Not ten days in and the leaves have begun to change. Wasn't May just yesterday? Didn't the garden just go in? When did the sunflowers get to be six feet tall? My inner time clock says it's still Spring, yet there was a red and yellow maple leaf on the front lawn. That was yesterday, too. It's not that one can look at the mountains and see colors. Not yet. It's still very green. Goldenrod, tall and yellow, bobs and weaves in the breeze. Purple loosestrife juts up all over the place. Queen Anne's :Lace seems to spread her canopies up and down the road. Pull up a clump, scrape the root with your fingernail, put to nose. Smells just like a carrot, doesn't it? A far-sighted farmer way back in time bred it to be just that.
If you visited you'd think it was simply a beautiful summer day, and, yes, it would be. However, people who live here are aware of subtle change and know that the blue jays, a winter bird, are maybe two weeks away. The air smells crisp and clean. Pelts become thick and full. Spots on fawns begin to fade.Blackberries are here. Apples coming soon. The bears will be up in those trees. Deer are scraping off their velvet. You can see where they walk by a patch of bark rubbed off the trunk of a sapling. Three more weeks and the fire bush will be bright red. Three more weeks and summer is gone. Where are the snows of yesteryear? someone once asked. If you live here you know they're on the way. And the tomatoes haven't even come in yet.
If you live here you know the change never stops. You may not see it but it happens anyway, and eventually -- even though you had no hand in it nor will you have a hand in it -- what happened will sink in. One day the grass is a trifle more brittle. One day the trees, their proud chests swollen with summer leaves, are a shade less green. The clover dies out. The thyme comes in. My forehead now sports an age spot. It wasn't there, and then it was. And is. If you don't change you die, although you're going to die whether you change or not. But the journey! Oh, yes, the journey is so much more interesting when you don't know for sure where you're going or even where you are. Call me a Luddite, but if I had my way I'd ban GPS systems. It lops off yet another innate, natural skill: the ability to find our way back. I've been lost in Alaska. I've been lost in a rain forest. Hell, I've been lost on the mountain outside my back door. But just because you lose the trail doesn't mean that's the end of the trail, something a tracker told me a long time ago. His way would not be my way but here's what he told me: when you're lost sit down, settle down, stare at the ground and breathe deeply. Then you look up at the sky and ask for help. You'll find your way. As I said, not really my way, but it sure worked for him. I've found that if I stay calm and keep walking down hill I'll eventually get where I'm going. Or somewhere else. But, not to worry. I will get there.
In the woods and mountains where we live, we know there is a reason for everything, even when it's not readily apparent. This past spring there were more mice than usual. Then I noticed more rabbits than usual. There were also far more turkey poults than I've seen before. How come? A neighbor told me that ruffed grouse, partridges, were back. He'd seen a lot of them up at the tree line of Rusk Mountain. How's that? Their numbers have been down for years. As preface to my answer, let me explain that in all the decades I've lived here I've seen a fox maybe four times. Yet, this past spring there were foxes all over the place. Two dens within walking distance of each other. One den is across the creek on a dead neighbor's property. The other is in another neighbor's abandoned barn. Four times in thirty-one years? How about a dozen times these past two weeks? Sleek. Black noses. Red fur. Bushy tails. I watched an unusually long line of poults follow their mother hen into the woods, and a couple of days later saw the little foxes returning to the barn from that same trail. Haven't seen the turkey there since. Was there more food because there were more foxes? Were there more foxes because of all the extra food? I don't know why. I just know what.
I think I'm beginning to ramble, so I'm just gonna stop.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Monday, August 4, 2014
Happiness Is For Idiots
It was my mother's mantra in the house of horrors where she remorselessly tortured three siblings until each was old enough to beat it the hell out of there. Happiness is for idiots. She was like a woodpecker perched on one's ear tapping away at one's head. "Only idiots are happy" was the single variant of the theme. If that woman's corpse ever undergoes autopsy (she's currently approaching 101), the doctor will discover a venom sack instead of a heart. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," you say? All I can say in return is that you weren't there when missiles were airborne and the weapon du jour was whatever object was closest to hand. It wasn't easy, folks. It was not easy. It's taken a lifetime.
Normally, when I wake up in the morning I have two first thoughts 1). Oh, good, I'm still alive, and 2). Coffee! One morning (already many decades into my life) I woke up to something new, a feeling which was like the feeling I imagine Gatsby might have had while he was under the summer sun in that elegant swimming pool, dozing on his rubber raft. The instant before the bullet entered Gatsby's brain, that very instant for him could well have been sublime, his last thought, one without anger or anguish, might well have been of Daisy's adoring face. Lenny, from Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", suits this trope as well. The very instant Lenny is awash in the fantasy of the farm they will someday have, of the rabbits he will raise, that very instant George puts a bullet in the back of his dear friend's head. Lenny dies happy. George will never be. Yet, his act is an act of love. And the act that eventually gets Gatsby killed is also an act of love. Anyone see a lesson somewhere in this?
History is needed here: for most of my writing life I credited my anger for my success. The best work, I believed, came from heartfelt pain and a core of righteous fury fueling my hero's and heroine's journeys as they pummeled their way to ultimate victory. Revenge! "How sweet it is" as Jacky Gleason used to say when threatening to put Alice on the moon. Of course, he never did nor ever would. We wouldn't have watched otherwise. Come on. What is the lesson here, and how did I miss it for so long?
More history: I was fortunate enough to sell my first film script before I'd ever set foot in Hollywood, a script titled, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney". It brought with it a three picture deal at Universal. My radar tells me that it would not work the same way these days, probably, would not work at all, period. I'd never been to film school, had never taken a course in screenwriting, improvised the form, balked at watching the Academy Awards, was only minimally taken with the medium unlike most of my peers, and told a love story set in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 20's. Try and sell that one today. You'd get laughed out of somebody's office is my guess, or tossed out. It took me a long time to realize how fortunate I'd been. I was unconscious until friends brought it to my attention. Hard to believe the naivete, right? I have my lapses. Have had.
I was still living in New York working at becoming a paid playwright (as if) when the phone rang and a secretary told me that Jennings Lang was coming to New York and wanted to meet with me (We'd never yet spoken) at Universal on Park Avenue. All I knew about the man was that he bought my script, signed me up, and set me free of my day job. A meeting? Sure, right there.
Yes, I was impressed. The halls and offices were so thickly carpeted that all the sound was muffled. There were no footfalls. There was a hush over everything. It had the feel of a sanctum in which important decisions were made but sedately and out of sight of commoners. You heard nothing. Contrast this with the last time I was in a "major office" in Beverly Hills waiting for a meeting to begin. Clickety click. Clickety click. High heels on marble. Nice. Sexy. But not reassuring at all.
OK. So, my meeting with Jennings Lang. It was reassuring (I said I was naive.). Jennings was respectful and impressive, so I gradually gained the confidence to open my mouth. We'd gotten to talking about the action elements in my script, and I patted myself on the back for writing such riveting sequences. The future would be full of them. No doubt. Bread and butter. Yo! "Hold on a minute," interrupted Jennings, "I didn't buy your script for the action. I bought it for the love story." The love story! Geez! The mystery of my life and career is why it took me so long to arrive at the truth. In geological time it seems as if it only just happened.
But that morning I'm talking about, the one that began all this, that morning I woke up and I was happy. How did I know, not being used to such a thing, that this was happiness? I didn't at first, but, since I believe in evolution, I knew something was different, yet it felt pretty good, and what I really wanted was to get to my desk in the mountains and write. I didn't have to fight it. There was little struggle. I thought of a book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". A momentary spasm. Happiness? I actually began to feel that I was finally where I was supposed to be, and I did not want to be anywhere else. "I am Writer; Hear me roar!" It's about goddamn time, bub! You do what you do because it is what you do, and it's gotta get done. You've jettisoned the gumption trap, amigo. Now, get with it. Zen and the art, or, as the Marines say, "Just do it". It doesn't need to come from solely a place of anger. It can come from someplace softer. It can come from love, too. Both the love and the anger come from the same deep well anyway.
My current fervent hope is that my Ivy League friends don't heave when they read this.
Normally, when I wake up in the morning I have two first thoughts 1). Oh, good, I'm still alive, and 2). Coffee! One morning (already many decades into my life) I woke up to something new, a feeling which was like the feeling I imagine Gatsby might have had while he was under the summer sun in that elegant swimming pool, dozing on his rubber raft. The instant before the bullet entered Gatsby's brain, that very instant for him could well have been sublime, his last thought, one without anger or anguish, might well have been of Daisy's adoring face. Lenny, from Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", suits this trope as well. The very instant Lenny is awash in the fantasy of the farm they will someday have, of the rabbits he will raise, that very instant George puts a bullet in the back of his dear friend's head. Lenny dies happy. George will never be. Yet, his act is an act of love. And the act that eventually gets Gatsby killed is also an act of love. Anyone see a lesson somewhere in this?
History is needed here: for most of my writing life I credited my anger for my success. The best work, I believed, came from heartfelt pain and a core of righteous fury fueling my hero's and heroine's journeys as they pummeled their way to ultimate victory. Revenge! "How sweet it is" as Jacky Gleason used to say when threatening to put Alice on the moon. Of course, he never did nor ever would. We wouldn't have watched otherwise. Come on. What is the lesson here, and how did I miss it for so long?
More history: I was fortunate enough to sell my first film script before I'd ever set foot in Hollywood, a script titled, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney". It brought with it a three picture deal at Universal. My radar tells me that it would not work the same way these days, probably, would not work at all, period. I'd never been to film school, had never taken a course in screenwriting, improvised the form, balked at watching the Academy Awards, was only minimally taken with the medium unlike most of my peers, and told a love story set in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 20's. Try and sell that one today. You'd get laughed out of somebody's office is my guess, or tossed out. It took me a long time to realize how fortunate I'd been. I was unconscious until friends brought it to my attention. Hard to believe the naivete, right? I have my lapses. Have had.
I was still living in New York working at becoming a paid playwright (as if) when the phone rang and a secretary told me that Jennings Lang was coming to New York and wanted to meet with me (We'd never yet spoken) at Universal on Park Avenue. All I knew about the man was that he bought my script, signed me up, and set me free of my day job. A meeting? Sure, right there.
Yes, I was impressed. The halls and offices were so thickly carpeted that all the sound was muffled. There were no footfalls. There was a hush over everything. It had the feel of a sanctum in which important decisions were made but sedately and out of sight of commoners. You heard nothing. Contrast this with the last time I was in a "major office" in Beverly Hills waiting for a meeting to begin. Clickety click. Clickety click. High heels on marble. Nice. Sexy. But not reassuring at all.
OK. So, my meeting with Jennings Lang. It was reassuring (I said I was naive.). Jennings was respectful and impressive, so I gradually gained the confidence to open my mouth. We'd gotten to talking about the action elements in my script, and I patted myself on the back for writing such riveting sequences. The future would be full of them. No doubt. Bread and butter. Yo! "Hold on a minute," interrupted Jennings, "I didn't buy your script for the action. I bought it for the love story." The love story! Geez! The mystery of my life and career is why it took me so long to arrive at the truth. In geological time it seems as if it only just happened.
But that morning I'm talking about, the one that began all this, that morning I woke up and I was happy. How did I know, not being used to such a thing, that this was happiness? I didn't at first, but, since I believe in evolution, I knew something was different, yet it felt pretty good, and what I really wanted was to get to my desk in the mountains and write. I didn't have to fight it. There was little struggle. I thought of a book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". A momentary spasm. Happiness? I actually began to feel that I was finally where I was supposed to be, and I did not want to be anywhere else. "I am Writer; Hear me roar!" It's about goddamn time, bub! You do what you do because it is what you do, and it's gotta get done. You've jettisoned the gumption trap, amigo. Now, get with it. Zen and the art, or, as the Marines say, "Just do it". It doesn't need to come from solely a place of anger. It can come from someplace softer. It can come from love, too. Both the love and the anger come from the same deep well anyway.
My current fervent hope is that my Ivy League friends don't heave when they read this.
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