Telling Your Story

In his novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Richard Brautigan wrote about a library where anyone with a story to tell could write it out and put it on the shelves for others to read. The overseer of the library, which was open 24 hours a day, lived there. The fictional library was based on the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library,

Inspired by Brautigan’s idea, in 1990 the Brautigan Library was founded in Burlington, Vermont, by Todd Lockwood, a Brautigan fan, together with poet Robert Creeley and Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe.. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System used by most libraries, the Brautigan library categorized its books according to the Mayonnaise System, referring to the fact that the library in the novel used mayonnaise jars as bookends.

My unpublished novel, The Dioscuri, registered with the Brautigan Library May 25, 1990, was given the Mayonnaise catalog number LOV1990.05.003. The 325 books of the Brautigan Library archive (which included Brautigan’s typewriter) traveled to Seattle for a book fair, then back to its basement home in Vermont. It changed addresses in Burlington a number of times, finally winding up in the public library. In 2005 the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington decided it would be fitting to ship the collection to the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Whether or not the collection actually made it I have not been able to find out, despite many inquiries. The last posted information about the move was a 2005 story in the Boston Globe.

What I wanted to talk about, however, was not the Brautigan Library itself but rather the idea behind a library where everyone could tell his or her story without the assistance of agents, publishers and editors. True, there is the Internet. But not everyone has access to a computer, and some people still like the idea of something written on paper.

I spend at least four hours a day writing at the computer, mostly for fun these days, though occasionally I will send something off to a magazine, and once in a while something will be published. I am a hundred pages into Murder at the Parthenon, a mystery novel set at a Tennessee newspaper in 1954. Certainly this effort is spurred by the love of the old newspaper technology, with its Linotypes and locked pages. I meet regularly with a writer friend so we can toss ideas back and forth and nag each other about keeping our noses to the grindstones.

I am working on a biography of the pianist and teacher Egon Petri, part of which has appeared in magazines and on a piano pedagogy website originating in Finland, of all places. I am editing a wonderful work in progress by a friend who wants to tell her story about meditation. And I am proof-reading an exquisite collection of songs by a composer friend.

There is a modern facility which somewhat resembles Richard Brautigan’s library. My nonfiction mystery, Searching for Anna, was published in February by this organization, Lulu.com. Lulu is an international print-on-demand publisher, some of whose thousands of titles strongly evoke those of Brautigan’s fictional library, such as “Growing House Plants By Candlelight”. Anybody can tell a story on Lulu. For a small fee, a book book can even get an ISBN number and be entered into Books in Print, which means it is available through outlets such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Everybody has a story. Jung said that in most disassociated “normal” living, one’s story was often interrupted. He said psychology’s primary function was to retrieve that story and reunite the individual with it.

One of the best pieces of writing I ever encountered was by a Skyline College student who had brought his essay to the Tutoring Center, hoping for help with his English. The story, laboriously written in longhand, was about how to wash dishes. The student’s grandmother had taught him the proper way to wash dishes, and in the telling of the story, the student revealed himself: Loving, respectful, obedient, attentive to detail, humble. The language was awkward, but the story was truly touching.

How to tell your story: Hemingway said to place the seat of the pants on the seat of the chair and move the hand from left to right, or something to that effect. I would add a bit about spelling and grammar, but really it seems to be mostly about having something to say, saying it as honestly as you can, and then hoping somebody reads it and understands what you meant.

(Reprinted from June Morrall's Half Moon Bay Memories)

Greek Practice

Nicodemus and I practice our Greek every day by reading the calendar to each other. He recites the date (Paraskevi, 26 Fevruariou) and the year (Dio hiliades deka), then adds the previous day's date and the date and day which is to come.

My job is to read the information on the particular saint's Day (Photeini, the Woman at the Well) and the historic event (Feb. 26, 1936, Volkswagen named its first model Genesis) and to translate the daily joke:

The policeman said to the thief "Since you claim that this gold brooch is yours, you need to prove it to me." The thief turned the brooch over and said "It says right here, 'Yours forever.'"

Soap

The labels on the homemade soap I give family and friends say “Sapouny”, which is the Greek word for soap. My Greek relatives used to sing an old song about soap: “Sapouni, two cents a pound, for dirty clothes, for floors, for plates.” And in the South, there was a song about Grandma’s Lye Soap “good for everything in the home. The secret was in the scrubbing; it wouldn’t suds and couldn’t foam.”

Sapouny does actually make suds and foam, but my soap mishaps are the subject of as much teasing as was the soy turkey I tried to construct one Thanksgiving. The worst mistake I ever made with soap was transferring a full pot of just-setting stuff into an aluminum pan because the mixture was threatening to boil over.

Sodium hydroxide or lye, the active ingredient in many soaps, will eat aluminum. In my case, there was an explosion, the kitchen filled with gas, I ran to the bedroom, closed the door and called 9-1-1.

After the firemen had arrived and asked if I was all right, they put the aluminum pot in the sink and ran water into it, simultaneously cleaning the sink really well and diluting the still-caustic soap mixture. When they finished (they were all decked out in fancy yellow HazMat suits), they showed me the pan, which had a big hole in the bottom. They said that sodium hydroxide and aluminum put out aluminum hydroxide gas.

“Why would you make soap?” they asked. “You can buy soap at the store,” they said, laughing. “It’s not that expensive.”

This was the most spectacular soap goof, but there were others: The butter soap which smelled like bad cheese, the grey lavender soap which was supposed to be purple. I once tried to make my own lye, dripping water through wood ash, which would make potassium hydroxide if you knew what you were doing. As it was, the mixture was far too weak to combine with oils and saponify (the official word for the process) and I had to throw the whole batch away after stirring for hours.

I have made a few batches of cold-process soap from scratch since the 9-1-1 episode. It is expensive to make and very labor-intensive. You don’t cook it, but you sometimes have to stir the oil-and-lye solution for a couple of hours. The hardening soap has to cure for about a month before it is safe to use, and if you make the mistake of putting a raw bar on your table, it will eat through the finish. However, it smells really good while it is curing and if you make it with olive oil and coconut oil, it is really good for your skin once it is finished.

You must scrape the ash from the bars, because it is the residue of the lye. I save it in a jar for really difficult cleaning tasks (wear gloves).

Lately I have mostly made recycled soap, which uses the easiest of all hand-milled processes and doesn’t involve physical danger. You pare or wash soap scraps to clean them, grate them and put them in a pan with a cup of water, heat and stir until they are liquid and more or less amalgamated (an electric hand mixer helps here), then add whatever fragrance or additives you like. Let the mixture cool and harden and then put it in molds or shape by hand.

The biggest hit of the hand-milled soaps has been chocolate soap, achieved by adding chocolate fragrance oil and cocoa powder to the soap mixture once it has liquefied. You can, of course, use any mild hand soap for milling if you don’t want to recycle scraps, and soap-makers’ supplies on the Internet include melt-and-mold blocks in several formularies including glycerine.

I don’t know why it is so satisfying to make soap. Maybe it reminds me of making mud pies as a kid. Maybe it is because all the utensils you use to make soap wind up shiny and clean instead of sticky and greasy. Or maybe it is as simple as bathing with a bar made to order.

Transcendental Metaworry

Last night, worrying about the storm and our old trees, my mother, Haiti, the Senate results in Massachusetts, and a half-dozen other things, I remembered Lewis Thomas’s essay on Transcendental Metaworry in his book The Medusa and the Snail.

His only half-joking premise was that worrying is a form of prayer, and that rather than avoid it, we should make it into a discipline and get really good at it.

After I found the book and blew the dust off it, I was once again drawn in to the mind of Lewis Thomas, who might have written the book yesterday instead of in 1974.

Most of the essays in Thomas’s books originally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, but their subject matter was wide-ranging. He wrote about the United States health care system, about cloning, hypochondria, extra-terrestrial life, warts (“warts are wonderful structures”), music, meddling, language.

Lives of a Cell (Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974) was the first Thomas book I read. Ann Woodlief’s Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 275, says that in this book Thomas “builds on the analogy between the workings of the cell and the workings of the earth and its lives, including man’s.”

Thomas’s point of view was Mozartean, a synthesis, an overview, expressed in optimistic terms without denying that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

By the time Thomas wrote Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, his point of view had become darker: He spoke about the possibility of nuclear war and called the nationalism which divides humans as “probably the most stupefying example of biological error since the age of the great reptiles, wrong at every turn, but always felicitating itself loudly.”

In The Fragile Species, 1992, Thomas’s final book, he expressed the need for some “powerful steadying cohesive force” to bring about what he called not peace, but rather “the comity of nations.” As in previous books, he spoke of the earth as a living organism whose cells include us, with a “vast wiring diagram that maintains the interconnectedness and interdependence of all its numberless parts, and the ultimate product of the life: more and more information.”

The Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula

(in memory of June Morrall)

“It’s as if someone

tore through the paper of the sky,

showing the light beyond.”

He has put away his telescope,

has come in with cold cheeks

and starry eyes.

He is describing the Orion nebula.

But I am thinking of her,

how she would greet you like a sister,

with such familiarity you might turn

and look behind you

to make sure it was you she meant.

What with the fog and the trees,

you can’t always see the stars here

and of course to see the nebula

the night must be quite dark.

Thalassophilia

“The sea is calm tonight”, Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” begins, with the ocean setting the background for an impassioned plea: “Let us be true to one another.”

The ocean is the background for many Coastsiders besides the fishermen, the surfers and the beachcombers. We are so used to its sound, its constant presence, that sometimes we hardly notice it unless it rushes under the front door at Nick’s Restaurant in Pacifica, throws foam on the highway, or produces monster waves like the ones the Maverick’s people are expecting next week.

I have been a Thalassophile, an ocean lover, since I first saw the sea when I was fifteen. Born in Tennessee, I knew about lakes and rivers, but I was stunned speechless when I first saw the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean from the Carolina coast.

Since then, I have crossed the Atlantic by ship and plane any number of times, have been swimming in the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Ionian seas, but I have settled at last where the first and last sights of daylight are the waves hitting the foot of Montara Mountain. The sound of the surf lulls me to sleep every night.

“Another summer at sea?” my husband remarked mildly last June as I began my fourth trip through Patrick O’Brian’s 21 seafaring Aubrey-Maturin books.

Now I am reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time and wondering why this big novel always seemed so daunting, gathering dust on the bookshelf all these years.

I am editing Susan Bradfield’s book The Reluctant Sailor, using Google Docs, since she is living on the yacht Apple II in Baja after some truly harrowing adventures in the Pacific. (Her first book, Any Time, Any Place: Meditation for Your Earthwalk, is now available on Kindle.)

My neighbor Richard is a true Thalassophile. He can see the Pacific from almost every room in his house. He fishes, walks his dogs on the beach, calls our ocean “Mother Pacific.” When he and Dolores were married at home, I took my portable keyboard and played Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave”. We ate crab and drank champagne, just them and the minister and me.

Everything rusts, silver will discolor overnight; we have fog and mildew and bone-chilling summers, but I don’t think I’d ever want to live out of sight and sound of our Pacific.

Extraordinary Women (Number One)

She lived in a Sufi commune and in a wilderness house she designed herself and which she surrounded with a fence of roses. She was in the Peace Corps in Turkey. She did a study, playing music to patients believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, and some of the folks, amazingly, responded.

Soft spoken most of the time, she is actually a lion in gazelle’s clothing. She has had various jobs having to do with improving the lives of old people. I have seen her at work. She can be terrifying when it comes to defending the old folks. She will not back down. She once bundled up a crowd of hospital patients and took them to the state capital to protest funding cuts.

She raised her son pretty much by herself and did a good job of it. She lives alone, but she hardly ever complains of feeling lonely.

You might see her as shy, but she is the one who will get out and rally her neighbors to join Friends of the Urban Forest and to plant street trees. You should see her present garden: Fountains, hedges, trees, herbs, a regular English garden in a 50-foot urban lot.

She is ecumenical in her religious leanings, attending Presbyterian, Quaker, Sufi and Jewish services. She can say the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. We were yoga students together at the Himalayan Institute in San Francisco.

She writes regularly for professional publications, has written a novel, and is presently writing a book about medical insurance coverage and health care.

We have been friends for more than 40 years. We got our ears pierced together in the kitchen by a doctor who used a darning needle, a cork and an ice cube, which I guess makes us pierce sisters.

I know her about as well as I know anybody, but she can still surprise me. And of course she has a shadow side, as we all do. She second-guesses herself a lot. She frets about things. Strangely, she is not terribly confident, though you’d never know it from her decisive day-to-day activities. She worries about money. She has driven the same Volvo for twenty years. It is always clean and shiny, whereas my VW always has a layer of cypress needles and road dust. She is tall and willowy and looks great in clothes, but does lots of her shopping in thrift stores.

I wonder if she would recognize herself from this description.