RoadkillBlues

Writing: Chain Letter of the Soul

2009-10-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here I am again, after many months' absence. It is unsettling to count how many. After the long political campaign of 2008, I deleted my heavy list of political and environmental emailings, and most other news from outside my tiny domain, and took a break from the internet machine.

I've been gardening and sewing and collecting enough fabric for ten lifetimes. I've also been watching the growth of a new addition on our house, which will include a well-lighted sewing studio and office for me--upstairs, a little eyrie, above a new living room with lots of windows, a wood-burning stove, and a place for musical instruments. I've kept most of my reading to myself, to write about later on. I've been choosing it carefully.

Yesterday I received in the mail the newly released book, Chain Letter of the Soul, by Bill Holm. Over the years, since reading Boxelder Bug Variations, Holm's first book, I have anticipated Bill's next, and next, book. He has never disappointed me. Clear and concise, yet totally original, his books all bear re-reading. I can't name a favorite. From beginning to end, his oeuvre is meaty and graceful, windswept and close to the earth. Totally true, totally pellucid. Already the poems in Chain Letter have made me smile and sigh and think. I am in a way the wrinkled owl to whom he taught English years ago. Bill's message, that writings are simply chain letters of the soul that all writers add to, link together, and pass on, made me insert myself briefly into the chain, and write this.

Chain Letter was published posthumously, by Milkweed Editions. Bill died in April of this year of septic pneumonia, at the age of 65. I missed notice of his death until today, but it came with the gift of his words. Goodbye, Bill, and thank you for your chain letters and your life.

The Sears Catalog Song

2009-01-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

We have our new refrigerator installed. It fits perfectly and has an icemaker, our first. We are not using the ice much these days. We have more than a dusting of snow on the ground, and temperatures have stayed below freezing for a few days, so the snow remains on the ground, crusting and glittering as though it contains diamonds, and accumulating tracks from birds, cats, dogs, us.

The cats go out, but come right back in through the cat door. They have cabin fever, and Frieda finds herself confined to my office because she doesn't like the dogs and the other cats. She sleeps on top of the piano, which we moved into my office (we cut a chunk out of the doorway to get it in), and she drinks from the fishtank. She has also become interested in the computer's changing screen savers, and the arrow cursor, which she follows with her paw. I finally cleaned the computer screen and covered it with a dishtowel. The cats emerge primarily at night after the dogs have been put to bed on the enclosed porch, which has a heated floor.

Tigger is my TV lap cat. Lionel is our wake-up cat (he knocks the clock, books and eyeglasses from the bedside table). Tweazer is my sewing machine cat (she gazes out the window as though she just happened to be there, and it has nothing to do with me). Frieda is the office cat.

A strange large gray-and-white cat came in through the cat door when it was cold, a couple of weeks ago. It was tame, and allowed me to pick it up and show it the way to go back out. It must have been an outdoor cat, because its fur was thick. When I adopted Cruiser in Logan, he was covered with thick fur. The vet, Dr. Johnson, told me that if I let Cruiser inside, he would drop that fur coat in a few days.

The piano had been on the enclosed porch where the puppies sleep, and I was worried they would reduce it to toothpicks. Rocky is working on one of the rockers on the rocking chair in the living room. I hope the chewing stage eventually passes. They are not discriminating about what they put in their mouths. Rocky carries his food dish around, drops the ceramic dishes, eats the plastic dishes. He chews on wrought-iron table legs. Liza likes nothing more than a sock to carry around in her mouth. They create house litter.

People must think we are crazy to live with six animals, but this is our fur-ridden life. It became that way with lack vigilance on our part. Who has the will to change it when we all call this little acre home? We all accommodate each other somehow. Ronn vacuums the dogs to keep down the fur, and has installed a pet barrier in the car to keep Rocky from insinuating himself into the front seat. Rocky is no longer riding with his head on Ronn's lap, but we effectively have a two-seat car. We make do, and our Polar-tec vests are nicely furred. Compassionate fur.

Jerry and Sherree Roundy in Escalante asked me to write a song for their annual historical play, about the importance of the catalog to the lives of people in Escalante. In the early days, the merchandise came by train to Marysvale, then was brought to Escalante by a team and wagon. By the 1950s, the merchandise arrived on the mail truck, and was picked up at the post office, so Dad handled the packages, and put notices (boxholders, I believe they were called) in the post office boxes.

We all ordered from the catalog. I remember filling out the forms, and mailing forms for Mom. The catalogs provided inspiration. When I was 14 or 15, I saw in the catalog a yellow-checked coachman-style dress I adored, and Mom looked at it, cut her own pattern, and made the dress for me, complete with big white buttons. I loved that dress. We called the catalog the "wish-book." Mom ordered wallpaper, upholstery material for the couch, and seat covers for the car. We re-used the boxes the items came in. The sturdy seat-cover box made a good suitcase. Christmas items and school items came from the catalog.

Every assignment has collateral benefits. I relied on a reprint of the 1902 Sears catalog for ideas about items to include in the song. The catalog items reflect close to the entire material culture of the United States at that time, and the prices are incredibly low. A pump organ for only $22. Items of clothing for less than $1. The Sears catalog was like Garrison Keillor's Pretty Good store: "If we don't have it, you don't need it."

Sears in 1902 required that cash be sent with the order. They encouraged ordering "small and often." In the 1950s, many catalog packages came to the post office C.O.D., and Dad collected the money. I would like to know when Sears changed their cash-only policy, and why.

This particular catalog was contemporary with my Grandfather Barney's mission to DesMoines and Chicago in 1901-1903. He writes in his missionary journal about visiting a tailor, changing his shirt collar, etc. Now I know something about the contemporary fashions of his day, when he was in his late twenties, and the prices he paid for some of the items he mentions.

Musical Brains

2008-12-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

I finished this book last week. Ronn and I were both reading it at the same time. I used the dust jacket flap to mark my place, and if Ronn picked up the book in the meantime, he of course moved the flap. So I often lost my place, and sometimes I fell asleep while reading--my fault, not the book's, because I like to read in bed. I read with my reading glasses all the time now--they make the type so much bigger, and I realize it has been shrinking for years, and will eventually dissolve into nothingness. I also work crossword puzzles in bed, and need my glasses to read the little numbers in the crossword squares. When I fall asleep, my glasses get bent skeewampus, and I have to take them in to Dr. Hicks' office to get them straightened.

Therefore I don't have a totally coherent picture of this book. If I were writing a review, I would need to read it again. The nine chapters seemed to have been written as separate papers (perhaps lectures to a class?), and some sections were more interesting to me than others. Dr. Levitin wrote this book for the layperson, and sometimes he seemed to be too much in my face, and I wished he would back off a little. This is the pot calling the kettle black, I know. He is "astonished," for instance. And he is too interested in himself, but of course it is a memoir of sorts. He loves music and refers to many musicians and compositions, and (I know this is asking too much, but) he might have persuaded Dutton to add a CD including some samples. I have no problem with his insider status as a scientist, because science is my milieu, but I was annoyed with his insider status as a music aficionado. I know the parts of the brain, but I don't know the songs of Creedence or the Police, or Van Halen or America. He used too many such examples. MEGO: My eyes glazed over.

Sometimes I can take Levitin's word for it, but truth be told, there are many places I would like to hear the music he's talking about. I took music appreciation in seventh grade: talk about Beethoven, listen to Beethoven, answer questions about Beethoven in the workbook.

Well, unlike what we are supposed to do in a writing class, I have presented my criticisms first.

This is actually a pretty good book, and I should probably read it again, ignoring the MEGO sections. Levitin argues that music is not a "spandrel" (an architectural term that entered evolutionary biology courtesy of Stephen Jay Gould--I do know about this, and I'll write about Gould in a later post). That is, music is not simply a meaningless byproduct of our other adaptations, chiefly language, but rather preceded language in our evolutionary history. Music or various aspects of music are found throughout the brain, which would indicate music and rhythm are very old, and very important. Levitin speculates that our ancestors who demonstrated rhythm and creativity would be differentially selected for. Then he brings that speculation into the present and tells his readers how desirable rock musicians are as mates. Whoa, says I. How many women want to mate with rock musicians? I am clueless about this. What is the equivalent for my generation? John Denver? I don't think so. However, I suspect he is on the right track about the evolutionary significance of music, but I would like a more convincing argument than the latter.

It's late. Ronn is home from the jam session, and the puppies are manipulating me. Here's how it goes: I take them outside to potty, give them a treat, put them to bed on the back porch, and turn out all the lights. In a few minutes, Rocky barks, so I turn on the lights to see why he is barking. While I am looking out the window, Rocky and Liza run quick as scat, as if they are harnessed together, into the laundry room to see if there is any food on the floor (they don't realize that dear sweet appetiteless Lady died last week, and no longer is her uneaten food there for the taking). They run around a little more. Tonight they chewed up my seamstress' tape measure. They ate six and a quarter inches and the metal clamp on the end before I took what was left away from them.

Then I put them to bed again and give them another treat.

I think it is amazing that I imagine I am in charge. An evolutionary topic for another day. Now I am off to find my reading glasses, and choose between crossword puzzle or Jon Meacham's new book, American Lion. (Meacham is an alumnus of the University of the South, and has a house here. He is signing his book at the bookstore this weekend, I believe. He pronounces his name mee-chum. Our cousins in Escalante pronounce their last name mee-kum. There is also a Chenoweth in Sewanee. She pronounces her name chen-o-weth. In Tropic, Utah, it is pronounced sha-noth.)

Stories as Spare as as the Landscape

2008-10-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

Author Tony Hillerman died today at age 83. He left behind an impressive oeuvre, including eighteen novels that feature Navajo tribal policemen Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee. His novels are a unique contribution to the literature of place. I have a map of "Hillerman Country." It's not a crowded map. Hillerman's mystery stories are spare and clean. Every one features traveling long desolate stretches of road in northern Arizona and New Mexico, the four corners area, and few characters, characters who are deftly painted.

I found it remarkable that Hillerman could, book after book, hide murderers and create mysteries in all that empty space and clear air, in a place with so few people who have so few material possessions. I traveled this country back and forth countless times, from Utah to southern Arizona and New Mexico. I know the sight of trading posts, a single hogan or trailer house, rusty pickups, empty spaces and grand redrock vistas, the paved navy blue or dirt roads transecting them, the colorful names of the small settlements.

Sometimes Indian children attended school in Escalante. Darlena Jake was dark and quiet. Marie Ann Cooley, from Tuba City, lived with Uncle Rol and Aunt Mina Porter for at least two years. Marie called Uncle Rol "Uncle Porter." She was quiet, yet gleeful and full of fun. My Tibetan friend, Dawa, reminds me of Marie. Once my mother mended a shirt Marie had torn while we were playing. Once Marie and I were swinging on Laura Baker's porch swing, without permission, and the chain came out of its mooring on the porch ceiling, and we went sprawling. I wonder what happened to Marie. I wish I had asked her more questions about her home.

Hillerman's books reminded me of my Colorado Plateau, but they are more than regional. They resonated with the entire nation, as well as with Westerners and the Navajos and Hopis whose reservation lives Hillerman portrayed with clarity and respect. Leaphorn and Chee aged, and grew convincingly. The older more modern Leaphorn lost his wife and retired, the younger Chee struggled with his ties to ancient traditions and attractions to modern women, Anglo and Navajo. Leaphorn and Chee always solved the mystery, they always got their man, deliberately, with calm, with acceptance, and readers learned about Native American traditions along the way.

I met Tony Hillerman briefly in the late 1980s, at a book-signing at the King's English bookstore on 13th East in Salt Lake City. The line to his signing table trailed out the door and down the sidewalk. When the woman in front of me reached Hillerman--a short, wise-looking, jug-eared man--she fluttered, "I've never been to a book-signing before. I don't know what to say." Hillerman didn't miss a beat. Pen poised above the book, he said, "Tell me how much you like my books, and tell me how to spell your name."

Thank you, Tony Hillerman, for your life and your writing.

Civil Service, My Government

2008-10-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Election day frequently coincides with my birthday, November 5. Voting was an important event for Dad and Mom, a civic duty. Mom dressed nicely, because who knows which townspeople she would see at the elementary school, the Old El, where votes were cast. Visiting was in order on voting day.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had given Dad self-respect at a very tough time, when he was a young father with no job. My parents liked old down-to-earth Harry Truman, too (as president he bought his own stamps for personal letters), but I wonder if/when they switched to voting for Eisenhower. They didn't say whether they were Democrats or Republicans. They liked Eisenhower just fine. And Mamie, and her funny bangs. The Eisenhowers were the first couple of my childhood. The old General presided over post-war peace and prosperity and it was fine with all of us.

The walls of my Old El second-grade classroom, across the hall from the activity room where townspeople voted, were festooned with a big American flag and framed pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We pledged allegiance to that flag, and we filled out a little flow chart of the branches of government, checks and balances and all that. We made an organizational chart showing the president and his cabinet members. Ezra Taft Benson, well-known to Mormons, had been appointed Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture in 1953, which undoubtedly solidified Mormon allegiance. It seemed appropriate that Benson was secretary of agriculture. Agriculture was important to Utah.

(Today, the recent film "King Corn" tells us just how crazy U.S. agriculture and food production have become. Obesity, food safety, antibiotic resistance, overuse of pesticides, ecosystem degradation, farm subsidies--it's all of a piece. We need a really good new secretary of agriculture.)

The current two-year political campaign has its craziness and ugliness, as well as its historical and critical significance. I think Dad would be intrigued with Barack Obama. He would respect his humble beginnings and his achievement, his equanimity and poise. Obama might remind my family in some ways of the drive and sunny groundedness of Warren Woolsey, raised next door to us by a single mom, who sometimes was a recipient of "commodity" cheese from welfare. Warren stepped out on the back porch each morning to brush his teeth. He was always well-groomed, he was a basketball player, custodian of the seminary, an Eagle scout, valedictorian of the high school. He went on a mission to Australia, became a dentist and a marathoner, and is now in Africa doing humanitarian work.

Dad liked Warren, and sent him a little money when he was on his mission. Dad might have sent Obama a little money, too. I can imagine him saying, "Old McCain is too old." My mother would like the pictures of Obama with the babies, and the photo of him talking on the telephone with his feet up, the photo in which you can see the holes in the soles of Obama's shoes. She would laugh and say, "Those shoes have been resoled once." She knew about resoled shoes.

It would not have been lost on Dad (who made $30 a month working in the CCC camps, under Franklin Roosevelt) and Mom (who helped Dad paint national forest signs) that McCain sneered about about "spreading the wealth around," while his wife Cindy, a beer-distribution heiress and old rodeo queen, stands beside him, worth $100 million, wearing thousands, with seven plus houses, a dozen automobiles and an airplane. Dad eventually retired from a civil service job, a job he did honorably, and faithfully, and proudly, for the U.S. government. During my childhood we had health clinics, welfare for those who needed it, and county and state hospitals for the down-on-their-luck and indigent. The Mormons are known for taking care of their own, but the government did its part, too.

Because of VietNam, I wasn't crazy about Lyndon Johnson (although I liked Lady Bird, and can highly recommend the Johnson library in Austin), but the presidents I've taken a shine to have all been Democrats. I remember the excitement of John Kennedy, and his speech about "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." I was a freshman in college when he was assassinated. Joanie called Dad in a panic, and he assured her that everything would be okay.

Nixon was sinister, maladjusted, and the Watergate hearings were one long nightmare. Jimmy Carter again gave us intelligence and honesty. I adored Jimmy Carter in his sweater, admonishing us to sacrifice a little, and I still adore him. I remembered Ronald Reagan from the movies, and found him an out-of-touch embarrassment. Remember David Stockman, trickle-down economics, closing mental institutions, and creating street people? Even George Bush I thought it was "voodoo," but Reagan was a Teflon president without compassion, a celebrity living in a quasi-fantasy world, ignoring the least among us, perpetuating the myth that the poor were poor because they chose poverty. I kept my head low and tried to forget who was president during those eight years. Reagan morphed into the weenie of Bush I, a privileged Kennebunkportian, out of touch with hoi polloi. Remember Bush's amazement at the supermarket scanners? Remember he hated broccoli? Did Bar make him eat it? The Bushes had no commitment to public service like the Kennedys. More dismantling of government.

I grew up loving the career civil service, public schools, public libraries, and the idea of everyone serving in the military. Those were great equalizers, in a Democratic country. When a politican says that government is not the solution, it's the problem, I cringe. Government is necessary for the good of its people. Ronn tells me: "The business of business is to make money. The job of government is to take some of that money, in the form of taxes, and use it for the benefit of all its citizens." We are now seeing the effects of the systematic dismantling of government functions and controls by thirty years of Republican effort. If we have a mercenary army, if we have Blackwater and war profiteers, I ask you: what motivation exists for peace?

I got excited again about Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Bill was a brilliant charmer, with a smart wife and a cadre of smart friends, and he got the government books in the black again. Wooden Al is animated on his topics. Davy Crockett said, "First be sure you're right, then go ahead." Carter and Gore have had the courage of their convictions, and have proven to be great humanitarians, and respected citizens of the world. What does it say about me that I fell in love with two Nobel Peace Prize winners in advance of their prizes?

Now Obama's words bring tears to my eyes. During the Bush II oilmen administration, an administration of an even more privileged Yalie, a clueless, lazy, and unworthy legacy and his vile (rearrange the letters to spell evil) vice-president, I have squirmed like a bug on a pin. How could we mortgage our future, and bankrupt the treasury? How could we preemptively invade and destroy a sovereign nation and sacrifice untold numbers of lives for oil and war profiteers? We have 6.7 billion people in the world, and hundreds of millions of people in the United States. Is this the best leadership we could come up with? We were scammed, big-time, by Bush and Co.

Finally, we have Barack Obama. Democrats seemed on the edge of extinction, but after the Republican fiascos, we roused a bit. Many good Democrats stepped up to the plate in the primary. They were all well-spoken (what a treat; remember how Bob Dole could hardly speak a coherent sentence, in fact spoke of himself in third person?). Kucinich made the most perfect sense, in a senseless world. Hillary showed her mettle and endurance. Now it's shaken out to Obama. Colin Powell has called Obama a "transformative figure." He has much to offer: education at the best schools (admitted on merit rather than connections), an admirably even temperament, curiosity, humility, empathy, energy, youth, fitness, a loving and exotic and international family. He is articulate and eloquent and grounded.

Obama seems not to be an egomaniac or a dissembler, but rather is a philosopher. He appreciates complexity, reality and wise advisors. I believe, I hope, he will pay attention to voices such those Al Gore, and James Hansen of NASA and all the other scientists who have been petitioning him, and will bring science back from where it has been starved, ridiculed and disregarded. Unlike the small minds of McCain/Palin, I believe Obama understands the value of a planetarium projector, studies of grizzly bear DNA, and fruit fly research--the foundation of modern genetics. But it's much, much larger than that: We need science and education to help us creatively address energy issues, and the looming and almost unimaginable threats of global warming, resource depletion, and global warming.

Obama's books are clear, crisp, and clean--indications of clear thinking. He has demonstrated extraordinary "executive" ability in running his campaign. How lucky we are that he has come along at this time in our nation's history, and is willing and ready to serve us. Small and vicious people have done what they can to derail him, but his incredible gift to us at this critical time in the history of our nation and the world is becoming clear to the majority of voters. The election of Obama will enhance our standing in the world, and our ability to communicate globally, like nothing else might.

Obama and his helpers have ginormous mess to deal with on many fronts, and I will be glad when the election is final, and I can leave a president #44 to it, a civil servant (I love those two words) rather than a businessman, and turn my attention to how I can serve locally.

Making the Earth Say Beans Instead of Grass

2008-10-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

I have many excuses not to weed. It's too hot. It's too dry. I'm not sure what that plant is--it might be something interesting. Oh, look, a bee (spider, caterpillar, butterfly, bug) is on that plant right now. So in August I didn't weed. Instead I posted 21 entries on this blog. In September I weeded a little. Today I weeded a lot. The soil is still damp from the last rain, the weeds are rank and spreading, some of them have gone to seed and started to dry or wither, the insects or other arthropods have raised their offspring and are not so numerous.

Weeding time is good thinking time.

I Set My Pigeons Free

2008-10-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Cooperative work and water resources are subjects that apply to Mormons in the West. These themes are reflected in song. We often sang "Put your shoulder to the wheel, push along. Do your duty with a heart full of song. We all have work, let no one shirk. Put your shoulder to the wheel." I could envision the early pioneers with their shoulders to the wheel, pushing their wagons through difficult places on the trail to Salt Lake City. And I have always had a great fear of, and guilt about, shirking any responsibility.

Until I entered seventh grade and was promoted to "Mutual" (short for the Mutual Improvement Society, also known as MIA), I went to Primary in the North Ward Church in Escalante. The North Ward was a substantial red brick building, with white trim. In the chapel were polished oak pews, with trompe d'loeil gold cord and tassels painted around the edges of the high curved ceiling. High windows with green velvet drapes. There was a glass-enclosed "cry room" at the back of the chapel for parents and their fussy babies . I felt that the Church belonged to all of us, and we all were responsible for keeping it beautiful. The town was divided by Main Street into the North Ward and the South Ward. A new modern church was eventually built in the South Ward, but I always felt the North Ward was the loveliest and most church-like.

Primary met once a week in the church basement, after elementary school was dismissed. The church basement was utilitarian, not dank, but cool, with plaster walls, a kitchen and large dining area, and classrooms. And--magical, like The Secret Garden!--an underground passageway led to the Seminary building, sort of a back-house to the Church. One room, painted sky blue, held the baptismal font, a cement tank of sorts, with steps leading up to it. My cousin Jerry Roundy, newly home from his mission, baptized me in that tank when I was eight years old. I recall that that day I was playing at Utahna Liston's house, and Dad came to get me to be baptized; it was close to my ninth birthday, and it was imperative that I be baptized while I was eight! I believe that Orland R. "Whitey" Porter, Dad's cousin, confirmed me.

For Primary, we all--children, Primary teachers, a pianist (it may have been one of the young mothers: Dawn Griffin, Geneal Shurtz, or Thelma Cottam, or our kindergarten teacher Ruth Griffin)--gathered in a room with benches painted white, and we had prayer, sang songs and celebrated birthdays, then to the sound of rousing piano music, a tune played over and over until the task was accomplished, we marched out into our individual classrooms for lessons or activities.

He sang a Primary theme song: "The Primary colors are red, yellow and blue..." As a group, we celebrated childrens' birthdays with a song that scanned nicely: "You've had another birthday, a happy one, we know. We join in celebration because we love you so. Happy, happy birthday, we'll sing loud and clear. May you have God's blessings through the coming year." Then, in an act that turned traditional birthday giving on its head, each birthday celebrant contributed "primary pennies" into the penny box at the front of the room, one penny for each year. We counted aloud as each penny dropped through the slot. Then the proud birthday girl or boy turned and walked back down the aisle, smiling, basking in special status. I assume the primary pennies joined the fast offerings, or were used for supplies for us, or perhaps they were accumulated and sent to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. At that time, pennies actually added up.

A few years ago, I told Joanie I was thinking about Primary and some of my favorite songs, and Joanie told our cousin Sandra Porter, who is a piano teacher, and Sandra acquired a Mormon children's songbook for me. I looked for "Give, Said the Little Stream":

Give, said the little stream

Give, oh give

Give, said the little stream

As it hurried down the hill

I'm small, I know

But where'er I go

The fields grown greener still

Singing, singing, all the day

Give away, oh give away

Singing, singing, all the day

Give, oh give, away

The second verse is "Give, said the little rain, as it fell upon the flowers."

"In the Leafy Treetops" was another of my favorites. How I loved the trees that lined the ditchbanks in Escalante, that grew along the creek, that shaded us at one place or another. The fact that we had a formally named"Green Spot" on the road past the Red Rocks, where we had picnics, speaks volumes about the desert we lived in.

In the leafy treetops

The birds sing good morning

We're first to greet the sun

We must tell everyone

In the leafy treetops

The birds sing good morning

These songs conjured up images of the life-giving crick, happy birds singing at dawn, the earth greening with the application of water.

Also in the book is the song about Joseph Smith, my great-great-great-uncle, digging up the gold plates from the Hill Cumorah in New York: "The golden plates lay hidden deep in a mountainside, until God found one faithful in whom he could confide..." Everyone loves stories of secrets and buried treasure. Years later, my husband Kent took a televised geography course from H. Bowman Hawkes at the University of Utah. I had known his daughter, Janice Hawkes, at Highland High School in Salt Lake City. Hawkes said "The Hill Cumorah is a drumlin." That phrase made us smile, and whenever the Hill Cumorah comes up, I remember that the Hill Cumorah is a drumlin.

This fall for the Oktoberfest celebration at the Community Center, Bazzania was responsible for the music, and we needed to add a couple of simple German songs that people could sing. We had played "Du, Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen" at Swiss Days. Mary found "Muss I Denn," a German folk song with a date of 1825. I hadn't heard the title, but the tune was eerily familiar. However, I could not immediately find the words I knew for it. Mary had the English translation: "Must I then, must I then, to the city a-way..." But those were not the words I had heard years ago. A few hours later, the words came to into my consciousness:

My pigeon house I open wide (open wide)

And I set my pigeons free

They fly so high they reach the sky (reach the sky)

And they land in the tallest trees

And when they return from their merry, merry flight,

I close the door and say good-night

Coo-a-roo, coo-a-roo, coo-a-roo, coo-a-roo,

Coo-a-roo, coo-a-roo, coo-a-roo

This was not a Primary song, but rather a a lullaby that Joanie sang to her babies. Mary had not heard the words about the pigeons. Which set me to wondering where Joanie learned the song, and whether it might be a song that was passed down from the Shurtz family, who were of German descent (our grandfather was John, his father Don Carlos, and his father Peter), or from some other early Utah pioneers.

I have often thought that communities in the early days of the Mormon church the congregation must have sounded like the United Nations--Germans, Welsh, Irish, English, all the different Scandinavians. Dad's grandmother Barney, whose maiden name was Bone, had immigrated from England when she was a Primary-age child. She came via a ship that landed at New Orleans, and traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, and thence to Utah. Did she have an accent? What songs did she sing? Dad never said, and I never thought to ask him.

Bees and Home-made Honey

2008-10-04T07:33:00.001-07:00

Both Tucson and Logan had USDA Bee Laboratories, closely allied with the universities and devoted to studies of honey bees and other kinds of bees. When Bob and I moved to Tucson in 1977, we quickly made friends with the Tucson bee scientists, including Steve Buchmann. Steve and Marlo were new to Tucson then, too. In the intervening years, Steve has published Letters from the Hive, The Forgotten Pollinators, The Bee Tree, and other books.

We bought a house on Camino del Saguaro in the Tucson Mountains, an area in which houses had been built among the native vegetation (unlike Phoenix, where cotton and citrus farms often preceded the housing developments). It was a hilly area, north of the road to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Across the street from our house was an arroyo in which grew tall native cotton and a thicket of other desert plants. We discovered the cotton in a roundabout way: we found pink bollworm moths in our house. But there were no cotton fields anywhere near us, so we knew the moths must have been feeding on wild cotton plants. Sure enough, the host plants were just across the street.

After summer rains, spadefoot toads quickly developed in the ephemeral pools of the arroyo, and for a short time we heard them, like sheep bleating. Scot often skateboarded down our street. Beth and Allan Morgan lived at the bottom of the street. They were active in Audubon Society, and Beth worked on the Aubudon institutes. Allan, a naturalist and nature photographer, led whale-watching expeditions. Scot made friends with their daughter, who was about Scot's age.

I haven't been back since 1990, and I fear development has changed the area, but the Tucson Mountains area, west of Tucson, was a wonderful place for wildlife then. We found desert tortoises, gila monsters, tarantulas, tarantula wasps, scorpions, and horned lizards in our yard. Cactus wrens nested in chollas. We had lots of harvester ant nests, and often saw horned lizards sitting near a line of moving ants, licking them up. One summer the harvester ants harvested all the seeds in a dried chile ristra hanging on the back porch. The chiles rustled for several days while the ants clipped off the chile seeds and carried them away.

One summer a horned lizard laid eggs in a pile of contractor's sand across the street, and the tiny horned lizards were adorable, like little brooches. One night we woke up to a musky odor and scuffling and snurfling sounds; just outside our window a little pack of javelina was eating prickly pear pads.

One night in another arroyo not far from our house we collected scorpions for display at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. We used a hand-held battery-powered "black" light to help us find the scorpions. Scorpions glow a fluorescent yellow-green under the UV light. We picked up the scorpions with long forceps, perhaps eight inches long, with tips wrapped with reflective tape. When we grasped a scorpion by its cephalothorax, it invariably tried to sting. The scorpion's sting hit the metal of the forceps with a "ping, ping, ping."

In our yard we planted additional mesquite trees and other native plants, such as Cassia, Acacia, and Jojoba, to augment the native vegetation that was already there. Acacia is very thorny, and is known as "wait-a-minute" bush, as in "wait until I get unstuck." Our back yard was partially enclosed by a stucco wall, but we could not afford gates for the driveway or other entries, so the yard was essentially open.

Planting the extra trees was no small feat. The soil is caliche, a calcium-based cement, and I dug the planting holes with a pickaxe. Digging one hole could take days. Dig a little, fill the hole with water, let the water soak in, dig a little more. Some of the mesquite trees were able to find a foothold and grow, but others remained stunted.

One mesquite tree in the backyard did very well. Under that tree, we placed a hive of honey bees. Honey bees love mesquite flowers, and flowers of the other plants in the bean family. The bean family is common in the desert; the three species of palo verde are in the family.

The honey bees thrived. Our interest was largely academic, watching the bees when we had the chance. We fed them sugar water during the time that flowers were in short supply, and they did so well that they swarmed at least once before we realized how large the hive had gotten. Initially, Scot was able to ride his bicycle or run on a desert trail to his elementary school in our neighborhood. Later, as a result of a desegregation settlement, he was bused to Manzo Elementary, in the Manzo barrio. One of Scot's friends from his elementary school came by and Scot showed him the bee hive. He said, "You're going to have home-made honey!"

Tucson is a good bee town, and supported a store devoted to bee supplies. We bought our frames and supers and accessories there. When it was time to harvest the honey, we went to the bee store and rented an extractor and a plug-in knife, which was used to cut, or rather melt, the caps from the cells in which the bees had stored honey. We pulled out the frames one at a time, and cut the tops off the honey-laden cells with the knife, avoiding the pollen-bearing cells. The bees flew around, but did not sting us. We used a "smoker," a little smudge pot with a bellows, to smoke the bees as we removed the frames. The smoke causes the bees to engorge with honey, and they are not inclined to sting.

We placed the extractor on a table in the garage, and inserted the frames like spokes around a central cylinder. When the crank is turned, the extractor spins like a centrifuge, and the viscous honey is forced out of the frames. There is a spigot on the bottom of the extractor from which the honey flows. We transferred it into big jars, and then I strained it through several layers of cheesecloth to remove pieces of wax and bee parts.

What a sticky enterprise! It took a couple of days to get the beautiful honey strained and into the final jars. Most commercial honey is heated, but we did not heat our honey. Unheated honey may crystallize, but it retains the perfumes of the flowers from which the bees have gathered nectar, and has a more complex taste. When I finished, I cleaned up the kitchen and scrubbed the countertops squeaky clean.

The next morning, when I went into the kitchen, I found a line of tiny ants licking honey from a joint in the formica counter. They were lined up like cows at a cattle trough.

Scot sold many quart jars of honey in the neighborhood, and made a little spending money. We still had gallons, so we decided to make mead. We collected and washed bottles, and bought more equipment, vats, thermometers, cans of hops, yeast, a bottle capper. I was not fond of the final product, but then we had the equipment, so we used it to make many batches of beer. One thing leads to another.

Later when I went to work at Utah State University, I wrote stories about the bee scientists there. One of them, Phil Torchio, figured out how to cultivate native blue orchard bees for use as commercial pollinators. Blue orchard bees do not collect honey, but are gentle and efficient pollinators. A few years ago, both Steve and Phil were featured in a television program about the problems of honey bees and other pollinators. The program was narrated by Peter Fonda, who played a beekeeper in the movie, Ulee's Gold.

The Art of Bedroom Knick-Knacks

2008-09-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

On my bedroom wall in Escalante during the late 1940s and 1950s hung an old-fashioned picture of a child kneeling in prayer at bedtime. The picture was approximately 8x10 inches, covered with glass, and had a frame made of chain, with a chain loop for hanging. Lettering below the picture indicated it was a gift of the Peterson Bank, in Richfield, Utah, as I recall. Maybe it was Panguitch? Dad said that when his mother died, he went to his Grandma Porter's house clutching that picture. Edith Barney died in 1914, when Dad was seven years old. She left four boys, and Dad was the oldest.

My bed at our house in Escalante was equipped with a metal headboard, painted to simulate wood grain, and it was equipped with a reading light, that was part of the headboard. The lightbulb was a small tube with a cover that could be moved to direct the light, and the switch was on the headboard. I don't remember the bulb ever burning out.

The location of the switch was extremely convenient, because I always read in bed, the light was personal and unobtrusive to others, and I was afraid of the dark for some indeterminate period of time. I liked to be completely covered with quilts, no appendages sticking out to tempt whatever might be outside the bed. Sometimes in summers I sweltered.

I slept alone in my double bed. My sisters were grown and gone before I went to school, and I had inherited their bedroom, with its dressing table (complete with spilled and dried nail polish in one drawer) and trifold mirror, diaphanous curtains and pull-down shades. I also inherited the children's furniture that Dad had made for them: the doll wardrobe, the red cradle where Betsy Wetsy slept under her own little quilt, the little Hoosier-style dish cupboard with the glass in the doors. I had a little gray table with two chairs, and my mother sometimes hosted a tea party for me and a friend at that table. (Years later, my mother used one of those little chairs when she was weeding in the garden.) I kept my comic books in meticulous order in a crate behind the door. My librarian tendencies were evident even then.

Because we heated the house with a coal-burning stove in the winter (we graduated to fuel oil and propane when I was in high school), the heat was concentrated in the living room. The bedroom doors were closed and the bedrooms were cold. The same was true of my grandmother's house. She and my mother heated my pajamas on the Heaterola, and the pajamas and the pillows sometimes had scorch marks from the grillework of the stove. I liked the smell and sound of the burning coal, and I looked forward to cleaning out the coalhouse in the spring to play house all summer.

In the winter, my grandmother heated a flatiron in her coal-burning store and wrapped it in a towel to put at my feet. My mother was thoroughly modern: she filled a red rubber hot-water bottle for me on cold nights. Once I woke up to a wet bed and thought I was responsible; but the plug had come out of the hot-water bottle.

In the summertime, my mother often came into the bedroom while I was reading and threw open the windows before she went to bed. I liked the cool breeze, and have always liked a cool bedroom. Kent's mother always left the heat on all night, and every time I slept there I felt I was suffocating.

Sometimes I would lie in bed and become aware of my feet. All I could think about was my feet sticking on the ends of my legs, and the toes touching each other. It was an unpleasant and unsettling sensation, and I would lie awake and try to splay my toes. Sometimes, not just in bed, I would also become aware that sounds around me changed and became low-register and ominous-sounding. This is difficult to explain, as well. I grew out of both of these sensations, just as I grew out of fear of the dark. I remember my stepson, Scot, having growing pains. The doctor explained that his long bones were growing so rapidly they hurt. Maybe I was having a variation of growing pains. I did not, could not, communicate these sensations to adults, and never thought to try. I felt I was alone in my sensations, in my world. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I was me and not someone else, and if others were like me. I wonder now if I was just painfully shy, or if that's typical of most children.

My mother's sister, Aunt Bernice Tuft, lived in Monroe, Utah, and visited us at odd times, any season. She didn't drive, and would catch a ride over with someone who was coming to Escalante. Many people came in and out of Escalante on the mail truck, but that may not have been an option for her in Monroe. Sometimes she would catch a ride back to Monroe with a different person. "I heard so-and-so was going to Richfield Thursday to the doctor. Let's go see if I can catch a ride with him." Catching rides was what people did in those days.

Aunt Bernice was two years older than my mother, and had been one of the five students in Dad's high school class. So I realize now in retrospect that Dad knew her very well, and I think now he had probably had a history of being flummoxed by her. Her husband, Uncle Leonard, was a farmer and sheepman. They had four children, two boys and two girls, and Aunt Bernice once told Uncle Leonard that if they couldn't afford to send all their children to college, they should send the girls, because girls needed a little extra advantage. As it turned out, all of the children went to college, and the boys have doctoral degrees. Aunt Bernice worked for many years at the school lunch at Monroe High School. She baked pies for people after she retired, and when I was working at Utah State in the late 1980s, she was 80 years old and was working for the mayor of Richfield, cleaning her house. She had slipped me two $100-dollar bills in an envelope when I came through in January of 1985 on my way to take the job at USU, said I might need it, and told me to pay her back when I could.

It's difficult to describe Aunt Bernice, just as it is difficult to describe my mother. They both were pistols, in different ways. They were generous and hard-working, and lively, but they were also all personality, proud and devious and mischievous and creative and headstrong. Secure in themselves. I did not get those particular traits, so I was often just amazed by them, flummoxed myself, like I was the audience at a show, waiting to see what they would do next. I have met a few others like them over the years, but not many. Their niece Hilma Carver, Aunt Leona's daughter, tall and beautiful with a husky voice, was like that, too. Someone said being with Hilma was like being with a movie star. If she was in a roomful of people, she commanded everyone else's attention. My mother and Aunt Bernice were not like movie stars, but they commanded attention.

Aunt Bernice loved nothing more than a good story, a good laugh, or a practical joke. She thought nothing of working half a day to make a cotton cake to serve to someone on April Fool's Day, just to see someone's reaction when they tried to cut it. Shaving cream topping, that kind of thing. Once she kindly offered me some rubber chocolates. In later years she had little handwritten signs around her housed. In the bathroom: "Turn handel to left. Better yet, stay here until the toilet stops running." In the bedroom: "Remember: The old sun gets low, too. But he rises again every day." On one of my last visits to her house, she gave me the battered roaster pan in which I had my first bath, in her house, on the oven door, in November 1945.

Aunt Bernice's hands were always busy while she was visiting. She was always working on something, sewing, crocheting, any kind of handwork, sewing or altering a dress for Grandma Shurtz. She loved crafts, Christmas decorations, the latest knick-knack, learning a new technique. Sometimes she came to Escalante to help put up fruit or vegetables. Sometimes she brought food, or made special food for us. We never knew when she might appear or what she would bring. Sometimes she would place a collect call for herself in advance and say something cryptic while the operator had her on the line, and we were supposed to puzzle out what that meant. By placing a collect call, she didn't have to pay for the call, but Dad might hang up and say, "Now what in hell was that about?"

One night late I was in bed asleep, and Aunt Bernice arrived. She had caught a ride with someone at the last minute. She put on her nightgown in the dark and crawled into bed with me. Sometime later, in the pitch dark, I woke up with a start under my load of quilts, with someone lying next to me and hugging me. It took a while to figure out it was Aunt Bernice. When we didn't have a moon, the nights were very dark in Escalante. I read recently that one of the best places in the United States from which to see the stars is Bryce Canyon. Escalante is undoubtedly even better.

On the wall in my bedroom was also a shadowbox, a place for little knick-knacks. Two little wooden souvenir salt and pepper shakers in the shape of pitchers sat there, and a piece of uranium ore, from Escalante's uranium boom after the war. I carried that ore with me when I left home, and I painted it when I took basic design at Glendale Community College around 1970. I no longer have it, or the painting, which was one of a series of miniatures I did that were pretty good.

Joseph Cornell's boxes reminded me of my shadow box and of the painting of the praying child.

A Wife's Interim Work: Laboratories, Zoos, Sewing, Teaching

2008-09-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

My resume shows that I have worked at lots of jobs. I can explain every one of them.

In 1977, my husband Bob Smith and I moved to Tucson. He had finished his Ph.D. in insect behavior the year before and had been working in the USDA's Western Cotton Research Laboratory on Baseline Road in Tempe. We regularly scoured the announcements in the back of Science magazine, and Bob had been applying for academic jobs, but it was a difficult time for new Ph.D.'s in biology--too many of them, and a static job market. However, we could get excited about any possibility: studying blackflies in Nova Scotia didn't sound at all bad. Bob had been scheduled for an interview for a job at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Station in Panama. We bought a new suit for him to wear for the interview, then the job was frozen and the interview cancelled, because the Canal had been repatriated and economic conditions had changed. We were disappointed.

Ironically, the job that materialized was just down the road in Tucson. Many of our friends from graduate school were jealous that Bob could stay in the Southwest, an area they loved. Many of them came to visit us during the time we lived in Tucson. Bob was to fill the urban entomology position in the Department of Entomology of the College of Agriculture at the University of Arizona. We understood later that they had interviewed three candidates and didn't like any of them, and someone from Cotton Research had said, "Hey, Bob Smith is looking for a job. Why don't you interview him?"

It was year-round position, and Bob started on the first of July. We sold our house in Tempe after living in it less than a year; we had bought it for $40,000 the previous fall and sold it for about the same amount. We bought a new house in Tucson, a spec house in the Tucson Mountains, for $50,000. The payment was a stretch for us, about half of our take-home pay, and continued to be a stretch for years. Bob's beginning salary at UA was $17,000, but I had given up my full-time job in Tempe, and during the eight years I lived in Tucson did not succeed in getting a full-time job. Tucson was a smaller town with fewer opportunities for me than the Phoenix area. That's not to say I didn't work. I worked constantly: as a freelance editor, a typist, for Kelly Services, for the University on-call services, as a substitute teacher, and as an adjunct faculty member at Pima Community College. I taught most semesters at Pima, one or two courses, with laboratory sections, and I have a lifetime community college teaching certificate. I taught every summer, often both summer sessions, when the regular teachers left to escape the heat. I loved the community college, which was also in the Tucson Mountains, but I didn't make much. Hiring teachers for part-time work allowed the community college to avoid paying benefits. Good for them, not so good for me. Sometimes I signed a special overload contract. It was the same situation as Bob had confronted: too many biologists, a static market, the Ph.D.'s were taking community college jobs, jobs that had previously been taken by people with M.S. degrees.

I was no longer paying into my TIAA-CREF account. In fact, we withdrew my small TIAA-CREF accrual for the down payment on our Tucson house. I did not start to build it again until 1985 when I went to work for Utah State University.

When we moved to Tucson in the summer of 1977, I gave up a high school teaching position. I had taught high school for three years and had grown to love my job.

To back up: When I finished my master's degree at Arizona State in 1974, I went to work for the USDA on cotton bollworm research. My friend Mary Belk was a laboratory technician there at the complex on Baseline Road, and had recommended me, and someone contacted me and invited me to apply. We knew Mary and Denton Belk from graduate school at ASU. Denton was an expert in fairy shrimp, and Mary loved Appaloosa horses. The Belks later bought Brackenridge Stables in San Antonio and were there for many years. Denton died a few years ago, and Mary continues to teach his courses on fairy shrimp.

The job at Western Cotton Research was repetitious. I felt like an automaton. Other scientists worked in the field on developing and planting different strains of cotton, but I put on my white lab coat and worked in the laboratory all day. It was my job to grind up the dried cotton plants of different genetic strains and incorporate them into the food media that the laboratory bollworms ate. I spent the morning precisely pipetting chemicals into solutions and cooking and pouring media into zillions of little wells in trays like tiny cupcake trays. I spent the afternoons "infesting" the agar-based media with bollworm larvae. I used a little painter's brush to place one tiny first-instar larva into its own little private feeding cup. Then late in the day I took the previously infested media cups out of the environmental chambers and used a dissecting microscope to examine the bollworm larvae. I noted if they had died, or if they had molted to the next instar. They did better on some kinds of cotton than on others. I kept the data in notebooks, and the scientists eventually looked at it, compiled it, and wrote up the results.

I have discovered that I thrive in an environment of variety where I can design many of my own activities and continue to learn down many different paths; the life of a laboratory technician was not varied enough for me. When I look back, I realize that teaching, writing, and research--and being a student--have been my favorite jobs. I should have continued for a Ph.D. degree, but somehow it seemed a huge hurdle, out of the question. Even though so many of my classmates did, they were mostly male. I discovered also, in the 1990s, that although I love books and liked many things about the time I spent as a bookseller, it also became repetitious and did not allow much time for other activities, and especially my own thoughts. Although it was always important to make ends meet, and avoid debt, payment has never been important as the task. As the scientific illustrator Donald Sayner once said to me, "numbers are not my interest in the world."

By the fall of 1975, Bob and I had married, and I started teaching at Trevor G. Browne High School in west Phoenix. I was also taking education courses at night toward teacher certification. The drive to Trevor Browne was a long one, but straight west through fields of cotton and flowers, then a little jog north. I left early. Some times I stopped on the way and picked flowers and cotton bolls for the students to examine. For a few weeks, I carpooled with Jamie __, who was doing her student teaching at Trevor Browne. I taught two semesters of my own biology classes as a long-term substitute, and during the final semester, in the spring, I did my student teaching under Leon Jordan, an African-American man who had also taught my Methods of Teaching Biology course at ASU.

The students I had taught for two trimesters were absorbed into the other biology classes for their final trimester. We had bonded during the time I had been their teacher, and they wanted to finish out the year with me; they protested to Mr. Jordan, to no avail. I had used up my substitute days for that year, and could not legally teach more, unsupervised. I was paid at a substitute rate for two semesters, then I taught free for the final semester, while I completed the final requirement for Arizona teacher certification.

I had already earned a bachelor's degree in biology, and a master's degree in zoology, then I took more classes in education for certification. I had done it backward, one frustrated education administrator at ASU told me.

Mr. Jordan had many administrative tasks at the high school, and he had already determined that I was a good teacher and had done well in his methods class, so he essentially left his classes, including advanced biology, to me. He saw I was a biology omnivore, and he told me a few things: "don't tell the students everything you know," he cautioned. He also encouraged me to choose one major concept for each class, and to hammer it home in many different ways during the class. I think now that probably had glaucoma, because he used eye drops every day, and another teacher, Dorothy Bender, helped him instill his eye drops.

I no longer have the textbooks we used in biology, but the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) texts were all the rage then. Mr. Jordan had been part of a national team that created them; they were in use across the country. The "green version" took an environmental point of view; the "blue version" had a molecular orientation; and the "yellow version" must have been the standard approach. I used the green version, and added many of my own laboratory exercises.

Mr. Jordan had a assembled a good and loyal group of teachers: Dorothy Bender, who also had a greenhouse business; Meg __, whose husband was an attorney; Paul __, whose hobby was repairing old adding machines; Cecil __, the chemistry teacher with thinning hair, who had a ponytail, trying to grow enough hair to have it made into a toupee. He was good-natured about the hair, and sometimes wore a toupee, much to his students' delight. Trevor Browne was an "open" school with a laboratory approach to teaching, but the classrooms were square areas, well defined, and the teachers were in-charge disciplinarians, so that it worked. Sometimes I became a little self-conscious that an adjacent teacher could hear and see everything I was doing, but I got over it. Jacob Bronowski's series was popular that year, and we showed the genetics segment on a television in the classroom.

Our assistant principal was Bill Bombeck, husband of the humorist Erma Bombeck. Dorothy Bender and I often sat and talked with him in the lunchroom, when we went for coffee break. He saw our problem students as well. I did not have any serious problems with students. I remember one name, Jerry Urich. He was an excellent student. When his father came on parents' night, he said, "Call me if Jerry gives you any problems." I learned that I usually saw the parents of the good students, and did not see the parents of the students who were having problems or causing difficulties in the classroom. That year Mr. Jordan's class took a bus trip to the Naval Observatory in Flagstaff to look at the stars and planets, and I accompanied them. I think I was more excited than the students were.

After my year at Trevor Browne, I taught in the 1976 summer education program at the Phoenix Zoo. Bob had taught there the previous year, I believe, and taken Scot with him. One of our friends from graduate school was the Director of Education, and we also had a friend who took around the Zoo's traveling show. The zoo offered an art program, and a nature program. The art program was inside, and the nature program, in which I taught, was outside. Students could take both programs during the day, by alternating. It was a good way to keep children occupied in a positive way while their parents were working. I took the children around the zoo during my class. We visited the animal night houses, we put out a stuffed owl and watched the birds mob it, we talked about all the different animals. The children were 10-year-olds. They said funny things about the animals, that tickled me. I wrote down some of their statements or questions, and sent them to the Sunday magazine of the Arizona Republic, where they were published, with photographs. That summer Sue Alcock tended Scot a lot. She and John had Joey and Nicky, who were a bit younger than Scot, but they played together well, and the Alcocks were very good to Scot and to us. Bob was John's first doctoral student. They were about the same age.

That fall I was hired at Marcos deNiza High School, near our apartment. I was thrilled about my new job and my beautiful classroom, a tiered lecture hall with an adjoining laboratory. I had about 24 students in each class, and taught five classes a day. My office was off the laboratory, and the preparation room was behind the lecture hall. The department was well-planned and well-equipped, and it was not an open classroom. I was a real professional! I took Bob to see my classroom in the evening after they had given me a key, and when I opened the door the alarm went off, and the security guard came running. I was embarrassed.

My salary was $9000 for nine months, and I collected it over twelve months, to be assured of a summer income. We lived in an apartment on Rural Road, on the ground floor, with an enclosed patio. The high school was several blocks south of us, close enough that I sometimes walked back to our apartment after school, always lugging an armload of books and papers. Our apartment complex was subsidized and the rent was low. Joann and Nelson Foster lived across the way from us. Nelson was also an entomologist who worked at Western Cotton Research. They had a little boy, Brandon, who played with my stepson, Scot. The Fosters were from Chadron, Nebraska, and Joann had beautiful long red hair. Nanette Savage from Antimony also lived there a short time.

A huge sign announced "No Pets," and that was how we naturally referred to our place: "Remember when we lived in the No Pets Apartments"? There was a good play area for children, and Scot's elementary school was close by, a couple of blocks north of us. The patio was enclosed with a solid wood fence, and we planted around the patio with castor beans, coleus, vines, and moss roses. It looked tropical. We kept our bicycles on the patio, until they were stolen. There was a huge vacant lot across the street from the apartments; an auto dealership was eventually built there. During meteor showers, we put a bucket in the vacant lot to collect micrometeorites. We picked them out of a bucket with a magnet. We had pet Colorado River toads on the patio that came out at night to eat crickets. Sometimes the toads hopped into the house. One we had to take up a section of carpet because a snake had crawled under it. And we had a sparrow hawk, Rusty, who had a broken wing. She was apparently shot during dove season. My students had brought her to me, as they did with most animals, and I thought she would probably die. They had put iodine on her wing and taped it with bandaids. She could not fly, but she climbed up the drapes to the drapery rod, or sat on the TV antenna or bicycle handlebars, and could sort of glide around the house. We kept her for about four years, feeding her crickets and mealworms, chicken hearts and gizzards, until she finally died of old age. It is illegal to keep raptors without a permit, but I could not bear the thought of the handicapped bird being tossed out in the desert like a pork chop. Rusty was dignified, smart, and proud, and taught us a lot about during the time she lived with us.

My first year at Marcos deNiza, 1975-76, I was assigned three sections of 10th grade biology, non-college-bound, and two sections of 9th grade physical science. The biology students were mostly Hispanic and Yaqui students, bused in from Guadalupe. They were handsome students, and I loved their musical names. The 9th graders were Anglos, children of professionals, many who lived near the high school in the affluent Lakes area, a development situated around artificial lakes. One of my students was a Chinese boy whose parents were both mathematics professors. He was more accomplished than I, and he was helpful in the class.

We studied geology, meteorology, astronomy, and physical science, and did lots of experiments. The biology students could not afford books, so I worked all year with handouts, National Geographic magazines, anything I could come up with. They had a high absentee rate, and I discovered that most did not have telephones. I devoted a lot of time to hearing excuses, explaining makeup work and giving makeup exams. My mother had a baby, and I had to help her, the girls might say. I had to forbid them to paint their nails in class.

That summer I did not have a summer job. But I felt the lack of clothes to wear for teaching. Often I wore a white laboratory coat over my clothes. One day I had worn jeans that I thought were dressy, with embroidery down the side, and tennis shoes. My department head, Jan Velasco, had come to my class for evaluation, and asked on the form, "Do you consider jeans and tennis shoes appropriate attire?" or something like that. It had made me very self-conscious. One of the young math teachers was very stylish, and Kathy Aspey wore very nice suits. So the summer of 1776 I began to sew. I had my old Singer 66 cabinet sewing machine that Jean had given me when I lived in Salt Lake City, and Cloth World was just up the street. I began. I sewed jackets and blouses, and tops, and pants and skirts and vests. I was very thin, with a very flat stomach, and I looked good in my clothes. When I found a pattern that fit me well, I made several jackets or pairs of pants from the same pattern, but with different fabric. When I finished one outfit, I went to Cloth World and bought more cloth and sewed more. I made bound buttonholes and I did topstitching. I went crazy. I put my name in for a drawing at Cloth World, and I won $100 shopping spree. I bought some tan twill and made a beautiful safari-style jacket and matching pants. Bob was working at Cotton Research and writing papers for publication and also working on a National Science Foundation grant application.

When we went to Escalante for Labor Day, I could say that I had sewed 35 pieces of clothing that summer. I couldn't believe it myself. Scot must have been gone to Michigan with his mother most of the summer, because I can't remember having to take care of him. It was the summer of the Bicentennial and I had the TV on while I sewed, and I had a refresher course in American history and watched the tall ships come into Boston Harbor. When I went back to school that fall, I had lots of clothes to wear. I had two pairs of shoes, a navy blue pair and a tan pair. Navy blue has always been one of my favorite colors to wear. I was still wearing some of those nice suits I had made when I took the job in Logan in 1985.

We bought a three-bedroom house on Dunbar Ave. at the end of the summer of 1976, just before I started my second year of teaching at Marcos deNiza. We had just moved in as school started, and Joanie came over and cleaned while I was at school. We had a large trapezoid-shaped yard, small in the front, and huge in the back. There was a big sandbox for Scot, and a garden spot, and a storage shed. We had no furniture for the living room, so we used the family room. We used the extra bedroom as an office. That year I taught four sections of college-prep biology, and a section of animal behavior/desert biology. I was the advisor for National Honor Society. I had several of my physical science students from the year before in my biology courses. The boys had grown taller over the summer. They were good students, and I was flattered that they had signed up for my biology class, because they had a choice of several teachers. I remember Steve Ockerman, whose father was an air-traffic controller; Rick Herzog, who had a great sense of humor; John Booth, who was an actor (I went to see him in a production of "Charlie Brown"); Margie __, with the frizzy hair, who was often in my classroom after school, helping grade papers. Kevin __ and Jon Obst were my student assistants. The NHS officers met in my classroom to plan their events.

I shared an office with Mike Lammle, who was a hemophiliac. Mike used crutches because his knee joints had sustained damage from bleeding. Buddy Rollins, a coach, had the classroom next to mine. Janet Velasco was my department head. The other biology teachers were Kathy Aspey, Stephanie (an attractive blonde who also taught sports), and an older man, Jack Shultz, who refused to teach evolution. He was given permission to skip that chapter in the textbook. Mike Crowe taught chemistry. He and Buddy Rollins were good friends. Mrs. Aspey and I were the teachers who were often in our classrooms after school, and we had our little informal "after-school club" of students who helped with bulletin boards and other tasks. I believe Mike Lammle did not return the second year I was there, and Mr. Jeter and Mr. Shultz were hired that year.

I had not originally wanted to be a high school teacher, but after three years, I loved my job and I was sad to leave. I had learned a lot about students' behavior, and about which activities worked. I had discovered that I was a good teacher. The first year was stressful and exhausting, and I often felt overstimulated, but I learned ways to cope and manage the classroom. I enjoyed the students, especially the students who were interested and took personal responsibility to do their work. There was an unwritten understanding that we were all there to work, but there was no prohibition against enjoying learning. I posted my rules on the first day, and seated the students alphabetically. I asked for collateral when they needed to borrow a pencil, so I always got my pencils back. I sneakily integrated writing skills into my science classes, and taught them how to write good laboratory reports.

I brought in lots of living specimens for them to study or observe. I had many resources from the University, and from our field work: sensitive mimosas, giant water bugs, caterpillars, desert pupfish, Colorado River toads, tadpole shrimp from Little Triste Pond. We created big climatograms on posterboard from data in the green version and learned a lot about the earth's climatic areas and the animals and plants adapted to them. We autoclaved media and repeated Spallanzani's spontaneous generation experiments with swan-necked flasks. We made Berlese funnels and collected soil organisms from the flowerbeds at the school.

My physical science students created a scale model of the solar system on the football field, from doing the mathematics to making pictures of the planets and staking them out. We had an astronomy night and looked at the stars. We collected rocks and categorized them and learned about the Moh's hardness scale. Steve brought in his father's weather maps from the airport. We learned about Ted Fujita's tornadoes. We did lots of experiments, and the students were always trying their own versions of experiments to blow the stoppers out of test tubes or something else unexpected, but they were good students, bright and active, hyper like puppies. The boys were small as ninth graders, and grew tall over the summer before tenth grade.

I had a few problems. In biology, one student spit tobacco on the floor when I wasn't looking. I was mystified by the wet spot on the floor every day, and wondered if the roof was leaking. One girl was devastated when her grades were too low for her to be in pep club, and made me feel it was my fault. Two boys got into a fist fight in class, because one had grabbed the other's pencil. One of my students misspelled his name, and his parents would not release his medical records so that his teachers could know what the problem was. I did my best with him. All in all, it was a wonderful time, and sometimes I wonder if any of my students remember those classes, too.

At the end of the school year, my colleagues had a goodbye party for me at Jan Velasco's house. They gave me a travel book and wished me well.

Okra at Strathshannon: Teaching by Example

2008-09-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

I met Dr. Reese Danley-Kilgo shortly after she retired from teaching at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Reese came to a writing group to which I belonged, and she invited the writing group to meet at her house. And to see her garden. Always to see her garden. It changes every day.

Reese was still counseling clients at that time. Her counseling office was a small blue building in the back of her garden, near her outdoor sink and shower. Among her goals when she retired were to write a novel and a children's book. She did both. Nine Bean Rows is the novel, and The Kitchen Elves is the children's book. She continues to write poems, and wins awards for them every year. She has written hundreds of book reviews for the Huntsville Times. She speaks fluent Spanish, and teaches English as a second language. She plays ping-pong, Scrabble and other word games, is a political activist, and has a full schedule of visitors of all nationalities. She teaches for ElderHostel and in lifelong learning programs, about the memoir, gardening, and books. She makes her own greeting cards.

Her husband, Toby, is an agriculture teacher and a farmer, originally from Alabama. Reese was raised in Florida. In years past, they taught in England and Central America. They began the American School in El Salvador when they were young, and adopted a Salvadorean baby, who is now the mother of one of their grandchildren. They founded "Meadowbrook," a summer camp for children in Alabama. Toby used to grow corn at Meadowbrook, and bring it to Falls Mill in Tennessee for grinding.

It seems evident to me that everything they have done has been uplifting to people, and respectful of the Earth's bounties and beauties. They always offer tea and biscuits, and share garden produce and seeds, and they nurture my better nature.

Reese and Toby grow about 70 percent of the food they eat in their suburban yard. Their chickens are grandfathered and have a chicken condo. The Kilgo house is an unusual island of lushness on a street of mowed lawns.

When I visit, I walk from the street under the vine-covered arch that announces "Strathshannon." The walkway to the house is lined with different plants every year: okra, corn, beans. At the front door, a sign asks me to remove my shoes. Another tells me that Reese may be in the garden. Always in the garden.

Remember the Founders, Remember the Ladies

2008-09-16T20:00:00.001-07:00

I've been watching the HBO movie, "John Adams," based on David McCullough's most excellent book. I'm enthralled once again with this incredible drama, and when it ends will probably have to watch it again.

Paul Giamatti's Adams is rotund, intense, and curiously adorable, Laura Linney's Abigail fiercely intelligent. George Washington is tall and muscular, with bad teeth. Jefferson is the dreamy-eyed pensive aristocrat, Franklin the lazy opportunist. And on and on. Edward Rutledge is a cocky young Southerner. John Quincy Adams is the bright young scholar. The French elite are dissipated, young King George III is elegant, his emotions thinly veiled. The founders plod forward, unsure of what they have wrought, where it goes, and what it means. Who are their constituents, really? What do they want, really? What is the effect of geography, slavery, trade? They are in the thick of it, responding to this and that, with personal agendas and vendettas. Europe is still playing a large role, wielding a huge influence. The clothing, hairstyles, and wigs are fascinating.

In 1789, George Washington was elected the first president with 69 "electoral" votes, and Adams, who came in second with 34 votes, became his vice-president. (Adams had fretted that the title "president" would not be regarded highly on the continent.) Washington decided he had had enough after two terms, and Adams was elected the second president. Charming Abigail Adams was the first second lady, and the second first lady. She died of typhoid in 1818, at age 74. Her eldest son, John Quincy, became the sixth president of the United States in 1825.

Adams and Jefferson were friends, enemies, competitors, opposites, friends again. They died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the last two signers of the Declaration of Independency to expire, on the Declaration's fiftieth anniversary. One was the "pen," the other the "voice" of independence. Who could make that up?

This story encompasses many dramas, great and small, and has myriad implications and foreshadowings. Forget about flag-waving, recitation of names and dates, and simple declarations of patriotism. It's a complicated story, with a complicated and selected cast of participants. What motivated the founders? Who were the people who made up the supporting cast? Venality, violence, ignorance, greed, and self-interest are as much a part of the story as high ideals and devotion to service.

In 1969 Dad bought an airplane ticket for me so that I could visit my sister Jean in Roanoke, Virginia. I had been there just a day or so, when Jean and George made the quick decision to take me to see Washington, DC. Jean has always loved history, and for almost forty years has soaked in the history and historical sites in Virginia. I remember when she and George were preparing to move away from Utah, and Jean was trying to reassure herself, talking herself into being so far away from home. She said, "Five presidents were born in Virginia."

Dad loved the nation's capital, too, and I believe I loved Washington as much as he and Jean did. I came away believing that every American of every age should connect with the nation's capital. Everywhere I looked was history made palpable: the White House, Arlington, the Capitol, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington monument, and on and on. How thrilling to see the first ladies' dresses in the Smithsonian. With Jean and her family I also visited Mount Vernon. And at another time we went to Monticello. I have seen Washington's false teeth and Jefferson's bedroom. How much more personal can history be?

I've been back to DC and environs several times since then, as well as to Philadelphia and to Boston, and each visit has made our nation's unique history more real and more precious to me.

Some years after the our initial visit to DC, Jean took me to see "1776" at the Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke. Up to that time, my favorite musicals had been "Little Shop of Horrors," "Olympus on My Mind," and "Evita." "1776" went to the top of my queue. Thomas Jefferson has red hair, Adams is rotund, and Richard Henry Lee, another signer of the Declaration of "Independency," sings "I'm a Lee, I'm a Lee, I'm a Lee from old Virginia."

Global Warming, Global Change, Change Needed

2008-09-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a call for 200- to 500-word stories and photos about climate change for a new online book, Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories About Global Warming. The two examples they give on their website are from Iowa and Indiana, so I sent them an account of our winter, spring, and summer of 2006-2007 here on the Cumberland Plateau. The combination of warm winter, plants blooming as much as four weeks early, then late freeze and hot, dry summer was devastating in many ways. A lasting reminder has been the death blow dealt to several large trees in our yard. This summer Isaac King cut down a dead 100-foot-tall chestnut oak that was perilously close to the house. It is now firewood.

This summer has been glorious, more "normal," but maps of worldwide temperature trends suggest this is only a temporary respite. Whereas the United States' temperatures are not extreme at present, the rest of the world is experiencing record highs.

In 1993, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Endangered Species Coalition. We met at the Washington Zoo. Every state was represented, and after the conference we lobbied our congressmen on behalf of animals and plants in trouble. I was the lone delegate from Alabama.

The speakers included Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson, as well as marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who talked about the often-neglected topic of the oceans. I had met Gould previously, in Arizona and in Iowa, and would meet Wilson years later when he visited Sewanee to receive an honorary degree. Gould was characteristically irascible and prickly, forbidding photographs by conference participants. He took the long view, and told us essentially that our efforts didn't really matter in terms of geological time. Wilson, gentler, urged us to do what we could for other species. Gould's view was undoubtedly correct. Wilson's view makes it in some ways both easier and more difficult to live in the here and now, realizing how stressful we have made the world for all the other living things in it. Other species are the innocents who do not vote.

Last week, I read, ten polar bears were spotted swimming 65 miles out from land. The cod is gone. Frogs are in trouble. Bees have colony collapse disorder. Bats are dying mysteriously, with white fungi colonizing their noses. Fireflies are blinking out. Songbirds are in steep decline.

Rachel Carson's silent spring is upon us. Many factors are undoubtedly to blame, including all the chemicals and pollutants we have added to the environment. Not to mention noise, heat, light pollution, dams, development, alteration of predator-prey relationships, you name it. Consider: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Earth held one billion people. It now holds more than six billion, yet Earth is still the same size it always was. We are worse than a plague of locusts. Humans have taken all the food and habitat, and have irrevocably changed the surface of the Earth. We have moved mountains, acidified oceans, and have altered the very climate that has allowed us to be so "successful."

It's overwhelming--time for Stephen Jay Gould's philosophy. But who wants to wait for geological time to do a bit for the Earth and its creatures?

A recent book with a more Wilson-like message of how we all might help remedy some environmental problems in a personal way is Douglas Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens. The book includes photographs that look like they could have been taken around here, and has won the 2008 Silver Award of Achievement given by the Garden Writers Association.

Tallamy notes that the United States is home to a population of 300 million humans, with more on the way, and that only 3-5% of land area in the United states is undisturbed. There is not enough habitat left for most species to avoid extinction. Unless we accommodate native species in developed areas, 95% will become extinct within our lifetimes.

What we have left of "nature" is in our yards and gardens, yet the trend has been for those to be sterile, inhospitable spaces. Tallamy urges us all to become wildlife managers by creating garden havens that will nurture birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Others have termed this approach "reconciliation ecology," reconciling our living on Earth with the existence of other species, plant and animal.

Here are some tips from Tallamy:

Recognize that alien plants are like plastic for wildlife (signs of nibbling are good signs).

Plant native trees, shrubs, herbs, wildflowers (they support native insects, thus birds).

Plant for caterpillars and adult butterflies (often their foods are different plants).

Plant for birds, seed-eaters, and berry-eaters (plants can be beautiful as well as useful).

Don't forget that baby birds eat bugs (even if their parents are seed-eaters).

Let wildlife provide pest control (it's free).

Create biodiversity and balance (let food chains and food webs do their work).

Shun monocultures, large expanses of lawn (lawns are sterile environments).

Plant in clumps, plant wide borders (even a 1/8-acre lot can support wildlife).

Redefine a "weed" (no native plants are weeds).

Relax about leaf litter (it provides microhabitat as well as nourishing the soil).

Provide water, hideyholes, relief, nesting sites (habitat is where it's at).

Plant extra for caterpillars, a row for the hungry (feel good about sharing).

Enjoy the beauty of bees, butterflies, birds, spiders and other wildlife in your garden.

The Dead Plants Society created an exhibit on Tallamy's book for the annual Trails and Trilliums event at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School this spring. The Tennessee Native Plants Society annual meeting in September will feature a speaker who will echo this theme.

Oceans for the Land-locked

2008-09-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

When I was six or so, I rolled up the plaid cuffs on the blue pants that Mom had made for me, and waded in the Pacific Ocean on the Oregon Coast. Water, water, as far as my eyes could see. The moving sand tickled between my toes, the ocean smelled of salt and living things, and the lapping of the ocean waves made me dizzy. The white noise of the ocean was loud, whoosh whoosh. The sun glinted on the water like a million shiny knife blades. Mom waded and laughed, too. That same day we saw the Sea Lion Caves, and heard the grunting and honking of the sea lions. Dad bought a little felt hat for me, with "Sea Lion Caves" embroidered on it, but it blew off my head across the highway, and I lost it. I took my photographs to first grade for show and tell, in the reading circle in Mrs. Gates' class.

We had traveled to the Pacific in Dad's white Chevrolet with the sporty sun visor. Mom packed food and clothes and pillows and tucked a quilt over the back seat. First, we drove over the Escalante mountain, churning up dust behind us, and through Antimony, where Aunt Polly's granddaughter, Nanette Savage, lived. Nanette was my summer playmate in Escalante, when she came to stay with Aunt Polly. Nanette's mother, Berdean, drowned in the Antimony Reservoir when Nanette was young.

We reached the blacktop, Highway 89, at the sign of the Flying Red Horse. A major milestone, it was, getting to the oiled road, leaving the washboard road behind. The air was cleaner, the ride smoother and quieter. I leaned over the seat, and Dad and I sang. One of his favorite songs was "Fifty Cents." "I took my girl to fancy restaurant...she said she wasn't hungry, but this is what she eat...when she called for pie, I thought I'd die, 'cause I had but fifty cents." Mom found us tuneless, but we liked the words. That got us through the dip of Marysvale, the old railroad town, and to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where we could go outside the store, and climb up a hill to see the bobcat, miserable in its tiny cage of chicken wire and boards.

We stopped to see relatives along the way in Utah--the trips run together, but they were punctuated by visits with Aunt Bernice in Monroe (Dad pacing, eager to get on with the trip, Mom and her sister catching up, Aunt Bernice insisting on taking Mom to see someone's else's house/furniture/you name it); blind, gray-haired handsome Uncle Leander in Salina (laughing about Aunt Gwen rearranging the furniture, he'd feel my braids with his long constantly moving fingers and tell me I looked pretty); Jean and George in Provo (Dad comfortable there with daughter and son-in-law, and grandchildren); Uncle Gard and Aunt Gertie (Dad and his little brother loved seeing each other, Aunt Gertie was lively, and cousin Johnny was my age, Stevie older, Colleen younger) in Salt Lake City. These Barneys lived then at 1321 Edison Street, just off State Street, and not far from Liberty Park. Aunt Gertie worked for the National Guard, and Uncle Gard worked at the Post Office, night shift, so he was home to cook pancakes and sausages for all of us.

We picked up Joanie from her boardinghouse on A Street in Salt Lake City. Then we traveled across Idaho and Oregon reading Burma Shave signs, and noting license plates. I worked in my fat travel fun book printed on pulpy paper, and used up good brain cells reading bad jokes. Q: "When is a door not a door?" A: "When it is ajar." Q: "Who is bigger, Mr. Bigger or Mr. Bigger's baby." A: "Mr. Bigger's baby, because he's little Bigger." On the plains of Idaho we saw fields of eroded volcanic rocks and a sign that tickled Dad: "Petrified watermelons. Take one home to your mother-in-law."

At our destination in Oregon were my mother's sister, Leona Leavitt, and her husband Percy J., in Springfield, and my mother's brother, John Alden "Jack" Shurtz, and his wife, Ida, in Eugene. The seven Leavitt children--Dean, Donald, Darrell, Doug, Dewey, Hilma and Ermine--were grown, but Dewey was unmarried and showed Joanie around. We visited some of the other cousins in their own homes nearby. Uncle Jack and Aunt Ida had a daughter, Donna Lee, who was a few years older than I. Donna Lee, with black hair, had muscular dystrophy and was wheelchair-bound. The substantial old Shurtz bungalow was equipped with a wheelchair ramp, and I pushed Donna Lee up and down and we had lots of fun with her books and toys and games. Uncle Jack liked to drink, and Dad got him out of jail to visit with us. He also played the piano, and the first song he always played when he sat down at the piano, was "Ida." "Ida, sweet as apple cidah...Ida, Ida, 'deed I do."

We drove again to the Oregon coast about six years later when I had just entered my teens, and didn't have Joanie along to talk with. Uncle Perce had died and Aunt Leona had Mormon missionaries living in an apartment above her garage. Donna Lee was older and weaker, her teeth protruded, and she had some difficulty speaking. We still loved one another, and I still pushed her up and down the ramp. She had lots of records, and we played the sound track to the movie, "Hawaii." She died a few years later, in her early twenties.

This time we had a different car, maybe the pink and black car, and my long legs stretched along the length of the back seat, and I slept a lot along the way, but I remember the fish ladders on the Columbia River, and Coos Bay. Dad loved a road trip, and was excited about all the new sights along the way. He told me of the bridges I slept through. He was also a tense and nervous driver, uneasy about passing other cars, and perusing the map, plotting routes to avoid the main highways. This time we went home by way of San Francisco via the coast highway, and the redwood forest. We stopped to marvel at the redwoods. They were so big and we were so small, they made me dizzy.

We ferried across San Francisco Bay to get to Hayward, near Oakland, where Joanie and Joe were then living with their two children, and Joe was teaching school. Dad was a baseball fan and took me along to Candlestick Park in San Francisco, where we saw the San Francisco Giants play. Dad was enthusiastic about Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda and the other players. He also took me to see them play once in Salt Lake City's Derks Field. Baseball seemed slow and I'm afraid the significance of seeing the Giants was lost on me at the time, but I ate hot dogs and popcorn and learned the rules of the big game, compared with the softball game we played at home in the street.

When I lived in Arizona, we made several trips to the beach on the Gulf of California, and I lived for a summer on Beach Highway in Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, but it was not until the late 1980s, that I saw the open Atlantic Ocean. My sister Jean, and her husband George, and their family, who had lived in Virginia since the late 1960s, invited me to spend a vacation week with them on North Carolina's Outer Banks. They have vacationed on the Outer Banks for decades, usually staying at a house in Duck. When we came to the Southeast in 1990, we continued for several years to go to Duck with the family, taking two days over and two days back, staying in Chapel Hill on the way.

I found North Carolina a beautiful state, the Piedmont gentle, soft, and green, the destination the best of all: the protected freshwater or brackish sound rich with life, the dunes of the islands of the outer banks patchy with sea oats and bayberries, the beach like front row seats on the world, the water much wilder than that on either gulf.

Too, we saw wild ponies, descendants of horses brought on ships, and pelicans and gulls and ospreys and black skimmers and sandpipers and ghost crabs. We climbed to the tops of the lighthouses, and walked Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk and saw the distances flown and the life-sized replica of the Wright brothers' airplane. At night we watched the outdoor pageant about the early settlement on Roanoke Island, and we learned about the shipwrecks through history, and about the waterfowl flyways and the history of market hunting of ducks for northern restaurants. We shopped and cooked and ate and slept and played games.

Again with many family members--this time I was an older one, watching the younger ones--I walked in the sand, and waded in the ocean, and the sand tickled between my toes, and the waves made me dizzy. It seemed softer, grayer, more muted than my old memories of the Pacific, but still I heard white noise, smelled salt and living things, and saw water, water, as far as my eyes could see.

The Work of Horses, Horses With Heart

2008-08-31T17:06:00.000-07:00

A survey commissioned some years ago by the American Veterinary Medical Association documented something we could have deduced: declining numbers of horses in the United States. It did not indicate how many of the five million horses were working horses, and how many were used in sport or riding for pleasure.

A hundred years ago, my grandfather, George Henry Barney, rode a big bay horse named for his endurance: Gosum. Granddad Barney and Gosum did his Forest Service work together for years. Dad said my grandfather did not invest in the Ford Motor Company because he didn't believe roads would ever be practical. A hundred years ago, in southern Utah, it was horses that were practical. My grandfather invested in telegraph poles.

Fifty or sixty years ago, uncle Uncle Emmett Porter rode Old Sailor, a white horse with a few black spots like a Dalmatian. Every day in the spring and summer Uncle Emmett rode Old Sailor past our house as he went to and from his fields southeast of Escalante. Sometimes Uncle Emmett just waved; presumably he had work to do. On other days he stopped at the fence to say hello. Once in a while, when I was small, Dad lifted me up behind Uncle Emmet for a little ride, down the street and back.

Each spring, Uncle Emmett brought his work horses, King and Queen, and the plow to our house and plowed our garden spot. When Joanie was a little girl, in the 1930s, Uncle Emmett's plow horse had a foal. The foal followed its mother back and forth for a while, then it got tired, and lay down at the side of the garden spot. Joanie went inside the house and brought out a pillow to put under its head.

We did not have horses, although my parents rode when they were young. My mother told of riding the thirty miles to Boulder when she was a teenager to help out her married sister, Leona Leavitt. Boulder was even more isolated than Escalante; it was the last place in the United States to get U.S. mail delivered by mule.

When my friend Lana Liston's uncle, Alma Liston, died, people were surprised to find he kept a car in his garage. He rode his horse everywhere; it was faster, less trouble. Lana's father, Stanley, was also a rancher, and Lana often rode their pinto mare with just a blanket and a bridle. One time I was riding behind her, and a dog ran out and frightened the little horse near MaeVon Dodds' house. The horse threw us into the irrigation ditch. We were shaken, but fine, and vowed to keep our secret. Lana didn't want to risk losing riding privileges. But when we got back to Lana's house, her mother said, "I heard you were thrown." MaeVon had seen us and called June.

I suspect that Escalante, isolated and rural, retained some customs after they had been abandoned by the rest of the country, but was also a microcosm of small Western ranching communities. We had a racetrack on the southwest side of town, the site of dusty rodeos where area cowboys competed, and the members of the Riding Club performed. Unlike the dances after the basketball games, when the boys had had a chance to shower, an after-rodeo dance meant dancing with dirty, sometimes drunk, sometimes scraped and bloody young men. They wore the rips in their clothing like badges of honor.

My friend Beth Robinson's father, Blake, kept racehorses, and Beth sometimes invited me to go to the races with them, in Richfield or Salina. When the Robinson horse won, the little jockey sat on the horse in his bright silks, folded like a frog, and we all crowded around to have our picture taken. Blake also owned Valley Finance, and the pool hall, where many photos of the winning horses were posted. One of Beth's chores was to give grain to the racehorses in the evenings, and I often followed her to the corral to grain the horses.

This summer I took a workshop in creative nonfiction from John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son. His book is the story of his father's life and death, and his own relationship with his father, and at the same time a compendium of everything, but everything, about horses. Personal and universal, it has been hailed as a masterpiece of writing, and an unprecedented treatment of the subject, sort of an equine Moby-Dick.

From prehistory to history, the evolution of the horse, domestication and the long companionship with humans, horses in war and conquest, art, transport, and their role in sport, Sullivan wields a broad brush. Woven throughout are fine portraits, including events surrounding Saudi horse-owners in Kentucky on 9/11. Sullivan's father, Mike Sullivan, is rendered in fine detail, as are the Kentucky races.

John Sullivan once asked his father about his best moment in sportswriting. Mike's answer: the horse Secretariat's Derby, in 1973, which he described as "just beauty." The horse Sham was favored in the race, and seemed to be a sure winner, ahead going into the last turn. "...it just didn't seem like there could be anything faster than that," Mike said. "Everybody was watching him. It was over, more or less. And all of a sudden there was this...like, just a disruption in the corner of your eye, in your peripheral vision. And then before you could make out what it was, here Secretariat came. And then Secretariat had passed him. No one had ever seen anything run like that--a lot of the old guys said the same thing. It was like he was some other animal out there..."

After winning more races in his characteristic way, Secretariat was retired to a Kentucky farm, where he sired countless offspring. In 1989, he developed laminitis, a painful condition of the hooves, and was euthanized. A veterinarian, Dr. Thomas Swerczex, performed an autopsy, and reported this: "The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. [Secretariat's heart] was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I'd ever seen. And it wasn't pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and valves were normal. It was just larger."

Non-prodigious and Late-blooming Music

2008-08-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

When Ronn was planning his retirement in 2005, he said he thought he'd like to learn to play guitar. He had tried guitar 30 or 40 years ago and had quit because, he says, couldn't hear to tune the instrument. Battery-powered clip-on tuners have solved that problem.

I had been taking banjo lessons from Jim Wood in Flat Creek, near Lynchburg, Tennessee, and arranged for Ronn to take lessons for a month. Ronn thought it was crazy to drive so far for a lesson. He was quickly converted. The drive to Jim's studio takes us through farmland, where we see wild turkeys, indigo buntings and other birds. The sights change with the seasons.

But that's not all that was appealing. Ronn is a mathematician. He says he was not exposed to music when he was growing up. Now he wants to know everything about the physics of music and music theory, about the characteristics of and transmission of sound waves, the scales, modes, musical notation, the qualities of different instruments, how to make and evaluate instruments. Jim can answer all his questions. I want to know how to hold the instrument, and where to put my fingers, and how to strum. Jim can answer my questions, too.

So Ronn began lessons more than three years ago. He still takes a lesson every week, and practices every day. He is 66. Last fall he moved on to fiddle, and he has joined the Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra, which Jim organized in 2007, and which includes people of all ages.

I took piano lessons when I was in elementary school, from teacher Stanley Spencer, but we did not have a piano so I practiced at Aunt Fon Mecham's house near Stanley's. My cousin Ronald, who was two years older and in book 2, teased me about my struggles, and the lessons didn't last long. Reading and writing came easily; music no. I was shy. I did not think I had natural aptitude for it. I did not have talent.

But my world was not bereft of music. I sang the songs in church, and sang in high school chorus class. In high school, I played saxophone with the band in 8th, 9th, and 10th grades. We were taught first by Mrs. Bench, the seminary teacher's wife, and then by Julie __, who took us to Salt Lake City for a band festival and parade. A dozen of us showed up for band practice from 8-9 a.m., before classes started. Beth Robinson, Effie Kay Spencer, and I played saxophones--Beth's a tenor, which her sister Ruth had played; mine a medium-sized alto, which belonged to my cousin, Geraldine, Ronald's sister; and Effie Kay's a little silver soprano, which belonged to the school. Judy McInelly and Jo Osborn played trumpet. Kathleen Marsh played clarinet. Paul Mounteer and Garna Willis may have also played clarinets. Someone played snare and bass drums. We met on the stage in the gymnasium. I practiced at least half an hour a day, and Mom initialed my practice log. She sang along with "Beautiful Dreamer."

One day we were sitting on the stage waiting, and Mrs. Bench came in with her armload of papers. She was a pretty woman, with her dark blonde hair clipped back in a short low ponytail. The doors to the stairs on the sides of the stage were locked, so she stood on a folding chair to get up to the stage. The chair collapsed and she went sprawling on the gym floor. "Goddamn sonofabitch," she said, or something similar, as she picked herself up below the stage ledge, as we peered over the edge shocked and gleeful and undoubtedly unhelpful. We were thinking only: the Seminary teacher's wife!

We were prone to giggling fits, laughing until we cried and our sides cramped. The more embarrassed I got, the more I giggled. I am trying now not to remember the episode during a saxophone trio performance at an assembly.

Before the band meet in Salt Lake City, we spent many hours after school, outside, south of the gymnasium, marching and playing, with Julie shouting like a drill sergeant. Julie had found a pile of musty old band uniforms and hats in the big cabinet on the stage, and we had them cleaned and altered to wear in Salt Lake City. Due to her efforts, we stayed with host families in Salt Lake City, and appeared on television, marching down State Street. No giggling. We did well, and were proud. "The smallest band! The band that traveled farthest!"

Mormons are a dancing people. In high school, dancing was our main form of entertainment in Escalante, along with basketball. We started dancing in elementary school, on Friday afternoons in the activity room, Mrs. Griffin playing the piano while watching us over her shoulder. In high school, we danced after the basketball games with boys freshly showered, their wet hair slicked back. We had dances for every occasion, and the entire town came. The Harvest Ball, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the Kris Kringle, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, the Frosh Hop, Sophomore Skid, Junior Prom, Senior Ball, Graduation. The dance band played from 9 p.m. to midnight, with a short break. Dawn Griffin or Betty Alvey played piano. Hal Shurtz, our principal, played guitar. Edson Alvey, our science teacher, played banjo. Lynn Gates, who owned the gas station and garage, played saxophone. Hal's brother, Dean Shurtz, and others sometimes joined them and played or sang.

The church had an annual Gold and Green Ball, for which we learned special dances, practicing in the gym; the boys wrote "R" and "L" on the toes of their shoes with chalk. For a while we had a regular Teen Club dance in the social hall of the South Ward Church, jitterbugging to current records played on a juke box, the Elvis, doo-wop, and sha-na-na songs of the period. Our English teacher, Berlin Osborn, was the advisor.

Paul Michael Cardon was a good jitterbugger. Kent Cottam and I usually shuffled around with the two-step; he was a good friend with a great sense of humor, and I liked dancing with him. Warren Woolsey, the boy next door, my playmate growing up, was Kathleen Marsh's boyfriend, but usually danced an obligatory dance with me. I dated Milton Osborn, Jo's brother, and danced with him until he graduated. At the after-basketball game dances we got acquainted with boys from other area schools. We saw the Bryce Valley boys most, because we were closest to Tropic, Henrieville and Cannonville. I danced with Garth LeFevre, Doyle Jolley, and Henry Jolley. I dated Henry when I was a sophomore, and Garth when I was a senior (sadly, he died young, injured in a rodeo, bull-riding). Sometimes Henry would come get me and take me to a basketball game and dance in Tropic (I know the Bryce Valley High school song), and he took me to his high school graduation. I pinned up my hair, and danced in the Bryce Valley gym in a brown checked dress with full skirt and flared sleeves that Mom made. I had cross-stitched the border of the skirt and the sleeves. Dances in Tropic made for late nights.

So I heard music, even though I was not playing or singing it. Then a big hiatus. When I joined Bazzania Girls Band 45 years later, I was reminded of lots of old tunes from the high school dances: "Beer Barrel Polka," "Walkin' the Floor," "Down Yonder," "Alabama Jubilee," and others. I could sing the words, although I had not heard the songs for decades. I recognized instrumentals, too, such as "Chicken Reel Stomp." The music touched my emotions deeply, and sometimes I cried and didn't really know why. Then I moved to figuring out how to play it on the banjo.

Ronn had told me he could not hear music in his head, and could not sing a song spontaneously. But about a month ago, he woke up and said, "I was hearing Ragtime Annie!" The exposure to music and the fiddle practice has tuned up his brain, and his practice has been accompanied by his neurons making new connections. He has now started picking out tunes by ear.

Neurologist Frank Wilson is an expert in the biology of music-making. In Tone Deaf and All Thumbs: An Invitation to Music-Making for Late Beginners and Non-Prodigies, he writes that early on he was identified as a non-prodigy, so he did not begin piano lessons until he was forty.

He had watched casually for years while his daughter played the piano. Then, on one occasion, it hit him: "I became aware that there was something remarkably physical about what she was doing." He asked himself how she could possibly make her fingers go that fast. He began his study of the neurobiology of music-making, and part of it was learning to play the piano.

Humans, Wilson writes, have a guarantee of musicianship. Rhythm is as natural as the heartbeat or breathing. Practice of music-making, just as practice of shoe-lace tying, trains the brain and the muscles. The cerebellum listens, and at some point says, "Aha, I got it." Automatic pilot ensues, and that was what he was seeing with his daughter. Musicians, says Wilson, are small-muscle athletes. Just as we benefit from jogging or aerobics, we benefit from exercise of music-making equipment. He knew that if he practiced, he could not fail.

"No matter what they are attempting to do, however seriously or vigorously," he writes, "people working at physical (or motor) skills are athletes-in-training--yes, even guitarists, flute players and pianists!--and all will experience growing sense of personal fulfillment as they work to improve their proficiency." Forget about talent and enjoy the activity, Wilson advises. Just as athletes have different abilities, so do musicians. Young athletes will obviously do better, but older people can exercise, too, and benefit from it.

As We, the Gypsies, Travel the World

2008-08-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

In 1977, a Gypsy told my fortune. She took my pale hand into her dark hand. She looked at my palm and into my eyes. Her merriment was not concealed. I had paid her already. A large authoritative woman with heavy skirts, she smelled strongly of horses and stables. She looked a bit like Isabel of Sacro Monte, in Andalusia, Spain.

I wrote my fortune in a little journal bound in green cloth. "You will live a long life," she said, and Eduardo Domizi translated. "You will keep all your hair. You will travel the world, as we, the gypsies, travel the world." She looked at my husband, who was busy at something else. "Your husband," she said, "will have a bad stomach."

She was amused that I did not readily understand, silly norteamericana, and said something to Eduardo to that effect. He did not translate. We were in Argentina, on our way to Iguazu Falls in a Citroen driven by Eduardo, and already I had a bad stomach. Eduardo was a crazy man behind the wheel.

We were collecting aquatic insects along the way, and had stopped at a gas station somewhere in the northern pampa, Corrientes province, and a big old truck with a tall covered wooden rack had pulled up and stopped, the rack swaying. We watched as a man emerged. Another man. The fortune-teller. Many ragged dark dirty children of all ages and sizes. They fanned out like ants.

"Gitanos," Eduardo said.

Gypsies. I thought Gypsies were in Europe. But then don't they travel the world? Didn't American parents tell their children if they misbehaved, they would sell them to the Gypsies?

For a bit more money, the Gypsy would provide an escapulario, a scapulary. I produced the coins. She reached into the folds of her skirt and produced a small flat stone. "Wrap it in a bit of cloth, with a pinch of mate [Paraguayan tea], and a bit of pan [bread]. It will bring you luck."

I followed her instructions for a while. But the mate and the bread made crumbs in my pocket, and the scapulary disappeared somehow back into the environment, as special rocks tend to do. I am still alive, many years later. I still have my hair, lank, blonde tresses making the transition to gray. I have no idea about my former husband's stomach.

I have not traveled the world, much as in theory I would like to have traveled the world. As the years go by and I still do not travel, and the chances that I will travel the world continue to shrink, I lean on Thoreau: "It is not necessary to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." I can count four right here in my office, or waiting at the food dish.

Sarah Bird's The Flamenco Academy took me back to the gypsy. Bird's heroine is an unlikely flamenco dancer, a young blonde woman of Czech descent and an unpronounceable name, who falls in love with the flaming passion of the dance, the music, the compas or rhythm, and with a dark Gypsy man. Bird's story takes me from a present-day Flamenco Festival Internacional in Albuquerque, a place I know, to Sacro Monte and the caves of southern Spain, where sedentary Gypsies have lived for five centuries.

Anthropologist Bertha Quintana returned again and again to Sacro Monte to study the Gypsies for her monograph, Que Gitano!, in which she writes of the Gypsies' poverty and freedom, their clannishness, and their guitar music, song lyrics, and dances--soleares, siguiriyas, martinetes, gitanas--which are of a piece. Quintana says, "the babies come out dancing."

Gypsies seem to have immigrated to Europe from India, in successive waves that began in the fourteenth century. They claimed to be pilgrims from Egypt, thus the name "gypsy." As their populations grew, so did intolerance. As they dispersed, plying their traditional trades of blacksmithing, horsetrading, fortune-telling, the dance, and tricking the gadjo, or non-Gypsy, superstitions about them grew, and restrictive laws were enacted against them. In Romania, Gypsies were sold as slaves until the middle of the nineteenth century, and half a million gypsies died in the Holocaust. Despite persecution, Gypsies persevered, without a home, without a written history. They have inspired many composers, poets, and novelists.

Sarah Bird's heroine pounds out the dance rhythms with her feet, demanding work indeed, and takes me deep into the Gypsy cante jondo, or Deep Song, "the song of the tragic sense of life." Deep Song is song of sorrow, but not of resignation. It's about the eternal paradox of joy and sadness. It's about unconquerable odds, and the unconquerable soul, the heartbeat of life, passion, freedom, life, death, survival, endurance, loss, the road that has no end.

"Give me the truth," say the Gypsy songs. "Give me the truth."

Would-be This, Would-be That

2008-08-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

After basic training, Kent was assigned to Luke Air Force Base, west of Phoenix, and we left Biloxi just days before August 17, 1969, when Hurricane Camille made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Camille was the second Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the United States in the twentieth century, and up to then was the only Atlantic hurricane with winds recorded at 190 miles per hour. The hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast, including the areas we had known just that summer, and killed 259 people.

We watched the reporting from Tempe, where we were staying with Joanie and Joe while we looked for an apartment. Friends, Johnny and Mary Kay, whom we had met in Biloxi, stopped to see us on the way to their assignment at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas. They gave us a first-hand account of seeking shelter and waiting out the storm (take food and beer to the designated shelters). Water from the hurricane had filled up their tiny rental house in Biloxi, and they lost everything, including their wedding presents. They wore clothing that the Red Cross had given them.

They were originally from the East, and later they told us that they hated Las Vegas. It's a surreal place, and then desert can be disconcerting for non-natives, and the desert around Las Vegas is particularly bleak. It can't compare with the colorful Colorado plateau desert, or the Sonoran desert with its unusual saguaros and ocotillos.

It was sweltering in Phoenix in August and September. Apartment-hunting and job-hunting were exhausting. I felt like a cooked and deflated balloon. I went back to Joanie's every day to lie down on the couch. She said, "When things get hard, you always go to sleep." It has always been and continues to be true, but that was the first time it had been called to my attention.

We found an apartment on the Black Canyon Highway where it intersected with Glendale Avenue. It was a noisy place to live, but Kent could drive directly west to Luke Air Force Base. At some point we borrowed Dad's Chevy pickup, "the red-headed woodpecker," and retrieved our belongings from storage in Salt Lake City.

I found a job for the City of Glendale, which was conveniently on the way to Luke AFB, and Kent dropped me off at work in the morning and picked me up in the afternoon. I worked in the garbage department, called General Services, which was also the water department. In the short time I was there I also worked as a receptionist in the foyer of the city building. The city clerk's office was in front of me, and the switchboard operator worked in a little cubicle behind me. I minded the switchboard when she took her lunch and breaks. I also worked in the Parks and Recreation Department, when the secretary was on vacation.

General Services was noisy. Keypunch operators sat at wide metal machines feeding in and punching out computer cards (like the perforated checks that came from the Federal Government years ago), and we had a room-sized noisy metal computing machine that read the punched cards and printed out the bills. People carried around shallow boxes filled with cards. Many of the city employees were Hispanic with musical names. In General Services I took calls from the public, and radioed the garbage men about roadkill. "Pick up a dead snake (dog, cat, other) at the corner of such and such," I might say. That December, 1969, the city employees had their Christmas party and awards dinner at the Thunderbird School of International Management. I had gone from Salt Lake City to Biloxi to Phoenix that year, and it was the year Tranquilino "Quilo" Garcia of General Services retired.

Once, when I was working as a receptionist, an agitated man strode in. He said the city had taken his horses away, saying he had abused them, and he couldn't make a living, so he was going to destroy some city property so he could live off the taxpayers. He was looking around for what he might destroy. Swinging his arm, he swept all the reference books and papers off my desk. The city police were close by, and quickly came and took him away.

Soon I began taking classes at Glendale Community College. I started with a night course in sociology. On the first meeting, the teacher gave us a pre-test, which she said was the final exam. I scored in the 70s, and decided that sociology was pretty much common sense, and I seemed to have that already (what can I say?; I was young). So, what else could I be?

We observe children and often can see their temperaments and interests, and intuit their destinies from the beginning. From the inside, we can't see ourselves. I kept thinking, "What will I be? What will I be?" and I looked at the catalog and found it a delicious smorgasbord. I had only the vaguest of direction. Dad had said, "You can do anything you set your mind to," but he encouraged me to learn typing and bookkeeping, because those were the skills that had helped him during the Great Depression. My high school science teacher was also cryptic: "If you're good with your head, you're good with your hands."

Birth control pills had recently changed women's lives. I was on the cusp of the wider women's liberation movement, in which many previously closed doors were opening, and in which women were able to imagine themselves in nontraditional careers, and I was pretty much unaware of it. My imagination was not bold; it lacked focus.

I just loved school, Everything about it. Classrooms, blackboards, information, pencils, pens, paper, books, the library. Soon I was a full-time student at the community college, working in the office of the Dean of Instruction, William Berry, assisting his secretary, Rita McVey. The Executive Dean, Matt Hanhila, was in an adjoining office, and I sometimes assisted his secretary, Martha Anderson. I liked them all. I typed and put together exams, worked on faculty records, pored over printouts, transcribed letters, anything I was asked to do. Mrs. Anderson, white-haired, pretty, and petite, was very proper. She gave me a P.E.O. cookbook, and when I graduated she gave me a crystal vase with a dragonfly etched on it.

Rita was divorced, full of fun, and always up to a little mischief. When I took the cover off the typewriter, I often found a Coffee Nip candy that she had left there for me. After I had graduated and left for Arizona State University, she called and asked me to come back and work for the summer while she and Mrs. Anderson took time off.

Kent started teaching psychology courses at Glendale in the evenings, and made friends with the other psychology professors. I took psychology from Duane Reeder. Rita handed me his exam to type. I said, "I'm in the class." She said, "I don't have anyone else to type it." So I did. I have to say that taking the class was a formality; I had read all of Kent's textbooks in Utah, and had accompanied him to rat labs. I especially liked the neurobiology text.

Glendale Community had opened in 1965 and I see now that they had put together a good facility, good programs, and a fine staff. I took advanced sociology, from my first sociology teacher. I took basic design and drew a self-portrait, and put together a little art kit, and learned how to use acrylic paints. We worked with all kinds of materials, on two-dimensional and three-dimensional projects, and had regular critique sessions, in which we could see how each student had interpreted an assignment. We went to a Robert Rauschenberg exhibit in Phoenix. We could check out framed prints of artwork by various artists for the semester.

I took botany from Mr. Calvin, and grew plants in the greenhouses on various nutrient solutions. I took zoology, studied the tree of life, looked at jellyfish and planarians, fish and frogs. I took American literature and read lots of shorter pieces as well as Moby-Dick and Walden and The Scarlet Letter, and James Fenimore Cooper. I found Mark Twain's essay about Cooper's carelessness with facts, such as a boat being wider than a river. My professor told us which chapters we could skip in Moby-Dick; they were the asides about whale biology. Are you kidding? Those were some of my favorite passages.

I took history of civilization from Professor Higgins, who held me rapt with his storytelling. I didn't need the credit, but I took the second semester of his class to learn how the story turned out. I went to the bookstore to see what textbooks were assigned to the other classes, and I bought the sale books and the paperback novels that the English teachers assigned. I found Eudora Welty in that way. I cried when I read "The Worn Path." Old Phoenix Jackson reminded me of my grandmother and some of the old ladies in Escalante. I read everything I could find that Eudora Welty had written, and was never disappointed. Her idioms or colloquialisms sometimes had parallels in Escalante speech. One of her characters was "busier than a cranberry merchant"; that was one of my mother's metaphors. I never knew what it meant; I still don't. Except that she was busy.

I took creative writing from writer Robert Wilcox, and one of the other students in the class, Barbara Kesselring, another married woman, became my friend. When Professor Wilcox learned that I was interested in geology, he gave me a chunk of red jasper, about the size of a blackboard eraser, that I carried with me for years.

I discovered James Thurber's piece, "University Days," in The Would-be Writer, the book we used for the writing class, and I read more of James Thurber. In later years, I often shared "University Days" with my biology class when they were learning to use the microscope. Thurber could not see cells through the microscope. Once, when he thought he finally had cells in focus, he excitedly called to his professor. The professor looked. "It's your eye!" he said. "You've adjusted the microscope to reflect your eye!"

Dad and Mom came from Escalante for my graduation. They brought Dad's youngest brother, Uncle Gard (Glen Gardiner Barney), and his wife, Aunt Gertie, from Salt Lake City, with them. Mom and Aunt Gertie were attractive, lively women, Mom dark and Aunt Gertie with glowing skin and blond hair. Her maiden name was VanLeeuwen. Uncle Gard and Dad loved to tell old stories and laugh. Uncle Gard had an infinite supply of jokes, and something for every occasion. "Did you hear about the teacher who was so cross-eyed, the tears ran down her back? She went to the doctor. He said, 'You have bacteria.'"

To signify that I was the recipient of the award for sophomore scholastic achievement, the college gave me a yellow rope with tassels that I draped around my neck over my white academic gown. It was a lovely day, and I see it now from a distance, as though I were observing myself.

I had already started classes at Arizona State University, but I liked the community college so much, that I thought I might be a community college teacher. But of what? How could I possibly choose?

What is the Value of Home? What is the Value of Beauty?

2008-08-21T09:56:00.001-07:00

After I married Ronn in February of 1990, he sold his house in Brigham City, I sold my house on Fourth East in Logan, and we bought a fairly new house on Logan's east bench. It was a blue frame, Federal-style house, built by a physicist who had gotten another job. I had liked Willy Harmston's old two-story four-square house on about Third West. It was surrounded by trees and had a deep back lot, but it was fast being encroached upon by commercial buildings, and that was a deterrent for Ronn.

After the several feet of snow melted in the spring, we realized that we had very few plantings in the yard and no shade at all. The sun shone mercilessly into the windows. Our first act was to define the property. We had it surveyed and built a beautiful wooden fence. When we turned the sprinkler system on, water sprayed on the outside of the fence as well as inside. The former owner had been overly optimistic about the parameters of the yard. So we watered by hand, and began planting. We worked in the yard all summer, turning over and mounding up soil, making flowerbeds, rearranging sod. We usually went to Salt Lake City on the weekends, and brought lots of plant starts from Ronn's mother's house. We planted Shasta daisies, succulents, catnip, lots of flowers.

We bought large trees for the back yard, because I didn't want to have to wait for them to grow. They died by the end of the summer, I suspect because our neighborhood sat on coarse gravels deposited by old Lake Bonneville. We planted aspens in the front yard where the soil was better, and they did well.

Sometime that summer Ronn came home and asked how would I like to go to Huntsville, Alabama? Oh, no. My colleagues gave me clippings about Alabama from USA Today. Alabama was first in bad things, last in good things, that kind of news. My boss said he'd hold my job for me for a year. However, Huntsville was a pretty town, with a high education level, high income level, diverse population, interesting history. Once it had been the watercress capital of the South, now it was Rocket City. We flew out in July and signed a contract to buy a condo. Homer and Elizabeth Walker had a goodbye party for us, the company had an appraisal done of our Logan house and bought the house, and we moved to Huntsville in October 1990. We spent the week before we left fixing the sprinkler system, a condition of the sale.

A change is invigorating, but I realized that although I was very tired when we left Logan, I had given up a demanding job that I loved. As a science writer at Utah State University, my days had been full, and my to-do lists long. I was central to many activities, and felt I had special skills that were useful. After so many previous stopgap jobs, so many moves related to previous husbands' work, my work at USU wasn't just a job, it was a career, and here I was, in my forties, starting all over again. I missed the people in the Bridgerland Audubon Society, and the chamber and folk music societies, and plays--Logan has the best theatre productions I've ever seen--and lunches and racquetball matches with my friends, and Cache Valley in general, the Wellsville Mountains swooping up to the sky, the clear river running out of Logan Canyon, the color of the tulips and lilacs in spring. The clear, clean springs and summers, even the cold, cold winters, and all those woollens.

Ronn, the eternal optimist, saw the move as an opportunity for me to write, to branch out into poems and short stories, as I had thought I wanted to do. So we settled into our new home in southeast Huntsville, I set up an office, and I began to write. Or to sit at the computer and get sleepy. Ronn was busy with his new job, and sometimes he worked late. The telephone didn't ring, I wasn't asked to do anything: edit a manuscript, arrange a press conference or a talk, write an article, give an opinion. What had happened to me? Where was I? I scolded myself for needing outside forces to direct my life. Did I have no gumption, no fortitude, no ability to self-start? Truth is, I function best with a deadline. Unless there's agreement that I am the teacher or leader, I am content to be a follower, an assignment-taker, driven by guilt and anxiety. Life was too tranquil. Too without boundaries.

For a few months I wrote this and that, and I read ads in Poets and Writers, and I sent out manuscripts. I found a writing group, and some friends, but they didn't really critique my work. I went to Newcomers' Club, and felt lacking in purpose, having too much fun. A few of my creative pieces found homes, but most of them were returned to me in my self-addressed stamped envelope. Nothing got traction. I thought of hearing Ron Carlson speak about when he quit his teaching job to write. His wife was working. He fixed everything around the house, he cleaned the refrigerator, he walked the dog, he read the paper, he mowed the grass.

One day, about five months into my freedom, I drove to the Huntsville Times and showed the editor my clips. He put me to work. My first story was published in March 1991. We were then in the midst of the first gulf war, and a Huntsville man had designed a protective suit that could be used for, among other things, cleaning up chemical spills. I interviewed him and wrote about the suit.

I wrote for the Times for two and a half years, as a stringer. They employed a regular reporter who covered the space science beat, so they sent me around to nearby universities and other places to report on other kinds of science. I also wrote copy for special editions, including a Redstone Arsenal anniversary, which helped acquaint me with my new home and the library resources on Redstone. The Times editor sometimes suggested or assigned stories, but much of the time left me to my own initiative to suggest something to him. I made suggestions for the art to accompany the story. Sometimes a photographer accompanied me, or took photos later. My story usually appeared as a feature on the front of the Monday science page, surrounded by short stories from the wire services. I went to the University of Alabama, Alabama A&M, and Athens State College to find professors working on interesting projects. I followed an Auburn University scientist to Blowing Wind Cave to learn and write about bats. I interviewed Jack Lee at NASA.

In April of 1991, I went to an elementary school in Lacey Springs, across the Tennessee River south of Huntsville, to learn about students who were building a rainforest and conducting guided tours. The school had an empty storeroom and the students went wild making a rainforest. They used colored plastic for a waterfall, they made papier-mache treetrunks, they cut out paper leaves and glued plastic ants to them, they brought in stuffed parrots and monkeys and snakes to hang in the trees. They studied about the rainforest, and they donned badges, khaki shorts, and pith helmets, and gave informational tours to the other teachers and students, and their parents. They knew a lot about the values of the rainforest.

The students were inspired in part by the story of The Great Kapok Tree, by Lynne Cherry. A woodcutter in the Amazon starts chopping on a kapok tree, on the orders of his boss. It's a big job, and it's not clear from the beginning that he has the heart for it. He grows tired and falls asleep. While he is sleeping, the animals whisper in his ear, about how the tree is important to them.

They appeal, citing practical values other than building materials or fuel:

"My hive is in this tree," says the bee. "I pollinate the trees and flowers."

The tree porcupine says, "Trees produce oxygen. Oxygen is essential to life."

They appeal, because the tree is home:

"Where will I find my dinner?" asks the jaguar.

"We will be homeless," says the frog.

"My family has lived here forever," says the snake.

And they appeal, citing aesthetic values, and regard for the future:

"What is beauty worth?" asks the sloth.

"What happens tomorrow depends on what you do today," says the anteater.

It's a story. In the story, the woodcutter hears what the animals are saying, and spares the great kapok tree. He drops the axe and walks out of the forest. A realist or a pessimist might wonder if he gets fired, and if the boss hires someone else. Maybe the woodcutter goes to work for the National Resources Defense Council or another environmental organization.

Unfortunately, stories about animals are usually considered children's stories. I can only hope that these children kept the story with them as they grew up.

My friendship with Marilee Plaks began when I went to the Huntsville Botanical Garden to make a Christmas wreath. Marilee's husband, Arved, who was born in Estonia, was an engineer for Boeing. A few years later, we flew south and east to Callaway Gardens, in Georgia, with Arved and Marilee, to celebrate Arved's birthday. Marilee is a pilot, and we flew in her little airplane, low over the rolling hills of Alabama. Callaway Gardens was beautiful that day, but in transit much of what we saw was a scarred red clay landscape, gullied and eroded. Many areas had been clear-cut. Some areas had been replanted with monoculture pine plantations, which do not support the life that a diverse forest supports, but grow quickly and can be harvested like a crop to satisfy the paper industry.

Friendship with an Old Dog

2008-08-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

In March of 1995, a stray dog came to my friend Jean Greenwood. The dog had shown up on the porch of a woman who worked for Jean in computer services at the University of Alabama. The woman lived north of Huntsville in a rural area. The dog was about eight months old, weighed 24 pounds, had hookworms, and was hungry. Jean took her to the vet for treatment and spaying.

Jean is compassionate and caring, and many animals cross her path. She is active in Therapy Dogs of Huntsville. She and her husband, Terry, have rescued retired greyhounds and they always have a houseful of cats and dogs.

They called us and told us about the stray dog. Ronn said, "What does she look like?" Jean said, "A little fox." Ronn, who had missed his daughter's sheltie, Gus, when we moved East, said, "We'll take her."

The Greenwoods brought her up to Sewanee. They said, "If you don't like her, we'll come back and get her next weekend."

Jean had named her Fresno. I called her Lady Fresno. She became Lady. Basically a cat person, I was not so sure about this dog. Cats stimulate cuddling behavior, dogs stimulate play behavior. I am more into cuddling than playing.

For about three weeks, Lady made me very nervous, because no matter what I did, she was always watching me. She was watching for cues, I realize, and I was not a good dog trainer, although Lady has always considered me to be the big dog. We had two cats at the time, Buster and Oso, and their litterbox was in our unfinished upstairs. Lady saw what the cats did, and she went upstairs, too. Lady and I both learned a few things, and we became the best of friends, and have done most everything together.

Early on Lady had a canine IQ test and some lessons from dog trainer Meg Keisling. Her IQ was average, but I think she was holding back. Ronn, wearing his tuxedo, once presented her on the runway at the annual Dog Ball, a benefit for the humane society in Huntsville. She didn't get a lot of attention, but we thought she was the prettiest dog there.

She has traveled to Virginia to see my sister, and she went with me every time I went to Huntsville to see Ronn. Our friends, the Gundersens, have kept her many times when we've had to go away, and she loves going to their house. Lady was my constant companion when I had the bookstore and for many years, until Ronn retired, she was my exercise program. Our current exercise program: She is about three feet from me right now, snoring. Nowadays she turns her walks into leisurely smell-fests, although she loves my women friends and always is game to walk with them. She is not so fond of other dogs, or of children. When I blow dry my hair and put on my shoes, she takes the cue, and is ready for whatever is coming. A walk always puts a smile on her face--crooked now that she is missing one canine tooth--and sometimes in the evening her eyes get emotional with love.

We think Lady has some shepherd and some chow ancestry. The lining of her mouth is mostly black, like a Chow, and she has black lips. Today she is about fourteen years old, and looks like this Old Coyote. Her muzzle is white, her eyes are cloudy with cataracts, and she has lost several teeth. Her eyes tear and stain her cheeks; the vet says the tear ducts don't drain like they used to. Sometimes she seems to be hard of hearing, because she no longer announces and greets every visitor, but sometimes I also think she's pretending, when she doesn't seem to hear me call her--sometimes she is a little headstrong.

In the past Lady has had two close calls with a car, but she doesn't venture far from the house now. Flying insects make her nervous, and she prefers to be inside near me. She is stiff with arthritis, but she still follows me up the stairs. Sometimes she slips and falls when she goes back down, which is more difficult than going up, but that hasn't deterred her yet. She is too stiff to get under the bed and get back out again, so gets in my closet when she hears a thunderstorm.

These days, Lady prefers to wait around and lick the cat dishes before she checks her own dish. Once in a while she will bark at a cat so it will back up and she can get to its cat food. She used to jump into the back of the car, but now we lift her in, and sometimes if I don't grip her quite right she squeals because her tummy is tender. I look around nervously to see if anyone thinks I am being cruel to her. For many years, I brushed the tangles out of her fur, but I've discovered that clipping makes it much easier. When I give her a puppy cut in the spring, she seems to like it, and I say, "Lady, you look ten years younger."

She still is beautiful, no matter what, and people still stop on the street and say "Oooh, what a cute dog. She looks like a little fox."

'Unless You Get Their Attention...'

2008-08-19T23:03:00.001-07:00

Last year, when I was driving back from a banjo class at the John C. Campbell Folk School, I composed a little song, melody and lyrics. I had no idea what key I was in or what the notes were, but I fiddled with it on the piano and wrote it down, and Mary Priestley helped add the proper chords. It followed pretty much a standard blues chord progression, with a little bridge which has a high note. So this is where songs come from, I thought. They emerge in your brain, and you need to pay attention and write them down in the time of it or they get lost, back into the ethers. It's like catching and caging a dream. This is what written language has allowed us to do.

"Roadkill Blues" has become a standard for Bazzania Girls Band, and people have asked for copies. I asked Jim Wood to add the piano arrangement, and we've written it using the software program Sibelius. I'll publish it like old-fashioned sheet music.

The song is fun, but roadkill isn't. Roadkill is actually carkill, and carkill is only about a hundred years old. (The phenomenon of trash buildup is about the same age; see the book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.)

I wrote Professor Roger M. Knutson in Michigan and asked him for a quote for the back of the sheet music. Knutson is the author of Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways. It's an excellent book, packed with information about the phenomenon of roadkill, the animals affected, and statistics. Did you know, for example, that swallows are the birds most frequently killed on highways?

Dr. Knutson wrote me: "The book was written as an educational volume, and forty years as a teacher had taught me that humor is a good way of getting people's attention. Unless you get their attention they are unlikely to learn much." His book got my attention when I saw it.

Here's the quote he provided for the sheet music:

"America's highways are probably the most forlorn animal habitat in the world. The inhabitants don't move, don't eat and are barely two-dimensional. Learning about them can only increase our desire to see fewer of them. Drive with care."

Years ago, an organization called the Coalition Against Paving took the position that we had enough roads and didn't need any more. It seemed a reasonable position. Unfortunately, raccoons and opossums don't vote, and the CAP movement didn't catch on. Americans don't like to put a cap on anything.

Cut, Sew Back Together; Not that Easy

2008-08-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

I made this twin-size quilt in February, in reds and purples with a red border, and it's one of the prettiest quilts I've made. Andrea Hill of Scottsboro, Alabama, machine-quilted it with red thread in a swirl pattern that united the tile-like blocks. Andrea is a retired teacher, and has a Gammill long-arm sewing machine for stitching. She can do custom stitching, or use a pantograph method to stitch repeating patterns. She does beautiful work. I asked her how many quilts she has quilted. Her answer floored me: 1700.

I sewed on the binding by hand. It me takes two or three evenings of watching TV to finish a binding.

I do the patchwork, and working on the quilt design is stimulating. The colored fabrics are like a big bunch of colored pencils, a palette of possibility, and they work together in surprising ways. I am continuing to learn about color combinations.

I have hand-quilted only one quilt, a baby quilt, and it took me three years. It was too small for the baby by then, so I gave it to a different baby. Hand-quilting is beautiful, but if I had to hand-quilt all my quilts, it would be like falling into a black hole from which I would never emerge. I've found I can cut out and sew a quilt top together in a week, however, if it's not huge, if I stay with it and if it's not a difficult design that I'm working out as I go. I machine-quilt baby quilts, lap quilts, and table runners myself, but if they are larger, I can't get them under my sewing machine needle.

Grandma Rachel Shurtz lived next door when I was growing up, and she always had a quilt in progress. If she wasn't hand-quilting, she was cutting blocks or sewing blocks on the sewing machine. I grew up playing under the quilts that were stretched out on quilting frames in the living room. She often sent me to the store for hand-quilting thread, 50 white Mercerized (60 is the gauge for general sewing-machine sewing). Grandma Shurtz made all kinds of quilts. I remember fans and stars and nine-patches and Dresden plates, and camp quilts that were made from old woollens and denims and tied rather than quilted. I recognized some of our old clothes in the fabrics. She sold her quilts for five dollars each. I wish I knew how many quilts she made during her lifetime. Aunt Bernice once said that she had twenty-two of them. I have three that were my mother's, just everyday quilts. The backing on one of them is made of flour sacks. Grandma made a special quilt for each of her grandchildren when they got married. She made two quilts for Joanie, a star and a double wedding ring. I was her youngest grandchild, and she died in 1957 when I was twelve. I felt I was her most special grandchild because I lived next door and knew her house as well as my own.

My grandmother's tools were flimsy patterns cut from paper sacks or pieces of cardboard, a pair of dull scissors, and a sad iron that she heated in the Heaterola. She had thimbles, but she tended to wear holes through the little indentations, and she sent me to the store for adhesive tape to put on her fingers. She worked on the kitchen table, and had to clean off her quilting projects when she rolled out homemade noodles or made bread. I have sharp rotary cutters, and mats with all kinds of grids, templates of every ilk, and two Rowenta steam irons. I have a table that I use only for cutting and laying out blocks. I have a brass thimble that is adjustable to fit my finger and has a little protective lip.

With these tools, I can make quilts that look perfect, but I don't like quilts to look too perfect and flat, like they were made by a machinist. The blocks need to wiggle a little, and an odd piece or odd fabric adds interest. I like the scrappy look, probably because my grandmother's quilts were scrap quilts, and it's more interesting working with many different fabrics. I like most of the quilts in Surprisingly Simple Quilts. I share the Australians' taste, which is a little old-fashioned. I usually work out my own design, but I've made another nice quilt from a pattern in this book. Contrary to the title, it's not always that simple. I've been amazed at how many wrong ways it's possible to sew two pieces of fabric together. I try not to make the same mistake twice, and the big design board that Ronn made for me from foam core makes it easier to plan ahead.

I saw an intriguing quilt in a book by designer Kaffe Fassett. The blocks are made of cotton shirting, and I've been collecting striped shirts from thrift stores, and cutting them into flat pieces, in preparation for making blocks. My grandmother would have liked this quilt.

Moving Cargo: Making Room for Potscrubber Lullabies

2008-08-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

When I closed out my bookstore a few years ago, it was like shutting down an orphanage. The children, my used books, still presented a problem. Although my husband is a shelf-building fool, we could absorb only so many books at our house. During the book dispersal, I discovered something interesting and at the same time disturbing about myself: my decision-making capability is a depletable resource. When I began to dither in confusion I realized I had to stop, for days or more often weeks, and let the well of decision-making capability fill up again. Some books were easier to part with than others.

I required time to reflect on the provenance of some books. Tobias Wolff had signed my copy of The Barracks Thief in 1986. Tony Hillerman's signed pocket paperbacks could go easily, but Wolff's was a trade paperback, which somehow complicated the decision, even though the pages were yellow and brittle. Should I keep the book club copy of Davita's Harp that Chaim Potok had signed? Was the memory of meeting him at Utah State University enough?

Some books I had to read or at least skim to the end, or look at the pictures. Some I could part with, but for some reason had to make a photocopy of a drawing, or the cover (go figure).

I played little split personality games with myself, employing my left brain to talk to the right: You may keep only one of these two, m'dear; which will it be? You may only keep three linear feet, or whatever will fit on a shelf, from these six boxes. Not one more. No, no. No books on top of the row of books; and no shelving double-deep. You may not covert the house to hamster trails. No, no, no. None in the knee walls where they will only tempt the carpenter ants. You do not need most fiction. Reference books are more important. The runs of ISLE and Creative Nonfiction can go to the library, where they will be perfectly safe.

My mantra became: You can go to the library. You don't have to own every book. This sounds like a solution, but it was not a solution really, because I owned some good books that had been discarded by the local library. And if they discarded them, I reasoned, chances are every other library has discarded them as well. Old science classics, by my old and mostly late professors, would surely be needed at some point to document the change in science teaching over the years. They were of historical significance. What if someone (me?) was to need to write an article on Allen Stokes, for instance, and was desperate for his dogeared laboratory manual on animal behavior? The most effective left-brain phrase for my emotional self was: You have come to a halt, Gretchen (my mother sometimes called me that). Frozen solid. These old books are preventing you from moving forward to new books, thus new experiences.

Various Friends of the Library groups took away lots of books. Artists took art books (difficult to shelve, anyway). Science fiction, women's studies, and true crime (not my favorites) sold cheaply, by the pound, on Ebay. Nate Carpenter of PaleoPublications in Idaho took boxes and boxes of old anthropology, geology, science and medical books. When I started asking Nate to return certain books, that was a signal to both of us that I should stop shipping. Signed first edition novels essentially had no takers, although I tried. Pristine-looking, dust jackets in mylar, they went to a couple of library collections and as a gift to a young bibliophile I took a shine to. I also gave him my extra copy of A Gentle Madness. His wife seemed okay with it. The German chemistry reference set was claimed by a small college in California when I advertised on the American Chemical Society website (someone had suggested I make lamp bases from them--horrors!), and I sent my children's books to my old elementary school.

The poetry collection presented a dilemma. Poetry books are odd things, often difficult to shelve because of their flimsiness, odd sizes, deckled edges, special paper. The paperbacks tend to warp. I gave essentially all the poetry books, and poetry commentary, to the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The UA is my alma mater, and I figured they were obliged to me. I wrote a note of apology. I just cannot sort these, I said. I am sending all. You will need to look through and determine which ones are useful to you. They thanked me for being a significant donor to their growing collection, and exhibited some of the books I had sent.

I allowed myself a shelf of poetry. I kept Dad's Robert Service to remember Dad reciting "The Spell of the Yukon." I kept the western poets David Lee, May Swenson, Sharlot Hall and William Stafford. I kept Bill Holm. I kept the nature poets Mary Oliver and Pattiann Rogers, and science poet Ralph Lewin. I kept Carole Oles' poems about the astronomer Maria Mitchell. I have met Lee, Swenson, Stafford, Holm, Oliver, Rogers, and Oles, and I've corresponded with Lewin, who has a zany sense of humor. I kept a few anthologies. I kept Martin Fierro: The Gaucho, that I bought in Argentina. I kept a couple of how-to books on writing poetry.

To date, I have not had poetry withdrawal, or lack-of-poetry panic. I have actually written a bad poem or two. I put my quilting books upstairs by the sewing machine, and I've made a few nice quilts. The book diaspora has given me breathing room and allowed movement forward. I was at the library just today, and every month a package or two comes from Amazon with something particularly intriguing that I must own. If the book I've ordered is disappointing, I quickly make the decision to pass it on.

The annual Sewanee Writers Conference is a good place to find new poets to love, and this year I discovered many good to excellent poets, but I bought only books by Brad Leithauser and Eric McHenry. Leithauser, I've discovered in years past, writes poems that speak to me, and if his book is also illustrated by his brother (see the cover above), Mark, I get a double treat.

I bought McHenry's collection because I loved hearing him read, particularly "The Wheelhouse," the final poem in Potscrubber Lullabies. It begins:

The house corrects its course each time I ease

the swan's-neck faucet four or five degrees...

and later,

...there's nothing left to do/except the dishes. I turn on the cold

and hear the cargo shifting in the hold.

Busy Talking to the Dogs

2008-08-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today I howled, a-woooo, a-wooooooo, and Rocky and Liza dropped the shoe they were chewing on and ran over to me and grinned. I touched noses with them, and looked into their eyes with love.

I am busy talking to our baby dogs.

Jean Craighead George has shown me how. Much of it is sign language, but some sounds are important, too. I met Jean's brother, Frank Craighead in Logan, Utah, in 1985. John Flannery, a writer and photographer who worked in the same office as I did, brought Frank to my apartment on First East. Frank and his identical twin brother, John, were well-known and well-respected wildlife biologists who conducted groundbreaking studies of grizzly bears and other animals.

Jean George's list of books is as long as my arm. She was raised in a family of naturalists and writes with firsthand knowledge about animals and nature. In this book, she appears in photographs with the cartoon dogs, to demonstrate her instructions. She has also written How to Talk to Your Cat. (I can imagine it now. You want to go out? Okay. You want to come in? Okay. You don't like this cat food? Okay. How about this one?)

This is a critical period in which to tell the puppies I am the dominant dog. Especially Rocky, who is growing fast, is exuberant, and is testing me. He clamps his big mouth onto the hem of my nightgown and travels in the opposite direction. I'm practicing dominance behavior so we will have mannerly puppies. They're fairly good and happy puppies so far. They're not barkers, but they wrestle and tussle all the time and seem to be huge mouths with four legs. Ronn is working on house-training. No paper-training for him. He has developed his own unusual and effective method.

To tell Rocky no, I am supposed to hold my hand out over his head. He's supposed to think it is a hawk. Maybe tomorrow he'll catch on.

We whimper into Rocky and Liza's fur when when we tell them goodnight.

Book Love and Teacher Stories

2008-08-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how I started down the slippery slope into book dealing. I have always loved typefaces, and dust jacket art, books and bookstores, and I have always been interested in stories of authors' lives and where books come from. At about the same time that I read Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness, about book collectors, I subscribed to FIRSTS magazine, and began learning about collectible books.

My primary interest had been in the information and stories between the covers of books, but I realized that books also have intrinsic value as artifact and work of art. And I realized that if I had spent my money over the years on first edition hardcover books instead of on cheap paperbacks and book club printings, if I had asked every author I have ever met to autograph my books, if I hadn't thrown away tatty dust jackets, and if I hadn't worn out my books reading and marking them, my personal library would have a much greater monetary value.

Everything about books began to appear on my radar screen. An author's signature indicated the author had once held the book. Dates were meaningful. Association copies were of historical interest. Small presses, small print runs, paper, bindings, illustrations, maps, pastedowns, copyrights, the history of printing, an author's ouevre--the whole spectrum was worth study.

I read in FIRSTS about a week-long seminar on antiquarian books in Colorado Springs, and Ronn encouraged me to go. In Colorado I met many old book dealers who dealt in old books, specializing in areas such as medicine, Americana, exploration, books on books. I got some inkling of how the business worked. I learned about book scouts, catalogs and appraisals, and how to research auction records. Use of the internet to market used books was just making an appearance on the horizon.

The founder of one of the first internet services told us about his program, the concept designed by young computer programmers. Kids. Many of the old book dealers were emphatic that they could never work that way. At that time, specific old books were located by a weekly trade newsletter in which book dealers advertised in very small print. That required another dealer to subscribe to and peruse the letter, to remember his stock, look for the book, and reply with a price to the dealer who had advertised. The original advertiser then contacted the customer with the information, and got back to the dealer who had the book. Accurate descriptions were crucial. Booksellers who did not use the specialized language and identify and describe a book properly were considered amateurs. The internet has changed all that, and has changed the nature of the book search, prices, and the characterization of certain books as rare. (Take a look at www.bookfinder.com.)

Ronn and I talked about a bookstore, as so many bookish people probably do at some time or other. But in this case, we started looking at where a used bookstore might be located in Sewanee. Ronn may have seen me floundering in Sewanee, and he thought this would be something of sustained interest that we could enjoy together--finding books for now, and perhaps working the business together later on when he retired. His mother had had a women's dress shop in Salt Lake City years ago, and Ronn was not afraid of starting a small business. We bought a run-down old rectangular commercial building in Sewanee at the end of 1998, and began to build shelves, paint, remodel, and otherwise fix it up as a bookstore. We began to scout out books, and add books to the shelves.

At about this time, Ronn had been offered a job in Chicago, as chief engineer of an aircraft parts manufacturing company, to become president when the current president retired. We both went to Chicago when he had the initial interview, and although it is an exciting city, I did not see it as a retirement home. I thought I might stay in Sewanee for the time being, while he went to Chicago. He initially accepted the job, complications ensued with the company that were not worked out for a while, and he decided against it. I will always wonder how our lives would have been different if we had not bought that building, and had felt free to leave.

We opened the store in April of 1999, with half-filled shelves, refreshments and great hopes. Lionel the cat was in residence to greet customers, and Lady the dog usually spent the day there with me. Ronn built oak-topped counters, and we brought in some antique shelves and furniture and carpets. It was an attractive store, and became more so as time went along. Books everywhere. Also cards and posters. Contrary to advice I had gotten at the book school, the store became a general bookstore instead of a specialist store. Many people showed up who wanted to sell books to me, and I was not discriminating in acquisition. Books began to pile up three deep in the storeroom. We built a large screened porch on the rear, and Ronn added a washroom in the big book room and a utility sink in the storeroom, and continued to fix up the kitchen, full bath and two rooms at the back of the store, which later we used as a rental apartment after the store was closed.

I had been active in Woman's Club, and invited the local Woman's Club board to have their monthly meeting there, which they did for two years. I envisioned selling good books, sponsoring readings and workshops and a book club in the room in the rear, and having a small publishing imprint, Ione Press (named after my mother) to produce books of local interest. My frog book was published under that imprint. I also worked on a little tour guide of Sewanee, a short history of Sewanee, and I thought that the nature observations that a local couple, the Yeatmans, had provided to the weekly newspaper for years might be distilled and edited into a little almanac of the Sewanee seasons. I thought that the publication and sale of one book would provide the funds for publication of the next book.

I was long on ideas and short on staff and income. John Shaver, who had a bookstore in Huntsville, had advised me against opening a store unless I also provided food. Ronn was working full-time in Huntsville during the week, and had his hands full with maintenance work on the weekends. We planted flowers and trees, built a sidewalk and a trellis, hung posters and light fixtures, and sorted and shelved books. I didn't realize that everything I envisioned would take ten people working full-time, not to mention a much bigger budget than I had. I was blinded by love--of books.

One day early on in the life of the bookstore a woman I knew from Woman's Club as Hallie Bennett approached the counter with her new husband, Bill Hampton. She told me that Bill had put together a manuscript about his former teacher, Father James Harold Flye. Bill planned to have it printed, but she wanted an editor to look it over first, and would I do the honors. I was a bit reluctant to take on something more, but I took the manuscript home to read.

I read and read. There were lots of interview transcripts. I liked the story of Father Flye, and his wife Grace, who spent 35 years at nearby St. Andrew's School. Father Flye was known primarily as the teacher of James Agee, and they corresponded after Agee left St. Andrew's. Father Flye kept the letters Agee sent him, and they were published as The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. Unfortunately, Agee, who died in his 40s, apparently did not keep the other side of the correspondence. This book seemed important to balance the scale a bit.

Father Flye's story had its own drama and conflicts. Father Flye was an exemplary and unusual teacher. His wife, Grace, ten years his senior, was a talented artist and painted pictures of many of the children. In her later years, she had Addison's disease, and became reclusive. She stayed in Sewanee every summer while Father Flye went to New York. In 1925, Father Flye traveled to Europe with James Agee, and he stayed in touch with many other students. The Flyes' dream of starting "Birdwood," their own school, never materialized. Although Father Flye was an erudite teacher, he was not universally loved at St. Andrew's and was fired, or forced to retire, shortly after Grace died. He went to St. Luke's in New York City for a good long while, and one time when he returned to visit St. Andrew's, he sneaked in. He lived to be a hundred years old, and died in a nursing home near Sewanee. Hallie Bennett Hampton had at one time been his nurse; that's how she and Bill had met.

I made notes on the manuscript, and recommendations based on my reading. Bill had certain biases, and I recommended tempering them. I had been reading oral histories. I told Bill that the book was a good oral history, and that it deserved more than photocopying, that he should look for a publisher. We talked back and forth. He said, I want you to do it. Bill was no spring chicken; he wanted the book out, soon.

I talked with Ronn, and in retrospect I think we were still feeling optimistic and magnanimous. We decided to invest in the project. We researched standard book contracts, and prepared one. We would own the copyright to the book, and would produce it in a certain time and make a reasonable effort to market it. In turn, the author had certain obligations to us.

It is one thing to edit and publish a book; marketing is a different animal. However, I did have the connections afforded by the bookstore, and my experience writing press releases and promotional materials. When we went to Bill with the contract, he said, ahem, there was a problem. It was to be one in a series of problems. A woman, Caryl R. Stevens, had worked with Bill on the book, he said, and he was negotiating with her to relinquish her rights, which she eventually did. I did not meet her, and will never know the extent of her contribution. I think she discerned, astutely, that retaining any claim to the book would not be profitable for her.

Bill did have the manuscript on computer files, but I became the copyeditor. Ken Morris designed and laid out the book, and we proofread it, and created an index, and we had the book printed by a company in another state. The book was 255 pages. The process was rushed because of Bill's family's travel arrangements, and on the morning of the book party we were still tracking down the book shipments. Ronn had to drive to Huntsville to take delivery of some books and get them to the store, just before customers began to arrive.

Bill signed copies of the book on the back screened porch. I wrote up and had lots of brochures printed and mailed them to a long list of independent book stores. I wrote to newspapers, magazines, and diocesan newsletters. I sent out press releases and many review copies. Booksellers are inundated with review copies now, so review copies are not guaranteed to pique their interest. The review copies began to show up for sale on used book sites on the internet. I scheduled a reading and signing for Bill at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, but that experience demonstrated that Bill was not well enough to travel and publicize his book, although he did showcase the book at alumni events at St. Andrew's School.

I liked the story, and saw it as another "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" or "Mr. Holland's Opus" that I hoped would find interest out of the region. I was querying and writing filmmakers to try to interest them in the book's possibilities.

Then I learned incidentally that the South Cumberland Cultural Society in nearby Monteagle, where Bill lives, was planning a production called "Cast a Long Shadow," based on Bill's book. They had hired a playwright, Ken "Kennesaw" Williams, a friend of Bill's who had read his manuscript early on and in whose house Bill had once lived, to write the script. I contacted them to let them know that we own the copyright to the book, and that our permission is required for derivative works. Copyright law allows the owner a window of time to profit from the work. Eventually a copyright expires, and the work enters the public domain. Or a copyright may be renewed, or transferred. Under the terms of our contract, we could ask for royalties on derivative works.

There was a lot of back and forth with the playwright and the principals of theatre group, but we were never privy to or part of their plans. On the morning of one of our Cinco de Mayo parties, Ronn went to an SCCS board meeting to present our position. The SCCS delayed their production for a year, but decided, most probably based on the playwright's assurances, that we had no claim, or would not pursue a claim. Their newsletter indicated that the playwright had gotten the ideas independently. Bill, who was retired and had no money investment in either the book or the play, was delighted that his book had stimulated a dramatic production, which would premiere at his alma mater, St. Andrew's-Sewanee School, so he was working with the playwright. I was exasperated and tired.

Finally, without being asked, I wrote a letter to the effect that they had our permission for one-time production of the play, but they would need further permission if the play went further. I asked them to please acknowledge Bill, which they did. The play closely followed the book. Interest in Father Flye as a character seemed local and limited, at least for now.

After Father Flye, I decided I did not want to be a publisher of works of other people I did not know well, or who did not appear to read or respect contracts. I gave Bill a couple of boxes of books, and kept one copy for myself. We closed the bookstore in 2002, after three and a half years. During that time, my life had been mostly devoted to the store, and I wanted to come home and take care of the house and enjoy home-cooked meals, and quiet days, free from small talk. I continued to sell books via an internet service for another three years or so. I liked not being at a counter all day. We disposed of all the books, eventually, and sold the building to an architect in 2007.

I did publish a wonderful poetry collection, Walks on Wheels, by my young nephew Bryan Hall, who has spina bifida and gets around in a wheelchair. It was a pleasurable experience for all of us.

I kept a few collectible books for their beauty, but I am back to loving books primarily for their informational value.

Cinderella, Robin Hood, Midwife, Assassin

2008-08-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

My sister Joanie was 14 years older, and I always looked up to her. She drew beautiful paper dolls and their fashions for me. Before I entered school, she had graduated from high school, and left to work in Salt Lake City. She was a single working girl for several years before she got married and had children. At first she lived in a boarding house on A Street in the Avenues, and then later shared a house on 21st South with other working girls.

During that time I wrote letters to her, and she sent me many gifts, among them paper dolls and two Madame Alexander dolls, which I still have. One is Jo March from Little Women.

Joanie likes to read, and I like to read, and one Christmas when I was ten or eleven, she gave me a copy of Good Morning, Young Lady, by Ardyth Kennelly. It was, and is, one of the most magical books I have ever read. It is both a Cinderella story and a Robin Hood story.

It is set in the early days of Salt Lake City. The heroine is Dorney Leaf, whose grandfather in Wyoming has told her romantic stories about the outlaw Butch Cassidy and set Dorney's imagination astir. Dorney's parents and her grandfather die and she must come to Salt Lake City to live with an unkind sister, and some unattractive nieces. She works in a laundry. Then she goes to work as a housekeeper for a former beauty Queen, who is married to a well-to-do restaurateur. Queen Alma's husband dotes on her, takes her to dine, and brings her boxes of chocolates. The Queen gains weight and cannot get into her beautiful clothes, so she gives her dresses to Dorney.

Dorney finally meets Butch Cassidy, and another man, too--a schoolteacher. Butch gets in trouble and wants her to run away to South America with him, but Dorney's sister foils their plans, and--oh, oh, oh! I cannot devour the pages fast enough. It is a bittersweet story, worrisome but satisfying, about dreams and realities, and realities that are like dreams. I have read the book many times, and it still has the same effect on me.

Butch Cassidy was from Circleville, Utah. We drove through Circleville and past Piute High School on our way to Salt Lake City. We played Piute High in high school basketball. Butch's given name was Robert Leroy Parker, and reporters loved to come to Circleville and interview his elderly sister, Lula, who lived in Circleville, and write stories about Butch (I found a similar situation when I edited The Tombstone Epitaph; reporters loved to interview Cochise's grandson, who was in the nursing home in Tombstone, and write the old stories about Cochise).

After reading Good Morning, Young Lady, I wanted to read every word that Ardyth Kennelly had ever written. I found The Peaceable Kingdom and its sequel, Up Home, and they were every bit as satisfying, and I read them again and again. They are also set in the early days of Salt Lake City, when polygamy was practiced. The heroine is Linnea, who is the second wife of Olaf, a tailor. Olaf's first wife, Sigrid, is thin and beautiful. Linnea, who is a midwife, may be sturdier, but she has heart and grit and many friends. Linnea and her children move often, and each chapter is an adventure. On the day of the temple dedication, Gertrude drops her new hat down the outhouse. After a move, the Linnea's dish cupboard falls on Rudie. Linnea is privy to many domestic secrets--Who is love with whom? Who is the father of that baby?

The Linnea novels are based on stories that Kennelly's grandmother told her. Linnea is Swedish. When she moves, which she does often for various reasons, she loves to clean house and arrange her furniture, then sit down and have a good cup of coffee. She says the Mormon proscription of coffee in the Word of Wisdom does not apply to Swedes.

I did not know for many years how many books Kennelly had written, but when I went to a library, I always looked for her name.

In March of 1968, my husband, Kent, entered the Air Force. His draft number had come up, and so to avoid a sure trip to VietNam and to have time to finish his master's degree in psychology at the University of Utah, he joined the Air Force, which was a four-year commitment. We were living on the Avenues in Salt Lake City, at about 10th east and C Street, in a four-plex. I loved the location and the little apartment, which had a hookup for a washing machine. We had found a used washing machine in the classified ads, and I liked hanging out clothes behind the apartment.

I had been taking some classes, too, and working at the Holy Cross Hospital in personnel, and as a typist at the Political Science Department at the U. I remember those two quarters I attended the University of Utah as one of the happiest times of my life, when the light was crisp and bright. I understand now that I was emerging from a period of depression. One of the symptoms had been a fear of driving. I hadn't told anyone, I just avoided it. My brain had changed settings, had switched from "anxiety" to "sponge," and I absorbed every photon of fall light and every fact and nuance. At the U. I took anthropology classes from Charles Dibble and John Dewey and a young MesoAmerican specialist, physiology from Dr. Goldfarb, and geology from W. L. Stokes. Lo, forty years have passed, and I still remember those classes.

I worked for J. D. Williams and Helmut Callis in political science. I had met Dr. Williams from a distance while I was still in high school, because he had moderated the Model United Nations conference that I had attended for three years. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a Democrat, and had run for political office. He took the office staff out to a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City for a prime rib dinner at Christmastime. I had never eaten prime rib.

Dr. and Mrs. Callis were historians specializing in China, and had escaped Nazi Germany to China, thence to the United States. Dr. Callis was so pleased with my spelling and accuracy in transcribing his manuscripts that he invited us to the Callis house to see their collection of Chinese art objects. They included large carved cabinets that were taken apart like puzzles so they could be shipped to the United States. The Callis house had a red door. He told me that red is the color of happiness in China, and that Chinese brides wear red wedding dresses.

From our apartment, I walked to the University along tree-lined narrow streets. I wore navy blue knee socks and a wool houndstooth skirt, a tan cableknit sweater, and a very uncomfortable, undoubtedly too small, pair of blue loafers that rubbed blisters on my heels. I often took the bus home at the end of the day. I was also typing notes for a political science doctoral student who was researching conflict in the Middle East. He marked passages in books, and I typed the excerpts onto 3x5 cards for him. I used my old turquoise-colored Royal portable typewriter to type the cards on our kitchen table, for Kent's master's thesis, we rented an IBM electric typewriter for a few weeks.

Kent turned in his thesis and completed his oral exams at the end of winter quarter, we returned the rented typewriter, put our few belongings in storage, and I left him at the airport. We had a round-back white Volvo, with red seats. I drove to Escalante to see Mom and Dad, then to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I spent a few weeks with Joanie, then I drove solo across country to Biloxi, Mississippi, where my airman husband was completing basic training at Keesler Air Force Base.

For a short time, we lived in a little moldy trailer that reeked of gas, then we found an apartment in the upstairs of an old two-story white frame house on the Beach Highway, where one of my husband's friends from the Air Force and his wife also lived. Our landlady was Miss _; her daughter, Miss _, also lived with her. They pronounced the air base name Kees-lah. Jeff Davis' house, a historical attraction, was just down the street. The cemetery vaults were above ground. I was in another country. The summer of 1968 was memorable in other ways; it was the summer of the Moon Walk and Hurricane Camille.

We were up high with a beach view, and out of the trailer, but our mattress smelled like mildew, and the cockroaches seemed as big as mice. They flew out of grocery bags, and they scattered like a school of fish when I came into the dimly lit foyer at night. The mosquitoes were vicious, and sometimes I saw a disoriented crab scuttling sideways down the highway. My husband was gone much of the time, assigned to KP duty in addition to his other training. I could not find a job, so I spent my time at the air-conditioned library on the air base. I looked for Ardyth Kennelly on the shelves, and I found The Spur.

It was like running into an old friend in an unfamiliar place, and sitting down with a good cup of coffee and interesting conversation. The Spur, about Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is not as common as Kennelly's other books, especially the Linnea books, at least one of which was published in a book club edition. But it is every bit as good. Kennelly was fascinated with John Wilkes Booth, and read everything she could find about him. One of the books she relied upon heavily for her novel, she said, is The Mad Booths of Baltimore, by Stanley Kimmel. Booth was wearing spurs in the Ford Theatre and he caught his spur in a theatre curtain when he jumped from the balcony to escape. He was injured, and his injury changed the trajectory of his story, and history.

When I was at Utah State University, I heard a scholarly presentation about neglected Western women writers. Ardyth Kennelly was one of them. The book flap text of The Spur is revealing about women's status at the time Kennelly was writing. Much is said about Kennelly's doctor husband's accomplishments, and Kennelly is said to enjoy housekeeping. But then Linnea enjoyed housekeeping, too. And so do I. And that cup of coffee in a clean house is deeply satisfying.

When I came to Sewanee, I learned that John Wilkes Booth had once visited the old Brooks Hardware store here (now Taylor's), where he pawned his pocketwatch.

Raccoons Take a Grand Tour of Grundy County, Tennessee

2008-08-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school in Escalante in the 1950s, one of our assignments was to find a pen pal. It may have been in third grade, when Iona Alvey (wife of Dad's Barney relative, Edson) was my teacher, or in fourth or fifth when Roland Porter (Dad's Uncle Rol, his mother's brother) was my teacher. Or maybe in sixth grade, when Lorenzo Griffin (son of Charles "Pappy" Griffin, Dad's great-grandfather, by his second wife) was my teacher. We looked at the map, and chose a town in another part of the country. We wrote to the elementary school in the town, told about ourselves, and asked to be matched up with another student for a continuing correspondence.

Dad, whose job in the Post Office kept him at the hub of Escalante's communication with the outside world, was interested in this assignment. He and I together looked at a map of the United States and some reference books, and we zeroed in on the little town of Palmer, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau, in a green part of the country.

"Palmer has a third-class post office like Escalante," Dad said. I wrote to the teacher of the appropriate grade at the elementary school in Palmer, and it wasn't long before I heard back from a student my age. Her name was Sandra Meeks. Her handwriting was very neat, and she was obviously a good student. We were well-suited as pen pals. Our letter exchange lasted for several years, into high school.

With Dad's encouragement and interest, I sent petrified wood and other souvenirs from Escalante. Sandy sent souvenirs of Grundy County, photos of her in her basketball uniform, and something surprising--a photo of the Mormon church in Altamont. Sandy attended Grundy County High School in Tracy City. I thought Grundy was a strange name, but it was just not a Utah name. Felix Grundy (1777-1840), I learned, was a well-known name in Tennessee. The original Felix Grundy had been a state legislator, a U.S. Senator, and a U.S. Attorney General. The major industry in Grundy County was once coal mining, but that is no more, and today Grundy County boasts some of the most beautiful recreation areas in Tennessee.

In 1992, when we moved to Sewanee, in Franklin County, Tennessee, I realized we were not far from Palmer. I wondered what had happened to Sandy. I called the high school, and a relative of Sandy's answered the telephone (it was much the same as Escalante in that way, too). She told me that Sandy's married name was Willis, and that Sandy was a history teacher in Knoxville. I called her, and we had a long telephone conversation. Her father had died, and her mother had remarried. Sandy said her two children were basketball players, too. We have not met in person, but the telephone conversation was a nice epilogue to our years as pen pals.

In 2004, Mary Priestley, who is curator of the Herbarium at the University of the South, was working on an environmental outreach project for area elementary schools. She created nature trails for some schools, including Sewanee Elementary School. In Grundy County, Coalmont Elementary School's location did not lend itself to an adjacent nature trail, so Mary conceived another nature-related project. Coalmont students took field trips to various sites in Grundy County and drew pictures and wrote about what they saw. Mary brought the student papers to me in a big paper bag, and I distilled them into a children's book story. When the idea for the story was fixed--raccoons taking a grand tour of the sights of Grundy County--the students drew additional pictures, all of them delightful, for possible use in the book.

I wrote about a country raccoon named Felix Grundy, who is told by his mother to entertain his city cousin, Taylor. Taylor is skeptical of seeing anything of much interest in rural Grundy County, but on the grand tour is persuaded otherwise. Latham Davis designed the book and created the map of the raccoons' travels. He used student drawings on every page of the story. I added two pages of facts about raccoons.

I was invited to the book's coming-out party at Coalmont School. They had an assembly in the gym, in which they danced and sang. I read a few paragraphs of the book to the assembly. Every student received a copy of the book. I visited the classrooms afterward and signed some books. It was a happy day and a great celebration.

I was emotional that day, and kept shedding tears, much to my embarrassment. I was thinking about Sandy, and about myself long ago, about how I miss my Dad, who was kind to children and amused by their capacity for originality, and who would have loved the raccoon drawings. I was thinking about my friend, Chris Kohler Smith, an artist who would have loved the raccoons, too, but who had just died in Marshall, North Carolina, having also made the trek in recent years from the American West to the East.

I was thinking about how the young find everything is new, but life feels like it will stay the same forever, and yet it passes so quickly. I was thinking about Escalante, about Palmer, about Felix Grundy, and the pen pal assignment, the specific teacher who cooked it up lost to me no matter how hard I think on it, about how the ribbon of life curls and folds back on itself, and about friendships and family, and how different people get to know each other, and how we find similarities and ways to laugh and to be of use no matter where we are.

One of the Coalmont teachers said she was so proud of such a positive project about Grundy County. I am proud to have had a small part in it.

Rare Birds, the Cerebral Cortex

2008-08-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

I saw the glass flowers in the Harvard Museum, but the rest is mostly a blur. It was February, sometime in the late 1980s, and I was attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Boston that year. The National Association of Science Writers, to which I belonged for many years, holds their annual meeting at the same time as the AAAS.

It's a perfect symbiosis. Science writers need scientists. Disheveled scientists are hived together, striding around with briefcases and rumpled papers, standing by elevators, chattering like magpies about very odd topics. If you're a scientist-watcher and a science-seminar buff, it's the the place to be. These otherwise rare and seldom-seen birds may be sighted in fairly close proximity. A parallel may be made with birds in the Chiricahua Mountains in southwestern Arizona, the only place in the United States where certain species may be found and added to one's list in a short time. I did not keep a list of my AAAS sightings, but they have included Jonas Salk, Isaac Asimov, Shere Hite, and Leonard Nimoy (the latter two undoubtedly strays from another continent).

NASW members attend press conferences every day and write stories about the scientific "news" presented. The press conferences are an additional hiving together where, say, the five scientists in the world who are working on, for instance, the cuticle of the nematode, or the locomotory behavior of gerrid bugs in the open ocean (I am making this up just now; usually the topics are chosen for their appeal to the masses) sit shoulder-to-shoulder, looking a bit dazed.

It is also the place where a scientist is asked to tell a roomful of ADD-afflicted journalists in five minutes, in layman's terms, the high points of his or her life's work. At that time of year, the science-attentive back at home will note that newspaper and radio science stories are derived from AAAS presentations. At the press conferences were the agitated newspaper and radio people, on the front row with microphones and recorders, filing every day. They seemed to grab a bite at the hospitality suites. The magazine writers were characterized by a more take-your-time leisurely demeanor. They dressed better. They could do lunch. The university people were schmoozing shamelessly, trying to get attention for their institution's scientists' presentations.

This trip started all wrong. I flew to Boston, where the slush was knee-deep. I told the taxi driver where I was staying, the Holiday Inn, let's say. I was driven somewhere, and dropped off. The hotel did not have my reservation, but they graciously found a room for me. I have trouble translating maps to the real world, and it takes a while for me to figure out where I am, if I ever do, and as I navigate new territory, I always feel as if I am listing. Usually to the left. I get dizzy. The conference was some distance away, so every day I took public transportation into the conference center. My impressions of Boston in February: dirty slush and snow, youth with great mops of springy hair (where were the limp blonde tresses?), everyone reading books on the--was it a subway?, the smell of wet wool, dangling mufflers, fur coats of every likely species, lots of black and brown and other subdued colors. John Updike has called Boston the "cerebral cortex of America." Presumably I was traveling around with the many students associated with the many colleges and universities in the Boston area. I could imagine the neurotransmitters released, the electrons of thought crackling.

As I began to talk with the other science writers at the conference, I asked where they were staying. I realized I had been deposited at the wrong Holiday Inn. The taxi-driver had not given me a choice, but had decided for me. I was made painfully aware of my demeanor, which, maybe because of the listing to the left, always seems to lack authority.

But the programs had begun, the days were full, and even if my other reservation had not been lost, it would have been too difficult to retrieve my suitcases and schlep myself to other lodgings. So every day, the slush, the wet wool, the readers, the furs, going the distance. My briefcase becoming heavier and heavier with the free papers I had picked up in the press room, and the fatal attraction of handouts from the exhibits: key chains, jar openers, pens, posters, candy, buttons (I *heart* science) and other doo-dads.

And I got sick. I came down with the flu. I developed a fever and red, runny eyes, and my cerebral cortex, already swimming with strange surroundings and navigational problems, felt as though it had been replaced with cotton batting. My airplane ticket fare was based on a Saturday to Saturday or Sunday to Sunday, something like that, and I was getting per diem that I already had to supplement from my paycheck. Changing my flight was impossible. I could not go home. I couldn't stay in my room. I needed to make prudent use of the hospitality suites. I went to the conference center and found corners to hide in and I absorbed what I could. I apologize now if I exposed anyone. I couldn't help it. I have an idea those bugs were widespread, anyway.

One afternoon I took a bus tour to Harvard. If Boston is the cerebral cortex of America, Harvard is its hypothalamus. For a Westerner, whose great-grandfather (Dad's grandfather, very familiar to my father) founded the town I grew up in, Harvard and Boston seemed positively historical.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is the repository for, among other things, Charles Darwin's sand dollar, George Washington's pheasants, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition. How exciting is that?

Sewanee Ladies Are Stories, One and All

2008-08-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sometime in 2006 I was handed an uneven manuscript of correspondence, pages written by hand and on various typewriters, and newspaper clippings. It represented an initial gathering of information about women who had been associated with Sewanee. The manuscript was 25 years old.

A group called the Sewanee Trust for Historic Preservation had formed a few years ago, stimulated in part by the University administration's unilateral decisions about historic buildings and structures. Sewanee's late 1800s barn on Breakfield Road had once been in jeopardy, its timbers considered destined for a different use. A Victorian house on University Avenue was deemed infested with termites and bids had been solicited for its removal. Both structures still stand, however, because some people didn't want to lose them, and interceded on their behalf.

Often, nostalgia is powerless. I know the sinking feeling associated with landmark loss. I've felt it with many things, including the "Old El," the two-story brick elementary school in Escalante, once photographed by Dorothea Lange, then imploded with explosives around 1970. And with my great-grandfather's three-story brick house, which he specifically stated that he built as a monument to be remembered by. It has been lost, melted away to a single story, with neglect and lack of imagination, or lack of champions. A photograph and a drawing remain. (It is doubly sad that my great-grandfather, who had seventeen children, employed the same bricklayer to build the school; in effect, two of his monuments were lost.)

Not everything can be saved, the late historian Anita Goodstein once told me. And that's true. We have to make room for the present. But what is our obligation at present to save some of the past for the future? And what parts of the past do we save? And how do we do it, given the demands of the present, and the everyday?

The mostly oldtimers who helped organize the Trust were repositories of "institutional memory." They knew personally how some things used to be, and valued historical artifacts. Here's my take on it: They wanted a bit of control, a bit of respect, a bit of say. They did not want to deal with an ambush from the rear. They did not want to be called upon suddenly for brushfire action, which can require the excruciating and time-consuming task of contacting and educating people one-by-one. They wanted an organization in place to help guide decisions about Sewanee's historical artifacts, buildings and otherwise. And the fact of an organization's existence might give pause: If an intruder ("decider"?) knows a watchdog is staked out, he may think twice.

But once an organization exists, it doesn't just sit inertly waiting for an issue to come up to have an opinion about. It defines a wider purpose, and takes proactive stances.

So the new STHP held informational meetings, programs primarily about the history of buildings on the Domain of the University of the South, and they began to talk about what they might do: assist the University archivist, lead tours, endow plaques, sell flower bulbs and greeting cards, collect oral histories, support historical publications, produce a newsletter, and so on. Members gravitated toward the tasks that interested them.

Writer and editor David Bowman and designer and publisher Latham Davis created a newsletter with articles about Sewanee's history. It was a lovely publication. David called it Keystone, and I was one of the contributors who provided copy. My pieces were mostly biographical sketches. David called us three the Keystone "Kops."

At one of the Trust meetings, when the president had asked the membership about projects the organization might take on, Loulie Cocke, a genteel wisp of a Sewanee lady, rose from her seat in the back of the room, and suggested that the STHP finish the Sewanee Ladies project, which had been stalled for more than a couple of decades.

It was the first I had heard of it. Meg Binnicker, the Trust president, tracked it down, Bowman read it, and eventually the manuscript made its way to me. It originated with another historical organization, the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, or APTA, which had once had a Sewanee chapter. The original concept of the ladies book seems to have been to create something akin to Moultrie Guerry's pompous old book, The Men Who Made Sewanee, in which the men are often wearing garb of some significance. But there was really no clear parallel in the women's stories; the women were different, the stories were different, their contributions were different. Their grandiosity often operated on a domestic or humanitarian level, and required more discernment.

An initial committee of APTA, which included Loulie, the late Jeannette Avent, Betty Nick Chitty, and the late Arthur Ben Chitty, generated a list of significant Sewanee women and solicited biographical sketches of them, from family members, or from people who had known them, or perhaps from someone who had presented a biographical sketch at some meeting or other. The women included on the list were all deceased. The original concept did not include photographs; reproduction and printing of photos would have been too expensive at that time. But contributors were encouraged to deposit photographs of the profiled women in the University archives.

Mr. Chitty had passed on to his reward when the manuscript came to me, so I could only make some guesses. Some of the sequencing of the sketches was alphabetical by last name. However, from what I could determine, Mr. Chitty had a structural concept that fit the sketches into the history of Sewanee, which he divided into several periods, including a "Golden Age." He had made a stab at that narrative, but did not finish it. He did note that when women were admitted to the University, Sewanee was changed forever. I have an idea that from his vantage point and orientation he did not see the trees for the forest. His connecting narratives, drafts as they were, were not really about Sewanee's pre-coed women. Not surprisingly, he was re-telling the history of Sewanee from a standard viewpoint. He had, in the past, written a book titled Reconstruction at Sewanee and it informed his narrative. He was employed by the University in alumni relations, the history of Sewanee was patriarchal, and the University educated only male students for about three-quarters of its history.

At some point, the APTA chapter dissolved and the project was shelved. The chapter's money was returned to the state organization, except a bit of money that was left with the University, for publication of the project at a later date; it seems to have disappeared into the general fund. Mrs. Avent passed on as well.

And time passed. Then along came the STHP archaeologists, who excavated these old pages. At first reading, I found the cold manuscript an unwieldly hodge-podge and thought that nothing could be done with it. I set it aside. But sleeping on a problem can set the unconscious to work. When Bowman encouraged to me look at it again, I saw some bright spots. A handful of sketches were well-developed, well-written, honest and colorful. Some might be fleshed out with information that I could locate. And some of the sketches were instructive in their own way about the historical period and culture in which the women lived their lives. Sacrifices and frustrations were implicit. Some sketches were only the frames of pictures: about a woman's illustrious ancestors, about her husband, about her children. Some said very little, except that she was a wonderful mother and loved her grandchildren. But there were tantalizing tidbits as well, threads I could follow.

I entered the list of women on a spreadsheet and began to sort it this way and that. I had birth and death dates for some of them. Some obviously important women were missing. A couple of women didn't belong in the history of Sewanee. When the list was fixed, I had about a hundred women. (The book's index of names lists more than four hundred people.)

Loulie filled in some blanks and helped point me to various sources. I looked at cemetery records and tombstones to fill in dates. I joined Ancestry.com and delved into census records, death certificates, and other records. A third of the women were born before the Civil War, in places other than Sewanee. Half were born between the end of the War and the turn of the century, and the remainder born after 1900.

When I sorted the list by birth date, a structure suggested itself, coincident with a rough timeline, and the story of Sewanee was implicit. There they were, emerging from the page, the wives of the founders, and the mistresses of the early boarding houses. And it continued that way, the missionaries, the wives of the later faculty members and theologians, the writers, artists, the matrons of the residence halls, teachers of children and female students. Donors throughout, angels of mercy of all levels who saw needs, big and small, and met them as they were able.

The oldest woman, born in 1801, was Eliza Pannill Otey, long-suffering wife of the flamboyant first Bishop of Tennessee (I added her because I had written about her for Keystone, and a granddaughter had sent her picture). The youngest woman, born in 1923, was Joan Balfour Payne Dicks, from her photograph a modern woman who would not seem out of place today. She illustrated and wrote children's books, had a messy marriage, and committed suicide. A panorama of women had emerged, and begged to be animated.

I am not a women's historian, but I am good at research and at jigsaw and crossword puzzles. This project was a puzzle. I fact-checked and filled in. As I began to find the photographs, I discovered that they told their own story in evolving women's dress.

The project taught me a number of things about women's history, and the tracks we leave on the sands of time. Two women whose lives were extremely well-documented were Sarah Barnwell Elliott and Charlotte Moffett Gailor. Neither married. Miss Elliot was a writer, Miss Gailor an artist who also wrote. They were from prominent families, and left a paper trail that can be found in the University archives. Miss Elliott has been the subject of a book, and someone should write a book about Miss Gailor.

One woman, Susan Dabney Smedes, wrote an unusual and extremely valuable book, Memorials of a Southern Planter. It is ostensibly about her father, Thomas Dabney's, life, but much is apparent about Mrs. Smedes as well. She was widowed after only a few weeks, and did not remarry. (My questions in general led to new acquaintances. The search for Mrs. Smedes led to a correspondence with Rebecca Drake, a historian in Raymond, Mississippi, where in 1830 Thomas Dabney relocated his plantation from Virginia. Becky and I were able to share enthusiasms and help each other with information.).

A couple of women left short narratives of their lives for their grandchildren. They are characterized by a certain humility, but these kinds of documents, especially if they contain details, names and dates, are extremely valuable.

The photo search took me far and wide. Photographs provided authenticity and interest, and with help I located images of ninety percent of the women, continuing to search even when the pickings had become slim indeed. When I went to the archives, my initial search image was (suspicious-looking, possible Sewanee pillar) "woman." I found some women's photos in the husbands' files. Many photos were unidentified, and likely will remain so. Significantly, a photo album kept by a matron, Miss Johnnie Tucker, who never married, was a valuable source of photos, as were the scrapbooks of the Sewanee Woman's Club, in which I found group photos. If a woman's sketch indicated where she had attended college, I was able to contact archivists at other universities and ask them to look in yearbooks.

As I continued to puzzle out and paste in information (and sometimes I had to correct birthdates and change the woman's place in the lineup--I suspect some fibbing about ages), The picture of Sewanee's women became clearer. However, many questions remain, among them Which Sonia Dabney Thurmond (there were two) is the Thurmond Library named for? And where (it must exist) is a photograph of Irene Ellerbee Hall (wife of Vice-Chancellor Billy Hall)? I went around and around on this one, and quit when I reached a librarian who said, "You asked me that question three months ago." I spent a lot of time on this book, filling in small details as best I could, and at the last I wrote a little song about the ladies.

My "outsider" perspective, and the fact that I found no blood relatives in the gaggle of females, gave me a certain advantage in that I could, I hope, take a fresh look at the material. The result is book standing to the side of, outside, the standard narrative, although these women were there all along in shadow. Sewanee Ladies shines the spotlight on a half of the population that provided essential scaffolding and more, and much of historical and general interest can be read between the lines.

One of my old professors, E. Raymond Hall, told me that "there comes a time you have to go to press." Finally it was time to finish up and move on to the next projects.

One of them, I thought, should be writing a few of my memories, with names and dates, and labeling my photographs. Lessons I learned from this project make me wish I had asked more questions (not just about names and dates, but about feelings and impressions, likes and dislikes) of my own mother and grandmother and aunts, and had recorded their answers. Honesty, emotion and homely or unusual detail are sometimes in short supply in accounts of the generic "my life."

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Griffin, kept a journal in which he recounted the offices of authority he held in the Mormon church. He also wrote about harassing the U.S. Army regiment led by Albert Sydney Johnston, and traveling here and there. But he says little about his wife or the births of his children. To my knowledge, his wife, Sarah Smith, did not keep a journal. She was the daughter of Hyrum Smith, who with his brother, Joseph, was killed by a mob at a jail in Carthage, Illinois.

Bats and the Comeback Bugs

2008-08-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when I entered Arizona State University, I was hired in the Zoology Department as a work-study assistant to wildlife professor, Bob Ohmart. Ohmart put me to work in one of the basement laboratories with another of his assistants, Phil Smith, producing flat "study mounts" for the myriad drawers that housed the wildlife teaching collection.

My first subjects were birds from a giant chest freezer. Many were waterfowl, "collected" (a zoological euphemism) by wildlife students who were also hunters. (Phil was an avid duck hunter, and responsible for my single foray into cooking duck a l'orange.) The freezer held a startling potpourri of frozen items, wrapped in plastic, brown paper, or newspaper, brought in by wildlife officers, students, roadkill aficionados, or other odd contributors. Scribbles on the brown paper or little torn pieces of paper stuck into the bags noted where and when the frozen and often bloody item was collected. (Not long after I began, we were the recipients of two whistling swans, which are protected species. An excited hunter had called the Game and Fish Department to come see the two giant snow geese he had bagged.)

I put together a "skinning kit" in an old blue metal fishing tackle box. A cross between a sewing kit and a carpenter's toolbox. it held sturdy needles, thread, twine, wire, scissors, scalpel, probes, forceps, and pliers. Borax for sprinkling inside the skin to keep dermestid beetles away, excelsior or foam for stuffing. A hair dryer for fluffing up feathers that had been washed or dipped in solvent. Tags to tie on the crossed legs. For the occasional "live mount," I could use shiny beads or shanked buttons to simulate eyes.

I did my best. I found this job more interesting than typing book reviews for Professor Collice Portnoff in the English Department, which I was also doing to make a little money. When Ohmart picked up my first specimen, which had assumed a shape reminiscent of a racquetball racket, a grin slowly spread over his face. He said, "You've created a new species: The long-necked grebe."

Bird skins are stretchy.

I improved. In a year or so I had graduated to bats that I had helped collect in the field, usually using mist nets in which they were entangled. We placed the mist nets near small ponds, which reflected light at night and attracted the insects upon which the bats fed. One of the collecting sites was on the Spider Ranch, near Prescott, where Ohmart was inventorying birds and mammals.

Bats are mammals, warm-blooded and furry. Because their teeth vary and are important in classification, bat skulls are removed (bird skulls are left in situ) and are kept, usually in a little lidded glass vial, alongside the stuffed or "mounted" study specimens to which they belong. I loved looking at the specimens in the drawers, thinking about how they were like books in a reference library, with name, collection place, collection date. A snapshot in time.

Bats are classified in the Order Chiroptera, which translates to "hand-wing." Bats' fingerbones are greatly elongated, and the thin leathery webbing stretched between the finger bones creates the bat's wing. Bats hold on with their feet and hang upside-down when they are sleeping or hibernating, usually in large groups.

I noticed right away that some bats came with extras. With forceps I pulled off what appeared to be translucent spiders with long pinkish legs. I popped them into formalin and delivered them to the curator of the insect collection, where I learned that they were parasitic flies of the Family Strebliidae.

Some bats looked like military officers, with little round horizontal-striped badges dangling from their chests. I removed the badges and looked at them. They were insects. I could see the stripes of their abdominal segments because they did not have wings. They were bedbugs. Once you have seen and identified one bedbug, they are unmistakable.

I vaguely remembered that my mother had once mentioned bedbugs, and the horror of acquiring an infestation through a suitcase. She said, "you can smell bedbugs." I had never seen a bedbug nor smelled one. My dad built our house before World War II, and apparently my mother's vigilance had kept them at bay.

Entomologist Howard Ensign Evans includes a lively section about bedbugs in his book, Life on a Little-Known Planet. Apparently I lived in an anomalous historical era, a bedbug refractory period, because bedbugs have been around since time immemorial. I once met Evans, when he visited Arizona State. Because I had found his book so odd, so hilarious, so off-the wall, so entertaining, I expected the books' author to be antic and colorful as well. However, I found him unremarkable in person and I have no recollection of his appearance, except that he seemed a bit dour. He was an author I preferred to commune with through his writings.

Bedbugs are bloodsucking ectoparasites that depend on a host, and humans and bats are the only mammals that host bedbugs. When our ancestors lived in caves, they apparently acquired bedbugs from the bats that also occupied the caves. When humans packed their bags and left the caves for more upscale homes, the bedbugs went, too. Ectoparasites depend on hosts for their taxi service. Crowding and sociality help them along.

Bedbugs were long present in the Mediterranean, and Evans writes that they probably traveled to England with the Roman Legions. Samuel Pepys, another wild and crazy guy in his writings, reports on finding his bed "lousy," which made him "merry." Bedbugs were common in the early days of the English colonies, but were apparently unknown to the Indians. Bedbugs were more gift that Europeans gave to the New World.

Evans recounts providing the "drinks for a bedbug bacchanal" when he was a college student. He was on a trip to Florida, and he says he didn't get much sleep, but that his cabin in Lake Worth provided enough bedbugs for years of use in his college classes. Another entomologist, Robert Usinger, who wrote a long treatise on bedbugs, put his pedigreed bedbugs in vials and took them with him to conferences, where he strapped them onto his arm to feed them.

Bedbugs feed only on blood, and they're sneaky. They feed at night, emerging from hiding places in cracks, under mattresses, or behind wallpaper. They are not known to carry disease, but the site of their bites may become red and itchy. Like other bloodsuckers, they inject anesthetic and anticoagulant to keep the host unaware and the blood flowing while they are feeding, and it may be the host's reaction to those substances that causes the itching. Years ago we stayed one night at an old hotel in Buenos Aires after a long, long flight, and I noted the next day that I had sustained a number of bites on my shins and legs. I did wonder briefly, but I was so tired I couldn't have roused no matter what was feeding on me.

Bedbugs are notable in that they smell cloyingly sweet, a smell described as like "fresh raspberries," and that they engage in a kinky practice known as "traumatic insemination." The male simply pokes a hole into the female's abdomen between segments when they mate, and the number of matings can be counted by the number of scars.

Evans says the head of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology remarked in 1889 that he had occasionally met a person who had never seen a bedbug, but that such persons were rare. Insecticides, hygiene, sanitation, and housekeeping practices have given us a couple of generations in the U.S. who have not seen bedbugs, but I've read several places, including in the Nashville Tennessean this week that the bugs are making a comeback.

"Suitcases!" my mother would exclaim.

And indeed, travel was cited as a significant cause. Also the ban on DDT. But DDT was banned for good reason, and who wants to sleep in a bed dusted with DDT? "You don't want to use a heavy-duty pesticide in a sleeping area," said the responsible Orkin man quoted in the article.

The subhead of the article: "Hotel industry says pests extremely rare."

The Teacher Whose Students Would Not Go Away

2008-08-09T10:02:00.001-07:00

I had been trying for what seemed like forever to get into the class, which had had a waiting list almost since it had begun. A hundred and sixty students, from far and wide, were turned away each semester. Finally, in 1980, I was one of the favored thirty-six or so admitted into Scientific Illustration, taught at the University of Arizona by Donald Bennett Sayner, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Sayner, I quickly discovered, was like no other teacher I had had before. He was like no teacher I have had since. He resembled a character from a Dickens novel, W. C. Fields with a bolo tie, Charles Darwin with sandals. When he smiled, his eyes looked to the side. He willingly posed for us so we could practice our photography skills.

He was gentle, yet authoritative, organized in his disorganization, focused in the midst of chaos. During his "lectures," which seemed more like a series of thoughtful asides, he passed around photographs, maps, bones, feathers, shells, sticks, plants, old cameras, film clips, calipers, templates, grids. His voice was soft, but he clicked along with enthusiasm and a kind of suppressed glee. Students murmured constantly throughout his presentations, but Sayner was not perturbed. He seemed to regard this chorus of katydids as pleasant background.

In his laboratory, the chorus continued, combined with movement. Sayner was not confused; in a white lab coat with a magnifying glass dangling from his neck, he moved, too, among the cluttered tables and cabinets with meditative ease. Sometimes he took a student's pen and made a stipple or two, or dipped a crow-quill pen into India ink and drew a little thick and thin line on a student's piece. Sometimes he licked his little finger and made a deft dab. His office was stacked neck-high with books and papers, the telephone's ring muffled in the bunker, but he could always locate something, or direct us: "Right side of desk, third stack, about a foot down."

We were to create two portfolios, in technical drawing and in photography, both as a reference for ourselves and a demonstration to others of what we could do. After basic exercises, which included drafting a map of Baja California and treating it six ways from Sunday, we were free to follow our bliss--into archaeology, botany, entomology, geology, medicine, museum displays, advertising, and so on. It was a beehive of activity, sometimes with a real beehive and real bees. And who were all those strange people bustling around, unrolling drawings, making diazo slides, moving back and forth from the enlarger to the darkroom?

"My students won't go away," Sayner said. "The old students come back and keep the place going at night for the new students." One of his assistants was a Yaqui Indian who wore thick glasses and played the harpsichord, and whose ancestor had published a Tucson Spanish-language newspaper, El Mosquito. Amazing line drawings flowed from the end of his pen. He designed his own concert tickets and publicity posters, printed them on a printing press in the corner of the room, removed the legs from his harpsichord, loaded it in his pickup truck, and went on tour.

In her short piece, "How to Be a Writer," Lorrie Moore notes that in college you notice that there are people who are dumber than you are and people who are smarter than you are, and that's pretty much how it will be your entire life. Whereas I wasn't exactly erasing holes in my drawing paper, my skills were less than mediocre in comparison with those of fellow student Paul Mirocha. Paul's illustration work was awesome, and I've watched it appear over the years on posters, book covers, and his own pop-up books. A few years ago I opened the cover of Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Prodigal Summer, and saw Paul's moth drawings on the endpapers.

Sayner--that's what everyone called him--did not have a college degree. He was born in 1914 in Odebolt, Iowa, "the popcorn capital of the world." His mother, an artist and illustrator, also managed hotels, and Sayner helped her with everything, including entertaining guests. He came to Arizona to study anthropolgy, but after a little time at the University of Arizona and working on digs on the Apache Indian Reservation, he ran out of money. It was the 1930s. He and a friend began barnstorming airplanes, chopping out landing strips in the middle of nowhere. On the Navajo Reservation, they drove around in a beat-up car playing "The Japanese Sandman" and telling the Indians where to come for an airplane ride.

When barnstorming gave out, Sayner joined the Air Corps Reserve and went to Oklahoma to train as a reconnaissance pilot, then was called into the regular Air Force. He spent most of WWII in Albuquerque, teaching B-29 engineers. After the War he answered an ad for a statistician at the Scripps-Howard Institute of Oceanography. He flunked the numbers test, but they hired him to survey and map. At Scripps, he gathered information at sea, then came back and drafted reports on seasonal changes, currents, beach erosion, and submarine geology. After seven years, he returned to the Southwest, where he worked on mineral surveys and drilling projects.

In 1956 he came back to UA, invited by Professors Chuck Lowe and Albert Meade of the Zoology department, to help students illustrate their scientific papers. He began with his own equipment and a handful of students.

"Scientific illustrators don't decorate," Sayner said. "They amplify the text. They help the reader understand the writing. They capture what a photographer's lens sometimes can't."

It was a practical effort, but Sayner clearly understood the passion behind representing nature, accounting for every feather, every petal, every scale. "My students dearly love the plants and the snakes," he told a newspaper reporter in 1982. "They have to love them, or they couldn't draw them." He could see computers coming, but he was emphatic that human intuition and experience would always be important in illustration.

When I finished Sayner's year-long course, computer-aided design was still in its infancy, so with my newly acquired skill I hired out to illustrate scientific publications. Irrigation projects from Senegal. Cotton plant research. Toxicology apparatus. Insect behavior. I drafted charts and maps by the dozens and dozens, expert with Mylar, Pounce, Zip-a-Tone, Rapidograph pens, K&E templates and proportional dividers. I drew most of the distribution maps for Jim Brown and Art Gibson's book, Biogeography. I went back to Sayner's lab when I had questions or problems.

When Sayner officially retired in 1985, he had trained more than 4000 illustrators (New York Times, June 16, 1991). Many had gone on to distinguished and award-winning careers. That year, former student Chris Kohler Smith (who illustrated my book, Senses and Sensibilities), helped organize "A Salute to Sayner," an alumni exhibit and party, in the UA Student Union Galleries. Sayner's old students came from everywhere, with drawings, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, bronzes, textbooks, T-shirts, and more. Sayner arrived at the opening in an antique car, decked out in vintage costume, and a great time was had by all.

I had written a little piece about Sayner for the short-lived Gecko Echo newsletter, and he referred me his "biographer." Sayner came to my wedding at the Arizona Inn in Tucson in 1990, and charmed my new husband. "I see we have the same barber," he said to Ronn.

Every year until his death in 2004 I received a handmade Christmas card from him and his wife, Lillian. One was a map of Baja California. Inside it read, "Baja, Humbug."

The Curse and Blessing of the Frog

2008-08-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

What biology teacher hasn't dwelt on frogs? Slice 'em, dice 'em, pith 'em, flay 'em. Stick pins in their cute little organs. Like yon Cassius, I thought too much, and I know I began to look pained. My students: "Why do we have to cut up a grasshopper? When are we going to get to the frogs?" A salesman: "A bology teacher? I never took bology, but I always thought it would be fun to bisect an ol' frog." Me: "Well..."

Snakes are forever safe from regular appearances in the basic course--every snake organ looks like every other snake organ, long and thin. But frogs were born with a curse--God made little frog innards too Disneyesque, too damned easy to identify. And frogs too innocent and innocuous. I have my own theory about who started this bology/frog thing, but that's another story.

So, I began to say firmly: Ahem, excuse me, but biology is the science of life. We will look at live things. As much as possible. And we did. We made Berlese funnels and collected soil critters from the flowerbeds outside the classroom. I went to the bait shop, and we staged cricket contests, and created pecking orders. We fed water bugs and looked at swimming behavior. We dangled bits of carrots on strings in front of living toads to ascertain facts about feeding behavior. We did something with live white rats. I can't remember what, but I know we didn't kill them ("sacrifice" is the term), because I brought them home when the school year ended, and they died of old age in a cage in my garage.

While I yearned for the day when plastic models or computer dissection would give me and the frogs a break, there was the year of the frog shortage, when we had to save the "dissected" frogs for next year; there were the African clawed frogs, touted as substitutes for the standard grass frogs; and there were emerging reports from around the world about frogs in trouble.

There were also the frogs of literature. In 1993, I went to a writers' conference in Charleston, and my antennae must have been up for amphibians. Mary Oliver read a toad poem, and a couple of other poets followed suit, and I came home wondering about the genre in general. I placed a tiny classified ad in Poets & Writers magazine, asking for poems or short prose about frogs and toads. As an afterthought, I added "salamanders okay," because salamanders are in the same taxonomic group and I didn't want to slight them.

I don't know what I expected, but certainly not 400-plus responses, from Hawaii to England. By then we had moved and I was no longer teaching, so I had time to sort through the papers in various ways. The pieces fell into definite categories. Warts. Sound. Metamorphosis. Dissection. The frog prince. Jumping. Chance encounters (flowerpot, toilet, etc.). Rain/Roadkill. Disappearance. A few salamanders.

I put together a manuscript, and began to reply to the contributors. I tried to represent each category, and to represent a variety of poetic forms.

I wrote an introduction: "Here...in rhyme and free verse and incisive prose, is a delicious sampling of what contemporary writers are saying about what amphibians have said to them...Here, at the interface of land and water, are human and amphibian serenades, shrill and bass, light and profound, joyous and mournful, tender and angry, gleeful and rappy." I especially liked the joyous and the gleeful.

Agent Joan Brandt tried without success to find a commercial publisher for the collection. Publishers didn't know what to make of it. Well, neither did I. But I knew it was important. It was a paean to all those frogs who had given up their little organs for the cause of knowledge. A salute to the Class Amphibia. An apology to a frog (also the title of one of the poems included).

Ken Morris created the cover and the "bashful" phrase. Canadian illustrator Barry Flahey and others provided a few line drawings. I published it myself. Some of the contributors are well-known. For one poet, this was his first publication. This odd book is now ten years old, and odd things have happened with it. Some of the poems came to be recited by an amphibian sculpture at the Detroit Zoo. One has been reprinted in a government publication. It has been distributed to herpetologists. The book appears among listings of publications that address science and literature.

Here is part of a poem by R. P. Lister. It was first published in Punch, in 1948.

There is great beauty in the bog

Where muddy creatures play,

And I have brought my friend the frog

To point me out the way.

A Love Affair With a Banjo

2008-08-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

I've always been crazy about the banjo. Its lack of pretension. Its basicness. A stick and a round thing and a few strings. Apply two hands, and off we go. The clear, crisp round notes sitting in the air, sitting in my ears like little gold balls. The jangling cascades of confident notes, little choreographed bouncings. Whoo-ee.

My science teacher was banjoist with the band that played for our high school dances, and one of my fellow teachers at the community college in Tucson played a mean banjo, even played at my last wedding, but somehow it never occurred to me until the second century of my life that I might play the banjo myself. It was news to me, still is, that I might demystify this particular stringed instrument.

I bought a banjo on ebay, and a friend directed me to a terrific teacher, Jim Wood, who was kind enough to take me on. I found that holding the instrument was tricky. I tend to hang back sometimes; I don't really take charge if I don't catch on right away. Displacement behavior sets in. I spent a lot of time making and adjusting straps. Making straps was easy. I made a strap for every holiday. Candy-cane straps were easy. Shamrock straps were easy. It was the simple bump-ditty that defeated me.

My neurons and muscles and brain don't train or respond as quickly as they once did. I'm also basically erratic, and don't play every day. I'm too easily distracted--with housework, meals, laundry, pets, friends, bills, sewing, exhaustion, sleeping, woolgathering, showering, brushing teeth, email, depression, elation, anything that makes up a life. My husband has noted many times that I don't prioritize. He is a mathematician, and creates little algorithms for living. Get out of bed, turn around, look. If no one else is in bed, then make the bed. If we get fresh lettuce, then throw the old lettuce into the compost bin. If you use the kitchen, then leave it cleaner than you found it.

I never learned the Franklin Day Planner. I am like the wood rat. I see something, and I drop the thing I happen to be carrying to pick up the current thing that impinges on my retina. I leave little piles of items around. Also, things drop off my radar screen, disappear from consciousness, and too often it was my banjo playing. Kind as my teacher is, I'd go to weekly lessons and humiliate myself. At one lesson, he asked me to write why I want to play the banjo. At the next lesson, I handed in three single-spaced pages. "How long did it take you to write this?" he asked. It was much easier to write than to play. I also showed him my array of straps.

I needed some catch-up time, a focus group. So in February of 2007 I hied myself and my Gold Tone banjo over to Brasstown, North Carolina, to the John C. Campbell Folk School, where Mary Z. Cox of Tallahassee, Florida, was teaching a week-long course in intermediate banjo. A wonderful teacher, a wonderful room, great people. I have never met a banjo player I didn't like.

Of about a dozen students in the class, I found I was the least intermediate. Mary handed out songs in tab, and I realized it was sink or swim. How could I drive back home? I had just arrived. I swam. I learned to read tab, and I played along, although I heard many extra notes coming from others. Some students had stuffed socks into their banjo heads to mute them. I went back to my room for a sock. Mary ordered the socks removed. "I like to hear the voice of the banjo," she said. For a week I heard the voice of the banjo, my banjo, and the voices of a roomful of banjos. A glorious sound. I absorbed the sound, and the philosophy crept in around the edges.

Mary brought in other banjoists to show us different banjos and different ways of tuning and playing. Lo Gordon of Brevard, North Carolina, brought in some of the banjos he had made, and one of his dear inviting little unpretentious banjos whispered to me, "If you like me, then buy me."

English professor Steve Harvey, author of Bound for Shady Grove (and banjoist with "Butternut Creek and Friends"), played and sang "Jimmy Crack Corn" and other tunes for us, and described his meditations on banjo.

"Shady Grove" is one of the first tunes I learned on the banjo. It is a simple, yet haunting, traditional Appalachian mountain song. The E minor is sad and beautiful, and the eight measures loop around and around without ever becoming tiresome. "Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall. If I can't have little Shady Grove, don't want anyone at all," ditty, bump-ditty, "Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove I say, Shady Grove, my little love, I'm am going away," ditty, bump-ditty...

In his book of essays, Bound for Shady Grove, Steve describes making a banjo from scratch (an animal skin is necessary, as is the proper wood), the qualities of banjo music, the history and character of old-time Appalachian music, and much more.

"Next to writing, the banjo is the hardest skill I have ever learned," Steve writes. I underlined that.

He says, "A banjo is more like a wonder of nature than a musical instrument, in the same league as panther, lightning bolt, and tornado. Like a mountain, it has no will of its own and succumbs to no one. Like a creek, it makes the same noise over and over and never repeats itself. Like the wind, it changes what it finds...

"It asks ears to bear all that fingers can do, and when the fingers stop and the banjo is safely back in its case, what it has done rings on in the ears, the limping and thumping of its clawhammer beat nestling deep in the body and, in due time, becoming one with the lub-dub and whoosh of restless and ailing hearts."

I composed a little banjo song on the way home, the banjo still thumping in my heart.

Music of Harpsichords and Boxelder Bugs

2008-08-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

I first met Minnesotan Bill Holm in the late 1980s.

It began with this slim volume, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985. I was working as a research writer at Utah State University in Logan, and was vice-president and thus in charge of arranging programs for Bridgerland Audubon Society. My friend Diane Browning was also a writer, and active in Audubon and folk and chamber music groups. She had opened a bookstore in a picturesque old house on First East. She called her store A Book Store.

One day I was browsing at A Book Store, and Diane handed me this slim yellow book. Utah has its share of boxelder trees, and Utahns know boxelder bugs well. Red and papery, they appeared in Logan in the spring, crawled around on the windowscreens in my office building--also an old house--and, although harmless, drove our secretary crazy. So there was that.

Diane and I put our heads together and read about Bill Holm. He was an English teacher. He not only wrote poems about insects we knew, but he lived in a rickety old house in Minneota (that's not a typo), with several thousand books, a couple of pianos, a harpsichord and a clavichord, which he played at odd hours of the night. How interesting is that? We looked at each other. Might he be our entertainment for the annual Bridgerland Audubon banquet?

So Bill Holm came to Utah. He told stories and recited poetry, and he demonstrated how hymns could be converted into ragtime piano tunes, and he enchanted the gathering of birdlovers. Bill is an imposing man of Icelandic descent, with reddish hair and a booming voice. People want to hug him. He wanted to meet David Lee, the pig poet (later Utah's poet laureate), while he was in Utah, and we helped with that, and Bill and Dave became good friends. Years later, when I was working on the Huntsville Festival of Books, both Bill and Dave came to Alabama and read their poems, and I wrote a newspaper article about them.

As I recall, the bug poems came about, Bill said, because his students were lamenting their lack of inspiration. Nothing interesting ever happened to them in Minnesota. They told him this more than once. Exasperated, Bill replied, "you can write about ANYTHING!" He pounded his fist on his desk. At that instant, a boxelder bug happened to be walking across the desk.

Bill pointed. "Write about that boxelder bug!" Because Bill always did his own assignments, he wrote about boxelder bugs, too, and composed music for them to boot. Boxelder Bug Meditations, which includes artwork, was the result. It has inspired a play.

Bill has written and published other excellent books since then (http://www.billholm.com/), and I can recommend them all, but I always come back to this unusual book, which demonstrates the clarity and elegance and skew of his writing. His introductory essay on boxelder bugs ends thusly: "Whitman said: 'A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.' So is a boxelder bug."

Here is one of the poems:

THE BOXELDER BUG PRAYS

I want so little

For so little time,

A south window,

A wall to climb,

The smell of coffee,

A radio knob,

Nothing to eat,

Nothing to rob,

Not love, not power,

Not even a penny.

Forgive me only

For being so many.

This Hog: How Does It Profiteth Me?

2008-08-05T16:53:00.001-07:00

From 1985 through 1990, I worked as an writer in the office of information services at Utah State University, the state's agricultural college. USU had eight colleges, perhaps still does, and at that time I was responsible for publicizing research in three of them: Agriculture, Science, and Engineering. I also wrote for Agricultural Experiment Station publications.

Each college had a "week," in which their activities and programs were front and center. The engineering college had egg toss competitions, for instance. Not long after I arrived, I was called upon to report on agriculture week. One of the events consisted of dividing the quad into a grid, like a Bingo card, and selling chances on the squares. A cow was then turned loose on the quad, and the resultant cow patties indicated the winning squares. I had come from a stint at the Tombstone Epitaph, in which I reported on a cyanide leak at the mines, and the drastic measures used in treatment of cyanide poisoning. The contrast was not lost on me.

Ag colleges are known familiarly as cow colleges, or moo U's, but of course they also sport their share of chickens, sheep and hogs, and other domestic animals that are the subjects of scientific study. The studies invariably have practical applications. "What good is this information?" I learned to ask. Because that's what the public is perceived as wanting to know.

Jane Smiley's 1995 verisimilitudinous novel, MOO, is set in a midwestern agricultural college. One of her characters is Earl Butz, a hog. Earl is housed in an abandoned building, Old Meats, and is looked after by a sophomore work-study student, Bob Carlson. Earl is the subject of an unusual experiment designed by Dr. Bo Jones. Dr. Bo wants to know how big a hog can get.

"Never been a hog that lived a natural lifespan," soliloquizes Dr. Bo. "Never been an old hog. Hog too useful. Hog too useful to be known on his own terms, you know. What can I do with this hog, when can I eat it, what can I make of this hog, how does this hog profiteth me, always intervenes between man and hog. When I die, they're going to say that Dr. Bo Jones found out something about hog."

Under Bob's care, Earl Butz grows about as large as a Volkswagen beetle but, in Smiley's novel, Bo takes off to study wild hogs, and the experiment is brought to a screeching halt.

In the real world, writer Sy Montgomery personally found out something about domestic hog, and about the possibilities of pigs. Practicality was not the point. In her 2006 book, The Good Good Pig, Montgomery tells about how she took in a runt pig no bigger than a cat, named him Christopher Hogwood, and gave him a home for his lifetime. When people asked Montgomery how long pigs live, she answered "six months," because that's a pig's average lifespan before it is converted into bacon.

After he was wormed, Chris Hogwood grew to something over 700 pounds. He was intelligent, emotional, sensitive, funny, affectionate, and adventuresome. He made many friend, and he posed every year for Sy's Christmas cards. When he died at fourteen of old age, he was buried on the Montgomery property.

"Christopher's success was fourteen years of comfort and joy, given and received," writes Montgomery. "Christopher was a gift who kept on giving. For me, his greatest gift was simply his presence, the pure delight of his company. But he had given me so much more..."

Montgomery quoes Henry Beston, writing in The Outermost House: "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals...For the animal shall not be measured by man..."

Montgomery's charming and thought-provoking book includes photos of Christopher and lots of facts about pigs. The weight record, she writes, is held by Big Bill, a Poland China raised in Jackson, Tennessee. When Bill was measured in 1933, he was five feet tall at the withers and weighed 2,552 pounds. Poland Chinas were raised for lard.