Jeff Tagami’s Rocket

Last night I was shocked to see poet Jeff Tagami’s name on the “In Memoriam” list in this month’s Poets & Writers. Jeff was only 57—in my estimation, about 50 years too young to die—when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer this past June. Jeff taught for many years at Cabrillo College and was known for his intimate, vivid poems about the people he grew up with, the farmworker community in and around Watsonville, California.

I met Jeff only once, but that meeting has stuck in my head ever since. It was about 15 years ago, at a writers’ conference where Jeff was teaching a workshop. I’d made an appointment for a one-on-one manuscript consultation with whatever poet was available, and had randomly drawn Jeff, whom I hadn’t heard of before that day. I brought in a few poems and nervously headed down a hall toward the room where we were to meet. Jeff—a boyish, soft-spoken man only a little older than I was—greeted me with the news that the room was occupied already, and we’d have to grab a couple of chairs and sit outside. We found a quiet spot under an overhang, and with the breeze riffling the papers in our hands, Jeff took a slow read through my poems. He made only a few comments; he thought they were basically good to go and didn’t want to steer me off in the wrong direction just for the sake of saying something. That was fine, I said, because what I really wanted to ask him was, “Where do I go from here?” I’d had a few poems published in decent literary journals, I told him, but I was feeling like Sisyphus rolling that rock—it seemed like every time I got some momentum going, the whole machine stopped and I had to go back to sending stuff out and getting rejected again and again. I asked him, does this ever get any easier?

Jeff laughed and said, well, maybe a little. At some point, some journals may start soliciting work from you, which is a good thing, and which will feel like the tide is turning. But there’s no guarantee that you won’t have to go back to doing the same hard work you’re doing now, and you might have to do it for a long time. Then he said the thing that has stuck in my mind all these years:

A writer’s career is like a rocket, he said. You hope it soars and goes great places, but you have to get it off the ground first. Too many times, he’d seen writers build and build and build their launch pad—which everybody has to do—only to give up, frustrated and exhausted, just before their rocket was about to ignite. They’d done the workshopping, they’d read the work of other poets, they’d attended the readings and networked with other writers, they’d researched literary journals and book publishers. They wrote good poems, got some work out there—and then got rejected the usual hundreds of times and just couldn’t deal with it. It was bloody hard work, and they gave up when they actually had something good going there.

That’s the key, he said: You can’t launch the rocket without building the launch pad.

I think about Jeff and that launch pad all the time. Obviously he did pretty well with his—there he was, mentioned in Poets & Writers on that sad memorial list, along with the likes of Ray Bradbury and Gore Vidal. And as a teacher—well, all you can hope for is that your students will remember you for all the right reasons. And I certainly remember Jeff.

Here are links to some of Jeff’s work:

“My Father Takes to the Road” and “Song of Pajaro”

Review of his book October Light* at the Poetry Foundation.

*October Light is out of print and goes for a fortune on Amazon. So if you see it at a used book store, grab it.

Little Things That Editors Love

A while back, I was talking with my friend, the poet Amy MacLennan, about an odd topic. We’ve both been reader/editors for literary journals and publishers, which means we’ve both spent many hours wading through piles of submissions, logging them in and sorting them into the Yes pile, the No pile, and the Maybe pile. The odd topic was this: Once in a while, a moment comes around when an editor is sitting there with two poems or short stories, both of which she likes, but only one of which she can accept. Maybe the fiction anthology is down to its last slot, or there’s room for one two-page poem, but not two. What will sway this editor to pick one piece of writing over another when, for all practical purposes, they’re equally good?

This is when little things become important—strange little things that an editor starts to notice when she’s read 300 submissions in a row. Picking one piece over another at this point may be a very unscientific process, one that boils down to a bit of charm, or a small annoyance, that the writer inadvertently sprinkled into his or her submission. Every editor’s different, and there’s no accounting for pet peeves. But let’s assume that I’m sitting there with two pieces of writing in my hands—one yours, and one that’s somebody else’s. Assuming that both of them feature stellar craft and suit my taste, what little things can you do in your submission that will make me root for you?

1. Surprise me.

By “surprise,” I don’t mean put a cockroach in the envelope, or tack another bloody O. Henry ending onto your short story. (Don’t get me started on O. Henry abuse.) The kind of surprise I like is, for instance, a sonnet that startles me with its gorgeous language set against an unusual topic—say, hospital food or safety deposit boxes. Or a short story that’s in the form of an accident report or a shopping list. This is the kind of jolt that lifts one good poem or story over another good one, a certain transcendence that makes an editor feel like she’s discovering truly inventive writing, perhaps even changing the course of literature. What editor doesn’t want that?

2. Include a short, straightforward bio with a few decent credentials and nothing cutesy.

Notice that this has nothing to do with your story or poem; this is all about the cover letter. Even if you have no publishing credits whatsoever, this is where you play it straight and say that you’re a stay-at-home mom or retired plumber or whatever, and maybe you’ve taken a few creative writing classes. If you have good credits—well-known literary journals, or small ones—list three to five of them*, and maybe a contest or two that you won, a degree you earned, or somebody famous you studied with, and keep it around 50 words. That’s it—no soliloquies, and no jokes. Humor in your story or poem is fine, but humor in a cover letter is like target-shooting in a strange, dark room—you’ll probably miss, and things will just go wildly wrong from there. If you’re a writer who likes mantras, here’s one for the cover letter: Do not scare off the editor.

3. Keep your cover letter simple.

This goes hand in hand with the short, straightforward bio, but it encompasses the entire look of your cover letter. When I was reading submissions for an anthology a while back, I was surprised at how annoyed I got with the overdecorated cover letters. I saw all sorts, from big splashy author logos to pastel photos of ripply lakes and aphorisms about dancing in the rain. All of those things qualify as too much information. I’m a sucker for elegant touches, like bullet points between the state and zip code, or the little telephone icon before a phone number. But after seeing so many methed-up cover letters, I’m leaning more and more toward the humble, plain-Jane variety, with the writer’s name and address at the top left-hand corner in the same font as the rest of the letter. (Needless to say, avoid frou-frou fonts, or the kind that a former co-worker called “too fontsy.”) The main attraction should be your poem or story; for the cover letter, the only rule of thumb is that it should not be distracting. If it does come down to you and that other author, don’t make the editor think, “Hmm…the one with the neutral cover letter that doesn’t say much, or the crazy teddy-bear lady?”

4. Just send one or two entries. Not twenty. Not fifty.

One exception to this: It might actually be OK to send twenty or fifty entries in to a contest. You have to pay for every one, so you’ll be helping them keep the contest going, and that’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve got twenty genuinely good stories or poems, they’ll do better work for you if you spread them around rather than putting all your literary eggs in one basket. And if you’re submitting to a journal or anthology—well, let’s just say that when an editor sees thirty-eight identical envelopes in the mail bin, he probably won’t be thinking, “I bet I’ll love this person’s work and will be thrilled to read every one of these!” Again, editor-ay, no air-scay.

5. Do any of the following, some of which are completely out of your control:

Be a little kid.

I love getting submissions from kids. I don’t care if the story is wildly inappropriate for our publication; these small people with their hand-scrawled cover letters and drawings of their hamsters just kill me. That’s not to say that I’ll accept the piece. But I will send the nicest rejection letter you ever got.

Be one of many people from your small town who sent in a submission.

I love this too. I’m fascinated by the little batches of envelopes that come in from the same tiny town in Kansas or Manitoba or wherever. Obviously these people know each other; they’re probably in a workshop or night class together. And because I’ve been in those workshops and classes where we all ganged up and tried for the same publications, and then laughed about it over coffee later, I’m instantly on your side. Bonus points if you’re from the same family.

Hail from an exotic-sounding place.

This is completely immature on my part, but I will give you a slight edge if you live someplace that sounds really cool, like Black Kitten Road or Woolgoolga, Australia.

Next up: There’s a flip side to this, of course. What dog-doodies should you avoid to keep your work out of the rejection pile? Stay tuned…

* Bonus pet peeve: authors who list every place they’ve ever been published, complete with the title of each poem or story, in a big honkin’ paragraph.

Photo by Niklas Bildhauer

Olympics, Week 1: The Good, the Bad, and the Rest of the World

Like a lot of people, I spent this past week glued to the TV, soaking up the Olympics. For me, it’s been an early-morning thing, hanging out on NBC’s “other” stations, the ones on channel eleventy-twelve that cover the sports I never see anywhere else, like archery and team handball and trampoline. As always, the Olympics are expanding my view of what’s cool, what’s possible, and what’s too freakin’ hard for me to ever try. But it hasn’t been all fun and Games. With all due respect to our talented American athletes, NBC is once again dedicating pretty much all of its prime-time coverage to them, while snubbing the rest of the world. And it’s a big world, with a lot of great Olympians—Olympians we will never get to know, thanks to NBC’s jingoistic journalism. But more about that later. First, the good stuff.

Cough, gag, sputter…gooooooooooal!!!!!

My favorite sport this week has been water polo. It’s just flat-out brutal, with more pummeling than taekwando and more dirty hits than hockey. The whole premise is crazy: You’re trying to throw a ball into a net while someone is trying to drown you. On the surface, it looks benign—a lot of bobbing heads and a few arms in the air—but the real action is happening under the water, where you can’t see it. Then they show the replay on the underwater camera and—holy cannoli, it’s a war zone down there, with all the shoving and gouging, kicking and grabbing and people pushing each other’s heads underwater. The women are even more vicious than the men because their swimsuits have more fabric, giving them convenient handles to drag each other down to their doom. I can’t get enough of this sport. It’s like roller derby with asphyxiation.

Ah, sweet mystery of fencing

I love watching fencing, but no matter how many times I see it, I do not understand it. Even when they super-slo-mo the replays, I can’t tell who’s stabbing whom. But I’ve decided that a fencing match is like a poem: Just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. I like the contrasting styles of foil, sabre and épée—some are thrusty, others are slashy, and that’s about as technical as I can get because, again, I do not understand this sport. And that’s fine. Everything happens in a split second, all aggression and forward momentum, all speed and snorting and shouting*. I especially love the fencers’ footwork, how steady and balanced they are, as if nothing could ever knock them over. It’s a welcome respite from gymnastics, where everybody seems about to fall down and crack their heads open.

The best worst day of your life

Speaking of gymnastics, when those fabulous American girls** won the team title and the Russian girls were crying their eyes out, I found myself wondering how many of them, on both teams, threw their guts up before the competition or felt like crap the whole day because they were so nervous. Watching the Olympics is like seeing hundreds of brides on their wedding day, and I don’t mean just the women—most of these athletes are more stressed out than they’ve ever been in their lives, with no sleep and bags under their eyes and wacked-out blood sugar. I guess that’s what separates the champions from everybody else: The best athletes know how to come out on a really bad day and look great in spite of it.

The other Olympians

Years ago, I was watching the winter Olympics late one night when I saw a figure skater who was way, way back in the pack—in 30th place or something—skating her long program. She was having a horrible night; she fell again and again, but she kept getting up and skating. By the time her routine was over, she looked exhausted and her legs were hatchmarked with thin, bleeding cuts from falling so many times on the ice. It was one of the saddest and most sobering things I’ve ever seen, but also one of the most real. Wow, I thought, figure skating is f***ing hard. I don’t remember her name, but I sure remember her, trying to do this almost impossible thing in front of millions of TV viewers and just having a hell of a time. At this year’s Olympics, there must be hundreds of athletes like her—not dazzling the crowd with their world records, but just scratching their way through these extremely difficult sports. I would like to see those athletes. We have a kajillion cable channels, so why can’t we see every athlete, in every sport, on TV? And NBC’s live online streaming thing doesn’t count; my Podunk-town cable provider isn’t on their list.

Patriotism, racism, or just business as usual?

I don’t have a scientific count here, but during NBC’s prime-time broadcasts, I haven’t seen a single “up close and personal” bio—or even a post-race poolside interview—with a nonwhite, non-U.S. athlete. A few Brits and Aussies, yes, but I’m continually amazed that the commentator sticks a microphone in the face of the American swimmer who came in fifth, when there’s a perfectly good Asian swimmer right there who just won a medal and is having the best day of her life, and probably speaks English. It wasn’t always this way; I remember lots of little bios in past Olympics featuring athletes from other countries, including many who didn’t end up winning bupkus. We got to see where they lived and trained, got to meet their families and dogs and hear about the obstacles they faced on their long journey to the Olympics. But this year, nada—it’s like athletes from other countries exist only as backdrops for Americans. Perhaps NBC is feeling the pinch, as we all are, and it’s too expensive to rustle up a translator or go do those overseas interviews. But I get the creeping feeling that NBC is holding the rest of the world at arm’s length for a reason. I see this particularly when NBC commentators talk about Chinese athletes: There’s a hint of disdain and fear in their voices, an unwillingness to get close enough to see them as people, as if they want us to think that China is cranking out so many cookie-cutter automatons, inhuman in their perfection. Is NBC is too lazy or cash-strapped or too—what, racist?—to get any closer than that? Or is it just a business strategy? After all, General Electric owns 49% of NBC, and as a leading defense contractor, GE does not have the purest intentions when it comes to promoting harmony between nations. The whole system feels wrong, tragically short sighted and clattering with conflicts of interest. We’ll see how the next week plays out—track and field is full of great foreign athletes—but I don’t hold out much hope for change. So I’ll probably head back to the eleventy-twelve stations where they show all those “other” sports, the ones where the rest of the world kicks ass…and wows me every morning.

* In contrast, archery and shooting are very Zen sports where commentators talk about relaxation and “letting it happen,” and the arrow or bullet’s flight is at the mercy of everything from the wind to the rotation of the Earth. All three—fencing, archery, and shooting—are beautiful, strange competitions that all simulate murder.

** I know we’re supposed to call it Women’s Gymnastics, but come on—only one of the Americans was even 18. These are little girls. Little girls who could break me like a toothpick.

A Town Like Eureka

I am in mourning. After five seasons, my favorite TV show, Eureka, has called it quits. This funny, smart series about an odd little Northwest town where science-y stuff happens is heading off to Netflixland.

     But in a way, I’ll always have Eureka—and not just because I’m greedily amassing all the seasons on DVD. The connection goes deeper than that. The truth is, I sort of live in Eureka. I realized this the other day while I was driving through my own little Northwest town of Ashland, Oregon. At a stoplight, I spotted a strange sight: two teenage boys springing across the street on futuristic, curved stilts, looking like creatures from Star Wars. It was surreal, but honestly, it wasn’t all that surprising. We have a saying here: “That’s so Ashland.” This is a town where odd stuff—usually fun, often artistic, and sometimes science-y—happens. And one of the reasons why I like Eureka so much is because the fictitious town of Eureka reminds me of Ashland. I mean, a lot—so much so that I often wonder if the show’s creators, Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia, spent their vacations here, lazing around Lithia Park or doodling on their iPads in one of our homey cafés. The show is set in Oregon, and some footage was actually shot here in Ashland*. But there’s more to it; the two towns really are eerily alike. For instance…

Sheriff Carter arrives in Eureka after he wrecks his car while swerving to avoid a loose dog.

This happens in Eureka’s pilot, and it touches on two recurrent themes in Ashland: People who wind up here because of accidents, and loose dogs wandering the streets. I can’t tell you how people have told me that they were just driving past Ashland on their way to someplace else when something went terribly wrong with their fuel pump or transmission or whatever. They had to stay a few days…and never left. And now (10 years later, 30 years later), they’re still here and they never want to leave.

     And then there are the wandering dogs. When I first moved to Ashland, I was in a constant state of panic over the number of dogs meandering around town alone. In the Bay Area, where I’d just come from, a loose dog is an emergency, sure to get hit by a car. But I eventually found that in Ashland, where the speed limit is generally 25 mph, a lot of people walk their dogs off leash and let them wander far ahead or behind. So you often see dogs that appear to be roaming free, when in fact the owner is just around the corner. I don’t condone it, but that’s the way it is here. The phenomenon is so common that that I’ve come to call it the Daily Loose Dog.

People in Eureka have futuristic vehicles, like electric cars and Segways.

People in Ashland do too. I’ve never seen so many electric cars in my life, everything from kit-bash golf carts to SmartCars to Priuses. I’m constantly reminded of what Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear says about electric cars: that they’re a menace to pedestrians because you can’t hear them coming. It’s actually true. And Segways, those geeky two-wheely things made famous by Paul Blart: Mall Cop—we had those ambling up and down our bike lanes long before Kevin James climbed aboard one. Just the other day, I saw a cop on a Segway wheeling up a trail in Lithia Park. And an even more futuristic-looking ride, Glide Cycles, are made right here in Ashland. They’re an eerie sight—if you can’t see the rider’s feet (which are running smoothly along the ground), all you see is an arc of metal with a person dangling in the middle, whizzing down the path. I’m using Jamie Lusch’s photo from a news article here, which I hope I don’t get dinged for; you sort have to see a Glide Cycle to get it.

On the outskirts of Eureka stands a shadowy government facility.

Hey, we have one of those, too. It’s called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory. But unlike Eureka’s General Dynamics, which is shadowy and secretive because it makes weapons and strange inventions, our own Forensics Lab is shadowy because it’s in the business of fighting bad guys. In fact, according to its website, it is “the only lab in the world dedicated to crimes against wildlife.” Their noble work—examining the remains of animals and putting poachers out of business—is, like other real-life CSI jobs, more grim than glamorous. But, like General Dynamics, the Forensics Lab takes government money and puts it to astoundingly good use. (And you’ve got to admire any collection of scientists who work with Interpol.)

There’s something in the water. 

On Eureka, a lot of episodes revolve around some strange chemical getting into the air or water, turning townspeople into zombies or savages or drunken nitwits. In Ashland you hear a lot of running jokes about this, stemming from a persistent rumor that the tap water contains traces of lithium, a drug used to treat bipolar disease. There’s a grain of truth to it: A lithium spring bubbles out of the ground near Emigrant Creek, a few miles from downtown, and you can sip piped-in “lithia water” (which tastes like Alka-Seltzer and eggs) from a couple of fountains in and near Lithia Park. I don’t know if any of the lithium ever leaches into in our drinking water—and I’m sure the city would vehemently deny it—but people are weirdly happy here. It’s a bit Stepfordian at first…but after a while, you’re just as smiley as everybody else and you don’t care anymore. Which I guess should be a clue.

*Eureka used footage of Ashland’s City Hall to stand in for a street scene in the “Primal” episode. (For fans of the show, that’s the one with all the Nathan Starks). Don’t blink—the footage goes by fast. You can spot City Hall by its green awnings.

The Tools’ Tales

Gardening is a solitary business, and that’s one of its charms. For me, a day alone in the yard, digging and weeding, usually cures whatever’s been ailing me. But I’m not really alone out there. Oh no—some old friends are always with me. Lots of gardeners can tell tales about their favorite trowels and pruning saws. Here are some of mine, not all of which started their lives as gardening tools.

1) The broken Sheffield Bowie knife

This relic is one of my most versatile gardening tools, and also one of my oldest possessions. It slashes open bags of manure, cuts twine, slits open seed packets, derails dandelions, and does the work of about a hundred snootier tools. And because it’s dinged up already, I don’t worry about abusing it, like calling on it to sharpen a stake when I’m too lazy to go find the “good” knife. The way it came into my life had an air of divine providence: When I was about ten, I found it while I was out horseback riding one day. It was half-buried on a trail deep in the woods. At that age, I was obsessed with cowboys and outlaws, and finding this knife—dirty, pitted, and with a smashed handle that looked like a horse had trampled it—well, I thought it was the coolest find ever. I still do.

2) The two hand hoes

These two beauties were already antiques when I bought them at an estate sale about 30 years ago. The man who sold them to me said they’d been outlawed on commercial farms because you have to stoop to use them, making them hard on the backs of farmworkers. But these hoes, especially the larger one, are by far my most-used tools. I hack out hard, compacted soil with them, dig furrows, loosen weeds, and smooth out mulch with the these babies. One of them is at my side at all times as I work in the garden. I worry about the handles—the wood is deeply grooved from wear, more so every year. The fittings are good and tight, but the handles keep narrowing, like old bones. It’s hard to say how many decades of work they put in before I met them; I think of them as old draft horses who used to labor in front of the plow and the haywagon and now are called on only for a little light duty, like pulling a kid’s cart around the farm on the occasional Sunday. The rest of the time, they doze happily in the tool basket. They’re beautifully built, and I’d be hard pressed to find anything like them again.

3) The $1 paint bucket

This yellow one is the latest in a dynasty of cheap paint buckets that have served as weed bins, compost movers, fish emulsion mixing bowls, and precarious stepstools. I prefer paint buckets over fancier trugs and pails because they’re sturdy and lightweight, their handles don’t pinch, and they’re quieter than metal pails, which is handy when I’m out working early in the morning. I’ve never bought a new paint bucket; I always find them at garage sales for about a buck. I’ve only owned three or four of these in my life; each one lasts about 10 years. Eventually, they start to photodegrade and break apart, and the chunks are as sharp as shards of china. When one finally, well, kicks the bucket, I get a little choked up as I (carefully) carry the pieces out to the trash can. Then I hit another garage sale.

4) The fancy-schmancy spading fork

Okay, this one is a snooty tool, and I paid a lot of money for it. But I paid that money about 20 years ago, and this English beauty has never, ever let me down. Before I got this, I ran through a string of shoddy spading forks. Digging out a new bed was an exercise in frustration; I still have a muscle memory of straightening out bent tines by setting the points on a brick and stepping on them, one at a time. Finally I scraped together $100 and marched over to Smith & Hawken (now defunct), a very dangerous store for gardeners, and walked out of there with this fork and, I’m sure, a half-dozen pretty things I didn’t need. I’ve used this fork so much that the brand name has completely worn off the wooden handle, so I don’t know what kind it is. But the metallic “Made in England” decal still blazes like new, and its tines are as straight as the day it was made. This one never gets left out in the rain, not even for a minute.

5) The no-name aluminum hand tools

I don’t remember when or where I got these, but it was at least 20 years ago, and I’m sure I didn’t pay more than about $10 for the set. But I’ve never wanted another trowel—this one fits me perfectly, is lightweight and tough, and never rusts, bends, or splinters. And the fork is indispensable; I’ve dug out acres of burdock and Bermuda grass with that thing. The thin little transplanter, great for putting in two-inch seedlings, is just icing on the cake.

6) The homemade soil sieve

This one isn’t old—I built it a few months ago—but it’s a replica of two old sieves I used in my first garden back in the ’80s. Those earlier sieves sort of came with the place—I found them in an abandoned shed—and, as weatherbeaten and creaky as they were, they still worked like a dream. Nothing else separates rocks from dirt quite as well: You place the sieve on top of a wheelbarrow, put a few shovelfuls of dirt in it, and shake it. The rocks stay in the sieve and the beautifully sifted soil goes in the barrow, where you can mix it with manure or whatever before putting it back in the hole. These sieves are hard to find in stores; I saw one about a year ago, but couldn’t find one again when I needed it, so I made one out of pine and ½-inch wire mesh. The secret reason why I love these sieves so much: They make me feel like an archaeologist.

7) The perfect pruning shears

I don’t have a picture of these . . . because they don’t exist. I use pruning shears constantly—aside from the hand hoes, they’re my most-used garden tool—but I’ve never found a really good pair. Oh, I’ve had pruners that lasted for years, but they’ve always been a grumbling compromise: They don’t cut cleanly, they don’t fit my hand, or they’re awkward and slippery and I keep dropping them on my foot. Right now I have a high-tech pair of Fiskars that looked like a million bucks hanging on the wall in the store. They have a sweet spot, which sounds good in theory but drives me nuts: If you don’t cut in just the right spot on the blade, they just mash whatever you’re trying to cut, and then you’ve got a fibery mess that you have to saw at two or three times. Their big selling point is an ergonomic rotating handle thingy that, via some law of physics, gives you added leverage. The result is that, if you manage to find the sweet spot, they cut through heavy branches very easily. Too easily—I live in constant fear of lopping off a finger with those things.

4 Odd Things That I’ve Never Done

Life is full of things we never get a chance to do. Some, like flying to the moon or winning an Olympic gold medal, are just statistically unlikely to happen to any one of us. And then there are the things we never scrape together the money or time to do, like travel around the world or become a professional glassblower. But the other day, I got to thinking about the odd little things that, due to a bend in the road, we just never do, and we don’t even realize that we didn’t do them until years later, when we discover that everybody else has heard Frampton Comes Alive! or eaten Tofurkey or whatever. These strange little turns of events came to mind one Sunday morning while I was driving past a local church. As I watched the well-dressed parishioners amble in through the church’s front doors, I found myself trying to picture what they were going to do in there. But I couldn’t, because…

1) I’ve never gone to church.

I’ve been in a few churches for weddings and funerals, but I’ve never heard an actual church service of any kind, and I’ve never been in a house of worship on a holiday, like Easter or Passover. My four siblings, all older than me, had to go to church and sit through Sunday school when they were little; my parents, though they weren’t religious, felt that this was what civilized families did in the 1950s. But my dad, who could fix or build anything, always got stuck with “volunteering” to wire the church’s P.A. system or dig the trenches for its sprinklers. When my family moved to Sunnyvale, California, just before I was born, my dad took one look at the local church—a brand-new blank box with nothing but dirt around it—and said, “We’re not going to church anymore.” That was the end of religion in my family.

2) I’ve never changed a baby’s diaper.

In fact, I’ve only babysat an actual baby once, and that was only for about three hours, during which he didn’t poop. As a youngster, I didn’t like babysitting and avoided it at all cost. I had no interest in babies; I was the youngest in my family, and also the youngest among my cousins, so I didn’t grow up around babies; to me, they seemed like some sort of alien race, slow-witted and uncoordinated. Baby dolls terrified me—the glass eyes always staring, the weird little pouty mouths—so I gravitated toward stuffed animals and model horses. To this day, my maternal instincts are still M.I.A.; I worked with kids for a while in my 20s and liked it, but I never warmed to them enough to want kids of my own. And as for babies, I’m still nervous around them; they feel like overfilled water balloons about to pop. Plus, as Elaine said on Seinfeld, “No matter how clean they look, they’re always sticky.”

3) I’ve never seen Bambi.

Or Dumbo, Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or a lot of other children’s movies from the ’50s and ’60s. This was another consequence of having four older siblings; by the time I came along, my parents were tired of kids’ stuff. They were ready to be adults again, and the fact that they had an eight-year-old child in tow didn’t slow them down. They walked right past all the kidflicks, and instead took me to see movies that I had no business seeing, like Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, which was about stalking and abortion, and Wait Until Dark, which was about murder and heroin. Cabaret scarred me for life; even if the fascism and confused sexuality were over my head, they killed a dog in that movie, and I definitely understood that. Years later, my sister and I used to go to a local movie house on Christmas Day to see classic kids’ movies, so I got caught up on Mary Poppins, Lady and the Tramp, and a few others. And now, of course, there’s Netflix; the only reason Bambi hasn’t trotted onto my queue is because I know it will make me cry.

4) I never learned weights and measures.

I missed this part of elementary school, where you memorize how many pints are in a gallon and how many feet in a mile, because I skipped that year. My mother, a fantatic about accelerated learning, taught me to read before I started kindergarten. It gave me a tremendous head start—back then, most kids didn’t learn to read until the first grade—but it had an unintended consequence: I was bored at school, bored, bored, bored out of my mind. My mother had skipped a grade when she was little, so she thought it would be no big deal to have me do the same. But it wasn’t that easy; the school officials balked, and it took her a couple of years to persuade them. Finally, they caved and moved me from second grade to third, in the middle of the school year. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this was why I knew absolutely nothing about quarts and acres, let alone furlongs and fathoms—they’d taught that segment early in third grade, the part that I missed. I ended up learning most of what I needed to know through grocery shopping. But I still don’t know how many feet are in a mile. And I’ve found it doesn’t matter.

Remembering Dad on Mother's Day

Last night, while I was looking for pictures of my mother to post on Facebook for Mother’s Day, I ran across the eulogy that I wrote for my dad’s memorial service. This past week was his birthday—he would have been 92—and he’s been on my mind a lot. But he always is; I think of him every time I saw a piece of wood (he could fix or build almost anything) or climb a ladder (he once fell off one and broke his back). For most of my life, he seemed to know everything, until he began showing signs of Alzheimer’s seven or eight years before his death. In the end, he didn’t know me or anyone else, and he couldn’t remember any of the houses we’d lived in or the Cessna airplane he flew or any of the cars he'd owned, except maybe the last one, which we had to take away from him. I delivered this short eulogy on a sunny day in Los Gatos in front of family and friends, and I wanted to remember back past the Alzheimer’s, back to who he really was, or who I remembered him to be.

June 9, 2007

I want to thank Dad for being a good dad, not complicated or ambiguous or demanding. I thank him for being so solidly good—a good man. He was simple in some ways, without an agenda or ulterior motives; he was almost childlike in that way. He valued learning and wonder, and he didn’t seem to care what people thought. He went crazy over handwriting analysis, astrology, self-hypnosis, biorhythms, waterbeds—anything to make life better and more interesting. We kids thought he was kind of a kook; we were embarrassed of him, like most kids are embarrassed of their parents. It took time and maturity for us to understand what a treasure he was.

Dad wasn’t rich, and didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t. His wealth was in experience, in stories, in places he loved and things he’d built. He never talked much about religion, but my guess is that for him, the underpinnings of the universe were a tidy garage, a smooth landing in a small plane, and a sympathy for old radios. He hated television, distrusted politics, and didn’t quite understand art. But he could fix your water heater, and he’d drive out to some godforsaken highway in the middle of the night to replace your power steering hose after it caught on fire again. He’d do whatever it took to get you back to living, so you could get on with your art or politics or whatever it was you liked to do, all things being pretty much equal with him as long as the belts were tight and the lines were bled and the wiring was wrapped and safe, so he could go home, knowing he’d done it right.