Dear friends,
My husband fell and has been in the hospital this week. He will not be coming home for a while if ever, due to a long-term illness that has gotten much worse. I have been looking at nursing homes. So I have not been able to post anything new this week, but I will as soon as possible. The newsletter will also be delayed. Thanks for your understanding. Please feel free to post your own questions, comments and ideas while I’m doing the hospital shuffle.
Month: January 2009
The ghost of William Stafford was there
Last night, nobody came to our Happy Birthday William Stafford poetry reading and that was fine with us. We three women watched the clock tick past 7, realized we were the only people coming, kicked off our shoes and gathered around the boom box to listen to a CD of the former Oregon poet laureate at his last public reading before he died in 1993.
Host Marianne Klekacz, who had optimistically set about 30 chairs in a circle in the Newport Library meeting room, couldn’t understand why all those folks who had said they’d be there weren’t. Their loss. Marianne, Dorothy Mack and I, co-coordinators of the Oregon Coast Branch of Willamette Writers, munched cookies and listened to this down-to-earth poet read and talk about his work as if he were right there in the room. His voice and style reminded me of Woody Guthrie.
Most Oregon poets are crazy about Stafford, whom I had never heard of before I moved here from California. He was American Poet Laureate in 1970 and Oregon Poet Laureate from 1975 to 1993. He published 67 books, including Traveling through Dark, which won the National Book Award, and Stories That Could Be True: New & Collected Poems. For all the Stafford facts, visit the Friends of William Stafford site.
What impresses me most about Stafford is his work ethic. He got up before dawn to write a poem every day, including the day he died. Considering he lived almost 80 years, that’s a lot of poetry.
Last year we had a big crowd at the Stafford reading, including people who had known him in life. This year, we were competing with a big literary event in Lincoln City, plus the inauguration of President Barack Obama. So we sipped our tea and ate our cookies and listened to Stafford. Weary of the hard blue chairs and tired of staring at the “state flowers” quilt on the wall, I slipped to the floor and did some yoga stretches on the turquoise carpet, keeping my body busy while my brain followed the poet’s words. I have a feeling he would have approved, saying, “Go ahead. Make yourself comfortable.” It was a well-spent evening.
***
Our Willamette Writers chapter usually meets on the first Tuesday of the Month. On Feb. 3, we will welcome Samantha Ducloux Waltz, who has written essays for many magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including A Cup of Comfort for Families Touched by Alzheimer’s, which has one of my stories, too. She’s going to share how to write and sell personal essays. The program is at the Newport Library, 7 p.m., free as always. Snacks will be provided, but no ghosts.
The Tide Goes Out at Sea Towne
Sea Towne, a maze of bleached-board ramps and stairways, with a lifelike wooden sailor sitting in the courtyard, and soft music playing from hidden speakers, is Newport’s only so-called mall, but like the wood it’s made out of it, this charming sea of shops on Highway 101 between Subway and Sears has been fading for a long time.
Before my twice-monthly meetings in one of the offices there, I often stop at the Sea Towne bookstore. Owner Bill Terry has been a great supporter of local authors, hosting book-signings, displaying our works prominently, welcoming us like old friends. Since he first heard about Stories Grandma Never Told, my book about Portuguese women, he always says the same thing: Did I tell you my ex-wife was Portuguese? Yes, I say, you did.
In November, I did a signing there to promote A Cup of Comfort for Families Touched by Alzheimer’s. The handful of sales I made that day were the only sales, he said. As I sat at my little table with my books spread before me, I noticed some of the shelves were bare. The faltering economy, plus the growing trend to buy books from the big online outlets, has hit independent bookstores hard. Why drive all the way to Sea Towne, where you probably won’t find the book you’re looking for, when you can order it from Amazon with a few keystrokes?
So yesterday, I was sad but not surprised to find Bill’s old store empty. A sign on the window noted that the future occupants had applied for a liquor license. Another sign, handwritten in black felt pen, noted that the bookstore had moved “around the corner.”
I followed the signs until I discovered Bill’s new store. It’s much smaller, the walls inside a startling shade of yellow. There was Bill, leaning on the counter. He had planned to go out of business at the end of last year, he said. Nobody was buying, and with the snow that smacked Oregon during the holidays, the Christmas rush never happened. He’s still trying to figure out how to fit his books into the reduced space. Four banks of magazines have been reduced to one, and the children’s section, once a sizable nook, is just one wall now. Right away Bill started apologizing for not having my books in a prominent display. No, no, no, I said. It’s still here; that’s all that matters.
I’ll be honest. I buy most of my books from Amazon.com. It’s just easier, but I ordered three from Bill in December and another one yesterday. If nobody shops at the bookstores, they’ll disappear.
The bookstore isn’t the only Sea Towne shop experiencing a sea change. The dog boutique is gone. Charisma Gifts has moved out. Several offices upstairs are vacant. As usual, I saw no one at the restaurant where the owners valiantly put up mouth-watering menus every day, serving a handful of customers at most.
Sea Towne still has a clothing shop, a home decorating business, a dance studio and numerous psychiatrists’ and counselors’ offices. I believe the key shop, a tiny cubbyhole opposite the elevator, is still going but it’s only open sporadically.
Sea Towne is becoming a ghost town, haunted by that wooden sailor who looks so real I always feel as if I need to say hello. My footsteps echo on the wooden planks. It feels as if everyone else has jumped ship.
Off Highway 20
BURNT WOODS, OR.–Out in the middle of nowhere, you park on the gravel amid the pickup trucks, step past a nodding chicken and a dog sleeping on the porch, and walk into a cafe that smells of pancake syrup and old wood. Four guys in baseball caps sit at the next table. An old fellow in overalls leans on the counter talking to the middle-aged woman in the kitchen.
Open the stained menus. The food is hearty, biscuits and gravy, cheeseburgers and fries, chicken fried steak and hash browns, all served with giant unmatched cups of strong coffee. Vegetarians have one choice: grilled cheese sandwiches.
Before you know it,you’re involved in a conversation with the other customers, whether it be the Beavers and the Ducks, the snow up the road or the price of gas. The four guys are working on the clearcut up the hill you can see through the dusty windows. The last of the loggers, regulars at the cafe, will soon head back to work.
A teenage daughter in torn jeans wanders through, clearing sticky plates. The cook’s husband stops at the four-top, pulling up a chair, leaning his thick arms on the table.
After all these years, we still feel a little like outsiders, Californians in disguise, but we’re getting the hang of it, the denim, fleece and flannel wardrobe, the lack of boundaries, mud on our shoes, and the warm, comfortable diners like the Burnt Woods Cafe that serve as country living rooms where we all get warm and fed and catch up with the news.
Lozenge on my teeth
As I crawl into bed, the wind huffs and puffs against the walls and windows. Outside, the trees bend and dip. Patio furniture scatters like Lego toys. Pine needles turn the street orange. When I turned the TV off, the news was all about snow in Portland. Again. Here on the coast, we have had precipitation in the form of snow, hail, and rain. It has come down in puffs, rocks, needles, sheets, drizzles and gully-washers. The extended forecast? More of the same. It’s enough to make a born-again Oregonian scream, “I want to go home!” I want to make like the Canada Geese and fly south in the fall. But of course, no one can afford to buy a house these days, especially in the Bay Area. So we put on our slickers and waffle-stompers and go on.
***
One of my jobs is assistant director of the contemporary choir at Sacred Heart Church, over the bridge in Newport. It’s a wonderful brick edifice opened the year I was born, very old-fashioned inside with creaky blond-wood pews, lots of statues and a giant dying Jesus on the cross up front, much like the church I grew up in before it got modernized. The choir sits in chairs on a plywood platform to the right of the altar.
Our director’s husband had open heart surgery last month. I was in charge the whole month of December. However, she was coming back yesterday and wanted to pick out the music, as well as play the piano. Fine. I needed a break. However, she didn’t actually pick out the music until late Saturday night and she was going to be very late on Sunday. She e-mailed the list of songs to the choir, but I was the only one who was online at that point. I had hoped to get to church early and organize the music, but somehow when my alarm rang, I shut it off and went back to sleep, waking up an hour later. It was a miracle that I managed to shower, eat breakfast, dress and be in the car at 9:15.
When I arrived, the choir was in a dither. Although she didn’t have the list of songs, another choir member had already started trying to do the music. There were papers everywhere, and nobody knew what was going on. I was singing the psalm and had not practiced it. Meanwhile there were microphones and music stands to set up. We were still figuring things out as we tumbled out of the chapel into the sanctuary. Father Brian stopped us early in verse two of “We Three Kings”. I thought he had paused to welcome our director back. But no, the number on the board was wrong. He asked us to start the song over from the top so the congregation could sing along. Lord, Lord.
When I went up to the lectern for my solo, I was still sucking a throat lozenge, trying to chase off the gunk in my throat. I had to either get rid of it or sing with this chunk of yellow stuff in my mouth. So there I stood on the altar, biting down, feeling as if the crunching sound was so loud the reader could surely hear it. In fact, it might be going out over the microphone across the whole church. Crunch. Crunch. Swallow. I had pieces of lozenge stuck to my teeth. Picture me clutching my choir book, gazing the over the lector’s shoulder at the sacred words, and trying like crazy to push the sticky lozenge remainders off my teeth with my tongue. There’s a period right after sucking a lozenge when your throat is still adapting to it not being there, and that’s when I took my place at the microphone, nodding at Mary Lee to play the introduction. I had no idea what would come out.
It could have been worse. We got through Mass and even received some applause. After Mass, for the first time since I woke up and saw what time it was, I could finally breathe. I thought my voice had sounded a little raspy, plus this was the psalm with all the place names, like Tarshish and Sheba, but a couple I met during coffee and donuts after Mass gushed over my beautiful voice. “What a gift,” the woman said.
Naturally I decided to ditch everything to become a world-famous singer. Again. But at this point in life, I’ll settle for famous in Newport. That and a maple bar washed down with Ruby Mist tea.
Rain? What rain? Ah, the artist’s ego.
Unleashed in Oregon 