You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.
Friday, November 18, 2022
Wednesday, October 05, 2022
Me and MyAmigo
We cruise through the Cheyenne grocery store like angels on the wing. We ride MyAmigo scooters, tidy charged-up EVs that transports you through the valley of soft drinks and into the foothills of baking supplies and to the mountaintop of the candies you crave but say you’re buying for the grandkids who never visit. We greet other grayhairs as we pass, josh about drag racing down the aisle at 3.521 mph. I round a corner and encounter Floyd Lopez in his own MyAmigo and we adjourn to Starbuck’s for coffee and talk about Spanish declensions. I insist it’s MiAmigo and he agrees but argues that my idea will make no sense to the majority of Anglo geezers like me. He says that “MyAmigo” is the perfect Spanglish term. “Pancho used it all the time on The Cisco Kid.”
Caffeinated and
informed, we return to our respective routes. We try to avoid returning
to the other end of the store for items left off the list somehow. That drops
the MyAmigo charge to dangerous levels, causes us to seek out a staffer to transfer
us and the groceries to a fully-charged EV if one is available and not in the
hands of another retiree who breezes around the store as if there was no
tomorrow as there may not be. Most shoppers avoid eye contact. What we need is
on top shelves. Elders who walk upright ask if they can help. Young couples
too, guys in middle age who just got off work and we remind them of their
parents tooling around a store in Case Grande or Fort Myers.
Check-out is odd. Cashiers are nice but young ones especially try not to look at you, as if grayness is catching. They hope you will not pay in bills and small change, or labor over a check, or redeem too many coupons clipped out of the Wednesday print ads. They move you right along as they don’t want any repeats of the old lady who yelled about how the leaking deli chicken got all over the muffins. The baggers ask to help you out but you lack any small bills and the kids won’t usually take tips but you never know. You cheat a bit by scooting outside into the lot even though the cart’s label reads “indoor use only.” Some people stop to help as you load groceries into the trunk. Some days you need it. The snow comes down, bitter winds blow. Once I forgot my gloves and it took too long to unload; spent 15 minutes in front of the car’s heater to defrost the claws of my fingers.
I drive home through the blowing snow. My son unloads my haul at home. It's done.
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Micro-essay: Denver
Denver
When you’re gone you’re gone. That first house you bought on South Grant Street, some kids you don’t know slide down the driveway on skateboards. A
stranger sits at your desk in the Broadway brick building, never heard of you,
the building is a different business now, has nothing to do with the fan-belts
and radiator hoses they make in the spooky factory across the street that’s now
a condo complex. That dive bar where you got shitfaced after college hockey
games is a fashion boutique next to a pot shop. Those softball diamonds all
over town, you can watch twilight games in July with players your kids’ ages or
maybe your grandkids’ ages. On one of those diamonds, you played in January’s
annual Sno-ball tourney and froze your ass off. Your favorite bookstore moved across
town. You and your girlfriend walked down Fillmore to the old place, it
smelled of books and not coffee and the two of you found books and a quiet
place to read for hours. Fourth of July at your aunt’s and uncle’s house you
and your cousins almost burnt down the wooden fence with Wyoming fireworks. A
procession of strangers have lived there and they keep on moving out and moving
in and you don’t recognize any of them when you drive by. Camping near Grand
Lake, we skip rocks in the shallow creek that grows into the mighty Colorado as
it tumbles down the Rockies. Concerts at Red Rocks, you can see where you sat
in the middle seats, surrounded by those with their own memories, the Eagles
and The Dead, full moon coming over the mountains, lights of Denver down below.
You’re not there. Days and weeks, months and years. Memories orbit like
planets, find you where you are now. At the old Stapleton airport named after
the KKK mayor of the 1920s, you drove to down Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard
to get there. You linger outside the boundary fence, stand on the car hood to
almost touch the arriving planes, hear the blast and feel the whoosh of the
engines. It was 1978 on that July afternoon you first flew into Stapleton for a
new job. On that day, you didn’t know it yet, but you were already gone.
Sunday, December 27, 2020
Some blog posts just don't grow into fully-formed stories -- and that's OK
Time to take stock of the year that was.
I wrote 67 posts this year. Published posts, that is. I wrote 10 or more that I didn't post. They just never jelled or I lost interest. The drafts linger on my site but will be banished with the new year.
When family members were quarantined and not working in the spring, we started hauling boxes filled with books up from the basement. I was tasked with separating the keepers from the ones to go to the library store or, when that closed due to Covid, downtown's Phoenix Books. Probably sent six or seven boxes out the door, just a fraction on those remaining. In one box, I saw a tattered copy of "Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter Thompson. This was before "strange and terrible" morphed into "fear and loathing." I really liked it when I read it in the early '70s during my Gonzo period. I didn't want to emulate Thompson's life but I did want to write like him.
I began to read "Hell's Angels" and got hooked. Read it all the way through in a couple of days. I tried to frame an essay about it but could not. Thompson's style I still liked. But I didn't like the sexism and racism. The Angels were noted for gang rapes and Thompson was cavalier about it. We liked the Angels for their outlaw image, at least we did in our youth. Their attraction has waned over the decades. I don't really find anything constructive about them. In my blog, written before the election, I wanted to paint members as diehard Trump fans but failed. It's a gross generalization to label motorcycle thugs as Trumpists. It's also a mistake to think that all bikers are gang members. Your local attorney is as likely to ride a Harley as your local mechanic. My neighbor is an IT guy and he rides and works on his very expensive Harley. My late brother Dan rode a Harley and he was an air traffic controller.
The Angels still exist but haven't been the same since Altamont and neither have the Stones. I gave up and put "Hell's Angels" in the discard box.
My conclusion: Thompson documented a lot of what happened in 1960s and '70s America. But, really, how much fear & loathing can a nation bear?
My next subject that didn't jell was about the Boy Scouts of America and its magazine, "Boy's Life." I was a proud Scouter in Colorado, Washington, Kansas and Florida. The Scouts seemed to be something I could count on to be pretty much the same whether we were snow-camping in the Rockies or avoiding water moccasins in the Florida swamps. I read Boy's Life from cover to cover. It was all boys back then, stories about knots and campfires and lifesaving. There was always a feature profiling heroic Scouts. I liked the cartoon about Pedro the Donkey.
Girls are now part of Scouts and it's about time. As you probably know, the BSA has been roiled by the same sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. Girls can now be Scouts and for some reason the mag is still called "Boy's Life." I guess an ancient organization such as the Scouts can move only so fast. They have that in common with the church. My youth involved Scouting, the church and basketball. I abandoned one of those when, in the ninth grade, I discovered girls. I do believe I would have welcomed girls into my Scout troop but it was the 1960s which was a lot like the 1950s in Central Florida.
I just lost interest as I wrote about Scouts, much as I lost interest in becoming an Eagle Scout when I got my first kiss. Reading a current issue of the magazine did not revive my interest although I was oddly pleased that Pedro the Donkey had made it into the 21st century.
This is what happens with writers. Not everything we begin has an ending. I have a two-drawer filing cabinet filled with rough drafts and beginnings. Stored on this PC and OneDrive are many finished pieces and many fragments. What seems like a good idea at the time never grows into a finished product that can be published. And not everything is published in any form, whether as a book or a story in a journal or a post on Blogger. That's not easy to understand when you start out but it becomes clear if you stick with it. I have, for some reason. Writing is important to me and no matter how many setbacks come my way, I stick with it.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
"Are we artists or monkeys?" -- three essays about the current state of "creative placemaking"
We've spent a decade hearing about the "creative class" and "creatives" and "creative placemaking" at one arts conference after another. Young creatives are transforming neglected city centers into arts oases where the artrepreneurial economy thrives, or so the story goes. There are success stories, to be sure, but not every imagined "creative placemaking" project comes to fruition. In Cheyenne, we're still working on several projects that, if successful, can revitalize downtown. But we still have that ugly gaping hole at the core of our city center. Hard to imagine a thriving downtown with a hole in its middle.
A triple dose of reality comes from a story by Ian David Moss at Createquity.com and two others from the Adobe Airstream blog written by arts writer Ellen Berkovitch and "young arts professional" Hannah Hoel about the Imagined Futures project in Santa Fe which hasn't gone much beyond the imagining stage. One only has to look at the URL wording to see the tenor of the articles:
Ian David Ross: http://createquity.com/2012/05/creative-placemaking-has-an-outcomes-problem.html
Ellen Berkovitch: http://adobeairstream.com/art/creative-santa-fe-coals-to-newcastle/
Hannah Hoel: http://adobeairstream.com/art/placemaking-in-santa-fe-are-we-artists-or-monkeys/
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Essayist Poe Ballantine explores "the imperatives of virgins in volcanoes and the ghosts who watch over us"
Here's some background info:
Share in the insights of Poe Ballantine, his writing life and the experiences he draws from decades of tramping about the country, taking odd jobs, living on $400 a month and failing spectacularly. Poe has been called “The Voice of the People” and “The King of the Personal Essay.” You are invited to view into his writing life, how he got here, how he sustains, the imperative of virgins in volcanoes and the ghosts who watch over us, matters of process, magic, mechanics, flambéing with banana liqueur and whatever else you want to know.
Monday, April 02, 2012
Easy to Love but Hard to Raise: "You are not alone"
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| One of my essays, "The Great Third Grade AIDS Scare," is in this anthology. The overall message of the book and the blog and all of its writers is "You are not alone," even though it sometimes feels like it. All kinds of compelling posts on the blog about medications, education, outreach, relationships, resources, etc. To connect, go to the blog at http://www.easytolovebut.com/ |
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
One of my essays in new "Companions in Wonder" anthology from MIT Press
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Saturday, November 26, 2011
Pre-order now: "Easy to Love but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories"
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| Received my copies of this new book today. It features one of my essays, "The Great Third Grade AIDS Scare." Thanks for Kay and Adrienne for putting together a great volume. Foreword by the legendary ADHD researcher and author Dr. Edward Hallowell. Pre-order at DRT Press. |
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Wyoming Women's Foundation wants stories by women struggling to reach economic self-sufficiency
Tipped workers have their work cut out for them. Sure, on good nights they make more than the $7.25/hour federal minimum wage. If they don’t, their employer is supposed to make up the difference. Most don’t, because there is no enforcement.
Wyoming's legislatively-mandated minimum wage is $5.15/hour. We are tied with Georgia as the state with the lowest minimum wage. Good to see that Wyoming is trying to keep up with the Georgians. Or vice versa. At least Wyorgia has a minimum wage requirement. Five Southern states have none. They include Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana. The Feds can’t mandate that states adhere to a minimum wage. They would be told “it’s none of your cotton-pickin’ business what we pay our
Such good company we keep.
The Wyoming Women’s Foundation is looking for stories from women struggling to make ends meet. Here’s the announcement:
The Wyoming Women’s Foundation announces the launch of a new project designed to help raise awareness of the barriers women face in achieving economic self-sufficiency in Wyoming.
We are seeking to learn about the life of workers who earn minimum wage in Wyoming. Are you earning minimum wage? (The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour).What kind of job do you have? Are you able to make ends meet with that wage? How? We will be asking how your wage impacts you life and that of your family.
We will also specifically be looking for information from Wyomingites who rely on tipped wages. Are your tipped wages enough to get you by and are you aware of the tipped offset? We encourage you to check the WYWF facebook page to share your story. If you would prefer your information remains anonymous and not posted publically, please email us at sarah@wywf.org or call 307-250-0479. Your information will be kept confidential, unless you agree to let us share your story.
Please join the conversation! We want to hear from you so that we can maximize the number of women in Wyoming that have achieved economic self-sufficiency!
Monday, October 25, 2010
Montana and Wyoming fiction writers give freaks a pass
That’s a line from Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” Maile Meloy reviewed the novel (mostly favorably) and referred to those lines as her favorites. I like them too.
I haven’t read a McGuane novel since “92 in the Shade.” And that was decades ago. More recently I’ve read McGuane’s essay collection, “A Sporting Chance.” Practically everything I know about cutting horses I know from this fine book. McGuane raises and trains cutting horses in Montana. As a youth, I was chronically allergic to horse hair and hay and weeds and almost everything else you can find on a ranch. Fortunately, I was a city boy and not a farmer’s son out on the prairie.
I have since been on horseback five or six times without collapsing with an asthma attack. But my sensibilities are totally non-horse and horses know it.
Maybe that’s why I’m so taken with McGuane’s facility with horses. Horses and language. As Meloy points out in the NYT review, McGuane’s novels are a little baggy while his essays are succinct works of art. She also points out some factual inconsistencies regarding some of the book’s characters.
But she’s willing to give McGuane a pass on this. Just as the attorney in the book in willing to give a Montana-style pass to the main character. Meloy gives McGuane a pass because he’s such a damn fine writer and he’s written a good book.
I sometimes get a bit suspicious when a fictional character’s freakishness is called out. It’s almost as if the author, who’s spent thousands of words portraying his character’s quirkiness, must now actually say the word “freak!” Just in case you missed all the clues.
But there’s something a bit deeper here. Have the quirky characters of the Rocky Mountain West become a bit of a stereotype? Quirky people live here, denizens of the Great Wide Open. They often have fled the more settled places of the East and South and Coastal West. They are tough individualists drawn to the live-and-let-live Code of the West. It’s not a code, exactly, more like guidelines. But you know what I mean.
Used to be all the freaky characters came from the minds of writers of the South – William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, etc. Along came Annie Proulx, Lee K. Abbott, John Nichols, Rick DeMaranis, Ron Carlson, Alyson Hagy, etc. These writers of the West wrote great stories and novels about freakish people driven by a search for solitude or personal freedom or some undefined crucial core value. Southern characters, on he other hand, were driven more by ghosts of the so-called glorious past and the constraints of their old-time religion.
I love freaky characters. I often try to invent some for my stories. But just because you live in a freakish place, such as Montana or Wyoming, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to creating believable characters.
Name the freakiest place you know. If you’re a button-down Midwesterner, Boulder, Colorado’s Pearl Street Mall might test your sensibilities. If you’re a hipster from Boulder, a trip to Sun City, Ariz., might cause you to come unglued.
Wyoming is pretty freaky, I must admit. Bill Sniffin’s Sunday newspaper column was devoted to the antics of the former Miss Wyoming-World, Joyce McKinney. McKinney is the focus of Errol Morris’s latest documentary, “Tabloid.” In 1977 in London, she kidnapped a former boyfriend, a young LDS missionary, and forced him to have sex for three days. The British tabloids had a field day with this woman who committed rape on a man. That’s the focus of Morris’s film.
Sniffin of Lander also recalled that McKinney surfaced a few years in Tennessee, paying a man to burglarize a house “to pay for an artificial leg for a three-legged horse.”
As Playlist says about Morris’s story: “Intoxicatingly entertaining and outrageously wild, Hollywood’s top writers could never have dreamed this up.”
Hollywood writers? No. But Mountain West writers – of course.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
The week in publishing...
I also heard from Liz Jackson at Laramie County Community College that my short-short story, "Flying Nurse," was accepted for publishing in the 2010 High Plains Register. There will be a reading by contributors in late April. I'll keep you posted.
I sent out two new pieces this week. One was another ADHD essay, which I sent to a proposed anthology on the subject by CRT Press. ADHD is such an interesting topic. Researchers are still arguing whether it exists or not. And parents experiencing glorious adventures with their attention-deficit children are left hanging.
The second piece I sent out this week was a short story set in Denver. The city crops up a lot in my fiction. I'm a native and spent the first nine years of my life there. I also lived there 10 years as an adult. Formative years.
If you'd like to read samples of my work, go to my web site at http://www.hummingbirdminds.com/. I'm also happy to sell you a book. Just leave a comment below. Or go to Ghost Road Press.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Great moments at The Literary Connection
"Writing is an exercise in longing" Quote by Isabel Allende which Laura Pritchett has on her PC.
Laura Prichett: "Every single piece of fiction I've written is set in northern Colorado and Wyoming. Those places are part of my soul."
Pam Houston: "Writing is about surrender to the metaphor. Not wresting control of it but surrender. We have to keep learning this over and over again."
"I'm a sharp observer," said Houston, author of "Cowboys are My Weakness." "I take things and put them together with other remarkable things and make a new thing. I'm like a collagist. I spend a whole lot of time creating raw material and then a lot of time on placement. Everything is moveable."
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Gene research could hold clues to ADHD
This week in the Journal of Neuroscience, scientists report that in two brothers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a genetic change appears to make one of the brain's neurochemical pathways — the dopamine transporter — run in reverse. The result of that miswiring is that the brain acts as if amphetamines are always present, the researchers say.
Randy Blakely, one of the study's authors, and Allan D. Bass, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, talk about the findings and what they might mean for ADHD treatment.
So, the dopamine transporters in these two brothers run backwards and that causes their ADHD? That could explain a lot, as too much dopamine leads to anxiety and nervousness and hyperactivity. The studies could lead to some breakthroughs in treatment for ADHD. It also explains the workings of Ritalin and Concerta and other central nervous system stimulants. They cause the dopamine tranporters to reverse their actions which, in the case of the two brothers, means that they are shifted from reverse into forward. Weird, eh?
Both my kids have ADHD. When we first put our son on Ritalin at the tender age of five, his pediatric psychiatrist admitted that scientists didn’t understand why Ritalin worked – it just did. Not exactly what parents want to hear when their five-year-old is being given a drug on the DEA’s list of Schedule II controlled substances, just one step down the scale from heroin, Quaaludes, magic mushrooms and LSD (also, inexplicably, marijuana).
So here are some new clues to the workings of ADHD medications.
I’ve written a lot about our family’s experience with ADHD. One of my early published essays on the subject in the now-defunct Northern Lights magazine was named "Hummingbird Minds" after a description of ADHD by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. He had ADHD in a big way and said that he and my son and millions of others had "hummingbird minds." That phrase became the title of my web site and later on my blog. In the beginning, I wrote a lot about ADHD but not so much any more. My son is 23 and in college. My daughter is about to enter high school. My son Kevin no longer takes medication for ADHD as he’s come up with other coping skills. It may be that ADHD is losing some of its sting as he ages. Not sure.
Some of my published work about ADHD can be found on my web site. Go to the "Writing" section on the sidebar and click on "On ADHD." Here’s an excerpt from my essay "We Are Distracted" published, in a slightly different form, in the 1996 book In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction by W.W. Norton and co-edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones:
Physicians have been prescribing Ritalin (a.k.a. methylphenidate) for more than 30 years for a condition that has been known as Minimal Brain Damage (MBD), Minimal Brain Dysfunction in Children (MBDC), Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and ADD with Hyperactivity (ADHD). If some progressive therapists and groups such as CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder) have their way, the official designation may one day be changed to Attention Deficit Syndrome with hyperactivity (ADHS). This alphabet soup can be confusing. Once, on his first day at a new school, my son announced in front of the class that he had ADHD. The next day, several very nervous parents called the school, concerned about the new student who had AIDS. Being a "hyper" kid turns you into one type or pariah; AIDS carriers get special mistreatment. It was weeks before the confusion was straightened out. But the impression had been made. Kevin was different; different is bad.