Small Spaces

That’s a text I sent myself one day
to remind me, simple is perfect.
 

Cottages and bungalows and cabins.

Big, soft chairs.

Old lamps

Corners and nooks and window seats and alcoves 

 

Places to write become places to live.  I like it that way.  Even in a big house, I’ll end up in one room, in one corner with a comfortable chair,  a small table, a light to turn up or down.  A few old and much-loved tchotchkes here and there.  A window is nice.

I like looking at tiny houses.  Converted sheds in the back yard draw me in. Little outbuildings turned into offices with a single bed or comfy couch in case of company. Or in case the occupant needs a nap. That’s just about perfect.

It’s clear this is now a lifelong pattern.  Whatever the size of the place, I live mostly in one room. When I’m tired of it, I go into another room.  That’s two rooms so far.

The concept of small spaces seems normal for a writer.  Less distractions.  It’s cozy enough to be filled with thoughts, or in the absence of them, it’ll contain the angst.

Sister Fern sings on TV 60 years later

Turned on TV Thursday night to watch a favorite show, A P Bio on NBC, and there’s Mother (Sister Fern Jones) singing “Didn’t It Rain”

It’s a funny show about a naughty-to-bad teacher.  Love the cast. These two pictured are Glenn Howerton and Patton Oswalt. Everybody’s at the top of their game.  The classroom’s filled with young talent. The teachers’ lounge is charmingly off-center and the school office has its own quirks.

I’m glad the writers and producers and music supervisors invite Sister Fern from time to time.   Her feisty rockabilly/gospel fits right in.

 

 

It Might As Well Be Spring.

By Anita Garner

California wildflowers poster series from artist Gompers Saijo**

When Spring arrives, most people feel awake, alive, excited.  For me it comes with a twinge of melancholy.  Right now we’re in the flannel-to-flowers transition in Northern California which puts me in mind of a song, one that haunts me at unexpected times through the year, but always at the start of Spring.  And always this song brings to mind a dear friend who shared my love for this ballad. Yes, I’ve written about him before, and may again.  That’s what happens when you’re unforgettable.

Ed Wetteland was a keyboard genius in a giant body. He played most of his life in the Bay Area, in clubs and concerts, putting on the tux for big band gigs, working with just about everybody in music who came through The City.  When he wasn’t working, he wandered, with some of us in tow, into clubs down hidden alleyways in The City, sliding onto the piano bench, playing a little, slipping back out and on to another club. Everyone made way. Everyone knew Ed.  Mercurial.  Tender.  Then mercurial again.

Home was his country acre in Sonoma County where the other part of his life was spent coaching singers in his studio and holding forth on the deck outside his honest to goodness log cabin in Sebastopol, indulging in very good wine provided by his Bohemian Club buddies, telling stories, stopping to name the notes played by the wind chimes and whistling back at birds.

We were friends from the first hello.  We had our little traditions.  Wherever he played, when I came in, he’d weave away from the song he was performing and slide into the bridge of one of my favorite songs, It Might As Well Be Spring. This bridge slays me.  Melancholy. Plaintive.

I keep wishing I were somewhere else
Walking down a strange new street
Hearing words that I have never heard
From a man I’ve yet to meet
 – Rodgers & Hammerstein

One Sunday Ed promised friends he’d play at their church in Santa Rosa.  He was distinctly un-churchy.  He insisted I come and he’d buy brunch afterward.  I arrived a bit late. Ed was playing a hymn.  I wish I could remember which one.   I didn’t think he’d seen me slip into a pew in the back, but obviously he did because he created a seamless segue from the hymn into the bridge above, and right back into the hymn.

He never recorded It Might As Well Be Spring, but here’s another favorite he played often. Sophisticated Lady comes from a recording session in the home of a friend. A few of us gathered in a wine country estate to hear Ed record some of his favorite songs at a spectacular Boesendorfer grand piano.

About this time of year, just before the official start of Spring, Ed would be on his deck, holding forth at length about flora and fauna and especially about California’s native plants.

Ed at Bohemian Grove

**Wildflower posters are available from California Native Plant Society

******

 

 

 

 

 

Monday’s Child

By Anita GarnerWell shoot, Mother Goose, I thought this was some of your work but now I find it comes from an old fortune-telling tradition from the 1800’s, a rhyming prediction of a newborn’s future.

If you want to play and don’t know the day of the week you were born, the internet will tell you.  Then you get to decide how much of this you believe.

In this house we have one “far to go,” one “loving and giving” and a “must work for a living.” That last one is me. I’m a Saturday.

Looks like you Mondays and Sundays get the best deal here.  I’m not sure in today’s world how far “fair of face” or “bonny and blithe” will get you, but it seems like a good start.

When I check birth dates for people who are squandering their perfectly lovely predictions, I have to wonder if this poem knows what it’s doing, but  that could just be my day-of-the-week envy talking.

******

 

In Search Of Genius

By Anita Garner

 

 

 

 

Left: Charles Schulz in his Santa Rosa studio
Right:  Three geniuses, Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank & Henry Ford at Luther Burbank’s Santa Rosa garden. 

When inspiration can’t find me, I go in search of it.

I don’t need to go far. In Northern California’s wine country there’s much to inspire – the roads that wind for driving or walking and bicycling past heritage hydrangeas climbing up tall barns, past wineries in all shapes and sizes. I’m on a quest.  I’ve traveled these roads many times and I know where I’m headed.

I’m headed to Sonoma County, to Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.  In the same way that reading biographies of achievers opens a window into their process, so do these field trips. It’s uplifting to walk where genius walked and talked and worked. There’s always the possibility that if I stand where they stood, something might rub off.

I visit the workplaces of two undeniably brilliant individuals.  The Charles Schulz Museum is, of course, an homage to everything Peanuts, and the Luther Burbank Cottage is Mecca for garden lovers. Both are in Santa Rosa. By necessity, guides deal mostly with the overview. They speak of awards won, of the subject’s ties to other famous people, of the work we know.

I’m looking for more. I want to see how they endured the days that were spectacularly unproductive. Moving away from tour groups, I look for the minutiae that tethered each of these famous men to earth. Was he an early riser? How many hours a day did he work? What did he eat? Did he have hobbies? Who did he love? Who loved him?

I want to know, did the realization of his goals offer even a small degree of immunity from strife? Or did he bump into his own saboteurs; the insecurities and loneliness and even the near-crippling fears encountered on the path to making something.

When we look at a creative icon who’s now departed, we’re always looking backward. We see a whole lifetime of output, an entire body of work. I want to know how he handled the chunks of time when things didn’t go right. I ask about the dry spells.

Charles Schulz used ice skating and long walks to cheer himself. He built a rink near his studio and his visits there were a vital part of his routine. Every day he sat at the same table in the snack bar, ate the same food, and watched the skaters. Merchants at the nearby mall report Schulz as a frequent visitor, not so much a shopper as an ambler. They grew accustomed to the lone figure walking around, deep in thought.

His real office/studio was in an unassuming building steps away from where the museum is today. One day I went to the empty office, found someone working around the building and asked if I could go in.

“Nothing in there.  The furniture’s in the museum now.”

I knew that, but I thought if I could just be where he worked…  It was magic and humbling to be reminded once again we’re not all created equal in terms of talent and abilities.

Luther Burbank grew himself an escape route. He took leave of his greenhouse in Santa Rosa and traveled the bumpy road to his experimental farm in Sebastopol to work and sleep in the modest cabin at the site. He walked and thought and wrote in his notebooks and on his way to bringing to life plants we now know he documented days when nothing bloomed the way he had planned.

Charles Schulz said he was driven to make cartoons because it was all he was good at. It was his form of self-expression. Charlie Brown, he said, was the manifestation of his own vulnerability.  Luther Burbank didn’t consider himself a visionary, but rather a hard-working scientist who kept experimenting until something good came of it. The museum in the carriage house adjacent to Burbank’s cottage is suitably informative, but I return to the tiny room at the rear of the greenhouse and to the desk where he kept his notes.

Both Schulz and Burbank fit the definition of genius. I feel it when I’m in the places they once were. It’s comforting to know that in the midst of lives filled with so many accomplishments, each of them put great store by the one trait they prized above all others – discipline. They kept showing up. I can do that.

******

Bloom where you’re planted.

By Anita GarnerDaddy was a master gardener with an aversion to forcing blooms.  When pressured by mother, he’d cut flowers for her and bring them inside, one bloom at a time, for a small vase, but he refused to buy hothouse flowers because of what he considered their unnatural growing conditions.

Reverend Raymond Jones, a Southern preacher, advised his congregations to “bloom where  you’re planted” and of course he meant it in terms of doing good works, no matter where life takes you.  But his theory was one he also took literally.  He was at odds with an industry’s need to force plants.

The root (sorry) of his aversion to cutting flowers may have stemmed (sorry) from the fact that his people were farmers by occupation.  Some of them were sharecroppers who also tended vegetable gardens and sold produce for a living.  Daddy came up gardening with Paw Paw Jones in order to survive.

When we moved from the Deep South to Southern California, a new world grew outside.  Birds of Paradise.  Avocados.  Camellias.  For the first time, Daddy had a pleasure garden and delighted in tending plants that nobody had to have, but he still didn’t cut any of them to bring inside.

At first he was apologetic about the rows of irises he planted around his vegetable patch, but soon pansies lined the driveway out front.  He’d try anything.  He coaxed to giant size some plants that shouldn’t have been able to thrive in Glendale, and later Palm Springs.

Daddy had been gone for years by the time I began putting Paperwhites in pots during the winter. I never saved the bulbs for re-planting outside but this year I’m trying.  There’s a spot right under the lemon tree that gets nice morning sun.  I think they’ll like it there, but since they’ve already been forced, I have no idea if they’ll want to show themselves again. If Daddy was around to appreciate watching them sprout and perfume the air here in my office, he might reconsider.

Morning People Versus The World

By Anita Garner

I’m a morning person, awake before dawn. One thing I’ve learned, if you’re one of us, best keep it to yourself. Night people tend to get touchy about mornings.

My radio and television colleagues who have to get up and warm a microphone and clap on a headset while it’s still dark outside are divided. There are the morning people – a cup of coffee and after some mild grumbling, they’re fine.  Then there are the night owls, and for them going to bed between 7-8 PM to get up around 2-3 AM is torture.

When I did morning radio, I dropped off my little girl, still in her pajamas, at the babysitter’s home, where she went right back to sleep while  I went to a radio station to power up. I hated having to trundle her around like that, but at least I could get my engines revving.

My blogging buddy, Dave Williams, is the morning man at KLIF, Dallas.  You can listen to him weekday mornings. He’s spent a lifetime going to work in the dark, in cities all over the U.S. but you wouldn’t know it from the warmth in the voice you hear coming through your speaker.

It’s nice having friends in different time zones.  We morning people can get a conversation going anytime with someone, somewhere. Much as I enjoy my solitary pre-dawn coffee, there’s something cozy and unexpected about looking across the way in the dark and seeing a light pop on. In San Francisco where I lived on Green Street, there was one tall building on Russian Hill among the Victorians and across from me on an upper floor, one window lighted up just as I switched on my lamp.  I never needed to meet the keeper of the light.  We were already morning buddies.

In Mill Valley, where redwood trees kept our entire Blithedale Canyon neighborhood dark for hours, one lone bicyclist rode past every morning on his way up the mountain with his light blinking in the dark.

We morning people always collect night people who think we’re odd. One night a friend slept on our sofa and when my husband woke, she asked him (about me) does she always sing like that in the morning?  Yes, she does.  Could you make her stop? In my defense, it was humming.

******

Spellchecking the South

By Anita Garner

Spellcheck and my book manuscript don’t speak the same language.  Spellcheck can handle “y’all” and “ain’t” but  I write a conversation from the Deep South in the 1950’s and Spellcheck lays down squiggly red lines.

Evangelists outside a tent revival meeting look up at the crop duster they hired to drop leaflets and one of them says,

“Well now he’s just showin’ out.”  Spellcheck wants him to say “showing off” but of course he wouldn’t.

Another place Spellcheck and I tussle is when I type lyrics to songs Mother recorded, and I spell them out the way she sang them. I never saw anybody in an audience who didn’t understand what she meant, but Spellcheck would like them fixed.

All through the editing process,  we make a million stops together with Spellcheck asking are you sure and me saying, I really meant it.  I type the name of this song I’m about to link for you. Spelllcheck asks would you like to correct it?  I say no thank you. I ain’t messin’ with Sister Fern.  I didn’t mess with her when she walked amongst us, and I ain’t about to start now.

In this song,  she gets wound up and I can see Spellcheck about ready to give up. “Furthermore” is fuh’-tha-more and she’s got her own version of boogeyman.  You’ll catch it.

You Ain’t Got Nothin’

 

 

Morning Preacher on The Glory Road

By Anita Garner

Brother Ray’s mornings started with newspapers and moved
on to the radio station.

Arkansas, 1952

Daddy and Leslie Ray and I all woke before daylight in the parsonage, ready to face the day.  My brother and I got up early on purpose because it was rare quiet time we could spend alone with Daddy before heading to school. Since leaving his father’s house, Daddy had kept to their farmer’s hours when every child was a farmhand and every farmhand was out in the field before sunup.

Leslie Ray took his place at the table, bringing his breakfast with him, and the three of us shared a comfortable intimacy. From behind my cereal box, I watched Daddy read the morning paper. To be present while he read The Arkansas Gazette was to watch a food lover devour a favorite meal. He smiled.  He frowned. He exclaimed,

“Well I never!”

He savored every page and remembered all of it. This was evident in the many references to newspaper stories that turned up in his sermons on the radio and in church.

If someone who didn’t already love reading sat across from Reverend Raymond Jones while he sipped his tea and read his morning newspaper, that person would have to re-think the power of stories told in newsprint.

If we were quiet for a long time, he’d read out loud a headline or the first two or three lines of a story. Then he stopped. When we became intrigued and asked him to keep reading, we could see him make a determination right then and there about content. He scanned ahead before proceeding, editing out references he didn’t want us to see. He underestimated our curiosity. When we left the parsonage we would find out the result of any story he censored at home.

Editing as he read created an intriguing rhythm. His deliberation caused a delay of a couple of seconds, so in my mind I played a game, racing ahead, guessing how the sentence and the paragraph and the story might end.

My brother and I went to the stove for several cups of the coffee Daddy made first thing when he got up. We’d been drinking coffee since we were very small, mixing in copious amounts of sugar and thick, fresh cream, like Southern children do, to turn it pale. Daddy brewed the strong Luzianne coffee with chicory Mother liked.  It would be re-heated hours later when she woke. Her coffee was so dense by the time she got out of bed, Daddy joked he could slice it up and serve it with gravy and call it supper.

Without looking up, he admonished us every morning,

“Leave enough coffee in the pot for yore Mama.”

With his head still inside his newspaper and without a glance at the food I had on the plate before me, he chided me about my breakfast selections.

“If that’s all you plan to eat, Nita Faye, you’ll never get big like your brother.”

Then he questioned his son about the care and feeding of the outside animals, some of which were destined to become our meals one day soon.  Did you feed them, son? No matter what the truth might be, Leslie answered, yessir.

To any other questions Daddy asked while reading his newspaper, we answered in the affirmative and sipped our coffee. In that companionable time, Daddy was easily pleased, satisfied with the way his days began.

As we cleared our plates and made ready for school, we left him with scissors in hand, turning the pages back to where he’d inked notes in the margin of a story, cutting out the ones he wanted to share with his wife. Mother didn’t relish mornings, but she loved news as much as Daddy and they had an agreement that he would bring to her attention points of interest by placing clippings next to her coffee cup. Later in the day the two of them held animated discussions about current events.

A few minutes more and he was at the sink, washing the ink off his hands before grabbing his hat and heading out on his early morning pastor calls and then to the radio station for a morning sermonette. I wonder how many stories-worth of newsprint he must have washed off over the years.

 

 

 

New reward system. Carrot, meet stick.

By Anita Garner

The younger me thought I could do a bunch of things at once.   This is not a great time to find out I’m no longer a good multi-tasker, if I ever was.  I’m working or thinking about working or talking about working on several projects at once.  My reward used to be seeing the check marks on a to do list.  Today I am the owner of a single-task mind and a check mark isn’t so exciting.

I’ve started a new book, need to revise (again) a book I’ve already finished, and working on a play which has been seen onstage, but the director and I both know it needs fixing.

I’ve been using the following reward system:  Write a scene.   Brew a fresh pot of coffee.  Work on the outline for the new book. Eat a candy bar. Open original manuscript file on the previous book and stare at it. Cheese and crackers.  Or pie. No matter how numerous and how caloric the rewards, the work’s still there.  Carrot, meet stick.

Eventually my coffee and sweets and cheese system will either produce something good and relatable and shiny or else I’ll be the roundest little writer in all the land.

******

*Sheep and carrot above from artist Gina Taylor, Cambridge, UK.  Here’s where to find more of her work.  Thanks, Gina, for letting your chubby sheep visit here.  If I don’t change my reward system soon, she may become my self-portrait.