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.

 

Aging Gracefully?

By Anita Garner

My teenaged Mother and her forever-boyfriend 

I learned nothing from my upbringing about aging gracefully. Mother’s  only advice about the passing years was to encourage the use of more moisturizer so boys will like you. She considered all men potential boyfriends. In her teens she married a man who, through some combination of mercy and grace, turned into a grownup husband who behaved like her sweetheart all the days of their lives. Daddy raised his wife along with us kids while she clung tenaciously to the role of teenager.

There was no talk, not one speck of advice about fulfillment, about health, about work, about relationships, about how all of that changes through the years.

As a Southern preacher, Daddy didn’t consider “old”  a condition that needed fixing or discussing.  He believed in keeping one’s old people at home alongside the halt and the lame and the merely odd. Many houses we visited had a bedroom occupied by someone who fit at least one of those categories.

Our California Gramma, the one we spent the most time with, transplanted herself from Arkansas and smoked and drank and danced and cussed and played the horses at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita ’til the end. There was no talk of age at her house either.  Paw Paw, the Louisiana Jones grandparent who lived into his 90’s, didn’t pass along that gene to his son, because Daddy left us way too soon.

I liked older people even before I became one. Younger friends say hush, you’re not old.  Well I’m certainly older than I was, and I’m not that upset about it anymore.  Every day I think to myself – better get moving.  Parts of me don’t move quite as well as they used to.  Every day this comes as a surprise.  Knees, I’m talking to you.  At first I’m ticked off but by the end of the day, I ask myself, what did you expect? Things aren’t brand new anymore.

I asked Mother once on a significant birthday if she felt any different. She said what we’ve all heard a million times – she still felt 18 inside.  Now I know what she meant.  She was also right about the moisturizer. Much more of it is required.

Shall we gather at the river?

By Anita GarnerWhen I was coming up, Southern preachers used euphemisms for death.  The older I get, the more I appreciate them.  People who believe in heaven may be the lucky ones because they’re comforted by specific words other believers say to them and the songs they sing.

So many ways Daddy talked about death – See you on the other side.  Crossing over.  Passing.  Meet you at the river.  And what my mother said to her mother at Forest Lawn – “I’ll see you in the morning.”

When Reverend Raymond D. Jones was the one speaking to the mourners, he’d get some music going behind him as we cogitated on all the ways people leave us.  His remarks always included, “The Lord calls us home.”  Then he’d have us stand up and sing about it. We shared many traditions with neighboring black churches and one I wish we’d borrowed is “homegoing.”  Our preachers continued to say “funeral” or “the service” as in “the service on Saturday for Sister Ogden.”

Everyone in our family sang at funerals. Daddy most often asked me to sing “Beautiful Isle Of Somewhere.”  Mother sang “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” and “Precious Lord” and “Just A Closer Walk.”  Daddy invited mourners to stand and sing with us, “I Won’t Have To Cross Jordan Alone” and “Shall We Gather At The River.” Two of his other choices, when he had the right singers and the right instruments, could go on for a long time: “Walk In Jerusalem (Just like John)” and “Swing Down Chariot.”

The first song below is from the Kennedy Center’s “Let Freedom Ring” celebration for Dr. King.  Gladys Knight sings

“His eye is on the sparrow.”

And two of our family’s favorites

Elvis

“Swing Down Chariot”

Harmonizing Four

“Walk In Jerusalem”

Photo above and below: Little Brown Church in Studio City, California was
my church home for years.

******

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quadruplets on The Glory Road

By Anita GarnerThe Arkansas Ponder Quads

Settling in a small town after years of traveling with our family’s gospel show was something to celebrate.  Daddy was the new pastor in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, population 1075. When we arrived in 1951, he  cautioned my brother and me, saying the behavior of a preacher’s kids would be noticed. People were already talking about the way Mother sang (and looked) and the way Daddy preached, and how unusual our church services were.

Leslie Ray and I tried to disappear, which was impossible, especially since we were the only redheaded kids around and ours were unusual parents.  We hung around Courthouse Square where people stopped to get acquainted and after “How y’all doin’?” “How’s your Mama?” and “How’s your Daddy?” next came, “Where’d you two get that red hair?”

We were still standing out when what we wanted was to blend in. We hadn’t counted on being remarked about this soon and we didn’t like it, but Murfreesboro was on the brink of change and other diversions would soon be available.

Out town was about to get its own diamond mine. On a nearby farm, people discovered diamonds in the dirt and now the owners were selling tickets, turning it into an attraction. Anybody could go out there and search. You paid your fee and stayed all day. Of course we wanted to go, but Daddy said it wasn’t becoming for a preacher’s kids to be out there digging up dirt, looking for money. We said we would be looking for diamonds, not money, but he said it’s the same thing.

About a mile from our parsonage was the home of the Ponder family. On a day made famous in the newspapers and on television, the Ponders expanded by four when their quadruplets were born. Doctor Duncan delivered the babies where the Ponders lived with their eight children. Now their modest home would hold twelve children.The Ponder Quads’ first home.

The Quads were written up everywhere and a reporter from New York came to interview the family. When his story appeared, it said the Ponders didn’t have enough chairs to sit on, that they hadn’t had enough for their other children even before the quadruplets came.

Daddy read about it to my brother and me at the kitchen table. He laid down the newspaper and huffed,

“Well I never!  Somebody sayin’ a thing like that!  We have got to go get that family everything they need.”

He said he’d speak to the county Ministerial Alliance and ask every congregation to contribute, but before he could get his efforts started, a new story came out saying now that the Ponders were instantly famous, businesses would provide everything they needed.

All the babies we knew drank canned milk mixed with water in their bottles until they graduated to soft foods. Dickey and Dewey and Danny and Donna Ponder were soon photographed with the famous Pet milk can with the cow on the label while the company built a new home for the family with a room in front featuring a wall to wall window for public viewing of the babies. Other companies gave the family everything from diapers to furniture.

The new Ponder home was near the road so cars could drive by, and a large parking space was alongside so we could get out and walk up to the window. If we were lucky, all four babies might be in their custom bassinets there.

The Ponder Quads did my brother and me a great big favor. While they were lying around being famous, we hoped to fade into the background. Instead of everybody talking about the new preacher’s redheaded kids, they could now drive down the road and look through a window at a bigger curiosity, four identical babies.

With the birth of the Quads, the whole nation was allowed to point and stare, without being considered unkind. Mister and Miz Ponder and Doctor Duncan went to New York to be on television. Those babies were all anybody talked about.

We’d finally achieved our dream of moving to a small town, one step closer to figuring out what normal might feel like. Now with the birth of four identical babies, Leslie Ray and Nita Faye Jones could slip and slide around and break some rules without always being the center of attention in Murfreesboro – new population 1079.

                                                        ******

A version of this story appeared in Reminisce Magazine

Curly Headed Singer on The Glory Road

By Anita Garner

While choosing photos for my book, The Glory Road, here’s one that fell out during scrapbook page-turning.  Find a picture, tell a story. It’s the law.  If it isn’t, it should be. Here’s a story with a song from the 1950’s.

My curly-headed Mother, Sister Fern,  on the right with her bobby pins springing out all around, next to her wavy-haired Mother, Gramma K, whose hair did what she wanted it to. 

Curls were never going to be all right with Mother, when what she craved were some of those wide waves women made with giant metal wave clips.  No matter how many clips she used, within hours her curls defied her.

There might have been no performances under all those revival tents without Vaseline.   She greased up her curls and pinned then down with high resolve and after a short while, the bobby pins squirmed out again and she re-applied her Vaseline, sometimes several times on a particularly troublesome day.  Then the tears started.

Curly headed girls, she told us, were not presently in style. She took it as a personal insult that she was forced to remain curly-headed during a wavy-haired fashion period.  On the way to performances in the Deep South during the summer, sometimes her largest concern was frizz. Not what she would sing.  Not which musicians and quartets would accompany her, but how long before curly became frizzy.  The weather could turn on you just like that.

The remarkable thing was the amount of patience Daddy showed. No matter how many times she burst into tears worrying about her hair, he rushed to reassure her, his voice never showing a hint of strain.

As Leslie Ray and I became more proficient at saying things we didn’t mean, we imagined Daddy must have been answering by rote all those years. If so, he’d never admit it.  That wouldn’t be chivalrous. One of the traits that made him a popular preacher was his ability to reassure over and over again as if this was the first time he’d ever been consulted about a particular dilemma.

From The Glory Road play, here’s a glimpse of Brother Ray and his favorite curly-headed singer.

——–

1950’s.  Deep South.  Outside a big revival tent.  A quartet sings inside while Sister Fern waits to be introduced by her husband, Brother Ray.  But she’s not inside yet so he asks the quartet to keep singing while he goes to check on her.

RAY
                  There you are sugar!  I was
startin’ to get worried.  How’re you feeling?

     FERN
                 Honey, is my hair frizzy?  Because it feels frizzy.
All this humidity.

             RAY
   (moves in close, touches her hair)
No, darlin’ your hair’s not frizzy.  It’s curly is all.
You’re my big ol’ doll-baby with big ol’
doll-baby curls.

                    FERN
(takes out compact mirror, checks herself)
Are you sure? Because I can’t sing when my hair’s frizzy.

RAY
  (closes the compact gently, his fingers over hers)
I’m sure.

One of Brother Ray’s favorite duets with Sister Fern.

I Don’t Care What The World May Do