Fiesta

My parents were married in August 1945. Among their wedding presents was a set of Fiestaware: cups and saucers, plates of various sizes, salt and pepper shakers, a gravy boat, a pitcher, bowls, sugar bowl and creamer, a lazy susan and possibly other items. They were the mix of colors typical of what's officially called just Fiesta, made by a West Virginia outfit and originally introduced at a pottery fair in Pittsburgh in 1936. I believe they were a gift from my mother's younger sister.

 Many of these pieces were ubiquitous in my childhood and beyond. The dishes were perhaps the "good dishes" for awhile, but some pieces in enough use that some bit the dust (the bowls, the cups and saucers.) Some pieces (the salt and pepper shakers) were in common use forty years later. The sugar bowl just quietly disappeared. But at a certain point in the 60s or 70s, they were replaced by a new, more formal looking set, and the remaining Fiestaware consigned to the back of a kitchen cabinet.

So imagine my shock when I was walking through a huge exhibit called The Machine Age in the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1985 or so, when I came upon a collection of Fiestaware that might have been taken from that cabinet, but it was in a glass case and labeled.

 When my childhood home was sold, I got most of the surviving Fiestaware, and perhaps all of it. I brought it with me out here to California. There wasn't really much of it left, and though one of the rarer pieces is in excellent condition, some of the plates are chipped. But one piece survived with only minor abrasions, all the more surprising because it was one of the most used pieces.

 That, it will come as no surprise by now, was the yellow pitcher. As a representative piece it is quite striking for the Art Deco design is most evident of all the pieces. But it also carries the memories of a lot of Kool-Aid and ice cubes on hot summer days through the 1950s and beyond.

 This past October of 2015, my niece Sarah got married. Her wedding was almost exactly 70 years after my parents wedding. So it seemed especially fitting that this Fiestaware pitcher be passed down to her on this occasion. And that's what I did. 

Though it has value on the collectors market, she is honoring its family history by using it.

69th Birthday Thoughts

On and around my 69th birthday recently, I had three birthday thoughts.

 The first was on the day, when I hiked up Trinidad Head. Unless you know the Head (in Trinidad Bay, far northern California), the thought may not mean anything, so I've included some photos from a subsequent walk, on a sunnier day. On my birthday there was considerable fog blowing in from the sea. Still, I wish I'd taken my camera that day.

 The thought was simple: my birthday present was that I hiked Trinidad Head--the experience itself (I even got quite close to a young rabbit on the trail) and the fact that at 69, I could still hike up Trinidad Head. That's the best gift.

It's not a climb in any mountain-climbing sense, it doesn't require equipment or training--it's not that kind of accomplishment. It's an ordinary climb--rigorous enough especially at the start, and a workout as the trail winds up. I've been hiking it for about 19 years, though not often enough. And I still can.

 It overlooks the Pacific on one side, and Trinidad Bay on the other. It's quiet and beautiful, and for now, it's available to me.

 That was first thought. The second thought, which came the next day or so, was more complicated. It had to do with success and failure.

 "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake," Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter. Maybe, but for an American man the basic criteria for success are pretty clear.

You're a success if in your life you make a sufficient living to raise a family, or if you produce work that receives honors and earns you a recognized place among peers as well as some more general community, or preferably both. You can be a success in your life, or a success in your work, or both. You are failure if you accomplish neither.

 I have accomplished neither. The failure is not absolute, I did accomplish something in each area. But not enough really to count me a success by these criteria.

Yet looking back, I have some satisfactions. So the second thought was: if I failed, at least I failed big. That is, the failure (however complete) was not spectacular, but my aspirations were big.

 I was remembering an acquaintance I'd once worked with who I last saw a long time ago in southern California. He showed me a script he'd written for a sitcom then on TV. I never saw him again. Though it appears he had some achievements in the movies and TV, it wasn't as a writer. There are other similar cases I know.

 I made compromises in my working life. But at least I did not try to write scripts for sad sitcoms or pathetic or loathsome movies, and failed. I failed trying to write the most ambitious works, the best works I could dream up, in whatever form. What I failed at was big.


The third thought is perhaps a corollary. If I were to describe, as simply as possible, what I did all my life, I might say, "I made sentences." (Nobody has asked me that question, nor any like it for quite awhile, but at least I have the answer ready.) I also made music, and dreamed up images, wrote dialogue and so on. But basically, in the range of work I did for love, a larger duty and for hire, I made sentences.

 John Banville began his review of books on Emerson this way:"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." Of course in addition to sentences, I made paragraphs and pages and so on. I thought about and worked at all these forms, but they are basically built with sentences. So I'll make my stand with the sentence.

 And if it is indeed humankind's greatest invention, it matters less what those sentences were about than the fact that I worked at making them the best sentences I could. While trying to lead an honorable life. It was not a bad way to use a life. So I think I'll keep doing it.

September Song

Martin Amis is a writer I've admired mostly from afar.  I've enjoyed the novels I've read and the non-fiction collection about the 80s, The Moronic Inferno, a title that describes the 80s and a lot of the ever since.  But I haven't read a lot of his work, for often his most urgent concerns are not mine--at least not of the same moment. 

Maybe it's just that his life has been so different from mine.  But he was quoted making an observation that I've not only never read anybody else making, I've never heard anyone else say.  He was describing something that happens to him, that I thought that for all intents and purposes, only happens to me.

He said that he is often caught offguard by a memory of something that attacks him with regret and chagrin, seemingly out of the blue, just walking down the street or in any daily situation.  In fact, I referenced this on this very blog:

 Several years ago I was pleased to hear novelist Martin Amis admit that small regrets hit him suddenly every day, to the point that they stop him in his tracks, literally, as he walks down the street, and he involuntarily winces and mutters to himself because of some small memory that emerged with the peculiar force of shame and the pitiless, bottomless thump of regret. I was pleased because I thought I was the only one this happened to.

Now he's done it again, in a recent interview (published at Smithsonian online and flagged by Andrew Sullivan's site.)  He has identified something I am dimly aware is happening to me--that in recent days I've become more conscious of.  Here's what he said:

"Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin [Amis is 62], but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.”

Yes, there is that "huge new territory inside" which is "the past."  But especially, "in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again."

It does.  It's a bit easier to appreciate the moment.  I'm very aware that this is a golden time--I'm reasonably healthy, I am without physical pain, temporarily secure--well, the sense that it is certainly all temporary.  But it is, right now.  And the day is easier to appreciate.  People, relationships that are good--and the blessings I have here, of this lovely air, especially in the sunny autumn of the North Coast.  It is fascinating and it is poignant, and it's sharpened by the awareness not only that it will all soon end, but you don't know when it will start ending, or how.

A Christmas Carol

This Christmas has more than the usual mix of joy and dread. The terror alert is high, and I'm not just talking about the Bush administration and Homeland Security. I'm looking at the next month or so, when it seems likely there will be changes with profound personal impact, perhaps defining the rest of my life. There are one or two good possibilities, and of course there could be the unforeseen bit of luck. But prospects do not appear rosy. What little I have, in health and stability, may be tipped on a steep downward fall.

What seems certain is that I've lost my gamble, and what I believed I should be doing at this point in my life will not be happening, at least not in the way I’ve been working and planning for. The books I felt certain I was meant to be writing are fading into the land of lost possibilities. This could be a quite costly loss for me, in more ways than one.

That of course could turn out to be the overdramatising sometimes described as catastrophizing. Or not. The story of the boy who cried wolf ends with the wolf finally coming.

For awhile now I have worried that at my age, when I am still pretty strong yet have those years of experience and learning to make use of---in other words, when my life should be culminating---that I will instead be eliminated a decade or two too early. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened, of course. And for someone of my birth and background, it's more or less to be expected. "Who do you think you are?" always echoes in the soul of the working class hero. Who do you think you are, not to be coughing in the basement from a lifetime of coal dust. Who do you think you are, to expect a living if you didn't follow the prescribed path, which meant getting a job and staying there forever, or even following the route outlined in the chant of my college days: work, study, get ahead, kill.

Okay, it's Christmas. I spent too much time in the past few weeks working on old audio tapes, some of them from the middle 1960s, the early 70s, etc. every decade till, well, the vocals were finished on a couple of tracks last week. I'd transferred the oldest (originally recorded on reel to reel) to cassettes a few years ago, and this month I used a "cleaning" and enhancing program, and two computers, to transfer the contents to CDs. I put together personalized CDs from the masters for family and friends as Christmas presents. They should be getting them about now.

There's always something strange about giving gifts that are your own work: writing, or in this case, music. It seems egotistical as well as apparently (though not really) economical. And there is something of an ulterior motive. It's all part of my preservation project, as are certain of these blogs. As I began to suspect that the world was no longer interested in sustaining me, I sought to preserve and disseminate as much of my past work as I could. Maybe I'll disappear, but not without a trace.

I don't know, maybe this is all what Buddhists call Attachment. Or maybe it's just natural.

That's why I've been posting old articles with new commentaries on the Kowincidence blog. I had hoped to make a book out of many of these pieces. I had a title and all, and I expected I'd have to publish it myself, through xlibris again. But now I doubt that I'll have the time or money to accomplish this. Cyberspace will have to do.

The music is perhaps more personal, especially since I've never made much of an attempt to make a living by it. Reviewing old tapes, most of them done with a single microphone in one basement or another, some preserving the few but treasured moments when I got to play my songs with other people of terrific musical talent, I realized how important making these songs and making this music was to my internal survival. In some of them, done with great sincerity and seriousness, when no one in the world was listening or probably ever would, I could hear how they were keeping me alive.

So as some phantom alien in a Star Trek episode once said, they are not expressions of my superiority but testaments to my existence. Evidence not only that I did exist, but how I existed.

I also recorded new material, with my old Yamaha keyboard (anything electronic that's more than 2 years old is Old) and its choices of formerly fashionable beats and accompaniments, using two of the four tracks on a simple four track cassette recorder. (I actually wish I still had the old boom box that unaccountably had a sound-on-sound recording feature, which allowed me to do multiple tracks that didn't have to be re-mixed.) By the time I did the last vocal tracks I was finally producing music that met or exceeded what I heard in my head.

Then I used the computer program that doesn't quite live up to its claims but is better than nothing. I haven't figured it all out yet, so there are some floating fragments and so on, but all in all I'm pleased. Even when the music or the sound isn't great, there's usually something for me to be fond of.

I couldn't make and send CDs for everyone I wanted to, but maybe I'll get the chance to do more. I do intend to post more on Kowincidence and the other blogs of record in the next month or so. I don't intend to go quietly.

This Christmas I'll be caroling with Quakers at a hospital and a nursing home. That should be as least as interesting, and as novel, as having Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Native Americans who are also Quakers.

Otherwise I'll keep up my morale with Jumbalones (the confection I make from my grandmother's recipe), rented Beatles and Star Trek DVDs, coffee and chocolate. Meditating with Margaret, hanging out with Tess the cat. The good things in life.

May your holidays be happy and safe.