great-great-grandfather. One of his prized possessions was a nautical telescope crafted by Negretti & Zambra of London, sometime in the late 1800s. The telescope is single-draw, with a tapered brass tube and covered in a hard-grained Moroccan leather. Much of what I know of this great-great-grandfather, I have my cousin Daniel Root to thank. A table of consanguinity shows that Daniel would be my “first cousin, once removed” -- my mother’s cousin. I'm happy to keep it simple, though.
I traded notes with
Martha Hoover on a Sunday morning. After the fourth email volley, I told her, “MasterClass
should offer you Wolfgang Puck’s first-born in exchange for doing a
‘Martha Hoover Teaches...’ video.”
Photo: IBJ
Yes, I know... Wolfgang
is near 70 and he’s probably out of the kid-making business. Plus, his
first-born is already grown and is probably shaving by now. Plus, Martha Hoover
wouldn’t have time to mess around with any little Pucklettes. She’s busy.
Barbara Shoup at the Indiana Writer's Center recently shared
Tina Jordan’s New York Times article about the websites of bestselling authors. Publishers
usually insist, Jordan says, that their novelists maintain a web presence. So she
visited the sites of the current bestselling novelists and reported back on the
most interesting thing about each one.
We writers might hope
to find a few tools or useful tips from these successful novelists. Many of
these sites, however, provide not much more than Q&A responses to overworked
questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” or “How do you do research?” I couldn’t
find any insights into the hard-hitting questions like “Is it better to write
with a pen or a pencil?”
A year of planning, six days and 46 miles on the Continental Divide Trail, and 16 minutes of memory. Strings and cello and fiddle harmonize with the landscape, and carry the emotion of being in the wilderness with friends, fathers and sons, and brothers.
These old boys ambled toward their table next to the corner windows in Miss Shelly’s Place. The sign by the two-lane just called it “The Place.” Underneath, the words “Country Cooking” had “Country” highlighted in quotes, as to make clear.
Inside, pies and cakes were lined up on the counter, each under a glass bell. The chalkboard listed today’s
special: Biscuits and gravy, two eggs, two strips of bacon, all the coffee you want -- $3.99.
Two crosses, one with plastic flowers, are in the grass on the corner across from where this guy just got T-boned. I could see it coming. The courteous people just ahead of me were leaving a gap to let a small yellow Nerds-to-Go van make a left turn.
I looked in my side view and saw a Black Kia coming along in the third lane at what looked like normal speed. Neither one
of these guys could see they were on an intercept, but I could see the whole board. No amount of horn-honking or hand-waving was going to help.
They say that time gets distorted in moments like this. It’s
true. Pieces on the board are in motion, slow-motion. The outcome is inevitable. If Jill had been sitting next to me, she would have said “what’s wrong?” in response to what would have sounded from me like a slow, drawn-out combination of a groan and the word: “Nooooohhhh.” The Kia laid on his brakes but it was a done deal. He hit the little yellow van a solid one. It got the van up on two wheels and spun him once, the van driver now facing me. I watched him as the little truck teetered and started to roll.
It was 27 years ago that I saw her see God. Twenty-four years since her mother Anna brought her ashes up here and spread them in this alpine meadow. It was now August and it had been 22 years since I'd been here to visit the bronze marker her mother had set at the foot of this boulder at 11,600 feet.
Before she died at age 21, Michelle took time to write down her wishes. She didn't want to be buried. Her daddy's horses needed the land to graze. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted to rise with her smoke back to her God. She didn't care what they did with her ashes, but she wrote, "A field of wildflowers near Ouray, Colorado is a wonderful memory for me."
The picture on the magazine page looked like snowy TV static. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I stared at the pattern. You remember Magic Eye 3D pictures, right? If you focused your eyes past the image on the page, a hidden three-dimensional shape was supposed to reveal itself: a sailboat or palm trees or winged birds in flight.
These 3D pictures were all the rage in the early ‘90s. Newspapers featured them in the Sunday funnies. They showed up as plot elements on TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends. Three different Magic Eye books spent a total of 73 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even the gentlemen’s magazines were getting in on it.
This may have partially explained the beads of sweat as I sat in my studio apartment, the summer of ’92 at age 31, trying to defocus my eyes on a magazine page with the banner:
“HEY! This page has bodacious 3-D Ta-Tas.”
After 10 or 15 minutes of crossing my eyes and moving the
page back and forth, I couldn’t see anything but what looked like a close-up of beach sand.
