writing on palm leaf
Memoirs come from someplace deep inside us, private travel to an unknown land. I wrote a memoir when I became outraged concerning treatment of my best friend, who spent her life in mental institutions. My story grew into a lengthy saga. Continue reading “deep memoir” »
Stinson Beach is the most beautiful beach in the world
When my parents weren’t tanked, we had plenty of fun times growing up in Marin County back in the day. We drove up to the Russian River and canoed around, carried kites and hiked straight up from the house up into our hills, pulling apart rusty barbwire fences and squeezing in between, cutting through pastures on the way. My father loved hiking, and we made up funny songs as we walked, poems and skits for each other, gut busting laughs. It almost seemed to make up for unpredictable drunk ugly. Continue reading “fun times” »
dream image of meeting C
Last week I posted a story that mentioned my sixth grade classroom experience, and the poor girl, C, who picked her nose in front of us. I don’t know what happened to the rest of her life, but I do know she was institutionalized at some point, unable to socialize well.
I had a dream about C last night. The main action: I’m waiting in front of a college building and C comes downstairs. We link eyes, and she walks away, but returns to speak to me. Continue reading “I don’t want to act like a bitch anymore…” »
what do we know about time?
Many people believe time is a theory of fourth dimension, like the essence of the hands on a clock. Part of the scientist Newton’s theory was that time was as a flow, a key dimensional role in math and physics, as well as behavior. Time measures change. We live in time. What happens when we die? Continue reading “hermit crab dwelling” »
gnome army
Today was glorious in West Point, California. Clear skies, 74 degrees, no breeze. I spent the day using my wheel barrow, creating under a birch tree. I made a gnome army surrounded by cloud glazed tubes.
I cleared and raked the seventy square feet to lay down weed cloth, which I hope will eliminate unnecessary weed growth. Three trips to the hardware store and fifteen buckets of pea gravel, the space looks like a zen garden.
My gnomes are made out of plaster of paris, and I made ten successful ones from a plaster mold, until the casing for the mold disintegrated. The gnomes have lived around my studio for over five years. Some people love my gnomes, with a face like Savannah, Georgian, Johnny Mercer, my favorite lyricist who wrote the song Moon River. Some people really hate the gnomes and have told me that they are creepy.
They are now surrounded by bent and straight turquoise cylinders glazed with cumulus clouds and magenta interiors.
My interest in tubes goes back decades, because I’ve thought that humans are like tubes. We have these forms that can be straight or bent, and their fragile nature doesn’t last forever. Our spirits inherit these forms we live with on Earth. For me, the tubes are my artistic conception of our fragility and hilarity of our bodies. Tube forms crack me up, and I don’t take them seriously at all.
This blog isn’t intense, because it wasn’t an intense day, and the gnome garden will testify to my passions, regardless of whether or not anyone else thinks they are funny. I’m laughing.
I felt like was Miwok too
When my parents weren’t tanked, we had plenty of fun family times. We drove up to the Russian River and canoed around, carried kites and hiked up into Tiburon hills, straight up from our house, crossing rusty barbwire fences through pastures on the way. My father loved hiking, and we made up funny songs while we walked, poems and skits for each other, gut busting laughs. It almost seemed to make up for unpredictable drunk ugly. Continue reading “past changes” »
I hope she climbed onto the rainbow
Aunt Pru was my namesake, my mother’s sister, and she died of lung cancer fifteen years ago this month. I’m remembering her. Our powerful relationship through the years was mostly good, but we had serious confrontations, too. This story is about the mystery unfolding for me at end of her life.
Aunt Pru was a master gardener, and her yard showed her loving efforts with loads of colorful flowers.
The day she left on a rainy Saturday, my seven year-old son, Joey and I drove over to her house that afternoon to say goodbye. I shared a memory about how my cousin and I sang the folk song, “500 hundred miles’ as a duet when we were young, and how Aunt Pru loved to hear us sing it. I wondered whether or not my cousin and I would sing it for her one last time, at her deathbed.
“How many miles to Heaven?” Joey asked me. I still don’t know an answer.
Heading down the hill toward San Rafael, we felt enchanted to witness a massive complete rainbow that extended across the sky, and it seemed to end above my aunt’s house.
She was unconscious when we arrived, and I sort of remember singing with my cousin. I do remember taking my aunt’s hand, saying, “There’s a rainbow over your house right this moment. I want you to get on it.” She passed away later that day, and we still feel her loss.
As I drove to my teaching job the following Monday morning, I was thinking of Aunt Pru, missing her. I also remembered about how much I love lacey old-fashioned white iris and their delicate beauty. I earnestly wished to see some of those beautiful iris on my commute, but didn’t see any, so I thought no more about it.
Five hours later after teaching my last class, I stood at the art room sink, cleaning up after students. One of my students burst into the room, holding an entire blue iris, complete with roots, that he plucked out of someone’s yard on the way to school. He walked over to me and handed it over without any explanation.
In church the following Sunday, my rector gave a sermon. He started it by saying,
“The goddess of the rainbow is the iris.”
Everything lined up for me when he said that. The warm presence of life, the flow of cosmic energy I do not understand. I don’t have to understand.
Truth does pass all understanding.
I love Taylor Mali and his fabulous response to what teachers make. It’s true. Teachers train hard for a career which prepares them to work with students and develop teaching skills. Teachers need support for what and how we teach. We need to be heard.
Students have different schools these days than before. Corporations, like Educational Testing Services control a tremendous amount of how a teacher teaches, and politicians are taking over with their philosophies.
For example, today’s American Standardized tests in English focus more on non-fiction than fiction. This is a crucial shift. Think about this.
A teacher on NPR radio opinion said it plainly this morning, “Out with Shakespeare, in with the New York Times.” Students are not being taught to respect their imaginations in school much anymore. Current politics has succeeded in ‘taking the teacher out of teaching’.
The teacher told about his students responding to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” in a more compelling way than if they read historical documents about the Viet Nam war. More than ever, students are taught to pass a test, instead of how to grow their character.
O’Brien wrote a collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. His third book is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division, 3rd Platoon. The powerful memoir vividly captures personal stories, but it is considered fiction. It took O’Brien over twenty-five years to write his memoir, relying upon a technique called metafiction, or verisimilitude. The reader becomes more involved with events because they feel real, deep connections with real characters as if they are true. These are the connections that truly teach about the Viet Nam war, not just statistics.
With non-fiction, we might get dates and events, but we do not get emotions that linking fiction brings to history. So we can’t use O’Brien, because it’s ‘fiction?’ Which content changes the world? The facts or the people? Does studying for a test make us compassionate individuals?
Someone once said, “Genius is the person who makes connections” and fiction can do that for each one of us. Students can read O’Brien and become part of the Viet Nam story. That is learning. Students learn to love reading and learn about their past, their humanity.
I respect teachers. We know what we are doing, and most of us do it well. We want students to remember both facts and use their imagination. How we learn does change the world. Student by student. Not test by test.
Our students deserve to go deeper into themselves with a blend of fiction and nonfiction, to learn who they are in American History and have it mean something.
Hastings cutoff was a tragedy
Every Californian knows the Donner Party’s unsuccessful struggle to get over the winter Sierra mountains of 1846 and 1847. The party believed that taking the Hastings Cutoff would save them three hundred travel miles, but that was not the case. Hastings deceived pioneers. Hastings had never traveled the route, but he made bogus maps that many pioneers tried to follow, and he made money writing his map. It was not a short cut. Cannibalism and horror are the Donner party’s story because they believed Hastings. Continue reading “The ultimate deception” »
heavenly colors
My parents found a San Francisco apartment on Lincoln Avenue when our family moved from Japan. It was a cold second-floor dump near Golden Gate Park. My father smiled and waved into the super-eight movie camera, wearing his overcoat, looking like Cary Grant, a strong nose, dark eyebrows, and brown eyes. My mother beams, looking sexy, with blue eyes and brown hair. A friendly mounted policeman lifts me onto his sorrel horse and rides me around, wearing a green car coat, brimmed hat tied with a bow over my golden hair. Continue reading “honest color” »