Evan Billups is a fifth-grader who’s been in the after-school writing program for two years. She wrote Moms Without Their Daily Coffee during winter break. I made very small grammatical edits to Evan’s original piece.

When moms don’t get their nice cup of coffee in the morning, it gets nasty. First they notice when they’re driving you to school.

“Oh no! I couldn’t get my coffee pot to work so I didn’t get my coffee!” Mom says.

“Oh, mom! Please get it later!” you say.

“No, no, and no! I have a terrible headache and I left my aspirins at home,” Mom says. She pulls off Woodstock Street and quickly drives to the nearest Starbucks. “Stay in here. This will take five minutes.”

“Yeah right,” you mutter.

She’s in there staring at the menu board. You can actually hear her asking, “Pike Place or French Roast?” After ten minutes, you get up and go in.

“It’s 8:10, Mom! I’m going to be late if you don’t hurry up.”

“Oh, well, I’ll get Pike Place then,” Mom says. “But please take your time, I don’t want it rushed or it will taste too light. I want extra bold coffee.”

So then the coffee-maker person takes lots of time and does five extra stirs. By then you give up about not being late. It’s 8:20 and Mom is searching for a five dollar bill. She finally finds it and then slowly walks out the door.

By the time you get to school, it’s 8:30. You walk in and explain to Carla at the front desk, “I was late because my mom wanted a perfect coffee.” She is about to write a running late slip, but then puts her pen down.

“Seems like a suitable excuse. Go to class now,” she says.

You walk down the hall congratulating yourself on not being counted late. You walk into Mrs. Yochim’s and Miss B’s. They start to say, “Where’s your late slip?” but you quickly say, “My mom wanted a perfect coffee.” Mrs. Yochim and Miss B. shrug and say, “Sounds like a suitable excuse. Now start reading the Reading Street books.”

I guess coffee is really important in grown ups’ lives.

Tuesday night after darts, my father
is washed out, the reek of smoke, ale,
the bar’s din still in his hair.
Down twenty bucks, he makes a bed
on the couch, snores through shows
until the anthem cuts the channel off.

More than once I’ve seen him raise his hand
in mid-dream salute, mouth the words
as if in uniform back before measles
kept him out of Vietnam, forty
from his platoon dead in a year,
my father sent to France.

In the morning beneath too bright a light,
a razor nip on his neck, he says
all that matters is the knot in a man’s tie
lines with buttons from shirt to pants,
your buckle shines, you smile
no matter how much it hurts.

Verse 22 of the Tao Te Ching ends with the following:

Be really whole, and all things will come to you.

I opened up to it today and thought of the writing process, not exactly the “process of writing” but just writing in general, and something every writer faces, which is the question of what to write when.

Many of us make our living writing certain things while we feel driven to write something else. Maybe not on a daily basis, but there’s a voice now and again that asks you to lift your eyes from one page and place them on another. Sometimes we listen and adhere; other times we argue and falter. Occasionally, either decision leads to guilt, which won’t help any writer accomplish anything.

When I read into these two short lines from the Tao and apply them to writing, I’m left with the following:

When we allow ourselves to go where we must and spend time with the writing that is calling to us, or even step away from writing and allow life to flow in, we are doing ourselves a service, and joy will filter into all of our words and work. If we block this voice, throw up walls, allow guilt to seep in or deny ourselves days “away” from writing, we are removing joy from the equation, creating a block in all of our work and complicating a process that should flow from us instinctively.

Go then, write, and know your words are good.

The process continues to unfold, and I’m discovering that revision actually means re-envision, which opens up the possibility of truly giving a piece new life, new form, etc. Earlier versions of the following three poems have appeared previously on the site, sometimes with new names, sometimes not, but generally in a completely different form.


Late in the Game

Smoke on the cliff beyond left field
where space between homes is vast
like continents adrift – I say fire does us in
before the next quake, but my father disagrees,
cites black holes and solar winds
as a foul ball careens off a seat a few rows back.

That, or the world goes on long enough
for the Dodgers and Giants to be neighbors
like when he and my uncle stole a car
and drove to Ebbets before teams moved west,
got in for a quarter or some nonsense
he reminisces as tonight’s game
slides out of hand, stands clear

and my father moves ten-thousand years
to the future because that’s how plates shift.
My mind drifts back to the smoke,
tumbles below where a kid reaches for a foul pop
falling toward bare hands, squeezes
around a dream like dust.

Dead Cat

Sprawled in the road still warm, the blood fresh
against your skull, l’d like to be
a hand for you, tongue to lick your wounds.
I dress you in my shirt, pat down fur
where I can, shut your eyes because
there’s nothing more to see, still glazed
from your view of death as it bore down.

A collar but no tags, let’s skirt the streets
door to door until we find your bed, bowl,
couch where you honed your claws.
I know, you were robbed, never got
your ninth life. No one does.

If the sun goes down and we still don’t know
your name, I’ll dig a plot – there’s a spot
in my yard, warm like mother’s milk.
You can sleep all night. Then
when you’re ready for your farewell pounce
scratch my door, head home.

Transfer

When the bus is tight like this
your best bet is to make friends.
Bob wears golf pants, a burnt
brown shirt. Says his legs hurt,
eyes too, and the meds
keep his head numb enough
to make it.

He’s a vet, asks me to guess the war
and nods when I reach Korea.
His wife’s dead but around he says—
hears a shuffle of feet,
sometimes the chimes out back
by the bees he keeps. At night
she’s the chair rocking through sleep.

When I offer she hasn’t transferred yet
he agrees. Some souls get stuck,
hers is too good for heaven or here
and why not?

Now my lap is her seat. Bob wants
to hold hands. Sure—we do
through stops, a few sneers from kids
soon off before Bob pulls the cord,
kisses my cheek.

I’m honored to have a short recollection, Decade Disc 1, Track 6 posted on BackFencePDX.com, based on their February theme, The Moment After.

The moment after I found out Leigh was dead, Neil Young’s voice came through the speakers upstairs, traveled like a ghost and hit me in the spot where my head and neck join. For the last 15-minutes I’d paced and tried to hope. Now I knew.

You can read the entire piece here.

Thanks –

There’s plenty of talk right now about eras ending, what with the presidential inauguration a day away – and there will continue to be plenty of talk about it. Eras are constantly ending while new ones start up. What we’re left with is an ongoing flux by which all life ebbs and flows. Someone’s dying right now, someone’s being born – something ends and something starts and there’s not too much of a use hanging on to what was.

Still it is our nature to hang on.

I hang on to eras. I know I do. I tuck physical and mental pictures away. Then I go back, not to see what’s changed but to remember what hasn’t. This makes everything a static moment resting on a continuum that, no matter how fluid, is actually frozen. Locked. The young man aging before you is still the boy heading off somewhere.

I’m writing from this place today because I’ve just learned that Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, a Milwaukee, Wis. landmark for 82-years, is closing its doors. All four locations (at one point there’d been five) will be gone as of March 31st.

I’m saddened by this. Troubled. Bothered. Annoyed. Pissed off. All of those things. Why? For any number of reasons. On a topical, tangible level, because they’ve always been independent, that means there will soon be one less independent out there. Also, we’re talking about books here. Call me a throwback, but even as my reading habits tend to wax and wane, I’ll take sitting in a room filled with books any day of the week over just about anything else.

Mostly I’m bothered because I’m still in that bookstore. Back in 2001, at a time when I’d gotten about as far away from writing and literature as I’ve ever been, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops saved my life. They hired me as a bookseller not because I had any retail experience – I didn’t – but because I loved books. My interview with Amie, the manager at the time, was 45-minutes of talking about our favorite writers. Then I jumped at the chance to make minimum wage for eight-months because I got to talk books, stock books, smell books and buy books for an amazing discount. A few years earlier I’d been a janitor in the same bar where I drank – my paycheck went right back to the company store, so to say. Now I was turning a fat chunk of my thin check back to Harry W. Schwartz each month and loving every hardcover I carried home. On my last day of work, as Courtney and I prepared to move to Portland, Amie presented me with a $100 gift certificate to use at Powell’s. Why? Because we are all book people, a collection of failed or failing writers, PhD candidates in stasis, old activists, young activists, book worms and book snobs. Even when we hated our jobs – and of course we did at times – we loved talking books.

Yes, things change, eras end and new things rise from the ashes. It’s an easier proposition to accept when there’s no connection calling you back. In this case, with the news still fresh, even 1500 miles away in Portland, I’m not ready to accept that this one is over. Not yet.

The essence of winter –
looking through morning fog
that will lift into a day
you would have painted
if you were the one
who painted the day.

A new round of workshops started yesterday. The kids came ready. I gave them each a notebook prior to winter break; Chineyere filled hers up in a month. Everyone else at least filled their pages half-way.

Noah presented me with a poem when he walked in, which he later read to the class:

Poem by Noah

Time like water rushes ever onward,
never stopping, always moving, rushing
onward
following the many paths of people,
irrigating the fields of history
onward shall time flow, forward past the
bond of the universe
onward time, onward!

Meanwhile, Alice ripped off two great quotes, both of which I wrote down and now can’t find them. Sorry Alice – I told her I’d add them to the Blog this morning. They’re around here somewhere, buried among the papers and thoughts.

This week’s assignment for the Monday class: write a short, personal essay that is “true to the truth of the story” without worrying about the “truth of the truth”; then write the same story as a haiku.

The title of this post comes from the book, haiku mind, copyright 2008 by Shambala Publications, gathered and edited by Patricia Donegan. The post itself comes from the fact that I can’t get the fire started this morning.

I can’t get the fire started this morning.

I’m on the floor with the dogs, working with the split wood, newspaper, cardboard, kindling and flame. And I can’t get it started.

Can’t get the fire started.

I’m on the floor with the dogs, and when I think about it, it’s an honor to be on the floor with the dogs, just as it’s a privilege, I feel, to have a wood burning stove, not to mention to have the time to slowly go about the act of starting a fire while the rest of the world, or America at least, or maybe just Portland, or maybe just my neighborhood, has gone off to work, to traffic, to load up on their personal octane before their commute.

The fire won’t start.

I have all types of excuses as to why the fire won’t start, and at times like these, when the fire won’t start, I’m good at letting them jangle around inside my skull. Eventually I mix them with air, breathe life into my thoughts and let words fall off my lips in tiny pirouetting grumbles.

The wood is too wet.
There isn’t enough kindling.
I was sick for a month and couldn’t split smaller pieces.

I am on the floor for 20-minutes trying to get the fire started. I decimate a small forest of newspaper plus what little dry kindling I have. I’m left with three semi-scorched logs, each one glowing but their sum total in no way adding up to a solid lasting flame.

So I quit.

Of course I don’t quit quietly.

No.

I remind myself that I’ve wasted 20-minutes on the floor trying to get the fire started, that I could have been writing/reading/editing for 20-minutes rather than trying to get the fire started.

I set the logs back in the stove, stuff paper around them, close the door and walk away, planning to try later.

Then the fire starts.

Which, more than anything, is the reminder I need – and maybe a good many of us need – to be open and not rigid in our pursuits, which is to say to be fluid and flexible.

I close the door and walk away. Then the fire starts.

The reminder that there is no wasting time – sitting on the floor with the dogs could very well be called meditation, and very well IS meditation.

The concept of being present is within the very notion of setting the wood in the stove, preparing the paper and kindling and striking the match.

Presence is in the practice of starting the fire.

When I remove the expectation of the result – a fire – from the act of starting the fire, I return to being present. I move through “I want the fire to start” to “The fire will not start” to “The fire is not starting” to “I can’t start the fire” to what actually happens:

The fire starts.

The notion of “wasting time” is actually a wasted idea that literally strips the act of sitting on the floor with the dogs, setting the wood in the stove, readying the paper and striking the match from any and all meaning.

Suddenly I am perpetrating an action for an intended result, and when the result doesn’t happen “in a timely fashion”, I decide I have “wasted time”. I consider what else “I could have done” with my time.

To be present is to sit on the floor, to build, to let the fire come.

And the fire does arrive. Ten-minutes later, it burns soundly.

Have I done anything?

To be present in all things is an easy message to forget. To turn this around to writing: Perhaps my reason for being here in this lifetime isn’t so much about writing or being/becoming a writer as much as it is about learning presence through the practice of writing.

Perhaps the goal of all lifetimes is to learn presence.

Sitting there watching the fire, a haiku rises with the flame.

morning smoke

twenty-minutes of waiting
the fire catches
when I walk away

Just a quick note to say hello and wish any and all readers a happy 2009. DaveJarecki.com went into something of a shutdown hibernation mode during December, brought on mainly by a bought of double pneumonia. We’re coming off the disabled list this week with new interviews, new guest writers and new creative work, so keep an eye out. 

Thanks for reading and for waiting – Dave