Save The Cat and Other Advice

I spent much of the week considering revisions to my books and to the film script. Finn lent me a book on structuring a story intended for a screen play. It is called SAVE THE CAT! (the last book on screen writing you will ever need) It is by Blake Snyder. If you have ever suspected that there is a formula for writing a popular movie then this is the book to send you on your way.

Mr. Snyder is very specific on how to organize a film script and he is supremely self confident that he has cracked the code. I find the book to be one of the most interesting and most distressing books I have ever read on the subject. Interesting because it makes so much sense and once I got past my prejudice against these type of books I found it very helpful. I have gone by the maxim in writing that “Nothing Hard is Ever Easy” for most of my life. But here I am thinking, that if I saw storytelling in Mr. Snyder’s way I might find starting a novel easer and less of a crap shoot.. When I looked carefully at his advice I began to see that it does clarify some of the most difficult challenges a person has in creating a story, without compromising the substance.

The first thing I discovered is you have to have a succinct answer for “What is it?” Can you say what your story is in a way that makes it attractive. Does it “bloom with possibility in your mind’. This is not just for pitching the book for a buyer but, as a creator, it helps you find firm footing right from the beginning. He calls these sentences “Loglines” I don’t really know why but let me try and show you.

A whaling captain goes to sea and loses his leg to a white whale and becomes obsessed with going out on another voyage to seek his revenge on the whale…. Moby Dick

An old man in Cuba goes out to catch fish and hooks on to a huge one that eventually kills him. The Old Man And The Sea

An African American girl has been raped by her father and she begins writing letters to God to cope with her suffering. She eventually learns to form bonds with other women who have suffered under opression and she becomes stronger. The Color Purple.

Arthur stops by for a drink.

See what I mean? Frustrating. These read like old TV Guide descriptions. We see instantly that these stories are much more than their loglines. There is no depth, no magic in these loglines, no themes, no poetry is mentioned. It’s as if you are meant to squeeze the soul out of your story before you even start.

All three of the books mentioned above have been made into films. And I have to say that all of them suffered in the translation into film. But that is understandable for the experience of reading a book has to be different than watching a two hour film.

But I still want to say that though Mr. Snyder explains in detail how to structure every film into fifteen “beats” that must hit precisely on their page marks, I still ask myself how to make the magic that we love in films: the gesture that silently tells the story of the conflict, or just the right line of dialogue which reveals a character’s deepest feelings without having to troop out to center stage and explain it to us. Here is where again we have to cut him some slack. Making magic is hard…. and it’s true that nothing hard is ever easy.

But when thinking about making stories, particularly when trying to tell a rich and emotionally resonant story, a lot of what he says, in fact, turns out to be true. Take for instance his advice to understand your hero/heroine. The heroine has a desire and that desire has to be primal. That’s what is at stake in a story. If all she wants is five dollars back you are going to have a hard time getting your audience deeply involved with her struggle. Captain Ahab’s desire is primal. Celie’s desire to heal herself is a deep primal urge. The Old Man’s urge to hold on to his fish even when it is being eaten by sharks is, yes, deeper than just an easy wish to have something. The primal desire often defines a life.

I knew a man who was a serial killer. He was in jail. His psychiatrist said that he killed his victims not out of some primal rage but “out of a simple whim, like how you might eat another doughnut even though you are watching your weight.” This could make a good story simply because the primal urge is highlighted by its absence. He might make a good character but not a hero because we don’t really care what happenss to him and, according to Mr. Snyder, every story must have a hero/heroine that we care about, and the hero must be dealing with a primal (or life defining) urge.

He tears down the movie, Miss Congeniality, which apparently was very successful. (Again, box office receipts are the “coin of the realm” for Mr. Snyder, which can be bothersome for the pretentious English Majors… like myself.) But he seems spot on for how the writer sticks to the formula. There are three acts and each act has five “Beats” - that is things that must happen by this point in the story. It goes from “OPENING IMAGE to THE FINAL IMAGE and include.. 11. ALL IS LOST and, 12. THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL. at the end of the second act then on to the finale at the end of the third act.

What is irritating is, you might ask, “Does it have to be that way?” Mr. Snyder answers, “Yes… absolutely, these beats have to happen at the exact prescribed moment..” And I suspect he is right if you want to sell a popular movie. But there are all different things to write and different ways to write them. One can write a villanelle by following the strict rules, or one can write in free verse. One can write a swashbuckler or one can write an experimental piece about squashing a bug on the wall. I find this refreshing…that there are so many choices. But also I like that someone like Snyder and his ilk have taken such a deep dive into the popular film story. For like it or not film stories in the current moment shape much of how we think about all the other types of stories.

Oh, and what is this about Save The Cat? Well, he says that in the early part of the first act the hero/heroine must do something that will cause you to root for them. He calls this the Save the Cat moment of the film. The heroine must be likable and sympathetic so that you will care about her journey. She must save a cat, or something plausibly sympathetic, so that when she is meeting her greatest challenge in the “dark night of the soul,” moment towards the end of the second act you will want her to prevail: no Saving the Cat… no dark night of the soul.

Dot still recovering.

Can it really be that simple and prescribed? I hate to say it but I’ve been watching movies and I’ve been trying to identify the beats he describes and I have to say that if he isn’t absolutely right about these fifteen beats and where they land then a lot of other people are getting it wrong in the exact same way he describes.

If you are any type of writer I suggest you take a look at Save The Cat and then think about it while watching a movie. The experience is both disheartening, in the way of learning the tricks in a magic act, and thrilling in the sense of seeing how magic is made.

Here is an old poem I wrote for a friend.

Lucky

I spent the week writing and looking after my dog. Saturday morning I hauled myself up from the pad in the living room where Dot and I slept during the week. I’m a light sleeper and I can hear when she starts to lick her incision. I ask her to stop and she usually does. Her surgical wound looks good now a week out from the operation, so I think it’s been worth it.

I made a big cup of coffee and I listened to my news programs, then I asked my robot machine to play all of Bruce Springsteen it could find. Dot sat at my feet and after a while we went for a walk around the block. When we came back we kept listening to Bruce and Dot seemed happy.

I remember liking Springsteen when he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek on the same week. But it was in the summer of sixty nine I had my Springsteen moment.

My parents lived in Atlantic Highlands New Jersey that summer. It was the only summer I didn’t work in the Cascade mountains. I read all the books on my schools reading list: Cannery Row, The Great Gatsby and Jude The Obscure, are the ones I remember. Though, the only thing I really remember about Jude The Obscure was that a girl named Jane Marie said it was her favorite book. I had a serious crush on her and I always regret that the book didn’t make a bigger impression on me. Every two weeks I had to take the bus into Manhattan to have my blood drawn mesureing my recovery from mono. From that summer I remember the moon landing, Doc and the boys living the life in Monterey, , and sleeping almost all the time.

I also remember meeting a girl on one of the bus trips back home. She had long brown hair and she wore some kind of colorful vest. She was coming from Manhattan on her way to Asbury Park. She made belt buckles and hash pipes out of antler horn and she was going to Asbury Park to sell some of her goods and she told me she was going to “Check out the scene around this far out band playing on the board walk.” She was about my age and she had a plastic soap case that was stuffed with marijuana joints. I assumed she was going to sell those as well. She asked me if I wanted to get off the bus with her in Asbury Park. She gave me a joint that I ruined in the pocket of my jeans. So frightened that my parents would find it on me, I just left it there until it disolved. I was a nerdy kid and not a free spirit. So I declined her offer to go check out the scene on the board walk of Asbury park.

I don’t even know if Bruce Springsteen was even playing there that summer. Its a detail I could probably check out on the web but I don’t want to. I only have to listen to one measure of the E Street Band that I don’t think of that girl and what might have happened if I had gone with her. I don’t check out that detail because I want to believe that we ended up in a nasty boardwalk club listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and then smoking her pot with Steve Van Zandt under the board walk.

That summer I was thinking about running away from home, but I was afraid of getting drafted, being repressed as I was I didn’t really want to run to Canada nor go to Jail. I mostly wanted to smoke pot with a pretty girl who appeared to be a free spirit.

But I didn’t get drafted and I didn’t run away. I went to college and got a degree in English and then a certificate from a Farrier’s college in Wyoming. I did have a liaison with a Lakota woman who claimed to be running guns to Wounded Knee. I did have some adventures in my life. All of these things come back to haunt me when I listen to Bruce: the draft and the boy I might have become. The truth is I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in this life I actually have had.

Here I am seventy years old, sitting with my black dog: a mid to lower list writer supported by adventurous women who I went with and many others I let step off the bus.

Here is poem I wrote about my good luck that doesn’t mention belt buckles, hash pipes or plastic soap cases full of pot.

Little Bit Of News

It has been a lazy weekend. Dot had her second operation this time on her left hind leg. The surgeons found a completely torn ligament in her knee which they had to detach and then had to rebuild the joint and by changing the geometry of the leg were able to rework the whole structure.

My job is to make sure she rests and doesn’t chew on her incision. Which is all pretty easy. For the next few days she will be taking enough pills to turn her into a gimpy zombie.

Jan concentrates on making sure Dot doesn’t go long without a treat or a bowl of ice to chew on. Dot is not all that hungry but enjoys chewing on ice cubes a great deal. I’m thinking of finding a nurse uniform for Jan.

My writing chair is set up across from Dot’s bed so I can working on my writing while I keep vigil on her nasty looking leg. Soon enough we will take her out to pee in the back yard. Soon enough she will be eating solid food from her bowl.

I’ve settled on a title for the new Cecil book and have chosen a set of non action related themes. Once I’ve done that I settle in on the plot/action outline for the entire book. I finished the first go through of what happens in each chapter, and I have a list of action plot points for each chapter. I have decided on about ninety thousand words into twelve chapters. Soon enough I will start on the rough draft by writing fifteen hundred words a day which is usually four to five manuscript pages a day. If things go as planned I should have a very rough draft done in two months. Then it will take me at least five months of revising before I let anyone read it. When people ask me how to write a book I tell them to do just this. There are no tricks, you just have to write. Put words on a page.

I will probably be bumped off my schedule by having to do revisions on my stand alone book about Jan. How extensive those revisions will depend on the editorial letter that I’m waiting on now. Editorial letters are like getting a report card, what they say will determine my schedule for the next year.

Last week before the operation Jan and I attended some lectures at the Stanford Marine Lab at the Hopkins Center. I went to a lecture about the poetry of Jeffers and Jan went to additional lectures on the marine mammals in this part of the Pacific, including the Gulf of California. Tomorrow Jan is taking her hydrophone out on their chartered boat with the class to help them find what whales and dolphins might be out there.

What I learned from the Jeffers lecture is that I have more reading to do to understand his work more completely. I think my piece last week might hae sold him a bit short. So I continue reading and learning about this regions most important poet.

The other thing I have been doing is trying to find a dog sitter for the first of November when we are going to take a trip to Sitka. Jan is going up to help with the memorial presentations for both Craig George and Don Seneti. Don was a Shantyman who was based out of the New Bedford whaling museum. He had an almost supernatural voice: huge and boominng. His sinnging could fill a big room without amplification. With amplification he could call up storms. He was also generous and kind with students who flocked to him in the many school programs he hosted in Sitka. He will be sorely missed.

Craig George was a friend and colleague who died this summer in a rafting accident. Craig was a respected scientist who lived in the Arctic and was one of the first western scientists to appreciate indigenous knowledge about animals and understood that it was based on close observation and deep sensitivity to their behavior. He was a fascinating guy and I always enjoyed talking to him about music, poetry, this mother’s (Jean Craighead George) writing and his many adventuress he had in the far north.

So Whalefest is a celebration of the complex webs of Marine Wildlife, that takes place the first weekend in November in Sitka, Alaska. There are lectures from world famous researchers, but also foot races, whale watching trips, art shows, a local talent show, and Sea Chanty concerts. And this year they will be saying a celebratory good bye to two old friends. There is nothing quite like it. The weather is almost always blustery but dramatic and there are almost always fifty to a hundred Humpback Whales in Sitka Sound so the whale watching trips are almost always full and full of interesting people… with lots of locals who come along for the adventure in the big comfortable boats. If you are interested in attending you should check it out soon because it often sells out. Just google up Sitka Whalefest.

Well, Dot is munching on her ice cubes and Jan is sitting next to her scrolling through her phone. and I am finishing up my letter to you. The weather is warm today and I promised Jan we would go swimming in the community pool once we got Dot settled in after she takes her meds.

I hope you are all well and happy. Here is another poem of mine.

Breaking Through

Happy Labor Day.

It has been warm this week in Carmel. Ninety degrees on our back porch which is hot enough for me, though I know that would seem cool to a lot of folks around the country.

I’ve been busy reading and making plans for Jan’s birthday in October.

I’ve been reading Robbinson Jeffers who is an important poet particularly in this part of the world.

A brief intro: Jeffers was born on the East Coast in 1887 and traveled all over the world in his youth. By the time he went to Occidental College he was fluent in English, French and German. He fell in love with a married woman who was older than he was and they finally married after a great scandal in 1904. They came to Carmel soon after and eventually bought some property near Point Lobos where Jeffers built a stone cottage and eventually a tower out of native stone. The house stands to this day under it’s original name of Tor House.

Jeffers was polific and wrote in a long narrative form. His longer poem read like short novels. He had a small loyal following thats to patrons who printed private editions of his work, but he was virtually shunned by the literary establishment. In the twenty’s and thirties his work gained popularity partly because his narrative style made his relatively easy to read compared to the other poets of the day such as the modernist T.S. Elliot or Ezra Pound. He was a nature poets nature poet and he cut a romantic figure spending all of his time in his stone house in the fog and traveling up and down the valleys into the Big Sur Country. He had a wonderful eye for details of this location. He had a deep feeling for what it meant to be Californian.

He was so intoxicated by the non human world that he called himself an Inhumanist Poet. One of his poems, the Roan Stallion had a tremendous effect on Jack Calvin, Ed Ricketts, Sasha Calvin and Joe Campbell. These four made a trip from Seattle to Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1932 and on that trip they kept re reading “The Rhone Stallion”. Here Jeffers makes his argument for the transformational power of the non human world. He wrote:

“Humanity

is the start of the race I say.

Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to burst into fire,

the atom to be split.”

He wrote this poem early in his career and well before the atomic age of energy and before the holocausts of the second world war.

This notion of “breaking through” or away from the grip society or the world view that was shaped by human rationality was wildly exciting to the four intellectuals on a small boat heading up the inside passage. Calvin and Ricketts were working on a book that listed intertidal animals in relationship to where they occurred on the beach. Not by the traditional taxonomy of how they evolved. The animals themselves would tell the scientists how they were to be classified. Joseph Campbell was facing a similar problem with the classification of folk stories but in almost an opposite direction. Stories had been classified by culture and place. But Campbell was interested in the shared energy of the various themes that stories dealt with. All stories, Campbell later explained grew from the principles of human consciousness how human minds developed and this is how they should be understood, not solely the country of origin they sprang from. This idea of breaking through the crust of humanity, not simply accepting what came before as irrefutable truth, was an idea that came along at the right time for these intellectuals. It was a lively time on that little boat going up the inside passage in 1932.

But to me it seems the world through their free thinking impulses a curve. World War II was about to begin, becoming the most monumental killing event in history. Jeffers stuck to his guns, he did not support the war by doubling down on his loathing for humanity. Both sides in the conflict were equally to blame, in bloodthirstiness and moral bankruptcy in his eyes. But what did he offer his readers in exchange? “Give your heart to the falcon,” Which was a line in one of his latter poems. The Peregrine Falcon is powerful and beautiful true, but does it have any answer to the moral dilemma which faced human beings. While it knows it’s true nature, which is hunting, what does the bird of prey teach us about restraint or kindness for that matter. What does a falcon teach a person about the horror of war, as it consumes it’s prey?

In his latter book, Written between 1931-41 “Be Angry At The Sun” Jeffers wrote:

“God curse every man that makes war or plans it”…

“God curse every Congress man who voted it, God curse Wilson, his face like an axe.”

This is what troubles me about Jeffers. In the second world war he looked down from his tower and implored God to curse his enemies. All the while hundreds of millions of fellow human beings were murdered in the war. It bothered a lot of his readers who abandoned him. But what was to be done? I’m not saying he was wrong in his condemnation of war, but what did he offer the dead in exchange for their sacrifice? A curse.

He was replaced by Gary Snyder and Wallace Stevens , WS Merwin and Pattiann Rogers as America’s Nature poets, and Robert Hass as California’s Poet of place. Snyder is a Budhist in terms of his relationship with nature. Hass, Stevens and the others are/were consummate stylists. But there is no one left in the great stone house in the fog. No Gray Eminence in American poetry today.

World War II brought us our great moral delema from which there is no ignoring. William Stafford was a conscientious objector during the war and”an iciness into his heart.”But Jeffers was no C.O. he simply spewed bile… poetic bile to be sure… but deeply cynical against humanity and this is what took him down as a writer of the heart, I suppose. Humanity may well be bankrupt but what can humans put in it’s place?

Here is an old Alaska poem of mine.

Friends and Family

I’m sorry I’m late again. Jan and I took a trip to Sitka, so that Jan could work in her old office sorting out some forty years of material and pinning down plans for her gajillion bits of data. I’m exaggerating there…I think.

Sitka rain.

I spent my time in Sitka, visiting with old friends and taking in the sights of town during it’s biggest tourist season in many many years. In Seattle I went to see and old eye doctor and celebrated with my four siblings.

The day we arrived in Sitka it had rained four and a half inches in twenty four hours. There were four ships in town and it seemed to rain hard for the entire week we were there. When there are four ships in on one day there are a potential of about forty thousand people walking the streets of town where there are about nine thousand summertime residents. Many of my old friends seemed depressed. Too much rain, too many people. People were discussing the possibility of passing a citizens initiative to put an upper limit on the numbers of people to off load a ship on certain days. This was bound to be controversial particularly when increased tax money is at stake. The schools are fully funded this year… would they remain so with the new limitations in place. But also a full week of hard rainfall did it’s part in making people feel grumpy.

I wasn’t grumpy. I had a good time walking in the cool rain, visiting old haunts and being with my old buddies. I signed a lot of new books at Old Harbor Books in Sitka which has the largest stockpile of old John Straley books and signing books always makes me happy.

I spent a lot of time reading: I read Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut and Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1967 and Lapvona in 2022, both purport be comic satires on the human condition, but I have to say that I thought Slaughterhouse Five is much more comic than Lapvona. I will think more about the comparison between the two books and perhaps write about that some other time. Finn is reading Lapvona now and he is really enjoying it. I found it grim to the point of being nihilistically bleak. But I have to think about it some more. I don’t like to flat out dismiss a book unless I’m sure I understand what the writer was trying to do. I loved Moshfegh’s book, “My Year of Rest And Relaxation”which makes me that much more cautious.

Seattle was a reunion with all my siblings. I’m the youngest for five children. My siblings all gathered in Seattle and we had a wonderful time: eating, teasing, and joking with each other. I’m well aware when we are together how lucky we are. Well into our eighties we seem healthy and happy, My brother has lost a wife to cancer and his current wife is coming through a train wreck of an operations. My oldest sister has lost a wife and she continues to grieve her great loss. But that being said of the five of us and our mates we have dodged our share of bullets, enough so that to sit down at a dinner table and laugh seems miraculous. And laugh we do.

Booster the Sitka office dog with Jan’s Alaska walker.

But with all the joy of reconnecting it is good to be home, to catch up on work and to be home with Jan, Dot, Finn, Arthur and Emily. The weather is clear and warm which is hard to complain about.

I’ve been working on the new Cecil Book and even got permission for a title from a pop song. The stage I am is big drafting, list making and thinking about just what these characters would do when I back them into a corner and what corners are available. I honestly do love writing these things.

Jan making pudding with Arthur back home.

Here is an old Sitka Poem.

Moving On

I sent my newest manuscript off to the offices of my agent in New York. Now I’ve been told it’s sitting with my publisher at Soho Press who is happy to get it.

The new book is called BIG BREATH IN. I wanted to write an extraordinary but realistic female heroine, so I wrote this stand alone story using Jan Straley’s history as the back story for the heroine. It’s a crime story intercut with sections out lining the natural history of sperm whales. It sounds crazy I know. but it works. If my publisher agrees, it should take about a year to get the book out into stores.

Why take so long? I know some of you are impatient but there are a lot of moves that have to be made from reading a manuscript to holding a book in your hand. I thought today I would tell you about some of these moves just so you know that what is happening while you are waiting for the next book.

First there are the business things. My agent will negotiate a contract with the publisher. They will work out the advance against future earnings I will get, and a whole list of eventualities that cover all the ancillary rights, foreign, film, reproduction in various electronic formats. This won’t take that long, I’m not an undiscovered genius or anything, so I mostly take what I can get.

Then there is the editing and getting the words into shape. This can take some time because of my lack of natural writing skills. After several months, if we have signed a contract I will get an editorial letter from my editor. She will give me her assessment of the story and make suggestions about substantial changes I should make. I usually follow through with each of my editors suggestion. For the most part New York editors are very experienced and professional. They know what they want to be published by their company and they work with the writer to make it attractive to readers. Readers often ask me about this part of the process. How much control of the story do I give over to my editor? I first published a book in 1992 and in that time I’ve learned that nothing good comes from fighting with your editor. The smartest thing to do is stay calm and try my best to give them what they want, just because they are intelligent and well read and certainly know more about what readers want than I do. I know what I want but what I want and what a reader wants are, sadly not always the same thing.

Then there comes book design and cover art while my editor and I are going back and forth with the smaller details of editing. Readers also ask me about how much input I have with the covers. Here too there are legions of professional designers and cover artists in New York. The editors ask for my input at the start and at the very end, but they make the final decision. Again, they know best. I only have been in one substantial argument, once when designers wanted to put a polar bear on the cover of one of my books. The designers and the editor loved it, but I pointed out that there were no polar bears anywhere near the story I had written, the editor was incredulous that I would be concerned about the “color of the bear”. Here I put my foot down…it wasn’t the color I objected to but the fact that the bear was from an entirely different region of the world than I had written about and anyone could see (I argued) that getting the specific details about place were very important to me. Of my fifteen books or so, this was the only disagreement I ever had about a cover.

There are decisions about when to release the book, and what to do to get the book noticed. These decisions are taken seriously, and I have some suggestions to make. Here things have changed a lot in the years I have been publishing. Every writer I’ve ever met complains about marketing of their books. Although I once had a drink with Elmore Leonard and I didn’t hear him say one negative thing about his publisher or their choices. Since I have long admired his writing I’ve taken him as my model when talking about marketing. If you do complain, only complain to your agent and see if she will get the most she can for your benefit. Once the decisions have been made work your hardest to help the people who are helping you.

Here is another thing you might not know about publishing. There are a lot of women in the management ranks of publishing. Ownership and the real centers of corporate power I imagine are still controlled by the men who run the four or five companies which run the publishing business. But among the managing editors, agents, slush pile readers, designers, publicists, marketing experts there are a lot of women. Luckily, I like working with women so I think it is all a good thing. I don’t really know the numbers across the board of women in publishing but from my experience, it’s got to be high. But in the end I’m not sure it matters. The people I’ve met in New York publishing , men, women and others are all professional and that means they want you to earn money and all the praise that matters.

Struggling strawberries in our own little backyard plot.

So the process to publish a book takes about a year. It can be done more quickly in the cases of timely books. Non fiction books tied to politics can be rushed out in time for an election or to line up with another predictable event that is on the horizon. But Crime stories come out on a well planned seasonal schedule. So that there is a natural rhythm to it. Summer books, Christmas books, winter books all have their reason for being there.

After I mailed my book out last week. What do I do now? I can’t just wait around. This weekend I reread my last Cecil Book and took notes on where Cecil was when I left him at the end of SO FAR AND GOOD, because I promised a woman in a bookstore in Seattle that my next book would be the book where Cecil gets out of jail.

Don’t think your comments have no impact on me. Really, a lot of the decisions I make about my books come directly from readers requests. I’m not exactly inundated with requests so the ones I get are important to me.

So, I’m off and running on the next Cecil book. I’ve chosen my title and making my lists of characters and deciding what needs to happen. I hope you all are in favor of that.

Here is the first clue from the newest Cecil Book in process: A haiku from Issa, translated by Gary Snyder.

This dewdrop world

is but a dewdrop world;

and yet….

Here is a poem I wrote this week while thinking about Gary Snyder.

Time and Aging

It was 1962 and I was in fourth grade. The new My Weekly Reader had an article about how there was going to be a World’s Fair in New York City in 1964 and this made me furious. Why tell a kid about an event that was more than two years away! It seemed absurd. Two years might as well have been forever. It was as if My Weekly Reader was taunting me about how time passed so slowly.

Last Sunday I turned seventy years old. The New York Worlds Fair came and went a lifetime ago, and fourth grade is but a blip on the screen of my memory. When I was nine years old it seemed like nothing much had happened in my life, and time seemed to pass at a glacial pace. Time between each birthday seemed like an historical age. The changes that happened during those long years were important. Big blocks to create a foundation, and these blocks of events piled up slowly and only came up to about my knees. But now at seventy my memory operates with the speed of nuclear fission. My mind is full of billions of little events, buzzing in my skull like bees. The time between birthdays now seem like an instant.

My favorite gift I got this year.

As a child I suppose most of my attention was focused on play. As a productive adult my attention was on Work. As an old man my attention focuses on what play and work have created for me.

I loved being a child, and I love being around children now. Probably because play is a ritualized form of exploration. Arthur is at the beginning of learning what is out there, and I love watching him explore. “Be gentle with the dog or else she may snap at you.” “Don’t run faster than you can carry yourself without falling.” Life lessons we learn from playing.

Perhaps these differences in how time passes define the three acts of life. If childhood is about play and exploration, and adulthood is about finding meaningful work, old age is about rumination concerning play and work, and how they intermingle. Certainly it has for me because at its best play and work has found a balance in writing. I love writing now in a way I never did as a child or as a worker.

Most kids don’t appreciate time passing because they are too busy playing. As adults we race against the clock because we have so much to do to satisfy our need to own time. Time becomes a commodity. As old people we realize that we never owned our lives at all and time means less and less. Do we want to outlive all our friends? Of course we do but it is painful. We don’t control time at all, it simply piles us like the snow from a blizzard.

Jan and Arthur exploring by looking for birds.

Of course I’m not sure that any of this is really true. It’s more likely that I’m thinking of time and the stages of life because I have too much time on my hands. That is certainly how a successful and active adult would see it. I’m not as productive as I used to be. I’m projecting my philosophy because it is only where I find myself: seventy years old, and taking care of a beloved wife, and afraid of disappearance.

If play and exploration is the province of childhood, and hard work is the way of adulthood, then I think that gratitude and love are the pillars of old age. We squander time as children, we think of time as a form of wealth as adults, and we cling to what remains as we get older. Or maybe that’s just how it feels from this side of seventy.

Here is a poem that got a lot of notice some years ago when it appeared in the anthology of poems used for Poetry Out Loud. I have enjoyed watching young people reciting this poem over the years.

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Talking To Our Dogs

Driving home from the market last week Jan saw the big gathering in the fields of the Junior High School. The sign said, “Del Monte Dog Show,” and it looked like an event with dozens of tents and paddocks for dogs to prance around. Jan instantly said. “Dog Show! I wanna go.” So we went home and unloaded our groceries and went back to mount a scouting expedition to determine what we could see.

Jan has always loved dogs and to this day she loves them. She is not a show dog person… or so I thought but at this large gathering of dogs and people she sought out other people and talked with them about a lot of different topics. She came back from one such conversation and said, “I love dog people…” which kind of surprised me.

This was a fancy dog show. People dressed up for it and the dogs were regal in bearing and appearance. So too their owners. Lots of people were wearing what I would consider “Court Clothes” that is dresses, and sports coats, no leather, no piercings, no visible tattoos… with some notable exceptions… that is when people had any tattoos they had a lot of them and showed them proudly. This seemed to be a trait for the Staffordshire Terrier enthusiasts. Which kind of made sense to me because if there were a breed of dog who would be proud of tattoos it would be Staffordshire terriers. Anyway it seemed that fancy dog show people are fancy people.

Jan and Arthur at the fancy dog show. Arthur is holding his stuffed dog named Puppy.

What surprised me was that fancy dog show people are very friendly. They apparently love to talk about their dogs and everything about their breeds, from blood lines, grooming tips, behavior to long term trends in characteristics. “It really is almost shocking how golden retrievers are trending to being shorter legged than the ‘classic look’.

Jan who is generally shy and not fancy at all ran right over to a woman leading a Beauceron and started chatting with her as if they had gone to high school together. The woman was lovely and so friendly. She had brought her dog over from France which is where the breed originated and is still quite popular. Our dog Dot is a Beauceron and I thought I was going to have to drag Jan away before they closed down the park.

Three things really interested me about the show.One was how important the grooming element was and how much specialized gear was involved. I saw three huge RV style trucks with several what I’d call grooming salons that popped out on the side. Generators were on, tables slid out, and dogs leashed in to proper looking stations where men and women combed, brushed and trimmed different breeds, apparently all day long. Most of these groomers were professionals who sometimes doubled as handlers to display the dogs in the ring. The dogs no matter what the breed looked immaculate and the best of the dogs seemed to know they were beautiful, just by the way they moved. Some moved like super models turning with a snap and loping next to their handlers as if they were going for an audition to appear on Broadway.

But what interested me most was how people talked to the dogs. The trainers were very professional, with sharp commands and steady serious encouragement. “Good Boy, Lovely now Nice turn!”

The owners tended toward baby talk, with the smaller the breed tending to be more babyish. That some of these dogs appear to be surrogate children seemed obvious to me. Others spoke in a surprisingly companionable tone. “You are a beautiful boy, aren’t you. Are you hungry? Can I get you something?” I could imagine the one sided conversations while traveling to the show. Friends talking about where they will stay and what to expect. “This is Carmel. Are you looking forward to seeing Miss Piggy? It will be nice to see her again. Don’t you think?”

I comment on this without a trace of judgement. Because I have always had weird ways of talking to dogs, and so does Jan.

Jan talks to her dogs as if they were siblings: Jokey and sometimes with sarcasm. (which is the way she most often talks with her siblings.) “Dot, you are a big oaf. This is a single bed and you want to come up here only when I am in the bed first.” She says this as she is making room for Dot to squeeze in to her hospital sized bed to watch TV for hours together. “You big oaf. You are such a pain in the butt.” as she pats and snuggles with her.

I talk to Dot as if she were a visiting professor for someplace known for erudition. “Now Dot, I understand and appreciate that you would want to bark at that dog across the street, but we can see that that the dog poses no threat to us right now and there is no need to bark. Thank you for your concern but really there is no need to bark in this circumstance.” I believe that Dot enjoys it when I talk this way, she stares at me and looks quizzical as if she has no fricking idea of what I’m saying. But she does not bark… usually.

This is Dot, not understanding a word I say.

I have long ago accepted that we project the type of companion we want on to our dogs. It’s natural I suppose. It seemed more natural when ancient herders really needed dogs to be fierce towards animals threatening to the heard and the conversation was more akin to, “Kill the Bear, Dot… go kill the bear.” Now we talk with our dog companions as if we had met while applying for a job at a junior college..

My old boss when I was a kid, had a working dog named Bob who he treated in a very business like manner. “Bob, come here. I really want you to run over there and get that bull out of that bog. Do you see the bull over there Bob? Now move him out of there and on up the hill.” He would point and I’m sure that was helpful. But then Bob would run over to the bull and bark and bite until the Bull pulled himself up out of the bog. What my boss wanted in Bob was a helper and that’s how he spoke. Jan wants a sibling and a friend and that’s how she speaks to Dot. Me I want to be friends with a rather priggish Oxford Don and thats how I speak to my friend Dot.

I suppose the most important thing is that we keep trying to try and bridge the gap between human beings and animals. It can seem silly but I also think that making that connection does in fact make us all the more human: that we are strong, empathetic and loving. Not to mention the fact that most of what we communicate comes from tone of voice and body language. Which, I suspect is a good reminder for all our interactions as people.

Here is a poem I wrote a while ago.

Caught By Surprise

We had some sad news about the death of a good friend and colleague who died in a river rafting trip in Alaska. The authorities are still looking for his body. His death is a devastating blow to a great many people in Alaska. For this reason I’m going to wait to write about him. I will let other of his friends memorialize him, before I write my two cents about this great man.

A day after we were informed of our friends death I saw this bobcat hunting in the field near our house. For some reason I can’t get it out of my mind.

Forgive me for my bad video. I had watched the cat for about fifteen minutes before I even thought of taking a photo. I sat with Dot on a comfortable bench that overlooks the field and watched the Bobcat hunt. It’s main prey in that part of the field was gophers. The cat had it’s tufted ears erect as it paced forward. Occasionally it stood up on it’s hind legs then pounced face first into a mound of earth. Three times it came up with one of the rodents and then sat down to eat. Once it came quite close to where Dot an I were sitting while it tore into it’s meal. We were close enough to hear the bones crunch, and it sent shivers down my spine.

The Bobcat was beautiful and again I’m sorry that my video doesn’t do it justice. It appeared well fed, it’s muscles well defined. It’s head was much larger in proportion to its body compared to a house cat’s physique. Up close it seemed fierce. I can only imagine watching much larger cats; an African Lion or a Puma: steady eyes and no sign of skittishness or fear when wandering close to human beings. The much smaller Bobcat shared these qualities with the larger cats. They project their penchant for hunting and killing. The wild cat’s eyes express the outrider of death. In their expression there is no ambivalence whether it be for Wildebeest, Mountain Goat or Gopher, big cats are predators and Wildebeest, Mountain Goats and Gophers are food.

When a friend dies suddenly people are apt to say things like: At least they died what they loved doing. But I doubt anyone ever said such a thing about a gopher. I imagine the gophers I heard being crunched up were just going about their regular old day to day hard work of being a gopher. When the lunge came I expect they had enough time to think something akin to “Oh, wait” and they are spared the details of being consumed.

When humans die no matter how much time they had to consider the possibility. I suspect the moment comes down to the “Oh. Wait…” thought and then one last reflexive big breath in order to hold off death, then the gradual long exhalation and and the relaxation of all feeling. Death, when it comes is indifferent. It doesn’t care what you were doing. We care but to death it is immaterial whether you were walking through the Louvre or were digging a ditch in rocky ground.

It used to bother me a great deal after I realized that death is served up either one of two ways: either suddenly, or gradually. But it really doesn’t matter in the long run. Death comes, how it will and when it does I’m betting it seems sudden no matter if you are 19 years old and losing control of your motorcycle or if you are ninety eight years old succumbing to physical exhaustion.

Maybe gophers are fine with their small sudden death. I don’t know maybe it feels like an extension of their normal unexciting grubbing around life. Maybe they are happy for it when it arrives. Maybe I will feel that way whatever happens in my last moments.

At least I hope so.

Here is a poem I wrote this week:

Fourth of July

Forgive me for not writing earlier. I had a self imposed deadline on the super secrete film script and while I had time to work on it, my concentration couldn’t include my writing these letters to you.

Today is the Fourth of July. My family spent some time in Sitka. Finn, Emily and Arthur went camping in a wilderness cabin and they spent time visiting with old high school friends and dabbling in the tide pools on the beach in front of our old house. Jan went to Sitka to visit Nancy Ricketts and to clean up the Whale Lab. Dot and I stayed home, writing and walking the trails.

The cabin at Fred’s Creek on Sitka Sound.

I’m going to post photos of Arthurs first big camping trip, because we used to love camping in the summer and I associate these images with July 4. I’m posting two old photos for my brother and sister because holidays make me nostalgic.

The Fourth of July is a patriotic holiday, often reserved for expressions of our love for America. For some, the whole issue of Patriotism becomes entangled with self identification. Some patriots have their own bellicose expressions; a kind of “Love It Or Leave It” sentiment. Some give off the impression of becoming unapologetic supporters of every war America has ever fought. Some feel alienated by this zeal.

Arthur discovers the thrill of throwing rocks into water.

Since I am alone on this Fourth I thought I’d try to define my own sense of patriotism. I love my country and here is why.

I love the land itself: the mountains, the plains and the eastern cities. The waters of Puget Sound, fields of Iowa and the immense kinetic sculpture that is New York City. . I went to horse shoeing school in Riverton Wyoming and I remember having to walk to the edge of town each Sunday night to call my parents from a lonely phone booth. I get shivers to this day thinking of the dark plains spreading out all around the phone booth with its one flimsy light. The wind rumbled under the booth’s creaky folding door There were no lights on the horizon. I was on Native land. The Shoshone Indian reservation. I had hitch hiked to get to this place and it was both lonely and beautiful.

I love the small towns of Iowa where I went to college. I had a girlfriend who loved to hitch hike to the tiny farm towns.. We would eat in the cafe’s and talk to anyone who would talk with us. We sometimes went to the local churches and we would eat at community potlucks where we would bring a six pack of soda and grocery store macaroni salad then eat our fill of casserole and fried chicken. We were welcome all the same. At night we slept in the one old and dusty downtown hotel which had sagging bedsprings and a pitcher of water on the nightstand.

I love the beautiful new England towns, with their white churches and rivers running through them. I loved living in New York City and the people I met there, where my friends and I played football in the middle of the side streets. And I loved the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I went every weekend to meet girls, which I never did and had an almost OCD list of paintings and sculptures I would visit in a strict almost ceremonial order: the mummies (in honor of Holden Caufield who was my spirit guide during my early teenage years) Rodin’s “The Kiss” for my fierce but frozen sexual longing, Chellini’s Cup for my mother who loved it. and always always Van Gogh who fascinated me then , and still does.

I volunteered teaching in Harlem and Hells Kitchen, where the kids confounded all my expectations, because they were so lively and fun. I was told that they were desperately poor but they were smart and their parents clearly took pride in their clothes and appearance. They were loving towards me even though I was just passing through their lives. They exhausted me each day.

I love the Cascade Mountains and every national or state park I ever visited. I love the smell of a cold morning of a hot day in the mountains. I love seeing a bear shambling across a meadow, and a snake sunning itself on a rock. I love the lonely roads of Texas. I love Jazz, and American Film, I love country music and rhythm and blues. I love John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, I love Pattiann Rogers, Toni Morrison, Herman Mellvile, Malcom X, and Crazy Horse. I love the bigness and sloppiness of American food: the thump and bang of American pop music, and I still love museums which broaden my view beyond America’s borders.

Yes I’ve met racists and evil Americans. I have met people who do not accept the terms of ending the Civil War, which is long past due, and I’ve met Lakota Sioux people who will never accept the ending of the Indian Wars… which they shouldn’t. I am no Pollyanna about America. There is a lot to be reconsidered and to resolve. A lot to be thrown away and a lot to preserve. But I know I love it, flawed, childish, brawling and infuriating as it can be. Yet still, America is almost all I know of beauty.

Happy Fourth of July.

Here is a poem I wrote about The Battle Of The Wilderness.