Readers and writers blog

Actually, my desk already is clean. It always has been. Even during the years I was a newspaper reporter and later an editor. I used to spread my notebook pages out on the desk, write the story and then throw the notes away. For files, I clipped my stories out of the paper and stapled them to note cards that I then stored by subject and date in a desk drawer.

Too Felix Unger? Maybe, but it makes life easier for me.

These days, it’s all electronic files, and I’ve got a few remaining in this computer that I’d like to share with you:

• A complete rewrite of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected, a cinematically drawn story of a woman who struggles with her skeptical intuition as she tries to find a meaningful relationship in life at the edge of Hollywood. The new version has been expanded from five to nine chapters, with epilogue, and Cafesin has plans to make it the first book in a trilogy.

• The remaining nine chapters of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow, a story of children and teenagers fending for themselves in a world left without adults by a global virus that continues to kill humans as they approach adulthood. Yes, it’s a fanciful premise but so well written that disbelief quickly suspends.

• A new poem by Laura Elliott, our contributor from the United Kingdom. Her new offering, ‘And Don’t Ya Know. . .?,’ throws us a lifeline at a moment of darkness.

• And, oh yeah, a note from a blogger in, of all places, Tasmania, bringing to our attention an entry she wrote about a border collie who herds sheep. Now that’s not so unusual, but the Oct. 21 entry by Fiona Stocker in her blog, Treechange Tasmania, gives the rest of us in the English-speaking world a chance to read some of the vernacular used in the island state south of Australia. Not just metric terms like ’square metreage’ but vehicular terms like ‘four-wheel-drive utes’ and farm talk of ‘tussocks’ and ‘chooks.’ Thanks, Fiona, and good luck.

And now, right beside my clean desk and its computer with now-clean files, a music stand holding a notebook of old songs, most transcribed onto staff paper in my neat hand, beckons to me to pick up an acoustic guitar sitting in its own stand just to the right of the music. Practice me, the music says.

I hope to arrange at least three sessions a week playing singalongs at nursing homes and senior residences in our area besides the Sunday sessions that our little band — my wife, Bonnie, her parents, Glenn and Virginia, and I — play at a senior residence just around the corner from our home. Glenn and Virginia say they’ll join my weekday sessions whenever they can, and Bonnie, when she retires next year or so, may join in, too.

But I’ll still be around at R&W Blog, certainly reading our blogroll colleagues and filing an entry every now and then.

Meanwhile, watch out for those chooks.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve gotten to know Tess Dyer pretty well in the past five months, and I’m going to miss reading more about her and her lover, Brian LaChance, as well as their friends Jeff and Laura Burke and their daughter Cassidy, Tess’ brother Dave and his wife, Kim, ex-husband Jason, Zeke the gay bartender and other denizens of small-town Maine.

Today we present the final two chapters of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring, and I’ll miss it. We’ll still have installments of another book, Ann M. Pino’s Steal Tomorrow, but I’m sure when we’ve posted the remaining chapters, I’ll miss that one, too.

And sadly, we won’t be accepting any new books for a while.

I’ll be taking a break, probably after my next post Oct. 26, for an indefinite period while I give more of my free time to other pursuits — mostly music, much of it as a volunteer in area nursing homes and senior residences. Hell, I’m pushing 70, and I can’t think of a better way to spend some of my remaining years. But don’t think I’m being noble. Because a large share of that time still will be spent, as usual, sleeping late and lollygagging. And — oh, all right — some more exercise and other healthy stuff.

Meanwhile, R&W Blog isn’t going anywhere. We don’t have a huge library of works, but what we have is pretty good reading and should remain on the Internet for those who haven’t seen it — or, as in my case, would like to read it again.

I know I’ll be reading Waiting for Spring again. Anyway, here are the summaries for its last two chapters:

Chapter 42: Winter is approaching, and Tess, still missing Brian after their breakup in April, learns he has torn down the house they once shared. She visits a spot they also once shared at a local lake, then drives on to the site of a house he plans to build in the spring. As luck would have it, he also shows up. They talk. They make love. She says she wants the rest of his life. He says it’s hers — and always has been.

Epilogue: It’s May, nearly two and a half years since Brian’s younger sister Rachel died. He and Tess still hurt about that, but they also have cause for happiness — their first wedding anniversary. Oh, and something else. In a week and two days, their daughter is due. And they’ve already chosen a name for her. You’ll never guess it.

Next week, we’ll be offering not a new book but a new version of Jeri Cafesin’s Disconnected, an e-book-in-progress currently in our Works section as five chapters and an epilogue. The newly edited version will be complete at nine chapters, with epilogue, although Cafesin tells us she intends to make the novel part of a trilogy with this as its first book.

Also next week, we’ll have a new poem by Laura Elliott. We’ll also post the remaining chapters of Steal Tomorrow. And whatever else happens along. Then it’ll be so long. For a while.

Also now in Works:

• Chapters 18 and 19 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 18: On a trip to a library, Cassie hears a rumor that she rushes back to report to her fellow Regents gang members — sightings of adults who apparently survived a viral pandemic that was believed to have killed everyone in the world but teenagers and children. If adults survived, the Regents leadership concludes, they must be scientists either with or close to a cure for the virus.

Chapter 19: Cassie learns that Galahad, the boy she loves, may have killed his previous girlfriend when he was a member of a death-squad gang called the Kevorks. When she confronts him about this, he says his memory is hazy about the killing, but he assures Cassie his love for her is true. She rejects this — and him. Frightened and angry, she begins training as a warrior.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is based on one found at Inmagine, a digital photography and photo processing website.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of ‘The Big House,’ Chapter 18 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Las Cruces, New Mexico. September 1985.

My envelope in the big house in Biddeford has been getting emptier for years, but I don’t really feel the emptiness until the trip to the Southwest. Somewhere on the road, the feeling takes hold. After I leave off Steve Lutes in Las Cruces, I find myself wanting to just keep going.

Driving through El Paso to the Mexican border, I think of Jack Kerouac and his friends roaring in an old Ford jalopy into Mexico, smoking marijuana the size of cigars, copulating with a harem of dark-skinned women in a small-town whorehouse, penetrating so deeply into the central Mexican jungle that they become part of it, swooning into it with their bodies caked with dead bugs and sweat, their breath mingling with the humid exhalation of trees and swamp.

I get lost in Ciudad Juarez looking for a post office to mail bullfight postcards back home. I stop a group of teenage girls to ask directions to el correo. One of them says something like, ‘Vaya por esta calle dos cuadras, luego la calle a la izquierda . . .,’ but it is hard to follow her Spanish and gaze upon her black eyes, cashmere beige skin and sparkling teeth as white as the blouse of her school uniform.

The wrong number of izquierdas later, I am sitting at the bar of a large hotel, drinking beer before noon and acknowledging that I am a dirty middle-age man getting older and no cleaner. I leaf through the postcards. Back home. What a joke. The postcards are to my co-workers, most of whom live in other towns, to an ex-wife, also in another town, and to my mother and grandmother, both in another state. Even the cats are in another town with a veterinarian who is showing them more attention than I have. There is no one back home.

I am drinking the fourth or fifth of a long list of unfamiliar Mexican beers the hotel serves when reality washes back in. I become aware that people are crowding around a television set in the lobby just through the door. I keep hearing a word that sounds strange even in my unpracticed college Spanish. Terremoto . . . terre moto . . . te rre mo to. Earthquake.

People are watching the screen with their hands at their faces. Some are weeping. Early reports are incomplete, but the immensity of the disaster is apparent. I feel like a spectator at a bad traffic accident, unable to help anyone but unwilling to leave without a long gape at the bleeding victims of the Mexico City earthquake.

I find the post office, mail the postcards, head back for El Paso.

Back in the house a few days later, I sit at the kitchen table and look out at the ‘77-78 Datsun in the driveway. I could have just kept going, I tell myself. I look down at Killer, a fat orange cat who twitches his tail at me in anticipation of being fed. Killer’s adopted sister, a tiny gray cat named Mouse, sits purring in my lap. How could I have left them? Bonzo is off in another room, probably in a corner, looking at the walls. He isn’t as easily won back. He knows why I am looking at that car.

That car carried nearly everything I needed for a month on the road. If only it had been bigger. But not too big.

Listen, I have to go back to work tomorrow.

OK, so what size would a vehicle have to be to contain my already meager possessions? And would I really need all of them?

I will have to think about it.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 40 and 41 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 40: Tess meets her ex-husband, Jason, at a diner for a conversation filled with mutual confessions that she wishes they’d had when they were married. Maybe they would have made it, they agree. Tess goes on to visit her father, recently separated from her mother, and finds he has a new ‘friend’ that she thinks he has long deserved.

Chapter 41: Still missing Brian since their breakup, Tess goes on with her cleaning business, getting a new computer and taking on help that allows her to become an administrator rather than a worker. And then one day, she runs into Brian at the grocery store. She can hardly speak, and he can’t at all. She walks away quickly.

• Chapters 16 and 17 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 16: Cassie fends off a couple of thugs searching the clinic run by her fellow Regents, a gang trying to survive in a world left without adults by a global virus epidemic. The intruders, members of another gang of teenagers and children called the Pharms, were looking for a research computer that may have clues about curing the virus.

Chapter 17: Cassie helps deliver a baby at the clinic, but the mother dies, and she is the girlfriend of the gang leader. Besides worrying about repercussions from him, the clinic staff now must help a newborn survive without mother’s milk. The gang arranges a trade with some rivals to get a goat and then struggles with how to milk it.

– Sid Leavitt

What a week — the bailout passes, Sarah Palin debates, Wall Street loses more money, the baseball playoffs begin, O.J. is convicted — and yet. . .

What I’ll remember long after this week is a kid coming out of a diner.

You know, I got called a ‘nigger-lover’ once. It was nearly a half century ago, and it certainly wasn’t a badge of honor then. And even if it had been, I couldn’t have worn it in good conscience.

I was a young soldier at the Army Language School, sharing a cubicle in the barracks with a guy named Bill Thomas, a nice guy from the Chicago area who happened to be African-American, and we were studying on our cots one Friday night when a bunch of our classmates came back drunk from a local bar. One of them spotted me but not Bill and started haranguing me, and then out came the epithet. I was stunned, not just for me but for Bill. But he wasn’t. Years later, I described in my book, Adrift in America, how he reacted.

I wrote in other places in that book about my racial attitudes at the time. I’d have to sum them up as naive. I grew up in lily-white New Hampshire. In the 1950s, when the Supreme Court declared separate-but-equal schools illegal, our school had a debate and I took the segregation side, which I did without a stroke of conscience. It was just an exercise in forensics.

Bill was the first African-American I’d ever known, and we just fell in together. Never a second thought for me. It seemed absolutely natural, and I assumed it was the same for him. I was to learn it was not. Through his eyes, I saw how America really was. And as distressed as I was to see all this, I was even more crestfallen when I failed him.

I should have gone to see him in Germany when I was getting out of the Army, but I didn’t. Because when I talked to him on the phone beforehand, I learned that although he hated the Army as much as I did, he had decided to re-enlist for assignment in Europe because he could live there peaceably with the white woman who became his wife.

Whether I was dismayed or just plain angry that he was surrendering to racism, I just couldn’t face him, and I’ve always felt I abandoned him when he needed me. Since then, I’ve never been able to examine my own racial attitudes without a twinge of embarrassment.

This is where we come to the kid at the diner. My wife, Bonnie, and I were leaving from the lunch we usually have there with her parents after playing our Sunday music program at a local senior residence. Bonnie was just getting in the car when I saw the boy, barely a toddler, an African-American toddler, coming down the steps in front of his mother.

I’m supporting Barack Obama, not because he’s African-American but because he’s a Democrat whose views I share.

“Look at that kid,” I told Bonnie. “I wonder how many white people after this election is over, no matter what the outcome, will look at a kid like that and not see a future gangsta thug but. . .”

She finished the sentence: “. . .a president of the United States.”

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 14 and 15 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 14: Cassie is visited by two shadowy figures from a post-apocalyptic world in which only teenagers and children have survived a global virus. Her visitors, known generally as Thing One and Thing Two, have brought her the body of her friend Leila, killed by a gang of fundamentalist zealots called the Christian Soldiers.

Chapter 15: Cassie’s gang, the Regents, mount a counter strike that wipes out the Christian Soldiers. Filled with grief for Leila, Cassie also has to endure fears as the Regents return from battle that the boy she loves, Galahad, also has been a victim. When he finally turns up, he takes Cassie to his private lair and pledges himself to her. She moves in with him.

• Chapters 38 and 39 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 38: After her sexual encounter with a stranger in a neighboring town, Tess finally tells someone — her gay friend Zeke — about dark secrets from her teenage years: She’d given up her virginity to her mother’s boss and continued to have sex with him, even though her mother knew — and used the knowledge to improve her benefits at work.

Chapter 39: Longing for Brian after their separation, Tess confronts more of her inner demons, slashing a painting that reminds her of her surrender to fear and crying tears for everyone she feels she has failed. But in the end, she feels ‘a something that (is) green and new inside me . . . just like spring.’

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top was taken by a photographer named Jeremy and shown on the web album site Picasa.