Another one bites the dust...

Read yesterday that Anderbo has given up the ghost. Shame. It was a nice magazine.

 We used to have a killer bookstore here, years ago, in downtown Colorado Springs. An indy that went by the name of Chinook. It was a wonderful old place staffed by charming people who knew everything under the sun, and when its beloved owners, Dick and Judy Noyes, saw fit to close the doors after 45 years in business, everyone—even folks who didn’t read—lamented its passing.

 R.I.P. Anderbo. You were loved and admired by many.

Groovin' to the Oldies...

Sheet rock crew showed up early and loud this morning. Diesel engines muttering. Doors banging. Men laughing and scaffold clanking. An oldies station was playing away on somebody’s truck radio.

Read Dan Chaon’s story, “What Happened to Us?” in the new issue of Ploughshares before going off to work. It brought back memories of the terrific stuff he’d done in his novel, You Remind Me of Me.

 Sometimes, the way things were is the way things are.

 

Awakenings...

Had one of those nights when I couldn’t sleep. Something I’ve put up with for years. My doctor once asked me what it was I thought about when I lay there, awake at night, and I said, “Same as most people, I guess. God and the universe.”

 She gave me a strange look and stood there, clicking her pen. Then she turned back to her clipboard. While I was getting dressed she informed me that I was way off the mark. That most people thought about their kids, or their spouses, or their finances. Not about God. And especially not about the universe.

 I was reading “On the Nature of Things” at the time this examination took place. Which accounted—in part, I’m sure—for my answer. But after the initial look she shot my way, I figured it wasn’t worth explaining. Tossing out a name like Lucretius would've only made things worse. 

A lesson in salesmanship...

Got a rejection slip this morning after one year, one month, and three days. It was a form rejection. No problem there—folks are busy and, hey, who’s got time to write, anyway?—but it arrived, as they sometimes do, with a special offer attached. A one-year subscription to the magazine, billed at a “Writer’s Discount.” Tell you what friend, I couldn’t reach for my wallet fast enough.

In remembrance...

Memorial Day.

 I have a faded black and white photo of my paternal grandfather, posing, quite seriously, in his petty officer’s uniform, circa 1917. The portrait is a formal one. It was taken in France during the first world war, and printed as a souvenir postcard—something the young sailor probably intended to send stateside, though there is no message, or address, written on the back.

 More than one of these postcards was undoubtedly printed, but this is the sole survivor. My grandfather’s troop transport, the USS America, sank in New Jersey harbor, was raised and repaired, and following its decommissioning some years later, scuttled. Or so I've been led to believe.

 My grandfather survived the Great War, living well into his eighties. But the uniform he wore found its way to the bottom of a dry cistern in Sioux City, Iowa one summer when my grandmother decided to clean the attic.  

Spanning time...

Took the train from Cañon City to Parkdale today, down through the Royal Gorge. The runoff was heavy and the Arkansas River was fast and high and muddy. Damage from the fire last summer was only visible on the canyon rim in the form of a few twisted, blackened trees.

 I met a man once, a pilot, who flew a small plane under the suspension bridge that spans the narrow granite canyon some 900 feet overhead. He did this while stationed at Camp Carson, during World War II.  The man is gone now (he passed away in a veteran’s hospital in Denver some years back) but his memory, like his story, is still with me. 

A writing ritual...

I do most of my writing on a MacBook Pro, in a big leather easy chair. Often with a cat or two in my lap. Owing to this frivolous practice—and the bone-dry Colorado air—I’m frequently packing a heavy jolt of static. Enough, I suspect, to fry my hard drive and destroy my work.

 Last winter, I decided to ease the risk of self-immolation by dipping my finger over the top of the lampshade and touching its metal ribs whenever I shuffled into the room. It worked, raising a spark and neutralizing the charge, and now it’s become a habit. A ritual, really. Like dipping your fingers in holy water.

The dawning...

Breakfast. Apple slices slathered in peanut butter. Kitchen won’t be serviceable for a while, so ate them on the front porch while watching a quilt of gray clouds gather over the peak. Took a whetstone to my axe last night. Have to remove the last of the tree stumps from the yard before reseeding the lawn. Shade mix to sun mix. One in, one out, as the man said. Chatted with the construction boss about his not-so-close-at-hand-retirement, and he mentioned, glumly, he was concerned about outliving his savings. This, to a writer.  

 

 

Weathering the storm...

Big hailstorm blew in yesterday afternoon. Trees denuded, flowers crushed, windows broken throughout the neighborhood. At the same time, a construction crew with whining sawzalls was ripping apart the kitchen, prep-work for a long-overdue renovation.

 I don’t mind writing through distractions. It’s good discipline. I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, thank you, but the occasional calamity sometimes forces the mind to focus in an unfamiliar way, making for stories with a strange and unexpected tenor. 

women, whisky, and bootjacks...

In the old matinee westerns, a good-looking girl with a pretty bottom would straddle the cowboy's leg, farrier-wise, and tug off his boots while he sat sipping whisky. In real life—where women and whisky were invariably more scarce than they were in the movies—that same cowboy would use a bootjack like the one pictured at the top of the page (beneath the author’s name) to get the job done.

 A lot of bootjacks are fashioned out of wood. But the old beauty you see in the photo—which once lived on the Bob Meigh ranch in Moneta, Wyoming—is made of cast iron and has a murderous heft to it. I don’t know that it doubled as a doorstop, but it was certainly possible. One thing’s for sure. If he ever clobbered a man with it, the story got buried along with the corpse.  

Out of nowhere, onto the page...

A copy of The Concho River Review turned up in my mailbox yesterday. My short story, “Dead Ringer” appears on page 17. The idea for that piece seeded itself in my head when I was leaving Wyoming, four or five summers ago. I still remember the easy way that boy stuck his girl in the cab of my Jeep and closed the door after her. Waving us off as if he somehow expected never to see us again.

The tire got patched in Waltman. Three long-haul truckers who’d pulled off the road to stretch their legs fixed it with one of those cheap, portable kits you get in the automotive department in WalMart. I paid them with a six of Heineken I’d had on ice in the cooler. I was sad to lose the beer, but happy to get the girl (and the tire) back to her stranded boyfriend. To the best of my knowledge, they never did make it to the Hole in the Wall.

 

A view to the future...

Had three old silver maples removed from the front yard last week. The forester said they were fifty or sixty years old, though they could’ve passed for a hundred to the unschooled eye. They’d died of old age. (A bad pruning job some decades back hadn’t done them any favors either.) Squirrels had stripped away the bark. The limbs had lost leaves. The roots were shallow, failing in every way. 

 I didn’t have the heart to watch them cut down, as they were good friends who’d brought much pleasure to my life. But when the stump grinder guy came along a couple of days later with his big yellow machine, I couldn’t help myself. I was all eyes. Man, that was some kind of rig! It had a whirling saw blade that must have been three feet in diameter, and it swung back and forth like the gate on a picket fence, shredding those ancient stumps into mulch.

 Planted a couple of young ash where the silver maples used to stand. They can’t ever replace those quaint old trees—nothing could do that—but it’s a comforting feeling looking out the window again. Especially when you’re glancing up from the keyboard. Or the pages of a good book.

To blog or not to blog...

Just got this contraption up and running, and figured maybe I should kick the tires and check the oil before I take it out on the road. So let's call it a journal for now. If it aspires to bloghood, we'll send it back to the shop and have it refitted.