Wooden Bookmarks: the Ken Kesey edition

I make my home in La Honda, California.  My friend, the poet Terry Adams, also makes his home in La Honda. Terry's home is the cabin where Ken Kesey hung out with the Merry Pranksters and the Hells Angels, where Kesey conceived of the Acid Tests, and from which Kesey launched the bus "Further."  Terry bought the cabin directly from Kesey after the place had been neglected, abandoned, vandalized, and—the final insult—flooded by the rampaging La Honda Creek, which knocked the cabin off its foundation and filled it with mud.

With a respect bordering on reverence, Terry rebuilt the cabin, maintaining as much of the original structure (and psychedelic interior paint) as possible.

Some of the original boards had lost their structural integrity and couldn't be re-used in the cabin. Sliced, though, they make a great bookmark.  With the help of James Adams (no relation to Terry), here are some  samples.

I've got lumber from Ken Kesey's original floor and from his old water tank.  Who knows what kinds of Kool-Aid splashed onto the floorboards to be absorbed into the wood fibers?  And as for what was in that water tank, I can only speculate.

Warning: if you receive one of these bookmarks, DO NOT CUT IT INTO TABS AND INGEST.  I am not responsible if you feel a sudden urge to rip off your clothes and paint your body with paisley designs.

The tabs—er, bookmarks—will be offered as incentive rewards in my upcoming 99 Jobs  Kickstarter campaign.

Wooden Bookmarks

For my upcoming Kickstarter campaign, I was brainstorming with James Adams, La Honda's master wood craftsman, about incentive rewards that I could offer to people who make Kickstarter donations.  We were talking in his woodshop, setting our beer bottles on top of his table saw, when I had the idea: "How thin can you cut a piece of wood on that table saw?  Could we make a bookmark?" 

James cut some samples.  A bit of sanding, a bit of finish, an experiment with freehand writing using a router, and — wow:

James has salvaged all kinds of local La Honda timber.  When a tree falls, James is there.  He has black acacia, dark walnut, fir, maple, redwood (of course).  Maybe that redwood came from Ken Kesey's old cabin.  James even has a cypress tree from Neil Young's ranch.

So I'll be offering bookmarks as incentive rewards on Kickstarter, starting next week.  Put a little lumber between your pages.  Own a piece of legendary La Honda timber.

Lit Night in La Honda

Tonight is Lit Night at Cafe Cuesta in swingin' downtown La Honda, California.  I'll be reading at the open mic, along with Terry Adams and whoever wanders in off the street.

It's always a fun evening.  Starts at 7 pm, usually over before 9 (hey, this is a working town).  Come early for dinner.

Malcolm (chef at Cafe Cuesta) will be making gnocchi.  Beer and wine, as usual, at the bar.  

Shirts not required.

James Adams: Local Salvage

James Adams, cabinetmaker, has been accumulating trees for a while.  Not entire trees, exactly, but the rough-sawn lumber milled by woodcutters around La Honda.  From Con Law, there was a walnut tree.  From Orril Fluharty, a pine.  From Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, a cypress.  Here and there, a bay laurel, a black acacia.  Trees that were sick or in the way or felled by a landslide.  Some of the wood, such as the black acacia, was of questionable value.  The lumber was salvage, and local, and would need to dry out for a few years.  “It was pure speculation,” James said.  “I had no idea.”

One day James, needing a new guide for his table saw, grabbed a rough scrap of  black acacia.  First he sanded it.  What he saw made him sand more, then apply a coat of finish.  “It just popped,” he said.  “It looked like koa, only better.”  (Koa is a highly valued hardwood from Hawaii and is a member of the acacia genus.)

What began as speculation became fine furniture, such as a cabinet James made for Russ Haines, a La Honda resident.  In this detail, the top is claro walnut while the support is black acacia:

“I’m a big fan of James’ work,” Russ says.

In a recent project, James built the kitchen cabinets for Maggie Foard, the well-known goat farmer and cookbook author.  Maggie already knew she wanted to use salvage.  Architect Lori Hsu drew the layout.  James chose details of how to integrate.  

 

Some of the wood, such as the panels of these cabinets, came from an ancient fence on the Driscoll Ranch:

Befitting their origin at a working cattle ranch, the fence boards included a few bullet holes (apparently not employed in the cabinet panels).

Under the big kitchen sink, James placed posts on which he carved bun feet and fleur-de-lis:

Working on a smaller scale, James makes sets of coasters from hard and softwoods obtained locally.  From left to right, on top are walnut and bay laurel (with a few insect holes to assure authenticity); on the bottom are black acacia and pine:

For another project, James is gathering driftwood at San Gregorio Beach.  Speaking of his finds, he can joke or wax poetic:  “Many pieces have spalting, a network of black lace-like patterns randomly suffusing the grain, acquired as the fallen wood lay on the forest floor before having been washed to the sea.  There’s one piece of redwood with stunning reds and blacks like shaded fire and smoke, and harder than Chinese algebra.  I never knew redwood could be that hard.”

Like many craftsmen, James’ language belies the popular image of the uneducated woodworker.  His father taught English at Palo Alto High and College of San Mateo.  From a childhood in Menlo Park, James came to the Haight Ashbury.  He says, “I bummed around, did my hippy thing.”  One day, he pursued a job listing for a cabinetmaker’s helper, which turned out not as expected:  The cabinetmaker wanted somebody to paint his house.  Needing the money, James took the housepainting job and eventually eased his way into various cabinet shops.  From “bang bang” shops turning out a cabinet every fifteen minutes to classical mortise and tenon work, from the Hard Rock Cafe to roulette wheels for the East Palo Alto mafia, from the Atomic Energy Commission to NASA (he built a cabinet to display a moon rock), “I had kind of a history working for somebody six to twelve months, catching up on the technology, then moving on.”

Along the way, James moved to the relative peace and quiet of La Honda, where he has lived for three and a half decades.  For many of those years, he was the town’s long-running multi-league soccer coach.  With age, he says, “I’ve hung up my cleats.” 

James is an astronomy freak who owns a collection of telescopes, including a home-assembled refractor.  On occasional nights he has set up the eight foot long telescope in the school parking lot and shared it with anybody in town who wanted to drop by.  A lifetime enjoyment of science fiction has encouraged his viewing of planets and deep space nebulae.  He is also something of a raconteur, telling tales of riding a Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle or participating in psychedelic "research."

James lost his house in the recent financial meltdown.  Feeling snookered by his mortgage company, James became a picketer outside Chase Bank, much to the institution’s displeasure.  Partly disabled by arthritis, he is engaged in salvage of the most local sort: his own life.  Currently he lives in a trailer and engages in part-time cabinetry.

In spite of financial hardship, James says, “I love the fun of woodworking.  Things fun don’t pay as well.” 

These days, he seeks creative challenges.  Inspired by legendary craftsman George Nakashima (and Nakashima's book The Soul of a Tree), James seeks a natural style that gives an idea of what the original tree was like.

Right now, among James’ projects are a commission to build a trestle table without hardware but with a leaf.  He’s also  designing a steampunk guitar. 

Creative challenges, local salvage.  As James wrote:  “Discoveries.  In found pieces of trees, beauty in flotsam littering a beach, in the jetsam of discarded pieces of wood.  If only there was some way to apply this principle to our day-to-day experiences…”  Which of course, there is.

(The photos of the Foard kitchen are used by permission of Lori Hsu, architect, who retains all rights.)

365 Jobs: Paddy O'Sullivan

Saturday, September 29, 1979 to Sunday, July 22, 1991

On a Saturday afternoon in 1979, I was working outdoors with a pick and shovel, making steps out of railroad ties on the hillside below my house.  A jolly man staggered slowly up the driveway.  With long whitish hair and beard, he looked like Santa Claus.  Holding out one arm, he said, "Can I lend you a hand?"

I stared down at that arm.  He had no hand.

"Oops, sorry," the man said.  "I meant the other hand.  This one was eaten by a tiger."

Paddy at Apple Jack's, 1978

That was my introduction to Paddy O'Sullivan (Padraig or Padreic or Padreac — I've seen it spelled each of those ways).  On that particular day, he actually helped me move one railroad tie before he realized that I wasn't a soft touch for cadging a drink.  

Paddy was by nature a performer.  He claimed that his career began at the age of four as a character in the "Our Gang" movies, tipping his hat on film with the same gesture as he tipped at age sixty-four.  Whether or not he truly started as a Little Rascal, he became a bigger one.
 
He could show you a newspaper article from 1957 with the headline MAN HATCHES OSTRICH EGG.  That man was Paddy.



His mother had a theatrical career, or so he said.  He had a pair of pistols called the Naked Ladies.

In San Francisco Paddy had been living with the poet Bob Kaufman in North Beach, just across the street from City Lights Bookstore.  Kaufman was an improvisational jazz poet who would riff and recite on sidewalks, even sticking his head into people's cars.

Bob and Paddy both were in a downward spiral.  A young woman who had befriended Paddy finally got him out of there, drove him to La Honda, and set him loose here the way people abandon dogs and cats hoping somebody will adopt them. Those dogs and cats often wind up on my doorstep, so it's fitting that Paddy appeared there as well.  Don't blame the young lady, by the way.  She gave Paddy "a couple years' worth of re-invigoration," as she put it.  "He had really crawled into a shell when I met him.  He gave me a couple of years of entertainment, and that's what he was, basically, all his life, an entertainer."

For a while in La Honda, Paddy was a squatter in Ken Kesey's old cabin, which was vacant, floorless, and basically unlivable at the time. Then he rented a garage and promptly got kicked out. He ended up occupying a trailer below my house.  The trailer was owned by a man who was preparing for an invasion by space aliens.

 



Paddy wore a cape.  He published a thin chapbook of poetry: Weep Not My Children.  Though he'd lived for years at the world center of beatnik culture, he insisted he was not a Beat.  Similar to Bob Kaufman, Paddy would recite anywhere at any time.  He once barged into a private birthday party, stood on the table with the cake, and recited wretched poems until he was finally shoved out.

 Paddy spent most of his days and nights at the bar in Apple Jack's where a photo of him, full color, framed, hung on the wall.  Claude and Kayla, the owners, kept a benevolent eye on him.

The last time I interacted with Paddy was in 1991.  A hot July night, sleeping with the windows open, around midnight I heard cursing from the street below my house.  At 5 a.m. I heard more cursing — and a voice crying "Would somebody please help me?"  Outside, at the base of those railroad tie stairs, I found Paddy lying tangled in blackberry vines: confused, lost, unable to stand.  He'd been there since midnight.  "Why did you fill my home with brambles?" he said.

"You're not in your trailer," I said.  "You're in my blackberry patch."  

I couldn't raise him to his feet by myself, but a patrol car pulled up.  The sheriff's deputy said, "Is it Paddy again?"

The deputy stood over Paddy and said, "You're getting too damn old for this shit."

Paddy said, "I only had a couple of beers.  I think I had a heart attack.  Flutters.  There's a respirator in my trailer.  Just take me home."

"Paddy," the deputy said, "last week you got lost in your own woodpile.  I'm calling an ambulance."

In retrospect, I'm amazed that Paddy helped me move that one railroad tie back in 1979.  I must be a pretty good contractor to have gotten that much work out of him.  He'd been hoping for a beer, but I had none to give.

Paddy could only be happy at the center of a three ring circus where he could read his poetry while wearing his cape and hat.  La Honda is a one ring circus, but it was the best he could find. 

Paddy, I'm a little late, but this beer's for you.

365 Jobs: Storms (Three) Like a Moody God

Saturday, December 3, 1983

From a deep sleep I awake in darkness.  The power has gone out.  I don't know why, but whenever the electricity stops flowing in the night, I immediately wake up.  Maybe it's the sudden complete lack of light.  Or of background hum.  Or of magnetic force fields, to which we are subconsciously tuned.  Me, I'm betting on the force field theory, but when I say so, my friends always roll their eyes.

Through blackness I hear trees bending in the wind.  In the redwood forest, the sound is a rush: Rush-h-h.  Rush-h-h.  I throw on a bathrobe and step outside, barefoot, with a flashlight.  Rush-h-h.  Rush-h-h.  Groan…  

Yikes.  In the dark a tree is falling — that sickening sliding accelerating sound of branch against branch— and I'm standing out here.  Where is it?  Desperately I whip the flashlight beam in a circle above me.

WHUMP. 

Below the house, across the street.  An old redwood, diseased, damaged long ago by roadwork.  It brought down a utility pole.  A live wire dances, sparking.

Inside I call PG&E and the Fire Brigade, then return outside and place orange cones that I'd collected for soccer practice.  I stand in the road, flashlight bobbing, until the fire crew arrives.

Dawn finds me sitting at the table with two lit candles and a cup of steaming coffee, surrounded outside the window by sequoia, dozens thrusting at the sky.  My hand still shakes as I write:

Like a Moody God

Last night
when you threatened to kill me
I realized how much
I love you.
To you I am just another little beast
among the chipmunks and chickadees
who you nourish with seed
as you feed my spirit.
In your height you create the fog
and then drink it.
You are a lesson in forgiveness
as you shrug off abuse
for centuries;
in wrath
as you will finally drop devastation
with a final groan,
no apology.

365 Jobs: Storms (Two) Helping the Next Guy

Saturday, January 22, 1983
 
In this endless El Niño winter there's a savage storm today, raining buckets, trees bending and roaring.  A roadside ditch is blocked.  Water is gushing across the roadway, down a hill and into my neighbor Mark's kitchen.  He's out in the rain with a pick and shovel, desperately trying to clear the culvert where the water is supposed to stream under somebody's driveway.  Mark looks like a madman plastered with rain. 

I bring out my six foot steel bar, which is pointed at one end like a sixty-pound spear.  Mark brings the rod over his head and then smashes it down again and again, poking holes through the driveway under which the culvert passes.  I shovel debris.  The blockage is cleared - and a third of the driveway is destroyed, stabbed to shreds by Mark and his heavy spear.

From helping Mark, I'm late leaving for work.  My son Jesse, age six, wants to come along, just for the ride.  He sits beside me in the cab of the truck listening to the radio as we drive an hour and a half through lashing gusty squalls across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and then north to Albany, where I replace my brother's water heater.  To Jesse, my brother is Uncle Ed, a strange and wild man who looks a lot like me. 

Driving home, before crossing the Bay we stop at an Arco station that makes me feel like a criminal — cash in advance, attendant behind bulletproof glass — reminding me why I live in the country.  By the time we're coming down our mountain close to home, the storm is nearly over.  A mist hangs in the air and clings to the windshield.  Coming around a blind curve on La Honda Road, I have to swerve to avoid a landslide.  I stop, pull out flares so the next driver will be warned.  I show Jesse how to light them:  Cool!  Like roman candles. 

Falling boulders, trees down, wires down — a winter norm.  In these hills, everybody carries flares.  You put them out not to help yourself but to warn the next guy.  We're all in this together.  Jesse absorbs this lesson as you absorb a way of life, without my speaking a word.

Back home in front of Mark's house, water rushes down the gutter and through the chopped-up culvert, heading where it belongs.  To protect Mark's house from the next flood, the La Honda Volunteer Fire Brigade — men and women in bright yellow slickers — are stacking sandbags along the road.  Volunteers.  Jesse says we should go out to help.  So we do. 

.
.
.
(Last year I posted another story about that same El Niño winter.  You can find it here.)

365 Jobs: Storm (One) A Small Spot of Light

Tuesday, November 30, 1982

Every winter, storms slam into the Pacific Coast.  Trees crash.  Land oozes.  Roads close.  These are the days when you realize what it means to live in a rural area such as La Honda. 

The winter of 1982-83 was an El Niño event.  (El Niño occurs when the Pacific Ocean is unusually warm, causing severe weather.)  It began in November with a hurricane that devastated Hawaii and then, somewhat diminished, struck the West Coast. 

At that time my children were ages six, four, and an infant.  I was remodeling a house on the Stanford campus, where the storm was simply a wet inconvenience.  They had electricity.  They could drive to the shopping center without dodging fallen trees.

After the day's work, driving home into the mountains, I remember fierce waves of wind.  Hail.  Thunder and lightning.  At home we had two Aladdin Lamps, four oil lamps, and various candles.  A camp stove for cooking.  We slept huddled together in front of the fireplace for warmth.  By firelight, I wrote this:

Hurricane Eva

The floorboards tremble.
Branches pelt the roof.
Rain blows under the door.
The phone, dead.
The electricity will be out for days.
I build a fire, light lanterns named Aladdin,
heat water in the fireplace,
play guitar, fetch wood, buy ice,
help the neighbor start her car.
My house from outside is a small spot of light
in a dark storm.
The power is out
but we are not powerless.

Lit Night in La Honda

On the last Wednesday of every month, we hold Lit Night in La Honda.  We meet in the bar of the Cafe Cuesta (formerly Sullivan's) for beer, wine, dinner and audience-friendly words.  I'll be reading as usual, along with a mix of pro and amateur writers.  Poetry (including the always-popular cowboy poetry), amazing stories, and the occasional one-person drama.  For the folks in Australia and Slovenia, I'm giving you extra advance notice this time.  Y'all come!

365 Jobs: Plumbing and LSD

August, 1987

Stony Ridge was an isolated, quiet, hardscrabble ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  You'd never find it unless you had good directions.  At the end of a long, twisting, somewhat hair-raising driveway you came to a gorgeous little valley, rocky and rugged and utterly private, with an ugly stucco ranch house.  A Stanford professor owned it with plans to someday retire there.  Meanwhile he rented the place to some Stanford MBA students who seemed incongruous in the wild west setting. 

The house was unfurnished.  Apparently all the Stanford MBA students required at the time was a mattress, desk, and gigantic stereo equipment.  They decorated the walls with pictures of themselves bare-chested riding motorcycles and singing rock and roll.  No doubt these men are now Silicon Valley moguls of the highest rank. 

When the stereo was off, the only sounds were the scuttling of lizards and the clicking of computer keyboards.

For several years I repaired the ranch house and surrounding outbuildings, never meeting the owner who spoke to me by phone and mailed me checks.  The house was a dusty broken-down disaster that had previously been maintained by an 80-year-old legendary mountain handyman.  I removed the man's deadly bootleg electric system which had tapped into the service entrance before the breaker box.  I patched the funky water system and tried to keep everything running.

Eventually I met the owner, Bob, who wanted to make the small barn livable so he could use it on weekends and eventually retire there.  Part of the barn would be a sculpture studio. 

On a hot morning in August I was installing a sewer line from the barn to join the main septic line from the house.  Olen Ring, a fellow La Hondan, was operating a Bobcat.  Olen was backhoeing  the ditch while I followed along with a shovel, communicating with hand-signals and head nods. 

After Olen departed, Bob invited me to join him for lunch.  He said he'd been watching me and, he said, "I like the way you work."

"I try to get it right," I said.

"I mean I like the way you synchronized with that backhoe guy.  How you communicate.  How you visualize."

All we'd done was plan a ditch and dig it.  I selected Olen because he always had a precise, gentle touch on a Bobcat. 

Bob showed me the sculpture studio, which was basically a stable with a window.  He was working with clay, shaping a nice little nude.  No model.

Over bowls of soup Bob questioned me and pried out the fact that I was a published writer, something I rarely revealed to clients.  My most recent novel, Frank City Goodbye, was about the birth of the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.  Upon learning this, Bob peppered me with questions.  How did I know so much about the hippies?  Had I been there?  Did I take LSD?  Did I hang out with Ken Kesey in La Honda?  What did I know about the origins of Kesey's LSD experience?

I answered as best I could.

Bob's wife was there, too, spooning soup and looking more and more uncomfortable.  Finally she said, "Disclose yourself, Bob."

He disclosed.  Bob had been one of the researchers at the Menlo VA hospital where Ken Kesey was given LSD.  Bob knew more about the whole story than I did.  He attended the Trips Festival, met Timothy Leary, etc.  But he’d been an academic and seemed to know little about how it felt to be young then.  That was my area of expertise: being young then, being a seed blown by the wind of the Sixties.  Bob was fascinated at how I'd taken root in La Honda, writing books, raising family, working with my body as much as my head.

I told Bob I’d quit writing.  At the moment I couldn’t juggle it anymore with work and raising kids. 

"I've been through the same thing," he said.  "It comes back."  He meant the sculpting, the nice little nude.

Robert McKim

As I found out later, Bob — Professor Robert McKim — was an engineer and industrial designer.  He created the Product Design major and the graduate-level Joint Program in Design at Stanford, an interdisciplinary program that combines mechanical engineering, art, math, physics and psychology.  Dean Hovey, one of the first graduate students in the program, said, “Bob McKim was trying to create little Leonardo da Vincis, people who were skilled in many things and diverse enough to create a whole product."

As a professor Bob had become frustrated that his engineering students couldn't draw or, in his words, "think visually."  He searched for ways to open their minds to visual problem-solving, which led him to the LSD research at the Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital.  

In a book called Altered States of Consciousness, Bob co-authored a chapter (originally published in 1966) describing volunteers — engineers, physicists, mathematicians — who were trying to solve problems after a 200 microgram dose of LSD supplied by the U.S. government.  (Oh how I wish there were a followup study of those volunteers, many years later.)
  

Bob moved on to other, non-drug methods of encouraging visual thinking and wrote a textbook on the subject: Experiences in Visual Thinking.

Thirty-some years later, by coincidence my son Jesse took a few of those classes pioneered by Robert McKim at Stanford.  By then, Bob had retired.  

Bob was a visionary in his field and an inspiration to a generation of designers, including the founders of IDEO, a world-famous design firm in Palo Alto where in the long strange trip of life, my son Jesse now works.  For the record, Jesse has never taken LSD.  But I'm sure Bob would appreciate Jesse's work methods, just as he admired mine.

As a handyman you never know what connections you'll make in the dusty backroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. 

365 Jobs: Welcome to La Honda

Drawing by Denis Shaw

August 11, 1980

In 1980 I'm new to La Honda, but already word is getting out that I'm a handyman and that - lo and behold - I actually return phone calls.  A pipe is leaking outside my neighbor Cindy's cabin.  She asks me to fix it. 

I can't find a shutoff valve where Cindy's water line comes out of the main. 

"Typical," Cindy says.  "I'll call Bob."  Cindy explains to me that Bob is the town of La Honda's one-man Department of Water, Road Repair, Swimming Pool Maintenance and Public Works.

After the call, Cindy tells me, "Bob says the shutoff valve is just four inches from the water meter."

"I can't find the water meter."

Cindy calls Bob again.  She rolls her eyes and tells me, "Bob says the water meter is just four inches from the shutoff valve."

Cindy calls Steve, the former owner of the cabin.  Steve comes over on his Harley and leaves it idling while he pokes around with his boot.  "The meter used to be right there," he says.  "It's gone."

"What could've happened to it?" I ask.

Steve shrugs.  "Welcome to La Honda," he says, and he rides off on his Harley.

I patch the leak with a pipe clamp.  It will work for a while.

In the afternoon I go to the swimming pool.  La Honda has this nice old pool that was built in the 1920's.  The filter system (maintained by Bob) is barely functional, but that's a different story.

In the shallow end, a little black girl is playing on an inner tube.  Three white boys are taunting her.  "Hey Crackerlips," one boy says.  The other boys join in calling her Crackerlips.  The girl ignores them.  

I've never heard this particular racial epithet before, but I know one when I hear one.

Several mothers are lying nearby.  All of them are white.  Nobody is doing anything.

I grab one boy by the shoulder.  He seems to be the ringleader.  "Hey!" I shout.  "Cool it with those names!  They’re ugly.  She has just as much right to be here as you guys, and if anybody has to leave it will be you guys." 

They cool it. 

But why did I have to do it?  I wasn’t even the closest, and I wasn’t in charge of the boys or the pool. 

One of the mothers rolls over and smiles at me.  "That's Gracie," she says, pointing at the little girl.  "She eats a lot of crackers.  She always has crumbs on her face."

"Oh.  I'm sorry if I—"

"They shouldn't tease her.  Her mother's gone all day.  I try to watch out for her, but she doesn't wash her face, and then she jumps into the pool."

A minute later in the shallow section Gracie slides out of the inner tube, bounces off the bottom, comes up on the deep side of the divider rope, and takes off in a splashy dogpaddle toward the far end of the pool.  The mother who had spoken to me says, "Oh shit."  She jumps up and runs along the side of the pool. 

The lifeguard is on her feet.  The pool - everybody there - even the teasing boys - become absolutely quiet.  All eyes watch as one small body in a very large pool makes slow splashy progress across the deep end. 

Gracie's movements lose whatever grace they had.  She paddles, panicky now, desperate, but she is still moving forward. 

At last she reaches the far end of the pool.  Clinging to the ladder, Gracie looks up at the mother reaching down to her and says in a small but firm voice:  “I need to work on that.”

In the evening, Frank comes over to my house.  Frank's a mason.  I called him six months ago about doing some tuckpointing on my chimney.  He says, "I guess I shoulda come over but I forgot."  He pauses, scratching his ear.  “That is, I didn’t forget forget, but I 'forgot.'  If you know what I mean.” 

He means, he remembered but he was busy.  And of course he never called me.  That wouldn't be the La Honda way.

That was 1980.  La Honda is less of a rural backwater these days.  The citizens, including children, are as feisty as ever.  The local tradesmen have learned how to use the telephone - and the internet.  The town maintenance department is now run competently and professionally ... by a prankster poet.     

My Little Town

(Note: I wrote this in 1982.  Mostly, it's still true today.)

My Little Town

In my little town
dogs sleep in streets
and act affronted
when you drive on the bed.

My little town allocates resources
in proportion to priorities.
We have one school
two churches
and three bars.

Every summer some flatlander
driving through my little town
misses the curve or tries to pass,
and dies with his head
through broken glass.

The teenage boys in my little town
gather by the pond after dark
with big engines and little cans of beer.
They strip the Stop sign, stone the streetlight,
tear down a fence.  But at least
we know where they are.

In my little town some girls keep horses
in their back yards.  Above the dogs and surly boys,
they cruise on saddles astride a big beast,
dropping opinions as they meet.

There are more children than grownups
in my little town,  more dogs than children,
more trees than dogs,
more fleas than trees,
more slugs . . .
    and more slugs . . .
             and more slugs . . .

Standard equipment
in my little town:
    a chainsaw
    a pickup
    a kerosene lamp.

On the Fourth of July
the whole  little town
has a big picnic.

There is never a line
at our little post office.

The ducks on the pond in my little town
waddle across the road each afternoon
a milling, quackling crowd
round the door of the yellow house
where the lady gives them grain.
Mallards and barnyard hybrids
and one mean old bird that looks like a cross
between a turkey and a troll.  When it rains,
they swim on the road or sleep there, like dogs.
We had a goose that attacked cars
but somebody ate him.
We had a black swan, lovely, mean, aloof,
but somebody stole him.
We have great blue herons, sometimes,
if nobody shoots them;
and coots, always.
Beneath the surface are
bluegill, Budweiser, and bass.

From mountain streams the water
in my little town
tastes like algae and old pipes.

On a cold morning
the woodsmoke of stoves
clings to the redwoods like fog
in my little town.

We hold town meetings
where a hundred-odd cranks and dreamers
grope for a grudging consensus.

We cling to the side of our mountain
building homes, making babies
beneath trees of awesome height.
We work too hard, play too rough,
and sense daily something sweet about living
in our little town.

365 Jobs, Day 177: Septic Dog Karma

Monday, June 26, 1995

So a lawyer calls me asking about a house that I repaired, a house just two doors down the street from my own.  The house has been sold.  The buyer is suing the seller for fraud and nondisclosure.  The lawyer's voice is precise.  Immediately I sense the chill, the threat of large sums of money changing hands.  Hopefully not my money.

"I understand you did plumbing in that house."

"Yes."

"Did you install a graywater line?"

"Yes." 

A graywater line is a way to dispose of wash water - never toilet water - by a system less elaborate, and much less expensive, than a septic tank.  They're not allowed in San Mateo County, but lots of rural folk install them because they combine two good things: they dispose of soapy waste, and they water the plants.  Generally, the county inspectors pretend not to see them.

"When you installed it, were the owners aware that it was illegal?"

"Yes.  I told them.  I installed it at their request.  And then later I noticed that they tore it out.  They said it was smelly.  And then even later I noticed they'd restored it themselves.  So whatever is there now is something they did themselves.  They never talked to me about it.  I'd stopped working for them by that time."

"Why did you stop?"

"They stopped hiring me." 

"Do you know why?"

"I raised my rates.  They were ... uh ... frugal."  Jake was a schoolteacher who tended to stray from the curriculum; Mindy was a seamstress who sold her handmade tie-dye dresses at flea markets.  Both of them tended to engage in wishful thinking.  Mindy liked poetry and birds.  Jake liked poetry and college football.  I'm sure they had no money saved up beyond the equity that had accumulated in their house.  They hired me when I was first starting out, paying me as I was learning on the job, and to them I'm grateful for that.

Like most of La Honda, their cabin had been built in the 1930's when the town was a summer home community.  During the hippie invasion of the 1960's, Mindy and Jake had bought a place and converted it - whimsically - into a year-round dwelling.  Unfortunately for the plumbing, the cabin was at the bottom on a sloping piece of land.  As a summer home, lightly used, maybe the location wasn't a problem, but as a full-time residence, it was a drainage disaster.

One more thing: they had a dog named Gandalf who was the bad boy of the neighborhood.  One time when he had my dog in a death grip, I broke a two by four over Gandalf's back.  Another time after Gandalf had broken into his house and impregnated his dog, my next-door neighbor wanted to borrow my rifle and shoot him.  Another time Gandalf attacked a seeing-eye dog  in Golden Gate Park - and Jake not only didn't intervene but also pretended he didn't know whose dog it was.

The people who had bought the house were a nice hardworking couple with a young boy.

"Do you remember the layout of their house?"

"Yes."

"Did you install a downstairs bathroom?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure.  They asked me once, but I told them their downstairs was below the level of the septic tank, so the only way they could drain the bathroom would be with a septic pump which the county wouldn't allow.  And it would cost more than they would want to pay anyway.  And even if they could somehow get the waste to the septic tank there was no place for an additional leach line which they would need.  In fact, there's no place for any leach line for that cabin and I have no idea what happens to their septic water and I bet they have no idea either."

"So you have nothing to do with the downstairs bathroom?"

"There's a downstairs bathroom?"

"We'll be in touch."

I would never hear from that lawyer again.  Forces of karma - and civil law - would grind Mindy and Jake to bits.

They were irresponsible.  But I'd always sort of liked them.

365 Jobs, Day 172: Cracking the Pool (Part Two)

June, 1994

(This is Part Two of a story that began yesterday.  Part One is here.)

In March of 1994 the rainy season lingered, but you can't wait forever.  The maintenance man ran the backhoe around the perimeter of the pool.  We needed a trench three feet deep.  He could excavate four of the pool's five sides, but one 70 foot side was up against a steep slope and would have to be dug out by hand.  Volunteer hands.  I spent two entire weekends in April shoveling muck with the help of some tireless volunteers including an astrophysicist who specialized in "space plasma."  Meanwhile we had unearthed an underground creek on one side of the pool, which had to be channeled and diverted through a culvert.

Misty rains continued.  The ground was still saturated, especially on the side with the underground creek.  We drained the pool half-way.  On weekends in May when it wasn't raining too hard, I cut and assembled and glue-welded six-inch PVC pipe all the way around the pool with short one-inch pipe runs to the water inlets, for which I would hammer-drill holes in the concrete sides.  Then I repeated the process for a separate drain system, hammer-drilling holes through the upper lip of the pool to the gutters.  You'd normally hire big burly muscle guys for this kind of job.  I was the thin muscle guy, but I didn't dare delegate the work - it had to be right.  At night I slept like the dead.

Normally, the pool would open on Memorial Day Weekend.  This year at the end of May we had a 3/4 empty pool surrounded by a muddy ditch and white PVC pipes.  In the remaining water were chunks of concrete, a layer of mud, and clouds of wiggling tadpoles.  Worried people were asking, "Will the pool open this year?"

I would answer, "I hope so."  I spent that entire gorgeous sunny Memorial Day Weekend alone in the ditches at the pool soldering copper, welding plastic pipe, and patching pool walls.

In early June we backfilled the ditches with mucky mud.  We drained all but a foot of water and mud from the tank.  The ground was drying somewhat, except on the side with the underground creek.

On a weekend - Saturday, June 11 - John Lindstrom rounded up a dozen volunteers to tie steel rebar, set dobies, and shovel base rock in preparation for pouring a new concrete deck.

On Sunday, June 12, the volunteers continued while I ventured into the tank, pants rolled up to my knees, to pump tadpoles out of the bottom, which is 8 feet below ground level.  As I'm working I hear a slow crackling sound.

I look up.  Above me one 60-foot section of pool wall is bulging inward with a spreading network of cracks.  It's the side with the underground creek.

For a moment, I think I'll be buried alive.  I scramble out of the tank as the crackling continues.  We race to run a fire hose from a nearby hydrant.  Our best hope of avoiding utter collapse is to refill the tank, providing counter pressure.

Only a trickle comes out of the hose.  It's a hot Sunday afternoon in La Honda when everybody is gardening.  Our water system is as antiquated as our swimming pool.  There is no pressure.

I dash home for lumber.  Returning, I build a wooden brace 30 feet long from one wall to the other, wedging the cracking wall in place.  Then I have to take my son to a soccer game.  Some things are more important than the imminent collapse of a swimming pool.

When I return a few hours later, the fire hose is pouring a steady stream into the tank and somebody has vacuumed the rest of the tadpoles and mud.  One crack is an ugly inch and a half across, running from top to bottom, spilling raw mud into the tank.  But it's stabilized, at least for now.  Standing knee-deep in water, I apply quick-dry patching compound to the fissures.  The compound has no structural integrity but at least will stop the mud from oozing into the tank.

Eight days later, the wall has not moved farther.  The pool is full of water and we are ready to pour the concrete deck.  For this phase, thankfully, we've hired professionals.  The deck is what will show after all our hard work, and we want it to look good.

We still need volunteers, though, to sleep by the pool overnight guarding the deck.  There are some rather determined vandals in La Honda, and nobody wants to see what they would do with yards and yards of soft concrete.  One of the volunteers, the same old-timer who explained to me about the La Honda way, is a kindly-looking grand-daddy type.  He says he's actually hoping to capture one or more vandals.  It's as if we've baited a trap.

“We won’t turn him in," the old-timer says.  "We’ll deal with him ourselves.  They understand pain.”

I don't think they caught anybody, but they wouldn't have told me if they had.  Some things, you just don't want to know.

Remodeling that pool, shoveling mud and gluing big heavy pieces of pipe, I'd already learned a lesson in pain.  I hired a firm that specializes in cracked concrete.  They poured some 15 gallons of epoxy into the fault lines along the side of the pool.  It hasn't budged since then.

La Honda pool today

There were more details before the pool could open that year.  I posted another call for volunteers: 

Free beer!
Live music! 
Fabulous door prizes! 
Special guest celebrities! 
Clothes optional! 

Enough people showed up to clean the grounds and help with painting and plastering.  Nobody complained that I'd lied about the beer, the music, the door prizes and the celebrities.  And the clothes truly were optional.

The pool finally opened on July 30, two months late.

Seventeen years later, the deck and pool remain, a beautiful sight on a hot summer's day.  I'm proud of what we did.  The town of La Honda is a bit more gentrified these days, and the lovely pool is part of its appeal. 

Volunteering is another part of the La Honda way - as is a lingering fondness for outlaw culture.  It's how we get things done around here.  You just try not mess up.

365 Jobs, Day 171: Cracking the Pool (Part One)

June, 1994

La Honda, the small town where I live, is managed by an unpaid Board of Directors.  I volunteered to become Recreation Director (though I ended up as President for a while).  The outgoing Recreation Director, an energetic young mother, briefed me on my duties running the swimming pool, the tennis court, the Fourth of July picnic.  She warned me: "You will find yourself making decisions for which you are in no way qualified.  Nobody will help you but somebody has to do it, and then everybody will criticize you afterwards."

She was right.  I knew absolutely nothing about swimming pools.  I dealt with a series of incompetent, surly, downright criminal employees.  One was on the take, one drunk, and one turned out to be an arsonist who would set fires and then show up as a hero volunteer firefighter to put them out.  The arsonist, when discovered, was dealt with privately and severely.  Nobody called the law.  As one of the old-timers explained to me, "We dealt with him the La Honda way." 

Eventually, we found a good maintenance man. 

In summer the swimming pool was the social center of La Honda.  It was the only activity we provided for kids.  On hot days, it was also the best way to cool off.  Nobody had air conditioning.

La Honda pool (foreground, right) circa 1920's

The La Honda pool had been built in the 1920's.  Unheated, summer-only, it was an irregular five-sided shape, poorly cleansed by ancient wheezing pumps with failing sand filters that leaked dirty powder into the water.  The tank would turn green with algae requiring periodic closures and shock treatments.  Leaves and dead bugs accumulated on the surface.  Vacuums broke down.  Teenage lifeguards had bursts of libido.  Parents would drop off non-swimmer kids and leave them unsupervised all day.  A pervert started bothering little girls underwater and had to be dealt with.  Babies pooped.  At night teens would break in and have parties.  A few midnight skinnydips took place (nobody complained, though some came to watch).  One winter a mud slide filled the bottom with twelve inches of dirt.  The diving board broke in half.  When I bought a new expensive board, the entire diving structure ripped loose from the concrete base and tumbled into the water on top of the overweight man who had bounced on it.

All the while, a county health inspector named Joe Miluso would hand me an ever-expanding list of what was wrong with the old pool.  The code violations were only tolerated because we were "grandfathered" into the system and because Joe, a truly nice man, couldn't bear the thought of closing us down. 

After 3 years of deterioration, lack of funding, and ignored warnings, in exasperation Joe Miluso asked me, "What can I do to help you get this pool fixed up?"

I didn't even have to think about it.  "Shut us down," I said.

With enthusiasm the inspector wrote a list of problems on an official-looking ticket which said if the pool was not in compliance by next year, he would not allow us to open.  With a wink, he handed it to me.

I presented the ultimatum to the town.  The response was electric: SAVE OUR POOL!  We had a town meeting, and suddenly $30,000 was allocated by the same people who previously would ignore the problems or plead poverty.  It was my political epiphany: to accomplish anything in politics, you first must manufacture a crisis.

I put the pool remodel out to bid and got quotes of $50-60,000.

On the advice - and promises to help - of several people in town, I came up with a plan to do it ourselves by cutting a few corners and using volunteer labor.  I, of course, would be the primary volunteer with help from John Lindstrom, another contractor in town.

The basic tank would remain the same.  The plan was to replace all the plumbing pipes, adding new water inlets and a better side gutter.  A new pump and filter would complete the job.

We couldn't do the work during the winter.  A basic bit of folk wisdom, handed down from one Recreation Director to another, was that you must not drain the pool over the winter (which is our rainy season) or else the hydrostatic pressure of the water-soaked ground will press against the concrete walls of the tank and possibly cause them to collapse.  You need the water in the tank to press back against the wet ground.  Nobody had ever tested this theory.  After all, would you want to risk being known as the person who destroyed the town swimming pool?  You might then be dealt with in "the La Honda way."

(Continued here...)

365 Jobs, Day 161: An American Boy

Thursday, June 10, 1982

I've been remodeling a bathroom all week.  Today my saber saw breaks down, a shower rail collapses, and the toilet water supply won't fit for love or money.  Then while I'm carrying a heavy sheet of 3/4 plywood, the owner's dog suddenly runs up without bark or growl and bites my blue jeans.  Punctures the skin of my leg.

"Sorry," the owner says.  "He's spooked by plywood."

"Why?"

"He's a rescue dog."

As if that explains it.  Meanwhile it's High School Graduation Night for the owner's teenage son, and the house is filling with proud grandparents and in-laws while the son stands tall and awkward in a suit and tie which he clearly is not in the habit of wearing.

So now I'm driving home, wincing with each push of the clutch, feeling slightly sorry for myself, my sore leg, my small problems when I pick up a hitchhiker on our mountain road.  He has a backpack, a beard, and he has the breath of a brewery.

"I can take you as far as La Honda," I say.

"That's where I want to go," he says.  "I'm going back home."  He laughs.  "I was installing solar panels in Laytonville when a lot of heavy shit came down on me."

"That's too bad."

"I'm over it.  I'm going home." 

There's a code in what he's just told me.  Laytonville in those days was a hub of marijuana farming in northern California.  Solar panels were in great demand among folks growing illegal substance off the grid.  Tales of guns, outlaws, lawmen, "heavy shit" and high times were rampant.  You might hear similar stories about La Honda in the Sixties, though with different players, different substances.

The hitchhiker tells me where he grew up, which street, which house.  I tell him it's just a hundred yards from where I've been building my house. 

"So welcome to La Honda," he says, cackling.  "And the cocaine dealer across the street from you - with all those old Volvos - did your realtor tell you about him when you bought the place?"

"No.  But the dealer's gone now.  So are the Volvos."

"And did she - your realtor was a woman, right?  They all are, right?"  He cackles again.  "Did she tell you about Limey Kay?"

Limey lives up the street from me.  He's a bricklayer with a fondness for guns and alcohol.  "No.  I met him on my own."

The hitchhiker giggles - little hiccup burps.  "I bet you did.  Women are the realtors because they make all the money.  It's the men who get laid off.  I'm laid off.  My wife just kept on going.  Until I lost her."  He laughs, closing his eyes for a moment.  "And does Bobby Black still live in the house below you?"

"Yes."

"With four kids in a two room cabin?"

"Five kids, now."

The hitchhiker slaps the dashboard and laughs.  "And does Bobby still go off chasing UFO's?"

"I don't know."

"Me and him, we used to chase UFO's together."

"Did you catch any?"

"No."  Giggling.  "But Bobby, he still believes.  When we were about twelve, we used to hide in the bushes behind Ken Kesey's house and throw stones at him.  The Hells Angels used to chase us through the woods.  They can ride, but they can't run.  We knew all the hideouts."

"Sounds like you've always had a taste for adventure."

"I'm an American boy.  That's all.  Girls, they want to settle down.  I just lost my wife."

"I'm sorry you split up."

"She was killed in a car accident.  I'm coming home."

"I'm sorry.  I thought --"

"I know, I know.  Don't worry.  I'm over it."

"Maybe you're not."

"Okay, I'm not.  Who cares?"

I stop in front of the Post Office.  The hitchhiker gets out and grabs his backpack.  He staggers.  He's drunk as a skunk. 

I say, "Welcome back to La Honda."

"I'm home," he says.

And he's totally adrift.

365 Jobs, Day 124: "I'm still in the same place."

Sunday, May 4, 1986
Kammy Chan was a friendly little man who worked in the Pioneer Market, La Honda's small grocery store.  If Kam wasn't at the store, he was wandering around the strip mall that is downtown La Honda: the restaurant, the post office, the realtor.  Or he'd just be sitting on a curb staring at the redwoods and smoking a cigarette.  He seemed to have no home.  More than once I asked him, "Where do you live, Kam?"

He'd smile vaguely and say, "I'm still in the same place."

Eventually I figured out where he was sleeping.  Eventually, everybody figured it out.

Bob Cook was the owner of the store, and he'd call me from time to time to patch his decrepit electrical system.  At the deli counter he'd cut me a thin slice of Swiss cheese and say, "Here, try this.  You've never tasted something this good."  Bob was a friendly, hardworking, great big guy from Texas.  How he came to be running a small grocery in La Honda, I never asked.  Many who settle in La Honda come here on the way to something further and then discover that La Honda is the something further. 

One day, April 13, 1986 I went to the store for some milk, and Kammy was gone.  Deported.  Bob was distraught.  He was so upset, I was worried about him handling that big knife at the butcher counter.  I walked him outside.  There were tears in his eyes.  And he told me the story of Kammy Chan:

Kam came to the USA legally with his family.  With some partners in China, Kam's family ran an export business in San Francisco.  Then Kam's parents died.  The partners booted Kam out.  He was a young man from Hong Kong all alone in the USA with an expired visa. 

Somehow, Kam came to the attention of a man who worked as an exterminator.  The exterminator offered Kam a sanctuary in his remote La Honda home.  The sanctuary came at a price.  According to Bob, Kam became a virtual slave for the exterminator and his realtor wife, caring for their children, cooking, cleaning, and doing household chores.   They threatened to report him if he misbehaved.  They gave him a mat on the floor and not much else. 

Eventually Kam got free of this couple and started working in the Pioneer Market.  Bob said, "We figured out butchering together.  We'd cut up sides of beef and see what went wrong.  We learned from our mistakes.  Kam did a day and a half's work in a day and slept in the back of the store, but nobody knew."  (Actually, everybody knew.) 

Okay.  I've heard other versions of Kam's origin.  In one version he came to the USA legally on a student visa, which expired.  In another version Kam's family was mixed up with Hong Kong mobsters who killed everybody else and were searching for him.  I believe Bob, but whatever the version, a kid from Hong Kong ended up in a tiny town deep in a canyon in the redwood forest.

Kam spoke passable English and excellent Cantonese.  According to David LeCount, La Honda's resident China scholar, Kam "wrote good characters," which implies at least the equivalent of a high school education.

David used to joke with Kam, saying there were three Chinese expressions that could be used to answer any question.  In English, the answers are:

"Who knows?"
"It's better than before."
"Right now, it's difficult to say."

Kam took those non-answers to heart and made up some of his own, such as "I'm still in the same place."  He was a master of the vague smile.

After 16 years in La Honda, Kam somehow came to the attention of the feds.  Bob Cook  blames the exterminator.  This man got into disputes with everybody, and inevitably he got into a dispute with Bob.  Bob believes the exterminator reported Kam just to make trouble for the grocery store.  Instead of coming after the store, though, the INS came after Kam, demanding documents.  

Everybody who knew Kam described him as "sweet."  He was too trusting.  People took advantage.  A woman who drove a big rig truck offered to marry him as a way to legalize his status.  It was strictly a financial arrangement, and Kam was the loser.  He moved in with her in an attempt to make the marriage look legitimate, though nobody in town believes it was ever consummated.  When the ruse failed, the woman dropped him but ignored his request to annul the marriage.

The town got involved.  Petitions were signed in support of Kam.  Bob Cook hired an immigration lawyer.

But nothing would move the INS.

According to Bob, part of the problem with Kam was: "He was secretive.  He never filed any paperwork, whether out of fear or ignorance.  There was an amnesty, but he missed it.  And he trusted the wrong people.  Except for that bogus marriage, Kam never spent money."

The end came suddenly.  Three black limousines pulled up at the Pioneer Market.  People in La Honda believe it was no coincidence that when those black limousines pulled up, Kam's old nemesis, the exterminator, was standing there, watching.  The INS agents pulled Kam out of the store and whisked him away.

Bob Cook and his lawyer went to San Francisco for Kam's hearing.  According to Bob, he and his lawyer thought they had prevailed.  They were talking to Kam outside the hearing room when three INS agents tackled Kam.  Bob jumped in.  So did the lawyer.  It was a melee in the hallway.  Bob, the lawyer, and little Kam were no match for the three INS agents.  They handcuffed Kam and led him away. 

Bob would never see Kam again.

A few weeks later on May 4, a Sunday, Bob called me to the store for an emergency.  A water line had broken, flooding the deli area.  As I worked on pipes, Bob ran the cash register and mopped the floor and made sandwiches to order, sorely in need of another worker.  He told me to look at a postcard on top of the deli counter.  It was a picture of Hong Kong at night.  On the back Kam had written, "It's expensive to live here.  I'm homesick."

So Kam did have a home.  Of all this big planet, from his birth in Hong Kong he had found a home in the little strip mall of La Honda, sitting on a curb smoking a cigarette and gazing at the redwoods, or sleeping in the back of the store. 

He can never come back.

Now, 25 years later, Bob Cook has moved on.  The Pioneer Market changed hands, fell into mismanagement, and changed hands again.  It is now called the La Honda Country Market, and it is a wonderful store.  The exterminator died several years ago.

Kam remains in Hong Kong.  By now, it must feel like home again, like another something further.  He has two children though he can't legally marry the mother because he is still, on paper, married to somebody driving a big rig truck somewhere in the USA. 

Who knows what might have happened? 
Perhaps Kam's life is better than before. 
Right now, it's difficult to say. 

Or as Kam might put it: "I'm still in the same place."

365 Jobs, Day 122: Normal

Saturday, May 2, 1987

I repair leaky faucets and work on a blocked drain at a house in South Palo Alto.  While working, I chat with Jane, a woman slightly younger than me.  It's a very normal house, and Jane is a very normal woman.  She says she works at Alza, the drug company, while completing a master's degree at Santa Clara University. 

While chatting we discover to our mutual surprise that she grew up in Big Pink, the house right next to mine in La Honda.  Big Pink is the opposite of a normal house, and La Honda is the opposite of a normal town.

Jane says, "It was my mother who painted it pink."  She sighs.

Jane's teenage years in Big Pink were the Ken Kesey years in La Honda.  As teens still do today, Jane hung out at the bridge next to Apple Jack's while Hells Angels and crazy people roared in and out of town. 

Jane says Kesey had no effect on her life, not really.  She says, "It's like how I imagine it would be living next to Disneyland.  People come there from all over the world, but if you live there, you never go.  It's just something that's there.  I mean, the world is a very weird place.  Only your family seems normal.  And then you grow up and realize how weird they were, too.  Like painting that huge house pink in the middle of a redwood forest."

"You're not weird."

"Thank you.  Nobody's weird.  Not even you."

"Not even me?"

"I mean, look at you.  You're obviously college-educated and you're cleaning my toilet drain."

Lit Night in La Honda

My Google statistics show that this blog has a few readers in Brazil, Australia, China, Russia, Iran, Germany, Pacific Islands...

I want all of you to know you're invited to the next La Honda Lit Night - or any La Honda Lit Night.

They take place the last Wednesday of every month at Sullivan's Pub starting at 7 pm.  You can come early for dinner. 

Have a beer, a glass of wine, and listen to some audience-friendly poems and stories - or read your own.

Next Lit Night is Wednesday, April 27.

Here we are as discussed in the New Yorker magazine.

Here is our weapons policy.

I'll be there.  Hope to see ya!

365 Jobs, Day 97: Creating the World

Cross-posted from my new blog, 365 Jobs:

(Before writing these blog entries, I go back through my journals reading one particular day for each year, sort of a Ground Hog Day movie except that each time everybody is one year older, and in the end I still haven't gotten it right.  Here are three such days.)

Saturday, April 7, 1979

A good garage sale can cure a bad mood.  So can a ride in a pickup truck.  Today I apply the double cure to my son Jesse, age two-and-a-half.  He's been horrible, a not uncommon condition for a two-year-old, but enough is enough.

We're still living in the Montgomery Ward cottage at Wagon Wheels while building our new house in La Honda.  The new house, I believe, is the cause of Jesse's crankiness because it takes me away from home all day every day, and he's used to having me around. 

In the pickup (known as the Twuck), I let Jesse lean forward in his car seat and push the radio buttons, choosing random music.   

At one garage sale Jesse falls inexplicably in love with an old brass coat rack, so we buy it to install in his bedroom.

Stopping at a grocery store, Jesse's eyes alight on a display rack.  "What's that?"

"Those are called pocket pies."

"You put them in your pocket?"

So I buy one.  As it happens, Jesse has no pockets today, so I put it in mine.  In Palo Alto we drive to a quiet street of big green lawns.  We park but remain sitting in the twuck under the shade of a sycamore.  We unwrap and share the pocket pie.  From a grocery bag I remove a beer and open it.  I pop an old Beatles tape into the radio/cassette player.

A pregnant woman with two travel bags is walking down the street, crying.  Jesse grabs his teddy bear from the dashboard of the truck and holds it, watching the woman.  She's wearing a long blue dress which is flapping in the wind.  She’s stopped walking.  Her fingers are on her lips.  Still crying.  I want to help but know I would only be interfering.  After a moment, she walks on.

Driving home, I see the world through Jesse's eyes, the world I've brought him to - the sun burning over six lanes of El Camino Real, glinting off cars, while Daddy listens to old rock tapes with a bit of beer on his breath.  A large part of Jesse's world will be whatever I bring to him, such as cruising the garage sales and eating pocket pie.  The woman in the long blue dress will no doubt create a far different world on this, our shared planet.

Saturday, April 7, 1990

Jesse is now thirteen and a half.  He's in eighth grade and sometimes discovers that I'm weird.  We live in the house I built in La Honda.  The truck is a Ford.  We listen to Grateful Dead tapes - Jesse's choice - and drive to Palo Alto where we hit some garage sales and come away with a turntable.  Jesse in his lifetime has never played a record album but has seen my crates of them stored in the attic.  He'd like to listen.

After the sales, we drive to a medical office building on Welch Road near Stanford Hospital where together we repair six entries for six psychiatrists.  I need Jesse's help to remove and replace each solid-core, dark mahogany, massive door.  He's old enough - and big enough - to help dad earn a living. 

For three hours labor on this, his first paying job, I give him $30, a great wage for a thirteen-year-old.  And he knows that he accomplished something. 

Back home the turntable works.  In fact, it's excellent.  My old records - John Prine, Phil Ochs, Big Bill Broonzy - have never sounded so good.  I haven't heard them for ages, and now I'm hearing them through Jesse's ears, a whole new world.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Today I'm providing childcare for my grandson, age two and a half.  Raj was born in San Francisco and recently moved to the suburbs down the Peninsula.  I could stay at Raj's house where he is comfortable and happy, but I consider it my job as grandfather to introduce him to the more rural life in La Honda. 

From my house we take a walk.  There are no sidewalks in La Honda, so we walk the narrow streets.  A bit up the hill from my house are two llamas in a pen.  One sleeps; one watches us with a steady gaze.  I explain to Raj that you will never see both llamas sleep at the same time; they watch out for each other.

We walk downhill a bit to another house and feed carrots through the fence wire to a couple of goats.  The bigger goat keeps butting the smaller one away with a thwack of horns.  He can eat an entire carrot in a matter of seconds.

Farther down the hill, we throw popcorn to the ducks in the pond.  Farther still, we come to "the cookie store" otherwise known as the La Honda Country Market, where we select one large chocolate chip cookie from a glass jar.

Back home we read a book I just got from the bookmobile: Gramps and the Fire Dragon, which becomes the event of the day.  To Raj it's an utterly gripping tale in which a boy and his grandfather encounter a fire-breathing dragon who chases them up an apple tree which they escape in a hot air balloon, but the dragon follows through jungle and cave and finally is melted by water from a fire truck's hose.  When Raj enjoys a story he's all over it fingering pictures, flipping pages, shouting, laughing.  We read it six times, cover to cover.  What a great book.

We talk about the fire dragon all the way home in the car.  Raj reprises episodes and adds new ones involving butting goats, hungry ducks, watchful llamas - framing the story and the events of the day, coming to grips with the fear, the excitement, the camaraderie.  To Raj there is no line between encountering a dragon and what we did today; it's all part of the wonderful web of life.  For me it's a beautiful lesson in the purpose and power of story - why we tell them, how we respond and grow.  I brought Raj to my world; in return he brings me to his.