Angoon

Snowing here today. Old, old, totems with moss growing off the top.  Clan poles for each of the houses.  Shark, Bear, Salmon, Killerwhale, Raven,  I walked around to all my interviews. Years ago I learned to take my time.  There was a woman I admired a great deal.  I still do.  She is the current Writer Laureate of the State of Alaska. Nora Marks Dauenhaurer. She is a linguist and a poet, a very dignified woman and a powerful intellectual.  I used to feel tongue-tied around her.  Whatever I said felt wrong and I'd tried to rephrase it and then that was wrong.... Augggg.  Once at a gathering, I decided to try just relaxing and not saying anything.  I sat down next to her and an agonizing ten minutes went by and not a word was said...then another ten.  Then Nora looked at a magazine on the table and it had a picture of the candidate running for president.  She said,  "What do you think of this guy?"  I said,  "I like him.  I think I'm going to vote for him."  She said, "Me too."  Then another ten minutes.  Silence.  And another fifteen.  I started to sweat.  Pretty soon she put her hand on my knee and moved to get up and she looked me in the eye and said,  "John, it was good talking to you," and left.  

What did I learn?  Absolutely nothing...except that she seemed happy, and more comfortable when I kept my mouth shut.  

Now I try and allot more time for interviews than I used to.  When I go to someone's house I try and sit if I can and if people will have me I just listen to whatever they want to say, without my tape recorder running.  I just sit and listen and say enough to let them know I'm interested.  Because I am.  I say,   "No way!"  "You are kidding me!"  "That's kind of like that in Sitka but in Sitka they...."   I watch their babies, and squeak their heads, and I just listen.... Women mostly....  I don't sit and talk with Native people who are drinking alcohol because it almost always gets ugly...  I've been in too many situations where racial tensions come to the surface easily and fights want to happen, guns want to come out, or knives. It's not usually personal...well it is but it doesn't matter...the information isn't worth much and I can't be where new crimes start,  I'm investigating old crimes.

But in late morning when the babies are fed and dressed.  Men come by selling fry bread...or with smoked fish for their Aunties.  It can be a delightful time to sit and listen.  People joke about "Indian Time" how Indians are always late...but you see it in white subsistence communities too.  You get on a different clock.  The house I sat in today was crowded with stuff,  toys and cooking tools, religious icons, then there are people coming in and out,  grabbing food out of the refrigerator.  The old Aunty sitting in her wheelchair presiding like a queen while a three-year-old races her trike around the kitchen table bumping into the table. The television on with only music.  The music from Frozen...is that it?  The three-year-old with no shirt on and a lioness backpack and glittery Princess slippers.  Her mother lying on the couch talking to a friend on her cell phone. The Aunty telling me about the times when she was a girl when the bears used to come right down into town and the girls could talk to the bears but the White Police Officers messed all that up with their guns by shooting at the bears.  I just listen and I don't take notes and I don't turn on my recorder.  I just watch the little girl in her Princess shoes go around and around and around the kitchen table and another uncle comes in and dishes himself some spaghetti and walks back outside with a paper plate dyed red and maybe tomorrow I'll get down to business.

Snow falls on totems.

Ravens on Satellite Dish.

I'm unstuck in time. 

jhs--Angoon 

Your Comments?

What?  I just discovered people were making comments!  Holy...um...Cow!  I thought they were little private notes to me...but no, they were meant to be posted.  I'm so sorry.  I'm a lunkhead.  I think they are posted now.  Thank you for taking the time to write.  Now we will all be famous to the fifteen people who read this blog...isn't that right?  That's the new Andy Warhol-ism everybody gets to be famous to fifteen people, for as long as they want? 

I'm off for a work trip to Angoon tomorrow and I will try and write a not work-related report if I can: weather, flying, general descriptions, maybe even some photos.  Angoon is pretty amazing on a lot of levels. The Salvation Army runs the Bed and Breakfast where I stay...it's the only game in town. They are damn nice folks and they make a hell of a good cookie. I'll keep you posted.

Anvils

Hard grey sky and north wind blowing. Spring wants to jump back to winter but the herring won't let it happen.  The fleet fished again today and there was some spawning out on the islands.  I haven't seen any branches come in yet but hoping they will soon. Whatever the temperature spring is here.  

Another month and another poem for the group.  Jan is headed to her doctor in Seattle. Her medication is losing its effectiveness and we don't know what the sawbones can pull out of his hat this time.  She is a beautiful soul and does not fret or worry but I am a big baby.  We used to travel through the country near the big mudslide in Washington State.  I can't imagine that kind of suffering.  I think of all the families and rescue workers down there and wish there was enough love to keep them safe from cruel and arbitrary bad news, but of course there isn't.  There is only enough love to dress the pain once it comes.  

ANVILS 

Down the road, curtains billow out

open windows, and the boys delivering eggs

have the collars of their coats turned up

waiting for tiny b.b.s to begin falling. 

I was sworn to protect her, for the rest of my life,

but this was a new kind of precipitation

we could not have expected:

nuts and bolts clattering and cracking the window casings,

yolks running yellow in the road where the boys have dropped

their cartons and run home, and the dented mailboxes are falling

over.

I cradle her in my arms and try to explain things

as hammers fall from the sky

whirling like scythes tearing the limbs from the trees,

and the eaves of the houses begin to shred away

 as the woodsheds become dented then tumble in,

dogs begin shrieking, scrambling under houses and digging

their way under stumps where desiccated

raccoons had gone to die.

Finally the anvils begin to fall,

as I’ve only imagined

they would someday.

The whomp,

whomp,

of their foot fall as the first few hit the ground scattering gravel

from the cratered ground

and the next go through the roofs

of the houses down the road, then all around

us, as we hold on to each other tighter 

and tighter, not knowing what

could be coming

next, 

or more accurately

not wanting to know.

                                             John Straley/ Sitka

When The Rules Get Hard: The Detective Parenting Guide

Yesterday it snowed in the morning, wet fat, postage stamp flakes, making paper mache on the porch until everything was white and then the sun melted it away. The gulls are singing their herring song and the fleet is in with all of its usual bustle.  Spring is shouldering its way into Sitka.

I suppose anyone who has raised a child to adulthood and that adult child is halfway presentable and out of prison, that parent thinks they are experts at child rearing.  Jan and I seem to have run in a crowd of great parents:  swim team parents and baseball parents,  chess team parents, they did it all. We did our share I suppose, and though we adore our son...sometimes I wonder,  I’m not sure I was really a great parent.  

First…my parents weren't all that great by modern standards.  I was horrified when I did research on FASD for my job recently, because I’m certain my mother never gave up her alcohol and cigarettes when she was pregnant with me.  She had lived through the Depression and World War II AND Prohibition,  she was not giving up cocktails for a her fifth pregnancy.  It hadn't hurt the other four.  My folks used to watch Jan and I discuss raising kids and shake their heads….“Jesus H. Christ,” my mom said a few years before she died,  “I don’t think I ever heard the word 'parenting' until you brought it up. You just feed ‘em and love ‘em and make sure they can read.  I mean really.”

I remember the first chores I had to perform were how to make a martini and how to build a fire in the fireplace. Also, my folks were sick of organizations by the time I came around.  I was told that the Boy Scouts of America were unacceptable because of the neckerchiefs and their close association with the Hitler Youth.  Neckerchiefs not Boy Scouts.  The truth was my other siblings had done scouting and my mom was done with it. So I didn’t start off with a great role model.  First, I’m not one for rules anyway.  I like discussions.  Finn Straley grew up in a swirl of language and discussions.  Of course there were rules when he was a baby…chewing…burping…peeing in the potty, that kind of thing.  But as he got older concepts got more complex.  Some things were “funny at home and not funny at school.”   It wasn’t always easy:  I remember walking downtown in Seattle where Finn’s Grandma lived and we came to a busy corner. He was a little cherub with golden curls and an impish smile.

“Remember what I told you about corners in the city?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with a furrowed brow,  “Stop, Drop, and Roll?” he said hopefully.

“No…,” I said, “Something else about coming to Seattle.”

“Don’t say ‘shit’ at Grandpa’s house, because he doesn’t think it’s funny.”

“All true, and good to remember, but corner-specific.”

He looked at me squinting as if he were trying to suck the answer right out of my brain.

“Stop…Look…and Listen,” I told him. 

“Oh Brother!” Finn said, looking exasperated and blowing air out his lips like a horse, as if there was just too much to remember in this life.

And there is, that’s the problem with rules.  Hard to remember, particularly if you have hardly ever had to walk across a busy intersection in your entire young life.  It’s way easier to remember not to say “shit” at Grandpa’s, because that’s something that could possibly happen. 

Later, Finn wasn’t all that crazy about having a father who was a private investigator as a teenager.  Whether it was true or not, Finn believed I knew what he did before he got home.  It so happened that I often did.  The police officers would sometimes call me, if they got hints of dopey teenage behavior.  Reports of car surfing or ghost riding the whip often made their way to me before Finn was off the hood of his car.  The worst for him was my punishment, which was often listening to my detailed description of cases I had worked on where young men had become quadriplegics.  

It was the Detective War stories that killed him, this really bothered the young Finn.  Every time I represented some young doofus who ended up doing something incredibly horrible that resulted in a long prison sentence it would invariably send me into a tizzy and I would rush home  to confront my otherwise perfectly angelic son.

“Hi Dad”

“Hi Buddy, How was school?”

“Good, How was work?”

“Good… except I met a kid who took too much LSD and had sex with three underage girls and now is being tried as an adult and is going to prison for seventy-five years.  Tell me that you are not doing anything, even remotely like that.”

“Good.  I’m going up to my room, until you are not crazy anymore.”

No, it was not easy being the teenage son of a private detective, and a natural-born worrier.  There is a Zen saying, “There are lots of ways to get lost in the world.”   I tried not being too hysterical as a parent.  Jan was pretty level-headed, though she did have her peculiarities, like her need to explain every biological detail in nature.  Like showing the Toddler Finn how mosquitoes suck blood from your body using a hand lens so that the little bugs grew into the size of killer pterodactyls in his mind and he ran screaming from the sound of one. 

In the end I settled on one golden rule for my parenting experience, the one inviolate principle I could find no exception to:  “Be kind to the dog and don’t do meth.” 

It really about covers it all, and I have to say so far it’s worked.  Finn Straley is a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, California, who has so far stayed out of prison and has a phobia of mosquitoes, and most of the natural world.  

 I may be a crappy parent but he is still a good man.  One could do worse for a sampler on the wall.

 Be kind to the dog and don't do meth.

The herring gather

on the beach outside our house.

I miss you so much. 

 jhs---Sitka, AK

Seth Kantner and Doing the Hard Thing

Hard rain for a few minutes and then clearing, then downpours again.  I need more words for the different types of rain. 

For Humanities 120 this week Seth Kantner called in from Kotzebue.  He's the author of Shopping for Porcupine and Ordinary Wolves.  He is a natural talking to classes with his storyteller's tone, who is comfortable around a fire or a coffee pot, or on the phone with a friend.  He is self effacing but...I've learned, partly from self reflection, that self effacement often protects a healthy ego...which is what someone needs who pushes himself.  

Though his first book was fiction, I believe Seth Kantner is a truth teller down to his bones.  He is both more empathetic and tougher than almost anyone else I've ever met, which are both good qualities for a truth teller. (I hate the term "non-fiction writer")

You might already know this from his work...but he was born in a sod igloo some two hundred river miles from Kotzebue on the south side of the Brooks Range.  His parents were back-to-the-landers and he was raised wanting more than anything to be an Inupiat hunter but he was white. His books are almost romantic parables of the boy raised in the wild, if they weren't so honest and realistic about the harshness of the conditions.  He loved  the dogs that pulled his sled, he told us but a dog's life had no real meaning or value and was sacrificed at the first hint of slowing the progress of the team.  He admired nothing more than the old Native ways, but found hard times and ugly conditions along with the friendships in the village. The gift of his writing is that he says what he encountered and he doesn't color it up to fit anyone’s mythology or fashion, often it's brutal...and ugly.

Brutal on himself: he spoke to our class about his choices and why he made them after he left his home school environment in the wild, went to college in Fairbanks and Montana then came back to live near his old homestead, in the far north.  I asked him about the "sense of place" in his own writing, and he said characteristically,  "I don't really know about literary terms.  I just know that I don't really want to write about anything other than this place.  I've been to Sitka and it's beautiful.  I've been lots of places in the world now and they are interesting but they are not my country...they are not the place I can tell stories about...or write about I guess."  

I asked him to compare himself to his old homestead and what qualities did they share, he said,  "Wow...I don't know...disorganized, windblown, maybe...open to the elements.."   

"Remote?"  I suggested. 

"Yeah"  Remote...hard to get to, I suppose."  

Later we were talking about how he was raised and his life now.  He said,  "It was interesting,  I just remember that doing almost anything was hard...." (He mentioned there were no clocks and there wasn't the usual rush or time anxiety.)  "It was hard but I liked it that way and I still do.  I like doing things absolutely the hardest way."  He told the story of asking his wife if she wanted to go camping and she said,  "Yes, I want to go camping, but I don't want it to be hard,"  and Seth thought to himself,  "Why would I want to do that? You know, do it so it’s easy."    

We agreed that writing is hard.  I say that to Jan all the time when I'm working on something. Writing is hard.  Seth said he would much rather butcher a moose than write a paragraph for one of his columns for the Anchorage paper.  I don't feel that way...I'd rather write a paragraph than skin a moose....but I'd be happy to set aside any paragraph to have some good moose meat to eat. Yet, we are both dyslexic, and writing will always be hard.  Making the transition from the music we hear in a storyteller's voice to the little black marks on the page, is tortuous... particularly in the beginning.  It's hard to understand if you don’t have your brain wired this way, but for a dyslexic to spell correctly is like a blind person pretending to see. Certain things just don’t make it from the eyes to the brain correctly: words as collections of letters, faces into our memories, sometimes.  But the upside for the weirdly wired brains is that we hear music everywhere and we can remember it.  We can even see it sometimes.  But as I said...it's hard to explain.  

Seth is an extraordinary man with all of the talents and struggles of a dyslexic writer, and maybe his books are so great just because they were so frigging hard to write.  Why would he want to do something easy?  His books have gotten a lot of attention and they deserve it.  His photographs are stunning.  

He told our class how he loved it when visitors would come by the homestead: “It would be one thing if a bear came up and licked the window but if a visitor came by THAT was exciting.”  If you ever get a chance to visit with Seth Kantner you should take it, you can hear the tone of the visitor who has come by dog team to rest his bones and laugh. 

This is an extraordinary and authentic voice.  Find it in his two books and online.  He has surprises for you and he might challenge some of your assumptions about life in the north, but nothing good is ever easy I suppose. 

So much rain tonight

the gutters flow black as blood

under the street lamps. 

jhs--Sitka, AK 

The Storm and Pattiann Rogers

Storm blowing up tonight.  I was wrong, five boats went out on opening day from Sitka when the seas were big, but the wind had not built to what they are calling for tonight.  They went out and set in the big seas and are back already.  The prices are high right now and they have caught their quota at the good price and can sit out the storm with satisfaction.

Yesterday I wrote about crime and Bukowski.  The other theme that has always animated my writing is the world on the other side of my windows.  I've loved stories about animals and adventures ever since I was a kid.  I loved Greek and Roman myths, my parents always talked about the old world and my dad read the old literature aloud to me.  To this day I love the stories of transformation from human to animal and back again. The happiest times I had working was as a young man working with horses and mules.  

I've always loved the poets who took nature as their theme. One poet I've stuck with over the years is Pattiann Rogers.  Born in the south and living in Colorado now, she has a genius for language that matches the complexity and density of experience.   She is no wide-eyed schoolgirl when it comes to nature.  Check out one her most popular poems:  

The Hummingbird: A Seduction

If I were a female hummingbird perched still
And quiet on an upper myrtle branch
In the spring afternoon and if you were a male
Alone in the whole heavens before me, having parted
Yourself, for me, from cedar top and honeysuckle stem
And earth down, your body hovering in midair
Far away from jewelweed, thistle and bee balm;

And if I watched how you fell, plummeting before me,
And how you rose again and fell, with such mastery
That I believed for a moment you were the sky
And the red-marked bird diving inside your circumference
Was just the physical revelation of the light's
Most perfect desire;

And if I saw your sweeping and sucking
Performance of swirling egg and semen in the air,
The weaving, twisting vision of red petal
And nectar and soaring rump, the rush of your wing
In its grand confusion of arcing and splitting
Created completely out of nothing just for me,

Then when you came down to me, I would call you
My own spinning bloom of ruby sage, my funneling
Storm of sunlit sperm and pollen, my only breathless
Piece of scarlet sky, and I would bless the base
Of each of your feathers and touch the tine
Of string muscles binding your wings and taste
The odor of your glistening oils and hunt
The honey in your crimson flare.
And I would take you and take you and take you
Deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted.

All I can say is Wowza!  Nothing Mickey Spillane ever wrote was so sexy.  Though to be fair to Mick, he never tried from the point of view of a hummingbird.  Pattiann Rogers is an extraordinary poet who is incredibly vigorous and funny.  I guess by vigorous I mean that she accepts no limitations to her imagination and to her manners.  If someone suggested that a subject or a tone was not appropriate for a poem, she would run straight toward it.  Difficult scientific concepts attract her, philosophical wit, tradition, and the avant garde attract her. She is not "correct" in any way, but is dedicated only to her delight and passion for praise, praise for the complex and and interconnected world we find before us.  One drop of her work may be an antidote to a volume of Bukowski's.  This is not to compare the two for there is no reconciling the two, that may be what I try and do in my odd crime novels.  No, Pattiann Rogers is open to the new and is as stubborn as a rusty valve.  There is nobody else like her, out there writing poetry.  

I've heard that there are a group of women who gather early in the morning once a year to roll naked in the morning dew.  Where?  I do not know.  But I like to think that their ranks are growing, and that they are is testament to this extraordinary early poem: 

Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew

Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered
Meadows, backside, frontside, through the white clover
And feather peabush, over spongy tussocks
And shaggy-mane mushrooms, the abandoned nests
Of larks and bobolinks, face to face
With vole trails, snail niches, jelly
Slug eggs; or in a stone-walled garden, level
With the stemmed bulbs of orange and scarlet tulips,
Cricket carcasses, the bent blossoms of sweet William,
Shoulder over shoulder, leg over leg, clear
To the ferny edge of the goldfish pond—some people
Believe in the rejuvenating powers of this act—naked
As a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs
And ankles drenched in the dew-filled gulches
Of oak leaves, in the soft fall beneath yellow birches,
All of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry
Of the kingbird, the buzzing of grasshopper sparrows,
Those calls merging with the dawn-red mists
Of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then
Not merely through the ears but through the skin
Of every naked person willing every event and potentiality
Of a damp transforming dawn to enter.

Lillie Langtry practiced it, when weather permitted,
Lying down naked every morning in the dew,
With all of her beauty believing the single petal
Of her white skin could absorb and assume
That radiating purity of liquid and light.
And I admit to believing myself, without question,
In the magical powers of dew on the cheeks
And breasts of Lillie Langtry believing devotedly
In the magical powers of early morning dew on the skin
Of her body lolling in purple beds of bird’s-foot violets,
Pink prairie mimosa. And I believe, without doubt,
In the mystery of the healing energy coming
From that wholehearted belief in the beneficent results
Of the good delights of the naked body rolling
And rolling through all the silked and sun-filled,
Dusky-winged, sheathed and sparkled, looped
And dizzied effluences of each dawn
Of the rolling earth.

Just consider how the mere idea of it alone
Has already caused me to sing and sing
This whole morning long.

- PATTIANN ROGERS

She has tons of books.  Find them and buy them.  They will change your life.  If you get a chance to hear her read do it.  Drive a couple of hours if you have to.  Take your sweetheart and get a hotel room.  It is worth it.  There is a lot more laughing at one of her readings than at a showing of American Pie III  Really there is, she is funny.  If you want to see your sweetheart blush, call out for the Hummingbird poem, and tell Pattiann that I told you to do it, and she'll get a laugh out of that.  

A good storm blows in.

Lanyards rattle the flag poles.

Come, let me hold you. 

 jhs--Sitka 

Crime and Charles Bukowski

Hard Rain, off and on all day, 30-foot seas offshore and the longline fleet is waiting to set their gear to begin the black cod season.  Soon people will be cutting black cod collars in town and soon the barbecues will be heating up.

Trial is over, our client was convicted. The charge was a misdemeanor assault and frankly no one was shocked at the verdict, including our client.  The case involved a late night brawl out in front of a local bar, some serious injuries.  Our client ended up hugging his victim in the hall of the court house.  There will be years of medical bills, which will need to be paid, and alcohol programs to go through, and the imperfect system grinds its way slowly on.  

I've been thinking about how I can write about my job on this blog and it really seems that I can't.  I owe my clients absolute confidentiality. The trial and its verdict, what happened in the hall was public, but if I try to change names and fictionalize characters, the contemporaneous aspect of a blog might lead some of my clients to believe I was writing about them even if I never intended to.  So,  I'm going to stay away from any of the day-to-day real crime stories from my job.  It's too bad because I learn so many things.  

I started out working a murder case back in 1984,  for many years I had a minor specialty of crimes on boats.  I worked several homicides on fishing boats.  I have worked several full time stints for the Public Defender Agency and have been hired away by private attorneys for cases.   I worked for DEC as an Environmental Crimes Investigator when we lived in Fairbanks when Jan was going to graduate school.  I covered the North Slope and I carried a badge, the only time in my life.  

Mostly I've defended people whose life has been blown to shreds by alcohol and/or drugs.  I've sat in countless cells with men mostly, but several women... and tried to help them piece their memories back together after they have done unspeakable things to people they loved.  Alcohol and impulse...access to guns.  Trying to put their lives back to the twisted "normalcy" that their childhood had been.  People, who to everyone else seem to be afraid of happiness and health and are drawn to despair. These are often the people that I serve,  that I work for.  

There was a good article in the Los Angeles Times today about Charles Bukowski, the poet immortalized by the film Barfly, and often considered the Bard of the Gutter.  Find it here: 

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-79556902/

Many young men of a certain temperament fall under the sway of Bukowski  their first year of college. I was of that temperament: down with the working class but with a sensitivity and erudition that kept me heartbreakingly apart.  Of course for me it was a pose, for Bukowski it was his life,  imposed on him by tough circumstances and then ironically embraced when it brought him fame, booze, a house, women, and open access to a ready publisher.

He has published so much, and so much of it is good,  but so much of it is the same.  Much of his work contains the boozy narcissism of the alcoholic genius stewing in his own juices: He is smarter and more sensitive than all those smooth skinned bastards who hurt him in the past. Fuck them. Stay with me and hear me ruminate on the death of our sick culture's minor gods.   

His achievement is that he has dialed his drunken ranting into poetry that fits into the western canon and he made it understandable...a few degrees to the right or left and he would be talking another kind of gibberish (alien abductions or black helicopter conspiracies) like the guy on the next bar stool.  What he did is a miracle really, as if he possessed some kind of microphone that filtered out insanity.  Because he clearly came from that place...a festering breeding-ground of craziness.  

So many people reach the same place and only have the strength left to pull the trigger. 

Hard rain all day long

not even the dogs go out

for more than a piss. 

jhs--Sitka, Alaska

Jury is out

Had a trial the last two days and the jury is out. I can't tell you the details other than I'm tired tonight.  I have a lot I'd like to tell you but I can't.  I'll stick to poetry for another night instead.  

The road to our house 

is hard to navigate,  yet

our dogs are friendly. 

Photo of a full moon

A full moon coming

over a cold, hard ocean. 

Only one crow calls.

jhs-- Sitka, Alaska

Beauty/Memory

The first day of March. The snow is a smooth crust in our yard, but in the north corner near one of the tallest spruce trees it was a warm springtime.  Jan and I sat out there for a spell this afternoon.  She has a cold and I was tired.  We had cleaned house and sorted our recycling.  I was getting myself together to sign books at the local bookstore at three. But sitting in the wobbly plastic chairs in the sun for the first time in months I didn't want to go anywhere.  It was exquisite with the sun reflecting off the snow and the heat on our faces.  We are sixty, is that why these moments feel so fine?  Is that why I want to stretch them out?  A few more moments...just a few more moments. 

But I got up and took the recycling in.  Jan didn't want to go.  Her cold had gotten the best of her.  She hadn't taken her medication for her Parkinson's and she wasn't moving well, so I blasted off and I packed my good clothes to change at the store because I was running late and I would get smelly dumping the beer and wine bottles from our tree-burning party that were in the recycling.  

To tell the truth I wasn't looking forward to the local signing.  My hometown signing is always emotionally loaded for me. These really are the people I want to like the book.  This is my audience, if I have one in my mind, other than my siblings.  So...if they don't come out I take it personally.  I know I shouldn't.  But I do.  Another big problem was there was a big event scheduled at the same time, the very popular, Wearable Arts Show!  So...big draw for the likely readers.  Jan calls me Eeyore when the local signing comes around because I tend toward pessimism. 

But I have another problem with the hometown signing: tension, memory, and my terrible spelling all conspire against me.  Here's how it works:  I have a hard time with names, I can't spell, I get anxious about it.  I see someone in line, I know their name, but then as they walk up I start to freak out and their freaking name flies out of my head.  I panic. I try to cover and I say,  "Help me with how to spell your name," and they inevitably say,  " B... O... B"  and I say something like,  " Oh the American way, not the French Canadian way?"  and move on quickly.  

This time there were people lined up who I have known for thirty years at the book store. I knew all their names perfectly well but that wouldn't matter because for some stupid reason as soon as they walked toward me with a book my mind would go blank.  So, I  took no chances.  I announced to them that on the way over that I had suffered a severe head injury and that I would appreciate if when they came up to the table if they would all tell me their names and if they were buying books for someone else could they please write the names down on little stickies (which the bookstore provided) so I could spell the name correctly.  I thought about wearing a gory bandage but hadn't prepared adequately.  

The signing went swimmingly. I reminded Ashia, the kind bookstore manager, about my recent head injury and to keep telling the customers to tell me their names and everyone, even people I owed money to and had just seen that afternoon at the recycling center, came up to me gently and touched my hand and said, "John you are doing so well, are you sure you don't need a rest?"  and I bravely pushed on and inscribed a book for them as if I were on the fields of Flanders.  It was great.  

I spelled most of the names correctly.  I got one Kristen or Kirsten wrong but that name is fucking impossible anyway.     

I had a lovely time, and I remembered what is great about doing this.  Next to  alcoholism whining is the biggest occupational hazard.  Writers love to complain.  I have done my fair share of it.  I used to complain about how writing is so much about delayed gratification.  You write and you never feel the satisfaction.  When you play in a band and perform at the Moose Lodge you get to see the people dance and as a musician you feel GREAT.  But when you spend years writing a book you end up with a stack of papers and you just look at it and then ship it out in the mail.  

Not today.  Today when people came to the bookstore on a wonderfully sunny day, when they snuck out early from the Wearable Arts Show, when they told me their names, even though they knew I didn't have a head injury, when I could see in their eyes they were looking forward to reading a story I had written, when a native woman told me she was buying a book for her 87 year old mother who had read all of my books and just had to have my new book, and when I told her that I had based a character on her nephew she clapped her hand over her mouth and giggled in a very old way that I instantly recognized as a family trait I was overwhelmed and grateful, grateful, grateful.  And I was nothing but happy that I that I had chosen to be a writer today. 

Crusty snow, warm sun 

we sit in rickety chairs 

and you hold my hand. 

jhs--3/1/2014  Sitka