasn’t anything like childbirth, nothing even remotely close to it pain-wise, for some reason yesterday’s experience gave me a renewed appreciate for mothers.

…I'm still enamored with Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, "The Chronology of Water."
"You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A's on our chests."

…Today, in just a few minutes after I read some submissions for Metazen, I am going to work on the novel. It's been a while. This week I've written a few thousand words--six pieces in all, kind of stylistically experimental for me.
Here's what I wrote yesterday, which is more or less a true event from my childhood:

Twisters

I am six almost seven when the twister comes do you see it do you see it my brother asks it must be as far away as Dickinson or Fargo the hill we live on gives a view of the flat land and on it this afternoon with the sky gone gray as night this twister is a manic marauder a cone-shaped thing alladin’s angry genie unleashed will it take us I ask you’re such a scaredy cat my brother says but he doesn’t realize I’m not really afraid he sleeps downstairs and can’t hear their fights mom’s muffled shriek’s her squeals mirror glass shattering atop their dresser pipe or fist hitting the wall going through it on the other side of mine my little indian warrior clock with its big brown eyes coming free of its nail breaking off one pony tail when it hits the floor and bounces dead as I always knew hate you hate you I hate you she screams and so he hits her his father does hits or slaps I’m leaving you you’re a monster oh yeah I’ll show you a monster last night was the worst every evening is bad but last night the floor shook bombs exploded I expected smoke expected flames to burn their room to cinders but breakfast came and mom was at the stove frying flap jacks wearing a head scarf and jackie o sunglasses smoking silent as a hollow log saying stop your gawking and eat go on you let it get cold and I’ll whoop you sure as satan and now in the distance the cyclone is swiveling its smoke hips and I imagine it sucking up barns and buildings and houses with screaming children and astonished parents milk cows and chickens hogs farms being rolled up like rugs the moss place folger’s farm chicory square all of them slurped up that massive funnel of dirt while I wait our turn kenny says we better get downstairs come on you stupid turd I shake him off fine go ahead and die see if I care he might mean it he might know more than I think there the twister pivots like a jerky dust dancer moving through smolinski’s plot swiveling mowing pulverizing breaking things apart wherever it finds them a motorcycle comes flying this way hurled a mile through space like a chrome asteroid this is it this is it this is deliverance this is god acting saying I’ve heard your prayers this is his wrath that I’ve read about only at the bottom of bell street where the coolie sits the twister veers east without warning east east why east I’ve been waiting my whole life my short life willing eager to give it up and there you go god there you go you do not exist don’t tell me any more lies there you go no different than the gray ghost vapors my mother blows out of her nose when she smokes mom dad and me the fight between three maybe not tonight but tomorrow tomorrow the twister will reappear a different cyclone but just as savage and cruel and it might finally be the one that takes me the one that ends it all.

--I THINK THE WAY YOU EAT YOUR TOAST IS ADORABLE

…I have a new story, "Maps" up at Curbside Splendor, a story, "The Hard Dance" at Awosting Alchemy and a poem, "Sunglasses," about domestic violence up at S/Word.
All of them are also here under "Words in Print."

…My hands are shaking.
I hate that.
It would be hell to have Parkinson’s. I just voted and my script was all jagged as if I was signing my name with a razor blade.
Prior to voting, I blew all the cedar shavings off the decks. It took over an hour. The vibrations from that machine get into my nervous system somehow, and I ended up being numb in one arm and have a twitchy thing going on in the other.
This typically lasts an entire day.

…Prior to all that, I ran five miles on the treadmill.
I listened to Alicia Keys.
I think she is a doll.
I think she should make dozens and dozens of albums.
I hope her marriage survives. I'm not betting on it, but I wish she would find love and that it would stick.

…I’m almost done with Lidia Yuknavitch's astonishing memoir, "The Chronology of Water." Her story, delivered, ironically, without a chronological timeline, is rendered in ruthless truth and her writing is lyrical and lovely.
Here are a few samples:

"I didn't know yet that sexuality is an entire continent. I didn't know yet how many times a person can be born."
"Women live their lives secretly wanting their lives to become movies."
"People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life--did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction?"
"There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you."

Do yourself a favor and get her book.

…Last week before my mother died, before the funeral and all that, I spent a full day reading stories for Scribophile. I was guest judge for a contest they were holding, a paying contest.
Most of the stories were very bland. Quite a lot of them were about zombies or robots or other weird sci fi shit.
I found three winners pretty easily. But that's all I found. It was too easy. I wanted it to be struggle. I expected it to be very, very difficult to hone it down to three. So what does that tell me/us? there are too many writers? Everyone thinks they're a writer?
Don't get me wrong--I was happy to be judge, honored and flattered to be asked. I just wished there would have been better writing.

…One of my favorite things is laughing. Saturday Night Live can pretty much always make me laugh. It's not as sharp this year, but there are still some good gags.
Laughing reminds me that I'm alive and that life is a good thing.

…Another of my favorite things is being asked by someone to write a story. I guess it's validating--having someone like your writing enough to solicit a story or poem.

…I am sometimes on Facebook longer than I'd like. I get sidetracked on it. But there are other people, people you know, who are on there ALL THE TIME. These people also have jobs. These people also edit lit journals and have a spouse and probably take time to bathe and dine and go to the restroom.
These people are writers.
How do they do it? Where do they find the time? And why is it so important for them to share every inane detail of their life?
I honestly don't get it.

…One other thing I love is Amazon. Amazon is dangerous.
The other day I ordered the new Jack's Mannequin and Laura Marling (because Ryan Adams name-checked her), two Kathy Acker's books, Jen Knox's book, and Gene Weingarten's, "The Fiddler in the Subway" about classical violists who anonymously pose as homeless people playing in the subway stations.
I can't wait for that box to arrive.
Oh, and I ordered Drake's new disc.

…Here are four things to ponder on a Monday:

"The innocent and beautiful have no enemy except time." Yeats

"Nobody has ever measured,
not even poets,
how much the heart can hold."
~ Zelda Fitzgerald

"When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills." Janis Joplin

"There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet."
~ William Blake

--ONE DAY WE'RE GOING TO LIVE IN PARIS. I PROMISE.


…I was really excited to have a story, "My Mother, Marilyn Monroe" named Best of the Web by Sundress Press and Dorothee Lang.

The story is about the mom character in my novel "House of Rats" who dresses up in costumes. Her daughter thinks the mother is going nuts. Her son, the narrator, thinks the opposite, that--following her husband's suicide--she is finally starting to live.

And then some stuff happens.

…Death has a way of allowing us to live better…

…So, I'm home now.
Got here last night.
Thank you for all who were so kind about my own mother's passing.
The world seems small in a good way. A lot my best friends now are people I've never even met, not physically anyway.
You find out how much people care about you when you get knocked down and dinged up.
And it’s not that they buy you a drink or send you flowers. They’re just there.
“There” can be anywhere.
Nicolette Wong, a talented writer from Hong Kong, is someone I "talk" to frequently via this blog or Facebook or email. Same with Maree in New Zealand and others in Germany, Scotland, etc.
But having cyber friends can be tricky. It often takes a lot of reading between the lines. It takes having to bend sentences so that the words form facial expressions. You have to throw your darts accurately, and you have to use the right ones or what you mean to say can end up meaning the opposite.
I'm not a huge fan of the exclamation mark, but every once in a while a well placed ! adds a little something, like Cayenne pepper in a meatloaf.
Someone once posted, "It's the internet. It's not real."
But it is real.
It has certainly felt that way these last few days. You can tell when someone is being genuine and authentic, even if they're half a globe away, even if they are someone you've never met.

…In college I took a lot of writing classes. My major was Poli Sci and I was going to be a lawyer because that seemed like a good choice, fiscally. But in my heart I wanted to be a writer and ended up double majoring, adding English to the mix.
I took scads of writing classes. In one, I wrote a story about a dysfunctional group of brothers who gather together for their mother's funeral, and afterward, after the wake, they sit down to play a game of Parcheesi, something they did quite often as young boys. During the game playing, secrets spill out, grudges get matched and vented. There's a lot of anguish and tension. Wounds are laid bare in order to be cleansed and then sutured. I think it was one of the better pieces I'd written up until then. I was 19. My professor gave me A for "The Parcheesi Game."
It was strange how similar yesterday was to that story.
--Following the service and burial we all met in the trailer where I grew up. It was very crowded to say the least. The food was not what my mother would have cooked. Most of the crowd kept taking smoke breaks. A few drank canned beer. Initially it was awkward and tense. Men are not very skilled social beings. Throw in blood line and a tarnished history and, well, it be very uncomfortable.
But eventually it was okay.
It was fine to be a little bit vulnerable. To not feel threatened. To saunter up to a brother you hadn't seen in 30 years and say, "So tell me what your life is like now."
It was all right to play Parcheesi again.
Death has a way of allowing us to live better.

…At the funeral one brother leaned over to another brother and, speaking of Mom, said, "God better like to eat."
Then he added, "And he better not have a problem following orders."
A little bit of levity that was quite accurate.

…I feel good. I feel fine. The lake is very still outside my window--a sheet of wax paper. A few geese keep flying across at tree height and on the south end steam or fog has bearded up the boat launch.
It's all quite beautiful.

…Here are a few fun things for a Seattle Saturday:

"A story has no reason whatsoever to exist unless it's about trouble." Les Edgerton

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde

"When we sit or when we run in place with images and sounds rather than flee farther into our rational minds, the imagination quietly reawakens to the possibilities of wonder and awe." Charlotte Beck

"The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality." John Quincy Adams

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean." Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." Sylvia Plath

This is a eulogy for my mother and a small tribute to the family she left behind…

Like my brothers who are here today, I grew up on the north side of poor and didn’t realize it until there was nothing to be done but work hard, listen well, mind yourself, respect others and—if you were able--share.
Sharing is a kind of bravery when you don’t have much. It’s Biblical in the purest sense.
My dad is, and always was, a genius with his hands, a mechanical artiste hardly matched by anyone in the entire state. Time and time again he tried to share his knowledge of mechanics with me, but I preferred poetry to Peterbuilts, books instead of bolts. Lovingly, he called me “Sally” and “Flower Child” because I had long hair and wore puka shells like David Cassidy, my idol, from “The Partridge Family.” So, whether or not he meant to, my dad taught me that it was okay to be different, to be a nonconformist, so long as you were true to yourself.
From my brothers I didn’t get a lot of advice, but I did get mounds and mounds of Hand Me Downs. I’d get ornate western shirts with pearl snap buttons, yoke-stitched shoulder seams, and silver-tipped collars. They were fine shirts, something a countrified Elvis might wear—but they were usually four sizes too big for me and typically most had an unbleachable rust-stained patch of Ring Around Collar.
I also got their coats and gloves and hats and ratty old sweaters that resembled boneless cats. It was always an honest thrill to receive a new article of clothing because I figured if the item had once been good enough for them, it was doubly adequate for me—as if by sweating on the garments, my brother’s had somehow doused and blessed them with Holy water..
For many years, I owned exactly one pair of jeans. Once, during baseball practice, a fellow player slid in high and cleated me in the knee so rough and hard and deep that it splayed my tendons open like lasagna, and you could even see bone. When I got back from being stitched up, Mom washed those jeans and sewed the flap and I continued to wear those pants until I outgrew them (Ironically, the pattern formed a huge L, as if I was wealthy and had started monogramming all my clothes, even work-play apparel.
Because I was shy and essentially friendless, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen. I would read at the table or practice my penmanship by copying the first fifty pages of the dictionary. Every day Mom was there cooking. She used oversized kettles and pans, gigantic, steroid-infused cutlery, hardcore cookware you’d expect to see in the military.
There were a lot of us kids, many hungry boys with insatiable appetites, and she meant to take care of us.
So she’d toil for hours on end, Mother would, dropping bags of potatoes into a cloud of steam, using a rolling pin to flatten a blanket of bread dough, slathering glaze over a tin of caramel rolls.
It was all very workman-like yet fascinating. Watching her cook, or bake, was akin to witnessing Michelangelo paint, Rodin sculpt or Lawrence Welk smarmily conducting his Champagne Orchestra.
Mother made homemade donuts and bread and cream puffs and Aunt Anne’s cake and Glorified Rice and dumplings, German dishes with strange names like Fleisch Keeklah that really amounted to nothing more thanfried dough and hamburger. I thought she must be a chemist, a magician, or at the very least, the best cook on the planet.
When I’d run out of things to tell her, I’d make them up. I don’t know if she knew I was lying or if she was even that interested in my outlandish stories, but Mom let me ramble on and on. I was really just trying to impress her. Back then, a huge goal of mine had been to make my Mother love me without condition.
One Spring when I got really bored and complained about having nothing to do, Mother handed me a plate of rolls and said, “Here, take this to the Lemelys. They live a mile and half over that hill. Tell them I said you needed to be put to work.”
I had no idea who the Lemelys were or if there was even a house a mile and half over the craggy landscape that was our back yard, but Mom’s instructions were always meant to be carried out, and to veer from them was a very unwise decision—like cheating on your taxes or spouse, like relying on the rhythm method for your birth control.
And so I did. I grabbed the rolls and ran. And just as she’d predicted, there was a house and a kind old man named Homer Lemely who took the caramel rolls with a big grin, handed me a rake, and after watching me work like a fiend for two hours, hired me on the spot.
Work was an important element of our lives—in the lives of being a Kuntz, a Volk, or a Hauff. When you don’t have much, what you do have are two clear-cut choices: to whine about not having anything, or to get busy.
In our family, we were always some sort of busy.
But being busy—for us anyway--often meant getting over yourself, steeping yourself in survival, ignoring embarrassment that others might equate with shame.
We raised milk cows—Kathy and Irene, Go Go and Thunder--that we milked each morning before school. We had chickens that Mom butchered. We had a makeshift garden and after harvesting, Mom would drive me down to Two Schwabbies. Working out a deal with the store manager, I’d be allowed to sell vegetables in front of the store. “Cucumbers, cucumbers, ten cents each!” I’d shout. Invariably I’d see a schoolmate who would gawk then stiffen like an erection, as if I were some diseased horror. Or often times there’d be some lady who would see me, stop and ask, “My God, aren’t you Joe and Alice’s son?” in a horrified voice that might as well have asked, “Aren’t you Michelle and Barrack Obama’s son?” On a good day, I might make four or five bucks, which Mom would collect, note on a ledger, and save for me inside a stained envelope labeled with my name.
During summers, Mom took us to the fruit fields where we picked strawberries, pie cherries, raspberries, and sometimes corn. We were the only white family among groups of Hispanic migrant workers. Mother was a Checker. Her job was to make sure no one loaded the bottom lug or flat with rocks and leaves instead of fruit. Her task was to sign off on each carton, tell workers where to pick, and generally, just run the show. It was a man’s job, but my mother could be as tough and mean as any male when she wanted to, and I think she was--by all accounts--a pretty damn good Checker.
Before The World’s Fair in 1974, Mom would drive a school bus down to the river, to a very sketchy area known as “Skid Row.” Always we arrived before dusk, usually at 4 am. When she’d honk the horn, the bums and winos would saunter out of the foggy dark like constipated zombies. They’d trundle up on the bus, and then mom would drive them to the cherry orchards where they’d pick fruit, get cash money on the spot, sing old Buck Owens songs with their bottles dangling from branches, drunk as one-legged dogs, burping and farting in key. I was 12 and 13 at the time, but I still recall the friendly, rank stench of those bus rides to and from the fields—it was a kind of cat pee-meets-lighter fluid-meets-embalming fluid odor, and to get through the journeys, I plugged my nose and breathed through my mouth. I remember Mom driving, smoking, wearing cat-eye glasses, tapping her fingernail on the steering wheel, looking tough as steel. I think the men on board both feared and respected her. They certainly didn’t give her any guff.
There are a lot of quirky but true stories, similar to those, that I could tell, but time is short and no one likes a story that never ends.
So, lastly, I just like to say that whether she knew it or not, Mom shared a way of living with me, with us.
She taught us how to love and she taught us how not to love.
She was hardly perfect. None of us are. The examples she set were sometimes unorthodox, often far from textbook, never Dr. Spock-approved, but if you looked and listened you could gain a sense of how to survive, even if history was a disloyal friend, even if the brightest odds looked bleak.
Mom taught the value of dollar, the importance of hard work, the value of service to one’s country, exemplified through the examples of my brothers here today.
She taught me that life can in fact be both simple and full at the same time.
She taught me that it’s better to be surrounded by a gaggle of noisy kids than to be sequestered alone in an empty room.
She showed me the importance of family and the necessity of a loyal, loving spouse, and how in the end those things are what’s true, how they become a kind of living legacy.
We don’t pick our parents—none of us do—but we do get to pick what we remember of our parents, or at least how to use what our parents taught us to better inform and shape our life.
My mother, my brothers’ mother, my father’s spouse—she was a complicated and paradoxical woman.
She was many things.
She was a young girl, someone’s daughter, a farmer’s daughter, a farmer, cook, chef, model, lover, spouse, bible salesman, truck driver, field hand, foreman and Mariner’s fan.
She was a tiny stick of dynamite that could take out an entire building or someone’s self-esteem.
She was a lot of things, but in the end, she was my mother. She me—gave us, her children—life.
So it seems only fitting that at a moment like this, on a day like today, that we fill our hearts with kind remembrance, that we give our mother a full measure of gratitude, that we wish her all of the grace and God’s love we would humbly wish for ourselves.
Thank you, and thank you for being here.

(...from last night when i was without a connection...)

--I WANNA BE SEDATED


…I have ten new micro fictions (each one is 25 words exactly and the titles are all nail polish color names) up at Nicole Scarpato Monaghan’s fun new site, Nailpolish Stories.
They’re also up here at “Words in Print.”

…Today was a productive day on some fronts.
I ran. I read. I took a bath. I submitted some poems to two different sites.

But most of the day I worked on my mother’s eulogy.

Last night late, my Dad called and asked me to give one.

I sort of new he would. I was actually expecting it.

He said, “Heck, you knew her as well as anyone.”

I thought that was an interesting thing to say.

Did I know her as well as anyone? I doubt it. I really do.

The eulogy is four pages long. It was tricky to write. To capture the essence of someone, to celebrate their life truthfully without denigrating it.

I think it turned out all right. I may put it up here before I leave on Wednesday. We’ll see.

I am reading “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Y. (I can’t remember how to spell her Czech last name and the book is downstairs. It is phenomenal, this memoir. She’s so, so brave. Many of the chapters read like eulogies. That helped me with mine.

Plus Mona Simpson’s eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs, is running around all over the internet. Her take on her life and their relationship also helped me create a flavor for being honest in a respectful way.
This week I will see brothers and sisters I have not seen since I was 14 years old. I will see others who do like one another. I will see some who vowed never to speak to my mother, and hadn’t for well over a decade.

I once saw an interview with Winona Judd where she said, “Our family put the ‘fun” in dysfunctional.”

My family puts the “dys” in dysfunctional.

But it’ll be okay. I think it will.

…It is Halloween.

Where I am on the planet it is pitch black out. The lake is a sheet of tar, ending only shore-side where some house lights glow.

We will not get a solitary Trick or Treator. We haven’t in the last four years. It’s not an efficient undertaking as it requires too much work to cover this road and make the long trek down our road.

When I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday. Free candy! As much as you want! We used to take pillow cases with us and run door to door as fast as we could. We’d work well into the evening. Halloween is a poor kid’s lottery winning ticket.

I hope you have a great holiday wherever you are.

I hope you are chewing on something sugary and maybe getting a little bit chubby.

…Here are some things I like on Halloween:

New York City – stingiest city for giving out Halloween candy
Washington, DC – third stingiest
Los Angeles – fifth stingiest
"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." Aldous Huxley

"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard." Voltaire

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." e.e.cummings

"Nothing makes you a hypocrite quite like parenthood." Amy Wood

‎"I've always had this sense that the unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake. It's going to come after you. And you can keep it at bay by always keeping it in your eye line." Joan Didion

"Art is a lie that speaks the truth." Picasso

"What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing
for this, I was training for this." Epictetus

"I saw myself when I shut my eyes: space, space, where I am and am not." Octavio Paz

"Don't bother about genius. Don't worry about being clever. Trust to hard work, perseverance and determination." Sir Frederick Treves

"The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is it's hard. If you think it's not, you're not doing it right." Gene Weingarten

--SO, FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND NOT YOUR HEAD


…I have a new story, “Black Heart” up at Pure Slush and here under “Words in Print.”

It’s a counterpoint piece to Andrew Stancek’s fine, fine story, “Belly Laugh.” The idea is Andrew would write a story and then I would take one, or two of the characters from his piece, and re-design it from a fresh/different perspective and point of view.

It was a lot of fun to write and I really enjoyed working with Andrew, who is an imaginative author and great support to me.

********

…I suppose I should tell you what happened, that my mother died.

This is true, not fiction.

She died yesterday. In the early morning.

I wasn’t there. My father was.

She had been sick a while. A long time, really, but technically, officially sick, since her stroke a few months back, and then early onset dementia.

I wasn’t going to write about this or her, her dying. It seems both outrageously personal and impersonal to write about one’s mother dying, to do so in a blog, to let strangers read your thoughts and garner your emotions, even guess at what you’re thinking or the ways in which you’re reacting.

I’m not sure how to feel about things. I’m doing something very odd here, just thinking out loud with a key board, not even pausing to edit. I am writing this right now not knowing if I will really post it, not knowing if I will finish it or what I’m even intending to say. I’m writing because that is the thing which more often than not helps me cope and sort, escape and survive, understand.

If you know me even a little bit, you know that much of my writing is “dark.” That stems from having a less than bright childhood. There are typically wounded, broken characters in my writing. Many times these are children. Often there is a mother figure present. Are the stories autobiographical? Well, some are. Some are nearly 100% true, yet I’ve just taken to calling them fiction, either to save myself from embarrassment or shame, or for some other reason I can’t readily identify.

Most of the time I’ve taken the germ of an event and contorted it, because without that real kernel there’d be no story. Without that dark truth, I’d not have had the foresight to be able to bend it into an acceptable lie.

Yes, I believe it when people say, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” A lot of mine has been that way.

As far as I know, my mother never read a single story of mine. She knew I was writing full-time these last few years, but it must not have interested her that much. My mother was very much a creature of habit. Adding new things to her plate—even lightweight stuff—would set her off course, put her of kilter so that the natural order of not only her universe was jolted, but so, too were the galaxies of anyone around her.

She was a complicated person, my mother. I know that word—“complicated”—can be a cop out, but it’s fitting in this case. Not only was my mother complicated but she was paradoxical across the board.

She was tiny but could be loud.

She was kind to strangers yet could be cruel to family.

She gave birth to a large group of children but didn’t seem to care that much afterward.

From time to time, she’d say she loved me, but rarely, if ever, did she show it.

And, for such a petite woman, she could sure create a lot of destruction.

Money (being poor) and sickness (she was a hypochondriac) were major preoccupations of hers. A ritual was sitting in the trailer saddled up to the kitchen counter, smoking Tareytons incessantly, drinking black coffee, and bemoaning gas prices or the hike in what coffee cost, how her gall bladder or goiter were going bad. This was her entertainment. It was the sad, cloistered world she’d shaped for herself, and rarely did she venture outside of it.

When I was a teenager, I toggled between knowing my family wasn’t normal and sort of daydreaming that we were. I knew TV was make-believe, too good to be true. There was always too much love on display, too many happy endings. So, I thought, perhaps we weren’t all that screwed up.

But we were, of course.

For years, I worked fiendishly at becoming everything my family wasn’t—I became book smart and went to college. I never got sick, even if I was. I worked until I could accumulate the types of things we never had (sugar cereals, clothes, a big house.) I grew my hair long and wore jewelry. I read poetry and wrote it. Eventually I became an attentive and loving parent. I told my children I loved them and meant it.

So, I'm rambling a bit, and you can see rather plainly, I would suspect that I’m still working through stuff. On Wednesday, I’ve got a solo, five hour drive to Eastern Washington ahead of me to do some ruminating. I’ve got that and the rest of my life.

In some ways, my mother did the best she could. In other respects, she might have tried a lot harder, or in the very least, there might have been different tactics utilized in raising her brood.

But if I’m complaining, I don’t mean to be. Growing up with little in the way of a material or emotional bank, having to make my own way in the world—well, those things have really helped me as an adult. Surely I’d be a different man without them.

Surely I’d be a different son without her.