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July 10, 2008I wasn’t looking for love;it was looking for me.AND IT FOUND ME.Well, it’s the Fourth of July, which I hate and never celebrate because it was the last whole day of my beloved Jackson’s life. Zazu sleepily raises her head when a furious fussilade of whistling fireworks goes off outside my kitchen window, and lowers it back onto her paws when it stops. The booms travel over the roof and sound on the street. When it happens again she couldn’t care less. Later I find the spent detritus on 15th Street, with little scorch marks on the asphalt. My sunburned shoulders from my afternoon at Dolores Park, the sun still beating as the clouds flew by, tingle as the fog moistens my skin up on the roof. City Hall looks like a Kubla Khan fantasy, its stately dome blurred by mist. Not much to see, fireworks-wise. But oh, the beautiful fog blanketing the city and softening its lights! I love knowing this sky is right above my apartment, over the sandwich of the roof; it reminds me, as one forgets in city life, that the sky reigns over all, no matter the interference from city outcroppings of buildings and communications towers. “I love your spot in the world,” Jon Crow told me. And wrote in my guestbook, “I’ve known all your homes on the West Coast, and this rates among the best…the perfect fit of elegance and place.” It does fit me perfectly, or perhaps I am coming to fit myself. I enact my yearly July 4th ritual of playing Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” my own personal national anthem. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease, I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees.” My dream’s not been shattered. In fact I don’t call my dream a dream; I call it life. As long as I can spend my days and nights writing and not being beholden to anyone, there’s nothing else I’m waiting to have happen. PHANTOM LIMBI’m still feeling a body appendage that was cut from me—my laptop. My dying dying dead dying hard drive died. The fate of my data is in the hands of The PowerBook Guy on the 10th floor of the Flood Building. “They love us on Yelp,” read his t-shirt. “I’ll love you on Yelp if you get my files back for me.” But this is rather lovely, writing with a pencil. It reminds me of sitting on the metal rocker on our porch as a kid, thinking my thoughts in the night, one of those close, dense, still Philadelphia summer nights when bats would circle Camac Street, the haunting Brothers Four song “Greenfields” playing on the radio… Once there were green fields, kissed by the sun./Once there were valleys, where rivers used to run./Once there were blue skies, with white clouds high above./Once they were part of an everlasting love.We were the lovers who strolled through green fields. I’ve always written drafts with a pencil, when I want to think slowly. Poems, short stories, the novel, anything in flux, because pen is too final, too satisfied with itself, and the laptop is too, too much an appendage. Through a pencil you actually write, form words, with your hand, not just by tapping your fingers on titanium keys. In fact I am an unofficial member of the Lead Pencil Club (unofficial because I love my laptop). In all correspondence, says their Manifesto, “we will favor the lead pencil—simple, erasable, light, portable, and responding immediately to the mind, that quirky little expendable that the superhighway would like to forget as it rushes past on its way to oblivion.” “PHILADELPHIA, PENCIL MANIA,”I’ve occasionally addressed a letter. As long as I include a zip code, it gets there. I still have at least one of the School District of Philadelphia pencils my first lover, my high school creative writing teacher, gave me in the early 70’s, and no pencil has ever been so toothsome, so gripping of the paper, so satisfying to write with. I leave my laptop at home when I go to Burning Man (desert dust—scared of you!) but when I misplaced my book bag with my journals, notebooks, blank books, my 30-year-old copy of On the Road, it was not my laptop I was missing, it was pencils, paper, and words in books. I don’t at all mind being disconnected from the digital flow of information—I love it, it’s part of the appeal of BM. So this year I plan to have my own little theme camp, a writer’s emergency station, featuring the 20-or-so blank books I uncovered while packing, that I’ve picked up or had given to me over the years, pencils, pens, tablets, legal pads, loose paper, stationery, miscellaneous books, a little desk and a comfy chair to enjoy it all in. I never want anyone to be stuck in the desert, like me, with no writing materials. NEXT DAY, ON A WHIMI take the 49 to Cesar Chavez and walk back down Valencia to see what’s to be seen. Not too far into my journey I spy a sidewalk sale in front of an Asian herbal shop. When I least expect it, I am struck by lightning. AND I’M IN LOVE!Who wouldn’t be, with this face?
The author’s new kitten, Zahra, right at home on the author’s couch. El sofá del autor, sofá del Zahra. A gal on vacation from San Diego had developed a rapport with a striped caramel cutie, one of three kittens in a cage on the street, one who immediately stole my heart. She turned her over to me and I knew she had to come home with me. She’d been waiting for her forever home, her forever love, waiting for me. It was a meeting that was meant to be. I’ve never been up on Valencia around there. My mission was accomplished. Her caretaker wrapped her in a t-shirt and I bought a fabric shoulder bag at another street sale ($5 reduced to $4—a dollar credit for the kitten). I walked her home in my arms, stopping to talk to kids and the owner of a tiny dog. Look, Zahra, it’s that thing they call a dog. Ever see one before?
You will indulge the author, yes? The author’s column puts Zahra to sleep.
The calendar shot from under the author’s toilet.
Look! The author’s cat is no bigger than The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2!
Zahra seen through a cardboard box handle. Too cute, even for the author!
All right, that’s enough. I’M A PROUD MOM, WHAT CAN I TELL YOU.It’s an auspicious night—a layer of smoky haze over the city, Sutro Tower poking out of it, and a “silver slipper of a moon,” as Tennessee Williams put it, rising above it all. Brahms on the stereo, evening breeze through the window, cats on the couch, that’s my idea of home. I even broke my LaborFest movie date with Mark “Silver Fox” Marsh to stay by Zahra’s side and assure her this is home. Lucky, lucky kitty! It occurs to me that on July 5th, the anniversary of Jackson’s death, that this was the perfect way to pay tribute to him. It was meant to be. I’m trying to engage Zazu and Zzyzzy, but they are keeping their distance, growling and hissing, recoiling from the smell of kitten on my hands. They have taken up sentry posts in the hallway, staring, with thought bubbles rising from their heads reading, “What is the meaning of this?” No need to be threatened or jealous, but Zahra after all is sleeping with the alpha cat, the author. All in the fullness of time. I wish I could just tell them in English, I’m only doing for her what I did for you, giving her a home when she needed one. You understand, yes? RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS, SENSELESS ACT OF BEAUTYin which the author revives her occasional feature of sharing golden nuggets of prose encountered in her readings. “We looked like a gang of lost corpses heading back to the boneyard.” “I’d seen a thousand kids just like them. They seem to come from homes somewhere that they’ve run away from. They seem to come to take the place of the old stiffs who slip on a wet board, miss a ladder, fall out a door, or just dry up and shrivel away riding the mean freights; the old souls that groan somewhere in the darkest corner of a boxcar, moan about a twisted life half lived and nine tenths wasted, cry as their souls hit the highball for heaven, die and pass out of this world like the echo of a foggy whistle.” “…the car jerked and buckled through the clouds like a coffin over a cliff.” BEFORE ON THE ROAD, CAMEWoodrow Wilson Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory. Woody and Jack were contemporaries; Woody was born ten years before Jack, in 1912, and died two years before him, in 1967. Bound for Glory was published in 1943; Jack wrote On the Road in 1951. Richard Sheinen of the San Jose Mercury News said in his review of David Amram’s “Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie,” that “quintessentially American figures who lived large”—Amram, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kerouac and Woody—“were part of a loose-knit community of artists in New York City; everyone knew everyone. Or soon would.” Still I don’t know that Jack and Woody ever met, but if not, they should have. Maybe they were, unbeknownst each to the other, riding the same freight at some point. Woody Guthrie was not just a great songwriter, but great writer, period. I’ve been a huge fan ever since the early 80’s, when a strolling guitar-playing Amtrak troubadour brought me to tears with the State Folk Song of Washington, “Roll On Columbia,” as we sped through that spectacular state. “Yeeeeaaaaah…” says Woody in the movie “Bound for Glory,” to the woman he spent the night with, who looks puzzled. “Yeeeeeaaaaah, I’m married.” Scoundrel! Amram, said the Mercury News article, “sees Guthrie as part of a ‘Whitman-esque tradition,’ one that ‘embraces the open road and all the people who live in this amazing vast country of ours.’ It’s a tradition that ‘expresses the beauty part of life experience’ in words and song.” I met Amram in Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell, Mass., and attended the San Jose premiere of the Guthrie Variations. The beat goes on, I thought. A shiver of history ran through me, and my connection to it. I am an heir of Whitman, of Guthrie, of Kerouac. I have a passable folk-register singing voice and even once thought of forming a band called The Woodies (tee hee) to revive local coffee house interest in his genius. Guitar, harmonica, tambourine, fiddle? Anyone interested? If you embrace the open road and the beauty part of life, sign up here: YOUR SATISFACTION. FIND IT HERE.Here? On the Haight Noriega bus, as it pauses in front of Café International to let off a wheelchair? It’s an ad on the side of the bus for certified diamonds. Even though Catherine Zeta-Jones once said, of gifts from men, “Call me old-fashioned, but nothing says I love you like a big, old rock,” I don’t think I’d symbolize my satisfaction with a diamond. Nevertheless, what if my satisfaction were to be found on that bus, in some random guy, and I let it pass. Go ahead, pass on by. Like I said, there’s nothing I’m waiting to have happen. One can’t wait for life, or it never gets here. I came to the Café to show the matriarch, Zahra, her feline namesake. And I finish this column here. So, my mission accomplished, I bid you meow!
------------------------------------------------------------ Now who would cry
They saw us in death, but never in flight, so roll on, Columbia, roll on... copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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