Buster's hands were like leaves, veins spreading out and out

Autumn comes, rolls in like the fog, like someone once said – on little cat's feet. Autumn is this way as well. Quiet until it is upon us, until the wind knocks us over suddenly in a gust as a wave is wont to do. Pulls us under with its scents of decay and longing. We like the bite and the chill, but we forget these things until the gust comes to knock us down. And at once we remember. We relish the taste of fires being slowly lit. We look forward to putting our bundled shoulders against the wind – acknowledging the comfort of a bear's hibernation – we endure with mixed feeling of pleasure and distress the sting of the change ,for we stand amidst the colors we forgot we knew. Colors that swirl in invisible eddies around our feet. How could I have forgotten such love for a leaf? Perhaps I never knew it before, not like I know it in the present moment....

Autumn is the dance before the nightly retire, the one last hurrah before we give up the last beats of our hearts. To snuggle down for the long darkness that we cry out against with so much fear and so much sadness. So many people write about Autumn. You'd think it would have lost its mystery; we'd know it by heart and not give a thought to it for a second. Autumn would be just a word with a definition, with a simple signifier and we'd move on to winter where the challenges mount and we wait in uncertainty for the coming spring. But perhaps this is why so many write about Autumn: it is inexplicable, needing thousands of metaphors and similes, thousands of poems and prose to grab a wisp of it as it rushes by, carrying along with it the colors, the cicadas in the trees, the smells of cut wheat and drying summer grasses, the living testaments. It is elusive. It is full to the brim of an excitement inexhausted. And we forget what it is and what it holds, so when it comes on its cat's feet while we are still holding onto the the last strands of summer, surprise fills us up. What a glorious thing is Autumn! And part of this fullness is sadness because we know how short it is, that the colors fleet past our eyes and nose and become once again part of the dirt – dead – and giving life years and years from now.

But I am not years and years from now. I am now. And I want to feel everything this moment. I want wind to whirl and the reds, yellows, and oranges to float about me and fill my nostrils while I hold a cup of tea and look upon and hug everyone I know from all my time on this little blue planet. In all my selfishness, I want you with me always – the same as I want Autumn with me always.

Autumn. It's a little girl's name. It's my favorite girl's name. I see her standing among the leaves; they are swirling about her in that invisible eddy, not minding if they land on her knitted hat or the shoulder of her jacket, crumbles of them stuck in her socks and scratching her ankles. There is nothing but joy and a few missing teeth. Nothing but hope, for how can you not hope when you see life going out with such a brilliant, shimmering bang. Maybe for you Autumn is an elderly woman smiling – as she touches the cold pane of glass – at the child in the yard who jumps recklessly into the beautiful mound of decaying leaves. But Autumn is a child, Autumn is me long ago with hopes beyond hope, recklessly bounding into the unknown depths of a pile of leaves. I want Autumn to stay with me always and remind me of that child that I often forget. I desire most fervently to simply remain with that unceasing hope, but the most I can achieve is to be like Autumn and go out with a brilliant, shimmering bang.

For you, my love. For me.

Wordsplosion!

So I've found the greatest website. And yes, it's called wordsplosion. And yes, it makes me happy to laugh at other people's grammatical and spelling errors. We all do it. It's just funnier when someone else does it and you get to point and laugh.

Her stories are runon sentences that never end and never connect enough to make sense.

What has your grandmother told you? Things to remember, I suspect. Sprinkles, or puddles perhaps, of wisdom tossed over her shoulder or whispered in you ear while she sat you on her knee.

My grandmother has given up these things as well. All my life - "You can, you can, you can..." Yesterday she forced me to promise her that I would write a book. She said, "Don't give up on the dream!" Did I ever proclaim such a dream? Perhaps it was my mother's for me? I had the dream to be a doctor, a vet, a runner, an artist, a musician, etc.... And isn't every page I write here, or anywhere else, part of the bigger book? And here we begin to question the meaning of words, the essences or the duality behind them...what is a book?

Anyway, as well as causing me to promise to write a book, she said that she is going to Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Israel next year. And that they might not let her do what she wants to do in Egypt. I thought she meant, she would be restrained as a tourist because of the riots and because she is a women. But no. She wants to ride a camel.

She wants to ride a camel and have her picture taken on it. So that I can show my children and tell them: "Gramma may not have been bright, but she sure was entertaining." And that's the damned truth. My gramma is unabashedly entertaining.

Once, I was sleeping over at her house, and all the beds were full, so I slept with her. She snores, loudly. And I was having a dream, vividly. And for some reason, perhaps to stop the outrageous snoring, I sat up and punched her in the shoulder. She let out a great Yelp! And scared us both. I couldn't tell her how sorry I was. But she's gramma and she let it go. Though I'm giggling as I remember it now. How many girls punch their gramma's at night? Or at all? And it wasn't a nice nudge to roll her over - it was an all-out, no-holds punch.

That's one tough, entertaining Gramma.

Don't ever grow too old for me.

Attilio Jacquemet, center, of Italy, rests after running the men's 80-84 age division 100-meter race at the 2007 World Masters Championships in Riccione, Italy. September, 2007.

Photograph by Angela Jimenez
Go to her website for the rest of her photography from the World Masters Championships.

Rocks from the basement of time

For the past month I have been doing research for a short class I'm teaching in August. In the opening of my Norton Anthology to Short Fiction, there is a "Talking about Fiction" section that describes why knowing how pick apart certain aspects of a story is useful and it gives examples. Under the sub-heading of "Indirection" is an example of its meaning, just like the examples they give for all the other sub-sections, but this one has the most beautiful, complete little story that you should look up if you have the desire. It's called "Important Things" by Barbara L. Greenberg. The definition of the technique Indirection is complicated, but the editor explained it so beautifully that I felt the need to post it here:

"Most stories - much larger than this one in bulk - stir up questions of right and wrong, of what is worth living for and dying for. Truly these are "important things," and authors work with all their skill to guide us to a point where the inexpressible can be sensed. It is the best tactic of fiction to move circuitously to the point of revelation. Then those readers who have followed the path of indirections complete the reading transaction by going somewhat farther than they have been led, by drawing from themselves the impassioned judgment that will make the story whole" Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Sixth Edition, p. xxx.

I agree, Norton. Indirection, then, must be my favorite part of a good story - the feeling or the sense that there is something more behind the words, something that is tugging at you from the roots of emotion, from the cellars of the collective human experience. And this something is inexpressible! Words are inadequate. Even the word to describe the technique that produces this sense - Indirection - is inadequate.

But how, then, if no words can describe, do I convince my Japanese students that when Norman Maclean says at the end of A River Runs Through It, "I am haunted by waters" that he means to fill you with the same deep regret and ache that is felt not from "waters" but from the loss of something that was fleeting and beautiful? Will they sense the indirection? Will they understand that although the ending's tone is filled with regret, the beauty of the words, the carefully enshrined description of Paul's last fish, have endowed Paul, the brother who is incapable of being understood, with an immortality as a man who thought like a fish, who became a river, who left his brother with a sense of what is beautiful, with a sense of what is worth living for?

I don't know if they will sense it. Or even if they care to. But I have to teach it. With books piled everywhere around my room, this one by Norman Maclean lays open on my window sill to the last pages of the story, its words facing the evening sky, feeling the after-storm coolness of the air from the open window. The cracking wooden sill scratches its spine. Its pages don't bother a flutter. And its words have left me with that sense of something more beneath the words.

Something inexpressible.

Another lol

I have a tiny fish with flowering fins named Nuke

When...it's one of my favorite words. You wonder why its not something more exotic, like leviathan or euphonic. But feel it in your mouth and imagine there is a yearning person behind it. Imagine all types of yearning people behind it, yearning for different things.

Imagine my father - his bushing eyebrows in arc like my own, they rise and wrinkle his forehead. Just imagine his mouth moving to the word Cuando! in a faked Mexican accent, stereotyped and comical. It was the only word in Spanish he knew for a long time, and he didn't know what it meant or why it needed to be said; he only knew that it added something definite and emphasized. He liked the word in his mouth and the sound it produced. And when he said it, his yellow tooth showed. The fake one that replaced the one he knocked out long ago when he was twelve, when the front tire came off of his bike and when he landed face-first on the pavement. He could take this tooth and the retainer it was attached to out. He washed it with his hands and showed us the dark, imperfect hole it left in his smile.

I like to hear my father say this word. For him it is a statement. A command. Now is when. And when is always. And this is the way I hold the ones I love. The way I try to love the ones I hold.

§

"Night-time is for the boy who can fly."
and who can fly
not me not them
he's in the dream
where I touched your shoulder
felt the dew of your skin
the freshness of your flight

Smoosh, Oh I do love myself an onomonopeia

Joe and I have been following this band since these sisters were 9 and 11 years old. Joe saw them open for Presidents of the United States in Seattle a few years ago. I wish I could prove that these girls love their talents and that music is for them a blanket and a tree house, not something they are forced to do by domineering parents. But since I'm distrustful of the news media (sometimes it's so easy to lie), watching them play is the closest I can get to honesty. And I feel, at least, that they love playing music. And this is why this concert video is so important and why you must watch it.

There are about 7 songs and you can skip through them if you like. The last two are my favorite. Be sure to pay careful attention to the drummer. She's amazing.