All the Free Things…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 23, 2012 in Blog | 4 comments

Preface

When all our riches are tallied up, our investments, real estate, savings, collectables, we are still poor unless we include all we have for free. Not long ago I tallied up the following list of treasures longhand as fast as I could write, just to find out what I hold most dear.

I had to laugh at some of them because they are silly, like French kissing a sea anenome, but many of the others on the list reveal what matters most to me, and surely to many of us. We may be poor as church mice, but we are up there among the wealthiest with what we have for free.

If you have some riches to add to this list, do it.

Free Things In a High Priced Life
• One another
• Air we breathe
• Water we drink
• Kisses we throw
• Hands we hold
• Cheeks we pat
• Dreams we dream
• Dreams Others Dream
• Advice
• Curses and abuse
• Dogs we pet
• Puppies and kittens

• Children we hold, or release
• Children we conceive
• Things we imagine, or don’t
• Leaves we rake up and jump into
• Dirt we dig
• Rocks we move
• Mud we step in barefoot and chew with our toes
• Fingernails we chew with our teeth
• Rocks and logs we sit on
• Noses we pick
• Reflections we see, or make
• Itches and scratching
• Throwing a stick for a dog
• Skipping a stone across the water
• Lying, fibbing, gossiping, exaggerating
• Stepping on grass, or deciding not to
• Washing our face in a stream or a sink or a puddle
• Inventing a never-before recipe

• Picking ticks off a dog
• Staring down a cat
• Crossing a road
• Watching a chicken do it
• Watching a rabbit freeze watching you freeze watching it
• Rubbing your nose in thought
• Rubbing your nose in total amusement
• Rubbing your nose because it’s there
• Putting on airs
• Taking off airs
• Clouds we watch change
• Clouds that form into crawling babies and ships and gulls
• Touching a horse’s soft nose
• Smelling a horse’s breath
• Hearing a horse snort or gallop
• Listening to our footsteps and following

• Being afraid for no reason
• Imagining disaster
• Nodding off while being told off
• Skipping
• Drumming your fingers
• Drumming her fingers
• Watching a lady bug haul butt across the back of your hand
• Quoting her your only ladybug poem about flying away because of fire at home
• Looking at the stars, finding one to talk to
• Seeing the star you were talking to fall
• Riding a bike
• Watching airplanes take off and come in
• Floating in a pond or bird feeder
• Standing in surf up to your ankles
• Commanding the sea to move away from the shore
• Having it do it

• Blowing a dandelion puff
• Puffing steam into frigid air
• Reaching
• Retreating
• Running
• Nursing a baby
• Nursing someone hurt
• Blowing bubbles
• Whistling Pomp and Circumstance
• Blowing Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Major on a kazoo
• Babbling nonsense
• Humming Jimmy Crack Corn as you die in bed of terminal boredom
• Orating to a field of daisies

• Looking at your face
• Staring into your eyes
• Staring into a growling dog’s eyes
• Growling back
• Running
• Laughing
• Smiling
• Simpering
• Crying
• Begging
• Receiving
• Adding and subtracting on your fingers and toes without amputation
• Stillness
• Rain and snow
• Belching
• Breaking wind and blowing out the seat of your pants

• Listening
• Hearing
• Seeing
• Feeling
• Drinking
• Eating buttered corn on the cob
• Dancing
• Wa-hooing
• Snapping your fingers together
• Snapping a twig
• Carving a stick
• Sniffling
• Blowing your nose with your fingers successfully
• Glancing sideways
• Swallowing
• Shivering
• Shaking
• Crawling
• Creeping

• Chewing tobacco, wheatberries and pine gum at the same time
• Issuing your spoken edicts to rabbits in the field
• Demanding
• Relenting
• Seeing a roach in the kitchen big as a rat
• Getting over it
• Commiserating
• Condemning
• Sighing
• Watching the river flow
• Seeing a fish leap from the river and catch the sun
• Watching dusk fall
• Eating a carrot you just pulled up
• Picking your teeth
• Sucking your teeth.

• Ducking to keep from being hit
• Sucking your lips
• Sucking someone else’s lips
• Touching a breast
• Holding a breast
• Rubbing your cheek against a breast
• Licking a breast
• Sucking a nipple
• Watching a snowflake melt in your palm
• Swatting mosquitoes
• Scratching a mosquito bite and plotting revenge
• Chasing flies with a swatter
• Getting four of them in one swat
• Hearing dogs bark late at night far away.
• Sneaking your signed name onto a copy of the U.S. Constitution
• Reading Thomas Jefferson’s Testament of Freedom to preschoolers
• Talking back
• Cussing the TV
• Reading a good story and never wanting it to end
• Reading a bad story supposed to be good for you and wondering how
• Watching grass grow
• Hearing geese head south and looking way up there for them
• Holding hands
• Massaging feet
• Smelling a nearby skunk at night
• Watching traffic

• Waving
• Giving a caterpillar and its sherpa a finger to climb up and come down off of
• Whistling back at birds and hear them whistle back at you
• Making faces in the mirror
• Finding one that’s acceptable
• Peeing in the woods
• Peeing in the river
• Peeing in the pool looking totally attentive to something someone is saying
• Biting into an apple picked off the tree it grew on
• Eating a Honey date you raised from a green BB
• Smelling fresh coffee getting ground
• Smelling a full hamper of laundry
• Watching a woman paint her nails
• Calling your dog & seeing him come
• Calling your cat, seeing her go
• Designing your first business card, throwing away your last
• Reading a map for fun on a long drive
• Getting lost
• Finding your way
• Sucking your thumb
• Using your thumb to catch a ride
• Collecting sand dollars and opening an account

• Hunting
• Praying
• Playing hopscotch with kids
• Tapping time with your foot
• Having a shoe fit
• Wearing it
• Hearing a child sing
• Hearing a child cry and feel your heart breaking
• Hearing a child laugh and feel your heart singing
• Finding a silver dollar in an old sock
• Giving it to someone
• Taking a worm you lacerated with a fish hook to Urgent Care
• Hearing the plop of a drop of water into water
• Watching a hawk kite a thermal

• Someone you don’t know smiling at you
• Snuggling
• Feeling your genitals say Hi to you
• Feeling them say Hi to someone else
• Falling in love
• Clambering out of love like Brer Rabbit from the Tar Baby
• Hearing from someone 30 years later out of the blue
• Not hearing from them
• Thinking of them
• Cobalt blue
• Cerulean
• Spider web turquiose
• Walking into a crowded room and everyone turns to look
• Walking out and everyone applauds
• Being invisible
• Rocking in a rocker on a porch.
• Rocking in a chair on a porch
• Falling over backward
• Finding God before he kicks the can
• Skidding on ice on purpose
• Hearing someone weeping
• Hearing them hearing you hearing them
• Finding a bird nest with eggs in it
• Feeling them touching you

• Watching your finger move to a task you did not will
• Sending it to the closet to think this sort of behavior over
• A hummingbird hovering beak to nose in your face
• Going home
• Leaving home
• Thinking of home
• Trying to remember a name
• Trying to remember a song
• Trying to remember your name
• Doing a somersault
• Darning a sock
• Damning a sock

• Pulling on a sock and finding a silver dollar in it
• Knitting a footbal field cover from cottonwood fuzz
• Stitching time
• Teaching a baby to say la la la la la la in ascending diminished sevenths
• Gargling the Star Spangled Banner
• Using a Q tip soaked in kerosene to chase earwigs from your brain
• Blowing down a bridge with a sneeze
• Crawling to Lourdes from Dallas
• Kissing a sea anemone
• French kissing a sea anemone
• Getting French kissed back
• Talking baby talk
• Talking adult talk
• Refusing to talk
• Taking a walk
• Never returning
• Wondering if you’re missed
• Making a cats cradle from picture hanging wire and opening a small gallery in your hands
• Planting cabbage and corned beef seeds
• Planting kisses
• Thanking God for us
• Giving thanks for all the free things
• Doing 30 pushups on the front lawn and hoping someone walks by
• Languishing in the embrace of a dog, child, God or hope
• Eating a fresh icycle in a hot tub
• Carameling a snowball when you can’t find an apple
• Living without a phone or TV

• Playing a 78 record on the wind-up Victrola in the attic
• Finding a chocolate in an old Valentine candy box and it’s still good
• Hearing someone singing who thinks she’s alone
• Overhearing a conversation that solves all your problems in life
• Watching the sun rise
• Feeling the sun rise
• Feeling something so keenly words fail and they cry
• Sniffing a lilac into the depths of your soul
• Praising a crocus in the snow for its courage
• Watching a concert through a hole in the wall with a friend
• Playing cards
• Going to Heaven, and seeing you’re still here
• Going to Hell, same thing
• Getting really sick and baffling the doctors with your recovery
• Forgiving the really unforgivable just because
• A cheeseburger and fries coupon when you’re starving
• Having lots of streets if you’re a streetperson
• Playing badmitten with a kitten
• Discovering there’s no sin
• Discovering God’s first language is sign
• Discovering we are the only translator who can make any sense of it.
• Discovering God is a dog, the one next to us
• Discovering…

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Tom & Jon & Rainey & Skye…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 22, 2012 in Blog | 1 comment

Skyla and her mother, Alicia (From the memoir, Marilyn & Me, from Augusta Wind Press)

IT’S MARILYN’S BIRTHDAY, we’re in the RV in Grand Marais reading, she is waiting to hear from Jonnie who still hasn’t called to wish her happy birthday. She falls asleep on the bed reading a paperback romance by Danielle Steel. The book’s been around the rig for years and she keeps after it. Today she’s found a character she says reminds her of me, a dapper well turned-out older guy who preys on rich young women, is elegant, broke and swims laps to stay in shape. He is totally spoiled and thinks only of himself.

When the phone rings she wakes up from deep slumber and says, ‘Hello Jon,’ and says happily she knew he’d call. ‘Are you getting ready for school? Oh, no! Do you think you’ll make first day?’ She listens, concerned, says ‘Your voice sounds really bad, do you have a cold? You do? Is there a fever? Oh no, pain? How bad?’ Listens. She’s a nurse. ‘That bad? It might be Strep.’ She listens and says, ‘Stress? Or Strep?’ I turn the music off so she can hear better and I can listen in. Jonnie calls me WCD for West Coast Dad from way back when I was first renting a room from his mother. He was spending a year of high school living with her in San Diego. He starts his fourth year teaching school in Edina in a few days, but not if he has Strep. He’s rarely sick and when he is it’s because of overwork in school during flu season. Today is the end of summer vacation.

‘How are Rainey and Skye?’ These are the names of his fiancée’s young daughters. From Marilyn’s replies it sounds like they’ve decided to talk about the weather instead of the two girls. ‘Are you staying warm? And what are you taking for it?’ Listens. ‘What kind?’ Listens. ‘Oh, for the pain. But they don’t prescribe morphine for that. No, even with Strep, Oxycodone is for things like cancer. Oh, Jon, you need to go to ER right away, who is this Jean, anyway, he’s not a doctor, you need to see a doctor. Have you had Alicia take your temperature?’ She listens. ‘Is Jean a friend of yours? Oh, your wife.’ Now Marilyn realizes this may not be Jon but Tom, her brother, who had a rotator cuff operation four days ago and has these giant steel staples holding his arm onto his rebuilt shoulder. Tom is partially deaf, and Marilyn has just awakened. Jean is Tom’s wife, and he has called to wish Marilyn well on her birthday. He is 70. When her son Jon does call later she tells what happened, and as they finish up she asks how his shoulder is and they have a good laugh.

Two Old Sources of Freedom…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 21, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Eve & Her Creation…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 21, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

We all come from sea slime. You look at a rabbit, scientist, priest or banker and you’re looking at the same thing we track our ancestries back to: sea slime.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here, it’s just to get you in the mood for an alternative to the ancient story of Adam and Eve.

Eve was first, and it was she who invented man out of her own body. Here’s the way it worked…
The universe is a womb. Suns are ovums. All is receptivity.

Eve was as fully equipped for self-fertilzation as was the universe. She had the full set of creation tools—a womb, fire, passion, imagination and love. Love is the fertilization factor. Nothing comes into being without it. But all she’d produced from her womb were baby girls.

Eve invented man out of herself, invented him out of her curiosity. She used her own body as a template, rearranged a few things to see if she could come up with something equally beautiful to a woman, but different enough to keep her interest and give some new angles to creation.
Paradise was nice, but with a woman, Wu, and a man, maybe there’d be new horizons to explore, and new feelings like jealousy and longing.

She had nothing specific in mind because in Paradise everything is perfect, but Eve was ready for more, and to get it she needed a counterpart. The rest is history.

Man knows all about Eve, and he’s spent all his time from day 1 trying to take credit for bringing her into being from one of his spare ribs. It rankles man to think he was dreamed up by someone on the scene before him. But he was there of her body and soul, she argues, and still is…

Elm on Highway 54…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 20, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

I was at that trashy rest stop on the Cimarron River, Texas panhandle, you know the place off highway 54, the one with the railroad span to the west?

I was talking with a tree about how things were and it said it couldn’t complain. Said its mother and father used to be up the road a bit either side of a barbed wire fencing the highway, and they never had it this good. They had full-on wind 365, and the only water they got was what run off the highway twice a year. They made do with what they got and seeded when they could.

This tree said its seed blew into this rest stop on a rare north wind, rather than the trades that almost always doomed elm seed to the wastelands, with no chance to sprout and root. Those that did through sheer grit didn’t reach longer than ankle high to a coyote pup before they keeled over and blew away.

The tree said it really liked the community of plants here, they was family, real strong though most every one of’m stunted, starved for love, and cripp’d up pretty bad. But they was alive, that was the thing. The parents never promised them a rose garden, only a chance to root & find out just what-the-hell kinda thing they might be.

That cactus over there found out and’s been complaining ever since, all the time grousing about what a rough deal it was dealt, how it didn’t ask to be a prickly pear bastard, how-come not a yucca with pretty flowers and stuff? Now that yucca was a cactus, not a Mickey-mouse-eared thing everyone talks down to. The elm said the whatever-it-was slept late and got up cranky, you’d think its spines was sticking more in than out.

Now the elm had a real story of deprivation and hard times, being an orphan down the road from its folks’ graves and all, brothers and sisters parched to dust, but you never heard it rankle about it. Elms was tough, they thrived on bad times, they loved bad times because then elms really feel alive and get to dream of turning things around and someday looking like one of them elms down there on the banks of the Cimarron. Runs sand on the surface, but deep down is lots of water. No, up here is good, real good, strong winds, get to see traffic whip by and the train loco-moting cross the span, maybe some horizon even.

I said maybe what that mouse-eared, down-home ugly, bitchy little cactus needed was for another like it to grow nearby, and it’d court it with pollen hauled over by bees and butterflies. Two uglies could make a pretty…

The elm said could be, could be, but…

I waved, said I had to get back on the road to Borrego Springs. I went over to the cactus and looked it over. Not bad, really, it had its beauty, the lopsided symmetry, the shriveled-up Mickey-mouse ears and buds and poisonous tiny barbs at the bases of thousands of long sharp spines promising a better yesterday, though not tomorrow. I mean it was saddled. But someone has to be a cactus, y’know. Guess I’d bitch too.

Racing With Death…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 18, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

The woman told me that the government had big hopes for Bahia, they’d put in a mile long landing strip and planned lots of high rise hotels and a connecting toll road across the peninsula to a port on the Pacific side so people could ferry their boats back and forth from the Sea of Cortez, without having to go around the tip of Baja. I’d heard Bahia was this quiet little paradise of fishermen and low-key life, now I was expecting Acapulco. But when we came down the hill overlooking the bay it was really no more than a sprawling marina and trailer parks with a few low buildings as cornerstones of hope for the tourist center being designed in Mexico City. I dropped her off and followed her directions to a motel where I got a plain room of bed, rickety chair and a table with a pitcher of water and wash pan.

It took half an hour to walk the village, another hour to walk the marinas and trailer parks, and it was getting dark by the time I returned from the air strip, which turned out to be exactly that and no more. A wide strip of mile-long asphalt only a private plane would dare land on. Not ever used and already crumbling. No foundations for a terminal. Not even a promissory sign: Soon opening, Terminals A-F, restaurants, condos, nightclubs, rental cars and aviation tower. Or rent to own.

Across the Sea of Cortez from here was San Carlos where the Mexican government had spent a hundred million on developing for 40 years, and it had refused, the land itself had refused, and the waters. The San Carlos spirit refused to allow it. A Cub Med came and went. A hurricane came and blew down everything the government had put up, and took away an ancient beautiful terraced camper park from the 1920’s, overlooking the port. When the movie Catch 22 was made there things tilted away from the land’s power to keep things as they were, a fishing village in paradise.

There was a two mile long four lane going into San Carlos along a tropical treed boulevard next to a magnificent deep bay edged by crescent sandy beaches, ahead were jagged castle rocks, one called the Caracol with a small village on top, the other a signature landmark called the Tetas de Cabra, looking either like the teats of an unmilked goat on her back, or the fingers of a drowning man reaching to heaven as he sinks away, depending on your mood.

In Bahia mariachi music played with Country and Western all night long, shrieks of American laughter and boozy singing, slamming of trailer doors, boat motors starting up, sometimes a beautiful crystalline phrase of Spanish blessing the desecration of a place imagined by the gods in the mellower times before humanity began to reproduce like viruses. I like squalor and chaos, so I could’ve joined them easily another time but right then I was in freefall, a shell of a man with no desire to kill fish or drink myself into a stupor with good timing guys and gals.

I got in the Buick early and took off. Along the road back I saw a turnoff north that’d cut 30 miles off my getting back to Highway 1 and took it. It was narrower than the one I’d come in on and along stretches were big boulders in place of shoulders. If you ever got a flat there was no way you could get off the road. Where there were no boulders there was a sheer drop to the desert floor. Back then the Mexican highway departments didn’t plan roads with driver’s in mind, only vehicles. What happened to you was your business, theirs was roads.

I passed another old American car, an Olds 88, just as big and heavy as mine, but when I passed him he passed me back right away, he had a bigger engine. He settled in ahead of me and slowed down to where we were doing 20. I fell back, he fell back. I needed a long run to pass him but there was no way to pull over and when I stopped in my lane he did too.

He got going first and I hung back till he was far ahead enough for me to make a run. As I came up on him at 90 he floored it and we were abreast and there wasn’t the power to pull ahead nor would he let me fall behind. I couldn’t see his face, he had on a dark hat and the sun was directly above us but I could see his teeth in a big smile…

A big truck is coming toward us, they travel at 100 miles an hour in the straight-aways. The smile stays there, now we’re doing 10 miles an hour side by side and he has me covered. On both sides of the road are boulders. I push the accelerator through the floor and so does he. Just when a head-on is inevitable he lets me squeeze around him, we click bumpers and molecules of paint from the Buick line dance with molecules of the Freightliner.

The Olds pulls around me again and slows to 30, so I follow him docilely till he turns off at a Y. He touches the brim of his hat in salute and there is the smile again, still no face…

(For more, go to Marilyn & Me, at the top of this webpage.)

split brain decision…

Posted by The Woodcutter on Apr 16, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Can left and right hand grip and shake?

IQ tests don’t and can’t quantify the right brain because it doesn’t know the answers to what the left-brain asks. The left-brain knows multiplication tables and lipstick colors and how to write, the right brain knows God and little children and sunrises. The left-brain says Gee that’s beautiful, and in so saying loses the very vision it is commenting on that veers in from the right brain.

Though they live side by side the split brains quarrel without end. One side feels life and is thrilled by it, and the other wants it quantified and filed for later examination and a report: Sun rose. Round. Yellowish. Blue sky. Some clouds. Easier to see now. Cows got out. Must discipline.

In our own head Ex-communication is going on all the days of our lives. Our Left hand is hand puppet of the right brain. It doesn’t know what the Right hand is doing and doesn’t care. But our conservative Right hand sure knows what the Left hand is doing, and wants an accurate confession on its desk in the morning.

Put simpler, half our mind doesn’t know what’s really going on and never will, while the other half doesn’t have a clue of what is going on but makes stuff up. Put these two under one skull and you have Life.

My left brain — the one that writes in prescribed ways, carries a big stick and scratches my head to help it think, the one that wants a full confession on its desk in the morning — is loud, rude and dense. It is the Crusader and Republican of me. As I get older its presence in my life diminishes because what it depended on for its power has waned: my looks, physical strength, charisma, intensity and the need to be right.

The right brain, on the other hand, talks softly and roots about in acceptance and humanity. It doesn’t know what winning is, or being right or obeyed or catered to. Think of the Dalai Lama doing a show with Bill O’Reilly. Think of Don Rickles and Jesus running for President, and doing a debate at Georgetown University. Think of lips and a fist. But, hey, I need them both. Thing is to domesticate the one and leave the other free and wild. This honors them both. Marilyn has this on the natch. Good model.

I opened a free trade agreement with the get-things-right side of my brain. For forty years I edited what came in from contemplative mind into what editing mind decided it oughtta be. I perfected the raw uncambered passion of ideas, characters and dialogue into bloody heaps of bones, blood and fur. My books were my stories’ roadkill.

Now that I think about it, I never really had anything to say until I was run-over enough to get dragged out of traffic into real life by this woman who does things like this for a living. She was a Benedictine nun for 15 years, then a nurse, then a nursing professor and now my wife.

Seems she needs impossible challenges to get her interest. Lucky for me.