celtic_writer

Ichabod Crane, McCarthy's Bar, and Life's Enduring Mysteries

When you wish, or need, to laugh these days, pick up Pete McCarthy's book McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland.

He's a hoot and three-quarters. You know you are in for some fun while perusing the book's cover: McCarthy tipping his hat, an affable smart ass standing in the doorway of a pub, accompanied by a pug dog and a nun drinking Guinness.

What makes McCarthy a great storyteller is he writes about everyday inexplicable things, like two Americans he meets:

"They looked in reasonable shape; yet the blanket refusal of most Americans to walk anywhere that has a purpose, like a shop or a bar or a castle, remains one of life's enduring mysteries. Put them in expensive jogging clothes, though, with headphones on and silly little weights in their hands, and they are happy to strut up and down main roads in toxic fumes for hours without going anywhere, because it's Exercise. But walk to the shop? 'No way. Not me.'"

That got me thinking about the mysterious things one experiences in life, so I thought of some:

1) Why do people take stuffed animals for rides in their cars? You see them: hundreds of Beanie Babies and little tigers and curly poodles and fuzzy creatures, stuck on the shelf near the back window of a sedan whose driver is talking on a cellphone while driving his or her stuffed animals in his or her car in the fast lane going almost 30 miles an hour, backing up traffic to kingdom come. They should be pulled over and charged with DWI: Driving While Imbecilic.

2) Why do so many people who shop in health food stores look ill? My mother Dottie M. had a saying when she passed a person on the street who looked poorly: "That guy needs a good shot of vitamins." That phrase swims through my head when I shop at a local organic food store for vegetables. Half of the people look grey, washed up, worn out, unable to pick up a stalk of celery without calling for shopper assistance. It's probably because they haven't consumed a decent piece of protein since the Eisenhower Administration.

3) Why was the bow tie ever invented?

4) Why do people think spandex makes them look good? Ichabod Crane would look fat in spandex.

5) Why do people drink diet soda with their french fries? Ichabod Crane would drink a real Coke with his french fries.

And not wear a bow tie.

What's on your list of Life's Enduring Mysteries? Comment, please.

Chatwin's Folded Pages

Saturday night, soon to be Sunday. Adjusted a Web app for a client today, then ate a steak with salad. Labbie Walt and I went for a walk. Leaves have finally fallen from trees, and the wind in Mason Neck blows them about.

Before I fall asleep these nights, I pick up a book, as always. And lately it's been the re-reading of nomad Bruce Chatwin, a Brit who left the society of Sotheby's so he could wander around the world to see what was really going on.

I originally found Bruce Chatwin in a bookstore, his tome on a table marked "for $2.00 or less." It was a book about Welsh brothers called On the Black Hill. It was his only work officially marked "fiction." I didn't want it to end.

There may be better writers in this world, but this man tells great stories. When he was a child, he discovered "a piece of brontosaurus" on display in his grandmother's "glass-fronted dining room cabinet." This treasure was "thick and leathery, with strands of course, reddish hair." It was a creature that "lived in Patagonia." His grandmother's cousin, "Charley Milward the Sailor, found it." Eventually the experience sparked a book called In Patagonia. I hope some day you get the chance to read it.

What I like about Chatwin is that he makes me fold the page corners of his books. An action spawned by a phrase I want to remember, wish I had written, a few words I can return to that make me think. While reading "Among the Ruins" last night, he wrote about a man named Axel Munthe, a Swedish physician descended from Scandinavian "bishops and burgomasters" who made an escape to the island of Capri. There he bought a villa, and made it into his own. Chatwin quotes Munthe:

"The place is small. It was built by me on the principle that the soul needs more room than the body..."

The soul needs more room than the body. When taking that sentence to heart, how can anyone on this planet need to be kept hostage, in business, or in life?

Slacker Squirrel

In 1903 Beatrix Potter wrote a story about a squirrel named Nutkin. The story starts: "This is a Tale about a tail—a tail that belonged to a little red squirrel, and his name was Nutkin."

And one of his clan is now living somewhere in my home.

Aunt Pittypat Hamilton had a great statement in the movie Gone With the Wind about Yankees in Georgia. She declared, Southern-belle hand placed melodramatically upon her forehead: "However did they get in?" It works for squirrels too. How did he get in? Perhaps through the front door, left open when I was out on the drive, gathering grocery bags from the Bug to restock the pantry. Or maybe he came down through the chimney. Perhaps Santa showed him the way.

The Black Labbies are very concerned about this intruder. I walked through the living room the other day to find the little varmint sitting right next to Marg's head as she lay snoozing on the couch. I was surprised he didn't have his little squirrelly feet up on the coffee table, using the cable remote to catch the latest doings on Animal Planet. Just my luck. A slacker squirrel. Get a job!

This isn't the first time Mason Neck's wild creatures have paid a visit to this humble abode. A few springs ago I was cleaning up the kitchen, and had some sundries to add to the infamous junk drawer. As I put the stuff in, I noticed a snake, and closed the drawer.

SNAKE!

It was a small black snake, slithering among the coupons and rubber bands, matchboxes and emergency candles. I slowly pulled the drawer out of the cabinet and, grimacing the whole time, straight arms holding the drawer as far away from me as possible, walked down the back wooden stairs to place the container on the ground so the little snake could twirl its way out of the drawer to go eat some bugs or something else FAR AWAY.

This squirrel is a juvenile (delinquent...probably tries my clothes on when I am not home) and is quick, not willing to be caught. Have been researching tips on how to catch him so I can release him out where he belongs. I have read that squirrels don't like mothballs. My mother tried that with a skunk in the garage, and the skunk slept through the whole undignified ordeal. So it looks like it has to be a safe trap cage with some peanuts in it. Or maybe the lure is a year's subscription to Ranger Rick. I wonder if they have gift certificates.

PHOTO: Squirrel Nutley, illustration from the book by Beatrix Potter, from Gutenberg.org

Rough Pastel

Big storm tonight in northern VA. Need the rain. Have been purging this dry house of paper and nonsense lately, and re-reading Hemingway before falling asleep.

From The Sun Also Rises:

"Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you have to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on."

I think women should read Hemingway. He tells us about men who fight bulls and other males, the ones who want women who are happy, not pure; women who are content in their puzzle, if that is who they are. He describes the men we know, detest, treasure, seek, lose, meet again at a different time, another place. And he lets us know about himself, how he feels about things behind the shield of masculinity, remorse, rememberance.

Fiction writers from way back were the first psychologists, using the rough pastels of words to scrape some lesson across the page, to tell the story of another human, to give us a glimpse of who we are. It delivers more meaning than being spoon-fed while laying upon some couch.

An acquaintance of mine told me something the other day: she went through thirty (30) years of therapy -- countless hours and dollars -- to only realize that if she had just been honest with herself from the get-go, she would have been all right.

PHOTO: Ernest Hemingway, from FingerLakesPhoto, filtered in Photoshop with -- you guessed it -- the Rough Pastel filter.

Otherworld of the Eternal Hobo

Am in rebel country, writing a book.

Came down this way two weeks ago, in a rented van carrying two Black Labs, Celtic music, a computer, some books and the excitement, as always, of getting gone.

Am in a wooden home with my friend Doug once more, near a South Carolina lake, where the geese are laying eggs and ducks waddle away from their nests in the woods, to cross quiet roads in pairs, down the bank, to freshen themselves in water.

The Celts believed in the Otherworld. The place you don't belong, but that is special and silent enough to awaken the antennae of the spirit.

About an hour away is another house, called Connemara Farms, in a place called Flat Rock, NC. It was the last home of American writer Carl Sandburg. His last location surprised me. How did that Illinois lad end up in the South?

Carl Sandburg was married to a woman who raised goats, and needed lots of land to do so. By the point in his life when he settled in North Carolina, Sandburg had the Pulitzer for his many words about Lincoln, so he wrote about honey and salt, and even more about breathing tokens, some of his best work. And he penned poems for children, and played his guitar for anyone who would listen, and would shake your hand, so one is told, no matter your nationality or color. And he was one of the first poets I ever read as a child. And I liked visiting his home, as his words helped inspire me so many years ago, as he suggested was his lot in life, to "dirty paper:"

Give me a quiet garret alone
Where I may sit for a few casual callers
And tell them ceaselessly, offhandedly,
'This is where I dirty paper.'
Thus each poet prays and dreams.
The eternal hobo asks for a quiet room
with a little paper he can dirty,
with birds who sit where he tells 'em.

Carl Sandburg, Breathing Tokens, 1978

Creed

Back before many of us were born, there was a radio show hosted by Edward R. Murrow called This, I Believe.

The show featured both famous and common people reading essays about the principles that have guided their lives.

If you tuned in then, you would have heard Albert Einstein, or a woman from the hollers of Kentucky, recite their original thoughts into air, delivered to the eager ears of millions of radio listeners. The show has since been revitalized by National Public Radio. It is worth tuning in. There's a great essay by a fellow who believes life can be described by the marbling in a pastrami sandwich.

The last few days, I have been thinking about belief, and what it means to have a creed in one's life. What are the things I still believe at the age of 51? I've come up with a list.

I believe in dogs. These creatures are our teachers. They love us unconditionally. They are always happy to see us, no matter what. They do not judge us. They listen, and act like you are the most interesting person on the planet. They simply treat us the way we should all treat each other.

I believe in misfits. They are the hope for our society. They think for themselves, have loads of creativity, yet have never been told they are smart. They are unafraid to discover. And they don't like being told what to do. They are my students. Who they really are: my teachers.

I believe in something much bigger than I can ever be, and it is called nature. If we peer through the microscope, nothing is calm. All is chaos. And that's what fosters creativity. And that's what contributes to flow.

I believe in not knowing. Life can be a surprise, if we let it.

I believe in silence. We all need it. The unencumbered hour spent simply listening is food for the soul.

I believe in books written a very long time ago. It reminds me that many people who lived centuries back had it right in the first place.

I believe time is the most important thing we've got. It's not things and big houses and fame and all that petty nonsense. It is time, 'cause we can't get it back. Yeah, we can make more money next week, but we can't get back one millisecond of yesterday.

I believe our characters are set in stone at a very early age, and that we don't change very much. We physically grow bigger, and hopefully, we mature enough to understand that remembering childhood innocence helps us live a long time.   

I believe there are people in this life we outgrow, and it has nothing to do with loyalty. There is nothing more they can teach us or we can teach them, so we have to let each other go.

I believe you should only hang around with people who make your life better. Otherwise, it is a deplorable waste of time. You don't have to put up with the bossiness and guilt, judgement and ignorance, pride and dishonesty. You can simply say "good bye" with your silence. No other explanation is needed.

I believe in coffee. Caffeine fuels creativity.

I believe you can support yourself...emotionally, physically and financially if you just keep learning.

I believe you should live unafraid. It is never anyone else's call. It is up to you.

I believe in life...as well as death. I have held both in my arms, and know we cannot have one without the other. And one teaches us about the other.

And I know belief is tested, every day. So when that happens, I try to remember a time when I was around seven or so, sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, drawing horses on a clean, white sketch pad. My father came into the room, and sat in a chair beside me. He asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up, Mary?"

I continued to draw, and thought about the question. After a few minutes, I looked up at him, and replied, "I want to be a good person."

I did not understand then why his eyes watered up, and the reason he got up and left the room.

But now, I believe I do.

The Mystery Guest

Returned from the beach last evening...to a mystery.

Wandered out in the dark along the country road with the Labbies to the rusty old mailbox to retrieve a few days of mail.

Once inside, with light, I discovered a small cardboard package mixed in with the letters and catalogs and paper. Addressed to me, I opened it. Inside: a slim book. One I did not order.

And don't know who did.

The book is titled The Mystery Guest by French author Gregoire Bouillier. I read a review of this book in The New York Times Book Review some Sundays ago, and was so intrigued with the story that I tore the title/author information out of the newspaper and placed it in The Vault so it would be readily available for reference the next time I visited the local Border's.

A few days later, at the bookstore, they told me, "Nope. Not in stock yet. Try again in a couple of weeks." OK. I placed the newspaper scrap back in my pocket. Then things got busy, and I didn't have the chance to check back.

Sometimes I forget I've ordered a book. But not this one. I remember wanting to purchase it locally so I could read it soon. To be sure, I checked my credit card account online. No evidence there. Hmmm. And I know I've never mentioned the book to anyone else.

It's the author's memoir of being dumped, without a word, by his girlfriend. No goodbye and good luck.

From the review by Erica Wagner:

"Years pass and he’s stuck with nothing, no explanation, only mystery and sorrow. Then the phone rings, and it’s her, calling to invite him to a party, a party for her husband’s best friend, who happens to be the artist Sophie Calle."

So Bouillier goes to the party, and brings an expensive gift: a bottle of 1964 Margaux. What he doesn't know is that it will never be opened.

Ms. Wagner also writes: "This is the theme of this work: the will to find connections, to believe in something other than random suffering."

Bouillier is hoping that, by seeing his ex, that the reason for his misery will be explained, and somehow will make sense. The reviewer writes, "the power of that kind of revelation lies entirely within ourselves."

The Zen Dudes say that one action begets another. None of us really know why things happen, but they do. And it's the small, surprising things that delight us. So, to the wonderful soul who mailed The Mystery Guest to me, I want to tell you, honestly, "thank you." It is a terrific book.

I am reading it slowly. I do not want it to end.

The Very Inn of Happiness

There's a book called How to Achieve True Greatness written by an Italian, Baldesar Castiglione, during the Renaissance period. His story includes information about a house he calls "the very inn of happiness."

I love that phrase. An inn is a place where you rent space, a piece of room for a short time. The stay is never permanent. Our lives change, and we take our pattern of contentment with us wherever we roam.

In his book Stumbling On Happiness, Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert writes about the science of happiness, and reports that it's the human frontal lobe that helps cause emotional misery in this society. That our brain gear makes us think too much about the future. How we spend so much time imagining how things are going to turn out...good or bad...that we miss what's going on right now.

Happiness can be chemistry, but I think most of the time, it just kinda shows up. And it is never who, what, when or where we expect, and it's usually not the big things that cause us to feel real joy. The small, everyday occurrences are what meld this life plot together.

Case in point: my three-year-old nephew Peter, after a few years of silence and testing and preschool, is talking. I walked into my sister's home after being out of town for a couple of weeks to hear from the little lad's lips, "Hi Mare Mare."

Go, Pete! You're a man of words! Welcome to the chatterbox Irish clan.

Now he's a total blabbermouth. My sister, exhausted from the noise, looked at me and said, "I've been waiting for this for so long, I can't ask him to be quiet."

Of course not.

The American painter Arthur Dove wrote:

"We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air,
There is much to be done--
Works of nature are abstract,
They do not lean on other things for meaning."

I suppose it all comes down to those unique seconds of joy we experience. From approaching life with affability, of being awake enough to notice, for there is no control ever, anywhere. And to accept that this is the way it is. There's a Swedish saying, "The things I hate to do, I do fast. The things I like to do, I do slow."

From the time we are young, women are told that "your wedding day is the happiest day of your life." Oh yeah? Uh uh. I no longer understand weddings, having participated in one of my own, as I feel a relationship so personal doesn't have to be put on public display in such a structured ceremony.

The day I remember, long ago, with Ken, was a single moment, many years before the day we got married.

We lived on Capitol Hill, in an absolute wreck of a rowhouse, that, at the time, was all we could afford. This home sported a back porch that had a rickety set of stairs affectionately called The Steps of Doom. You had to know exactly how to make your slow descent or ascent on these stairs, or you left yourself open to the possibility of crashing to the concrete in a sickening thud of protoplasm.

I drove an old bright yellow Beetle then, and had just returned from a road trip to Boston to visit my friend K. I parked in the driveway behind the house. When I looked out through the dirty windshield, I saw the back porch door open. Ken, looking every bit like as he always did, a Seattle Ernest Hemingway, rushed out the back door and made his way as hurriedly as he could down The Steps of Doom, dogs Casey and Shaman following behind. Ken made it safely to solid ground, and walked towards me, smiling. That's when I knew this thing was real, and that it doesn't come along very often.

I had been missed.

And so had he.

Painting:
Red Sun, 1935
Artist: Arthur G. Dove
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Secrets of Life

There's a book on the shelf I've carried with me for 43 years.

It's titled Secrets of Life: A True-Life Adventure

I received it when I was eight years old, gifted as part of a subscription to a children's book club. I read it cover-to-cover many times, when I was supposed to be asleep. The bedcovers a tent; flashlight from the glove compartment of the red Ford station wagon providing the light. My father passing through the hall, seeing exactly what I was doing, but never instructing me to sleep, as he knew how much I needed the written word.

It is a tome filled with explanations about ants and trees, how bees create a comb, where the secrets of rocks reside, and how many underwater treasures are concealed.

The Zen Dudes say we are all one. They would point to a rock and tell us the stone has life too, an energy that abounds in the same way as a tree. A rock is just a rock. As it should be.

There are stony things about, which I suppose can be classified as occurences that create death in the ways we live. A real-life tale about a wife who, unwilling to compromise, departed to a foreign country via a one-way ticket for herself and the children, leaving a husband behind to wonder, in his grief, what happened.

All stories wear two hats. But in the end, where does it all go? Love does not have to be cruel. But sometimes, it is.

My Irish grandmother had a theory about love, and how it all works. She told me to ask myself three questions about a man before I spent much time with him.

1) Does he make you laugh?

2) If you were stuck out on the highway at 3 a.m., would he come help you?

3) Could your heart always be full of him?

So, on this Wednesday evening in the woods of Virginia, there are trees and bees, rocks and no worries. Worrying is like sitting in a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it never gets you anywhere. People "worry" about everything. I gave that up a long time ago. When you do, it leads to a peaceful life. Everything is as it should be.

So I wonder about living things, and how they move through their lives. I suppose it all comes down to this: life's too short. Make the most of what (and who) you've got. Our lives can change in an instant. Share who you are, be thankful for what you have. Love is never what or who we think it's going to be. It just is. And that's the beauty of it.

Rust

I like to walk out along the road to get the mail.

There's a letterbox out there I've used for the last 16 years. It is rusty. It states on the door that it's been approved by the postmaster general, so it can't be all bad. Thought about painting it many times, but then I stop myself.

I like its color of rust.

Yeah, I know its corrosion is caused by water, and rust's gobbling nature makes things fall apart. Rust frightens. It's not clean. Destruction, inactivity, neglect. But we are all rusty in some ways, aren't we? So it is part of the movement of life. And every day it makes the act of getting the mail like getting back in the saddle once more. You simply open the mailbox door and look inside its corrugated grey for some sort of surprise.

It is not Christmas every day in northern Virginia. But at this time in my life, nothing inside this rusty container along a country road frightens me. Bills come every month, and I pay them. Living simply keeps the content of these glassine-windowed envelopes acceptable.

I like when the Dalai Lama writes to me. It's always addressed personally to "Dear Friend", and filled with words seeking dough for the International Campaign for Tibet. The last one included a string of paper Tibetan prayer flags. Cheez, I love the thought of those things. String them outside your house and the blessings fly off in the wind to land on someone else in the world. Though methinks this string would last about 1.5 seconds outside in the wind and would detach and fly and tangle in the holly tree behind the back porch. Sturdier sanctity is needed in this Virginia. So I've strung 'em edge-to-edge on the bulletin board in my office that is so full of photos/paper, it could use some grace.

And the annual birthday card from my beloved Aunt Cookie. She never forgets. Ever. She and our favorite Uncle John have retired to the beach in Delaware, and have better things to do than send birthday cards. At 51, it still makes me smile. Though I have stopped shaking the cards so the ice cream money falls out. Well, sorta.

The other day I opened the mailbox door to find a box. I had forgotten I had ordered great ideas. Sent by a service called The Readers Subscription located in that great book mailing mecca of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, I received 12 paperbacks from a publisher called Penguin. They are simple little books, light little numbahs from thinkers, radicals, pioneers and perhaps a visionary or two thrown in to make sure you are getting your money's worth:

The Symposium - Plato
The Art of War - Sun-tzu
The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan
How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione
Of Empire - Francis Bacon
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau
Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen
Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt
Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard
A Vindication on the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

So the old postal container standing stoically along the road delivers rusty thoughts that can always be revisited. And tonight I will read, just before I fall asleep, and those long-ago published thoughts will be different. And as I turn out the light, I will remember that I am too.