These Are the Champions

 

As I watched Opi, sweet Obi, our cat, old and frail and growing thinner by the day, lick the light stream of water from the kitchen faucet—he likes his water fresh and flowing—I knew he would soon leave us and join Zoom Zoom, the cat who traveled to and from Hawaii with us. Zoom Zoom spent the better part of a year on my desk, getting off only to use the litter box—thank heavens for that. He even ate on the desk. (I had a long, wrap-around-the-corner one.) Those wild pigs that marauded in the night were more than he could handle. A mouse that big? No way.

Zoom Zoom and Opi--a desk can get really crowded.

In Eugene, Oregon, a group of five women, a like-minded group, who had similar spiritual understandings, studied ancient mysteries, went to lunch together, celebrated birthdays, and parties where we dressed up. Someone sang or recited a poem they had written.

Now there is only one—me.

Those women walked the earth; they lived their lives—some lost spouses, some divorced, one remarried—they raised their kids, and developed their place on the Spiritual platform of life. One taught us how to die; she knew it was time, she stopped eating and died.

Joy dropped from them like diamonds.

I will be forever grateful to have known them.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect.  Ray Bradbury wrote of it in a short story. Arrogant time travelers went back to the dawn of life on this planet to see dinosaurs.  One person slipped from the wooden pathway that kept curious onlookers from disturbing the ecological system and accidentally crushed a butterfly. That small step altered history forever.

We don’t know how we affect the people around us—the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the planet.

What did John F Kennedy say?

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

See why there was such hope then? See why the young people rushed from their college studies to join the Peace Corps? See why we believed we could send a man to the moon?

We had excitement. We had hope.

 

Well, it’s been a wet week in Junction City. And I had been putting off painting the Tiny House because it was too hot to paint outside. You could call it Resistance, procrastination, or "I don’t want to do that," but I committed to doing it.  We debated about the color. I couldn’t find one I liked. Okay, we agreed on a color.  I bought the paint, brushes, roller, long handle, and the following day it rained. For three days it rained.

I negotiated with someone to paint it for me, for it has a high peak, and I’m not so steady on a ladder anymore. I’m not ready to join my friends on the other side.

It isn’t painted yet.

And then yesterday, old friends came in the form of BOOKS. Daughter Dear came into my office carrying a box, and asked, “Do you want a box of your old books?

“Sure,” I said, not knowing that they had been buried with my husband’s old research materials and shop supplies.

Wow! What a find!  There's that Orchid lei book my son-in-law gave me for Christmas in Hawaii. I had looked all over for that book, but not in the right place, obviously. There was the Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, translated and edited with commentary by Martha Warren Beckwith.  I excitedly found that book in a bookshop in Hawaii years before we moved there. I knew it existed and never thought I would have one. Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, one of the all-time great writers on writing, and Seabisquit by Laura Hittenbrand. What a writer! The first paragraph in the Preface of Seabisquit has my vote for being the best written:

“In 1938. Near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t the Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

“In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed hotels, and cleaned out restaurants.”—Laura Hiittenbrand.

And you know I love horses.

Diamonds appear all around us while we feel hamstrung by a man who wants to rename New Mexico for heaven’s sake. He’s like a bird who steals other birds’ eggs or an old dog who pees on everything and says, “Mine, mine, mine.”

 

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man.”

We need a champion like Seabiscuit, who helped people out of the depression.

Any volunteers?

I love you guys. 💗Thank you for the honor of your attention.

 

P.S. Why are the cats champions? Because they brought us joy.

How About the Price of Those Eggs?

 

Or...

The good, the bad, and well, what I’m doing.

You know how we have had a long record of wrongs the President and his cohorts have done to harm this country and alienate our allies. Now you know he is changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America; how insulting is that?!

Well, that isn’t what I want to write about.

Notice that we don’t see much about the Epstein files anymore—he has done a good job turning our attention away from those.

I didn’t want to write about those either.

After committing absurdity after absurdity that would take pages to enumerate, and you guys know them already anyway, he is now setting the stage as he did before the last two Presidential elections, making us doubt the legitimacy of any election where he is not the winner. And look what he is doing with AI, portraying himself pumped up, then insulting his opponents. They are as fake as his qualifications for being the Chief of this country.

And the Republican Party is holding on by the skin of its teeth. Don’t you wonder why?

Ha ha. “Money makes the world go round.”

 

Sometimes we need to shut up and let a picture tell the story.

This is from Robert Reich’s Substack post:

$594 million in 2017 from his own endeavors.

$ 2.24 billion after he became president.

How do you like the price of those eggs?

Holy Schmoley!

A Reprieve:

Saturday: My daughter, grandson, and I visited a farm where she chose two baby goats to be Daughter Dear’s in the middle of September. 

I sat on a pile of pallets, and one little female goat climbed onto my lap and slept while Daughter Dear talked with the owner. She will be getting neutered males, gently neutered, using rubber bands. All the females were already reserved.

Neutered males are called wethers, and they are gentle and lovable; we know because we had two when we lived in the forest of Oregon. 

Here are two little females we bottle-fed in Hawaii:

All our goats kept the brush around the house cleared. All were free-range because we had the room. The goats we will get this time will need to be penned. Too bad, but necessary.

We hear goats love to eat blackberry vines, and blackberry vines are taking over the back portion of the property. Husband dear had cut them a few months ago, but the vines loved their hair cutting so much they broke out in song and grew new stalks.

I won’t use poison on them—and they know it.

Goats to the rescue. We have an extra wild area behind the outbuilding behind our backyard we call the Wayback, where I have my office and where I am writing to you right now.

My Saturday lap baby wasn’t for sale. The young man who ran the farm adopted her. She was the third of triplets to be born. Two larger, stronger males were born before her, and the mother said, “That’s enough,” and focused on the strong ones. Her adopted dad takes her into the house at night, and she sleeps on his lap.

I was recharged on the farm. I felt its peacefulness the moment I stepped out of the car.

Back to Writing:

For the last couple of weeks, I had been rewriting old stories, editing, and submitting some to agents with no responses, but I had a brilliant idea.

“You need to write a new book.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, write about things working instead of things not working.”

You know that people loved Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield—it sold a kazillion copies.

You know that people loved Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” It was on the New York Times List for almost two Years.  

So, see, people do like uplifting stories. Yes, yes, I know, those were non-fiction. I am talking about fiction.

It doesn’t matter; it tells me people want to believe in good, to see the world as a safe place, to realize life has its struggles, yet to hold an idea such as W. Clement Stone had when he said, “I believe God is a reverse pessimist; He conspires to do me good.” With fiction, you need conflict, or you have no story—so say the writing gurus. Okay, we’ll see what transpires.  

Then, to give me cause for pause, this week I read a post by an author saying he gave up writing and it almost killed him. He had written a book; it was published and got good reviews, but it didn’t sell.

He was devastated.

He languished in misery. Stopped writing. Took up tennis, and became fanatical with it: lessons, practicing daily,

He didn’t miss writing.

And then it slammed in on him. He did miss it.

So, why am I writing when there are authors far better than me out there?

Because I want to.

So, I began, and for the first 24,000 words it flowed. It felt like the universe was throwing helpers at me.  Amazing people (fictitious) appeared on the road to somewhere.

 

Elevator pitch for “No Working Title:”

“Fifteen-year-old Josie is on the run—no folks, her 92-year-old grandmother has died, so with a GED, a driver’s learner’s permit, and being an emancipated teenager, she and her dog, Zeus, climb into Grandmother’s pickup and aim for parts unknown.”

 

P.S. Josie grows up.

Listen. What’a Ya Think?

“There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear...”

“I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down”

These are the lyrics to this 1966 protest song by Buffalo Springfield, written by Stephen Stills. It describes the tension and paranoia of the Sunset Strip riots. It is titled For What’s It’s Worth, but identified as ‘There’s something happening here.”

“There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong...”

“We better stop, hey, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.”

*I give praise to Leigh Horne’s brilliance as a writer on Substack. She posted the lyrics to that song. Thanks, Horne, you gave me hope that things are a changing.

Yesterday I started to write this blog—I was griping about apps. Apps here, apps there, everywhere an app app.  Even coffee kiosks want you to order using an app. I was complaining because I called a company by phone—hey, the number was listed on their ad, but they asked me if I had an app. I think I did because I use their phone service, but I had never used it and didn’t know my 15-word code. They offered to guide me through it. Sometimes we want guidance. I just wanted to ask a question.

I graciously excused myself, but didn’t feel gracious.

I think I’m becoming a Curmudgeon. I’m fried like half the country.

You know how events, like technology, come along and we are so excited with them, take cell phones. What a wonderful invention. And then we have to limit their use because young people become so addicted it takes over their life.

Once, when I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I took a drive into a forest in Oregon. We had taken a logging load. I had used my folks’ car, and I got it stuck. Try as we might, we couldn’t dislodge that vehicle. So, we walked home—half the night, all the while thinking that any strange sound, a snap or a crunch, was a cougar stalking us.

We made it to a pay phone and called my folks, who still had a phone attached to the wall by a cord. (Everybody did.) My dad drove out with us the following day and got the car out easily. It’s a good thing we remembered where we had left it.

My point?

Sometimes technology is really handy. Except we are left wondering if it will save us or swallow us.

One of my favorite quotes is by the poet William Cowper. “To find the medium takes some share of wit, so tis a mark fools seldom hit.”

We’re impatient, fed up, irritated, and probably intentionally driven crazy. Of course, I am speaking for myself, but it feels right for about half the country. And I see how some people hold so tenaciously to their beliefs that wild horses couldn’t drag it out of them. But then why would wild horses want to drag anything? They want to be free. Human or critter, no one wants to be a slave.

Another take from Horne is her comment on Angie Nixon, whom she didn’t know about, nor did I, until she won the Democratic Primary for the US Senate in Florida.

“Just wow,” said Horne after she listened to Nixon being interviewed. “This young working mother and public-spirited volunteer for social justice just blew me away.”  

“Nixon is a single working mother and is now a stepmother. She is down to earth, smart, informed, and above all unafraid to listen to and otherwise engage with the people she wants to represent in Congress. The fact that she’s black is another plus.” Horne, a certifiably white person, says, "Black people, of necessity and through no choice of their own, have always understood the nature of oppression and their oppressors. And it’s about time we fully recognized that they have a whole lot to teach us about not only how to resist them, but how to take care of themselves and each other on the long, long road to freedom and dignity.”

P.S. William Cowper wrote, among many other poems and songs, “Amazing Grace,” and “The Negro’s Complaint,” 1788.

Once Upon a Jacket

Do you Know Where Patagonia is?

I didn’t when I bought a Patagonia jacket about 25 years ago; I only knew it was from a an exceptional company who were into recycled materials like plastic jugs.

I still have the jacket, and I know where Patagonia is.

It’s a huge part of the Southernmost region of South America, filled with a portion of the Andes Mountains, glaciers, rainforests, lakes, fjords, and deserts.  

The jacket has traveled, not to Patagonia, (I wish) but from Oregon to Hawaii, to California, and back to Oregon. I wore it when I hiked the trails on Hendricks Hill in Eugene, Oregon, with Jewell, my soul-dog, and in the evenings when it got cold in Hawaii.  I wore it while horseback riding in Marcola, Oregon. And I was wearing it when I painted the fifth-wheel trailer we had lived in for two years while our log house was being built. One day that jacket received a smear of what looked like vanilla ice cream on the back. So did our Rottweiler Gabe’s tail.

Neither ever washed off.

Both he and I were on the floor of the fifth wheel. I was painting: a dangerous combination: one dog, one person, one gallon of paint, but hey, only a dog’s tail and a jacket got the brunt of it.

We were living in the fifth wheel while our log home was being constructed some 200 feet away. Living in the forest as we were those 10 years were the greatest, both the two years in the fifth wheel where I oversaw construction daily, and the years that followed living in the log home. I even cooked a Thanksgiving meal while living in that fifth wheel trailer. I learned that if you load an outside grill with briquets, wait for the fire to get blazing hot, put a foil-wrapped stuffed turkey on the rack, close the lid, and go inside to your abode for a night of slumber to rest before preparing for the dinner the next day, you will awaken to a perfectly cooked turkey.

Imagine a video on hyper speed. Logs jumping one on top of one another, a crane named Sweet Marie, gently setting a roof atop those stacked log walls. Sweet Marie, sent to us by our magnificent log home designer, lifting the three skylights into place.

If you ever build a log home, hire a mountain climber; they know how to use ropes and pulleys. That climber, our superb finish carpenter, managed, by himself, to place a 12- foot header log over an open space where a bank of windows would set beneath.  He put those in too.

The horses came after the house was completed, and the freshly painted interior of the fifth wheel went to an elderly couple, for fun times at the ocean about 80 miles away. And when young fillies and one elderly mare were released from their paddock to careen around the log structure we called home, the young ones would gallop up the drive, and one would do a Lipizzaner’s leap, kicking out her heels in mid-air, while flying off the retaining wall.

All this came to me because I read about the company Patagonia this morning. (Anything that takes me back to the forest.)

You know, in turbulent times we need a reprieve from the chaos. And remembering good times allows our poor little nervous systems to calm themselves. People who are into “vibes” say that our remembering puts us back in the same “vibe” where we were when the event occurred. It reminds us that life goes in cycles, and while it appears that the earth and its people are sad, this is one way we can find hope.

All this over a jacket that now has a broken zipper.

Suddenly that jacket has become an icon for me.

And Patagonia, the company, is one reason I have hope for the future.

Here is Yvon Chouinard’s letter from the Patagonia website. Written on September 14, 2022:

“If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have.

“I never wanted to be a businessman. I started as a craftsman, making climbing gear for my friends and myself, then got into apparel. As we began to witness the extent of global warming and ecological destruction, and our own contribution to it, Patagonia committed to using our company to change the way business was done. If we could do the right thing while making enough to pay the bills, we could influence customers and other businesses, and maybe change the system along the way.

We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 201 we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet.

While we’re doing our best to address the environmental crisis, it’s not enough. We needed to find a way to put more money into fighting the crisis while keeping the company’s values intact.

One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed.

Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility.

“Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.

Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.”

 

“Earth is now our only shareholder.”

 

                                                   https://www.patagonia.com/home/

Read Yvon’s letter   Wow, would some geologist tell me how those mountains were made?     A Chilean Gaucho--a skilled horseman, said to be noble, brave and generous--and unruly.

 

A Short Story

 

“Like frog we are asked to know when it is time to refresh, purify, and refill the coffers of the soul.”—Medicine cards, Jamie Sims & David Carson.

 

Hey, everybody, I'm glad to have you here. You are the best to hang in with me through thick and thin, messes and cleanups, mistakes, typos, and all. I try to be good, but miss sometimes.

Okay, this has been my last few days: I took my short story, novella I had called it, off Kindle. I don't know if anyone was reading it anyway. I have no way of knowing, although data might be in the bowels of Amazon for all I know.

Now that's a disgusting thought.

Anyway, I like the story, but it needed work, so I revamped it, went over it word by word, inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, until I gave myself a headache, and decided to give the story away for free. (Hold a bird in an open hand, or frog in this case.)

You might have read something about this story in an earlier blog, but I’m back at it, and as a writer, you know a piece of writing is never perfect. (Once a writing teacher said, “All art is flawed, which gave me hope.)

While reading about the toy frog a child has in this story, I was motivated to buy a plush CoQui frog toy off eBay this week. I had bought one when we lived in Hawaii--can't find the same one. It was cute, and when you squeezed its belly, it said its own name, “Co-Key.”

One day, one of our dogs, then a puppy, got the frog, and “Goodbye, frog.”

(I will post a picture of my frog when it arrives.)

Another idea in this book I got from Hawaii was that someone had offered a green frog toy, prettier than the brown Coquis, with the instructions to carry that frog with you on your adventures, write your adventures in its accompanying book, and give it to another traveler who will add their stories. It’s a fun idea, but those things fall flat and grind to a halt, and you never hear of them again.

Here, if you wanted, you could pretend that you are carrying a frog and a journal, and write down something funny, inspirational, or profound. We would love to read one or more of your gems.  Keep going for the link.

 

“Frog sings the songs that bring the rain and make the road dirt more bearable.”

—Medicine Cards, Jamie Sims & David Carson.

(My inspiration for using the Frog’s Song in a couple of titles.

I will post a picture of my frog when it arrives.

You may have heard me talk about the CoQui frogs of Hawaii before (an accidental import from Puerto Rico)—they are only about the size of your thumbnail, eat bugs and insects, and say their own name “CoQui,” which is to call a mate.  In mass, they can be loud, causing some to call them noise pollution, but that was not my experience. I thought they were sweet, and from a distance, innocent me who didn’t know they existed, thought they were birds.

All this is leading up to my presentation. Ta Da! In my effort to be transformational, I am presenting this short story, 5,850 words.

 

When you are in Hawaii, and you find a sign alongside the Highway saying “Voted the best café by my mother,” with an arrow pointing to a road through the cane grass. Take it.

You will bump along a lava-encrusted road with grass slapping the sides of your vehicle until it opens to a sandy beach beside a café. Above the entrance of the café, on its thatched roof, is a sign that reads, The Frog’s Song Café’. Go in, have the best sandwich you have ever tasted, and accept their invitation to a campfire at the beach, where you will find…

Well, I’m not going to tell you; read the book.

 

Click for Page and to read the book