Conjurers

Wouldn't you want to know the rest of Anna's story?!

Good thing No. 2 about facebook™®: It's a de facto forum of storytellers.

Which ain't surprising, since by its nature facebook™® is a megatool for tales.

Daily — hourly! — you and I read tales there heavy and light, grandiose and haiku, vulnerable and vague, from hither and very, very yon.

I'm delighted that this social medium attracts people who love to tell stories, and tell them so well, whether spun from pure invention or dragged heavily from life.

Also not surprising: Many of the tellers hail from the south — the southern United States and the south of England. Something about those places seem to make it a sin not to tell a good story.

Cressida in England, for example, invigorates a familiar game — imagining the lives and purposes of people passing by in the shopping mall or airport — to another level. She has fashioned hilarious and weighty backstories for fellow travelers on her daily train commute, and dispatches the goings-on among the regulars and irregulars, even if all they're really doing is sitting and reading and chatting.

In the world Cressida has created, they are spies and saboteurs, social and professional climbers, and closet clowns, progressing through their sundry struggles in episodic detail that deepens the lives Cressida has forged for them.

If the real people ever found out about these daily stories … or maybe they're really as Cressida describes and she is a journalist on the front lines of British commuter life.

Zane, an English teacher in Mississippi, can describe the day in ordinary heartbeats, can lay his life open about the struggles of family and faith, can deliver Southern satire, and then can let rip a story so raucous I want to ask — but don't know how without offending — "Come on, did that really happen?!"

(He, politely, says it really did.)

What makes the stories so important to me are their power to evoke images — so strong that I have to stop reading and look out the window, watching the pictures build behind my eyes.

And I just have to draw.

Another wonderful storyteller is someone I have swum with (in fact, Cressida and Zane are swimmers: A connection?). She goes by Anna and I imagine a mug of good hot coffee in my hand, across the table from Anna in a shop somewhere, while she tells true tales of her layered life.

Tales that make me feel I have been standing still all my life.

The illustration above comes from one of her stories from childhood. I could not help but draw it.

Anna's dad once gave her opossum babies, she tells, to care for after mama possum was killed. They became her boon companions, hanging on her while she went through life. They even wound their tails over her bicycle handlebars and rode upside down with her.

See? How could you scrub that image from your mind? Why would you ever want to?

While reading that, I had to pick up the nearest black Prismacolor®™ pencil and put down in my sketchbook what I saw building in my head. Then I photocopied the result onto heavy bristol (thanks very much, kindly FedEx Office® technician near my house; no thanks at all to the FedEx Office®™ person in the next nearest office, who didn't even want to try and help), and painted over with watercolor.

It's one of my favorite techniques, because the toner resists water and therefore color, and the blacks remain black.

OK, enough technical talk.

This is about storytellers. I hope Anna turns that story into a book. I hope Cressida turns her tales into a book too; I see many keep asking her to. I hope Zane keeps enriching us with stories of his time and place, so foreign and now so familiar.

Keep telling! I want to keep drawing.

Elegy

Why no silent night,
O Christmas rat, O Christmas rat?
Why thrash so,
so I can hear?
I, the hunter, who wants no prey,
who prays you'd just go away?

Why die so, and salt my suffering?

Up in the rafters you arose, such a clatter!
The hard red, warm, dry wood,
better drum than house,
raised your death rattle to a roar,
a battle royale. 
Such horrible skritches,
the snap of trap having caught
a reindeer by its paws
perhaps.

We were no different,
wanting the same:
Shelter and comfort,
rest from labor, peace from intrusion.
Quiet.

You were no rat of Christmas past,
who fattened in our larder,
mocking our dominion.
You slipped instead in a door disguised,
unseen except by keen eyes, and dined out.

I had to shut that door for good
and hunt you down:
You spread disease and reproduce and make
a mess!

We are no different.

Finally I found you. It took two tries. 
You had not flung far,
but slumped in the cream curds of insulation
under the trap where I set it.
Hiding, even in death.

I gave you this much: Only so much
as a sidelong look at your folded shape
so small and light,
before I bagged you.

And set another trap, peanut butter-baited,
because I am the hunter, and must.

I have sinned.

You sinned too:
         A creature
stirring

Just right

Thanks to my swim buddy Doug, I no longer drink just "lawnmower beers," golden and light, gulped like replenishing water.

Doug's swim persona is a cover: He's really a mad brewer bent on taking over the world. Short of that, he'll settle for bending Northern California taste buds to his will, and teaching a few philistines like me.

I now prefer porters and stouts, which long ago I described as tasting like motor oil. I'll drink IPAs, his favorite, but the piney flavor still stops me. Which, it turns out, is a big problem, because the piney flavor is from hops, the flower of the beer gods.

I'm trying. Doug's trying. It's a work in progress.

I know I've made progress when, for beers after a swim, I ordered Guinness and could not believe how weak it really was compared to the dark beers to which I've built a tasty tolerance.

Could I parse the components of a beer, and tell you the individual flavors that uphold its harmony?  Could I tell you whether this or that beer is, as they say in the business, "hoppy?" No, I could not. Like I said, work to be done.

This art (guoache and transparent watercolor on line-art-photocopied bristol board) for a story on mad brewers juggling multiple varieties within constraints of time, space and budget, reminds me of Doug.

Who, by the way, says "lawnmower beers" have their place. Such as, after mowing lawns.

Cheers!

What I did on my spring break, part II

Spring bloomed along a narrow road near
Barry and DeAnn's home.

The children who could, and sometimes their spouses, have taken their turns looking in on Barry and DeAnn Lewis at their home in in southwestern Oregon the last few months.

I was mostly useless and harmless during my turn. I helped watch TV. I ran errands, shopping for new things to replace broken things, sorting out the recycling. I took the first meager step in getting their little wooden deck ready for a new coat of paint; a task my wife and one of my brothers- and sisters-in-law completed.

I swam each morning in the little nearby lake, and I painted from memory — in watercolor — what I saw at the lake and around the quiet park where my in-laws live. Barry Lewis passed away Saturday.

I already posted one batch of paint sketches from the leather-bound watercolor pad my sister had given me. Here are some of the rest.

Barry and DeAnn's home is a peaceable kingdom, which the park inhabitants built in a seamless transition between civilization and nature. As a result, deer and jackrabbits and turkeys roam through as if nothing had changed of their feeding grounds, as if the humans are just another species uninterested in doing them harm.

Modified golf carts are indispensable in the park.

Neighbors never fail to wave at each other at the park, and at interlopers like ourselves.

The pervasive quiet of the humans allows nature to sing — whistling wind, hammering rain, even, I daresay, the rustle of hawks' wings in the thermals above the spruce forests.

Little Cooper Creek Reservoir ought to be warm by now … it wasn't exactly cool in March when I swam it. Fishing boats are probably thick on the water, forcing me to swim earlier and earlier next I get the chance.

Chill!

Circumstances notwithstanding, 'tain't all that bad …

Beer bash

May (or may not) be for a primer on how not to make beer (or beer bottles). Or not.

Cheers!

It's gonna cost you

When your brewpub springs a leak, better bring the Benjamins.

Just some friendly advice.

Never work a day in your life

Whatever you do, get into it …

What I did on my spring break

Looking in on my mom- and dad-in-law last week in southwest Oregon, I swam each morning in a small lake minutes away.

It was an illegal act.

Though what should be illegal is the low regard the keepers of Cooper Creek Reservoir hold for swimmers.

It's not a swimmers' lake. Oh, it has a swim area. It's a tiny pocket, not quite a cove, poorly promoted and marked, about halfway along the length of the lake, and a hike down a bluff, far from the main parking lot, the one with long parking lanes for fishing boat trailers.

High contrast reminded me of  the lighting for
opening scenes of Snow Falling on Cedars in the San Juan Islands

A gunky rope, fastened once and forgotten, delineates the swim area, where disuse has encouraged a thick forest of plants to reach their bony limbs through the mustardy water to the surface. Children's nightmares spawn here; or would, if any children ever dared swim.

Just beyond the fetid rope, the middle of the lake is given over to personal watercraft. Not that I could imagine Sea-Doo™® and Jet Ski©™ riders rooster-tailing this lake. Too small: At about two miles, Cooper Creek Reservoir is half the length of my home Lake Natoma, and only a couple of hundred yards wide.

Still, a nice how-do-you-do? to hardy swimmers: Don't swim past the rope. Or else. A second boat ramp nearby reinforces the threat.

No personal watercraft rode the water when I swam past the rope last summer, my first time in the lake. Just fishermen. In every cove and finger of the lake's midsection, where the Sea-Doos™® are supposed to roam. Every place I wanted to explore was already occupied, fishermen ensconced in the shadows, their lines blinking in the sun.

This visit I skipped the swim area and went where the fishermen launch, thinking that in the early morning, on the cusp of spring, I'd have the lake to myself. I didn't bother, until after the last morning, to read the signs saying I wasn't to swim that end of the lake.

No one in the superintendent's double-wide off the parking lot ever came out to tell me no. Barely obedient civility ensued.

Even last Sunday, St. Patrick's Day, with three fishing boats in the water, I went unnoticed, invisible, even with my bright orange "butt buoy" bobbing behind me, and a diver's blinking red light clipped to my goggle strap because of the morning mist. The water was maybe 50 degrees, a bit warmer than my home lake, opaque and pea green, mysterious.

I kept to the far alien shoreline just in case, wearing the water like a St. Patrick's Day robe, and the dark rising forests like a mantle, swimming leery that a boat might approach.

Water muddled my message: The forest behind had been clearcut, leaving
the spaces between these trees to shine.

It was stop-and-start as a result. Even when I gathered a swimming rhythm, a high strangling scream in the water made me stop abruptly to see a fishing boat roaring past at 40 mph to the far end of the lake. I don't know; I've always perceived fishing as a contemplative activity.

Since I was bound to do a lot of stopping, I made a game of taking mental images and then painting them back at my in-laws' place in the beautiful leatherbound book of watercolor papers my sister had given me long ago. The book is ever so slowly filling with images, mostly from camping vacations.

These are some of the results, two or three a day, which became a fine way of passing the time to talk or be quiet or listen to golf or spring training baseball or NCAA basketball or The Andy Griffith Show on TV.

Outside my mom- and dad-in-law's quiet forested place …

More to come soon.

All hopped up

Any day I get to     
turn a bud of brewing hops     
into a sentient being …

… boldly if resignedly     
infusing a new     
beer batch …

… sacrificing its     
essential oils for queen     
and country and     
quaffing connoisseur …

… that, let me tell you,   
is an excellent day.