Drafting–Colton speaks with his attorney, and Sandy

Colton pressed Accept on his iPhone and suppressed his dissatisfaction with the attorney who’d come highly recommended. “You’re up early for a Saturday.”

“It’s my golf day and I’m about at the first hole so I’ll be quick.” Colton visualized Cliff driving his cart, and could hear someone beside him talking, probably on a cell phone. “Hey, tried calling you several times last night.”

“Sorry. I was, well, out of range. Plus, my phone died.” He sat in his recliner, put his phone on Speaker, and grabbed his cigarettes and lighter. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll go first,” Cliff’s passenger announced.

“Court. Monday. 10:00 AM.”

“What the hell. You said my trial wouldn’t be for months.” Colton lite a Marlboro and took a deep pull.

“That’s right, this is about your bond. The DA refiled his motion and the new judge set a hearing. Just be there. Dress nice, and be on your best behavior.”

“Shit man. Shoot me straight. What’s going on? Am I about to go to jail?” Sweat popped out on Colton’s forehead. He remembered Cliff telling him Judge Stewart had to retire. Health reasons. And, to hope his replacement wasn’t some deranged pro-prosecution crusader.

“I hate to say it but the new judge, Judge Rhodes, will probably put you in jail until your trial, or increase the bond amount. Possibly to something you cannot afford.”

Colton lowered his foot rest, stood, and headed to the kitchen. He needed a beer. “Can’t you do something? Why is this happening? Why doesn’t Judge Stewart’s order still stand?” Four months ago, the DA had pulled this same stunt, filed a motion to revoke or modify Colton’s bail, and Judge Stewart had refused to set a hearing. Cliff had said then that given the seriousness of Colton’s crime, a majority of judges wouldn’t be so friendly.

“Listen, I got to go. Be at court early, say 9:30, and we can talk more. Have a good weekend.” The call ended. Colton downed half a bottle of Bud Light.

“Have a good weekend, my ass. That’s fucking easy for him to say.” After returning his half-emptied beer to the refrigerator Colton walked to his recliner and called Sandy. Still feeling the need to talk outloud to himself, he said, “shit, he’s in the same boat I’m in. The only difference is the names of our attorney’s.”

“What the hell are we going to do?” Sandy’s answer left no doubt he was also due in court Monday. “Where you been? I tried calling all night.” Sandy sounded desperate. Colton walked outside and stood on the front porch knowing his best friend believed he still had a tender reed of hope. Unfortunately, that was about to burn up like the morning fog.

“Sorry. I just heard. Cliff called and told me about the hearing.”

Before Colton could continue, Sandy blasted, “Millie’s going to be there. And tell them. Right? It’s time man.” For months he had blamed Colton for their predicament.

“Sit down and brace yourself. We’re in worse trouble than you think.”

“Huh? What the fuck are you talking about?” Sandy had always been pliable, almost like a puppet, especially for Colton.

He started to lie and tell Sandy the best thing they could do is wait until trial and surprise the DA with our alibi, but then decided that was bullshit. Plus, he needed Sandy to help execute the plan that was percolating in his head. “Millie’s gone, left yesterday. Don’t know where she is, but we have to find her.”

Again, Sandy jumped in. “And how the hell will we do that while sitting in jail?” A well-articulated question by the construction worker.

“Pack a bag and meet me at Mitchell’s in an hour. It’s time we go off the grid my friend. Millie’s out there and we’re going to find her.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” was all Sandy could say.

01/19/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. The strong winds prevented me from riding my pistol route, which is my goal every day. But, sometimes cold weather (or high winds) says otherwise.

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

Here’s what I’m currently listening to: The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders

Sanders was a tremendously talented writer.

Amazon abstract:

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author introduces readers to “a great detective, a detective’s detective,” New York cop Edward X. Delaney (Kirkus Reviews).

New York Police Department Captain Edward Delaney is called to the scene of a brutal murder. A Brooklyn councilman was struck from behind, the back of his skull punctured and crushed with an unknown weapon. The victim wasn’t robbed, and there’s no known motive. The commissioner appoints Delaney to head up a clandestine task force, but soon this effort ignites an internecine war of departmental backstabbing. Distracted by the serious illness of his wife, Barbara, Delaney begins his secret investigation. Then the killer claims another victim—slain in the exact same way, leaving the strange puncture wound. As more young men are found murdered, Delaney starts putting the pieces together. Soon, he’s faced with a cop’s dilemma: He knows who the killer is, but the man is untouchable. That’s when Delaney lays a trap to bring a monster to justice . . .

Learn more–read this great review on Amazon by Pennydreadful

I feel I may have cheated when reading this book because I read it in gosh, too many years ago to count. However, Sanders’s Deadly Sin series were the first stories that put my heart to pounding and made me wish I could write. Recently, I wanted to see if that belief was still true, and darned if it isn’t.

Lawrence Sanders quite simply is a master. Of characterization, of research, of police procedure, of getting inside the characters’ (and readers’ heads). His set up might indeed be frowned upon today. He starts the book with several chapters surrounding the antagonist, and then we meet Captain Edward X. Delaney and several chapters pertain to him and the politics surrounding a police captain with a critically ill wife.

But a killer is on the streets of New York City, and soon Captain Delaney is torn. Torn between sitting by his wife’s bedside and putting a madman away. Naturally it’s not as simple as that because politics and a power struggle are afoot, and a new kind of police reorganization affects the department all the way to the mayors’ office.

Edward X Delaney’s wife takes a turn for the worse, and he tries to resign. A police commissioner persuades him to take a leave of absence. But in the midst of all the politics and turmoil affecting the police department, the commissioner convinces Delaney to work in secret and independently while using his years of detective experience to find the killer who is walking the streets of New York and murdering unsuspecting men with an ice ax.

To accomplish this private investigation, Captain Delaney must do much of the leg work and research himself. To do this he recruits civilians to aid him in this quest, including a bedridden mountain climber, a 70+ retired curator dying to be of assistance and the widow of one of Blank’s victims [Blank is the suspect]. Much of the case is done thanks to these people when the city is in a full-blown panic because of the new administrations’ blunders and inability to catch the killer.

Captain Delaney is called back to work. And with police resources given him, he makes every effort to stop a killer from killing again.

A masterpiece of writing.

Drafting–Colton begins plotting his search

Colton is awakened to the alternating sounds of a skillsaw and a chainsaw. A month ago the old house next door sold and the new owners, a young couple from Rockford, began their first remodeling adventure. Weekends were not only made for Michelob, but for six AM demolitions.

His head was pounding. Too much beer, not Michelob, but Bud Light. Last night, he’d downed a six-pack while pondering Millie’s note, then driven to D & J Liquors for two twelve packs, thinking that would last him the weekend. He’d consumed way more than he should before passing out in his recliner down stairs. How or when he’d made it up upstairs to his bed was a mystery.

Colton rose slowly and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom. After peeing a pint he swallowed four Tylenols ignoring what the high dosage might do to his liver. “Shit, the beer and whiskey will kill me first.”

A sharp, stabbing pain exploded in his right temple the moment he thought of Millie and his predicament. He returned to the bedroom and rifled through her nightstand, chest of drawers, and closet. Useless. He inched slowly back into the hall and down the stairs, taking one step at a time. Coffee was his first objective.

On his second cup, Colton sat at the kitchen table and started to focus. He knew a plan was imperative if he ever wanted to see Millie again. He couldn’t just do nothing, go to work, come home, and wait to see what happened. There was no doubt, he had to act and act quickly and decidedly, otherwise his life was over and he’d spend his remaining days behind bars.

The first person Colton thought about was Matt Quinn. He was Millie’s number one cheerleader. It hadn’t taken a genius to figure this out. Since Colton moved in with Millie and Molly two years ago, Millie had received at least four raises and two promotions all while her work hours had stayed the same. Actually, for the last six months, she’d worked less.

Colton grinned as he thought about his foresight and wisdom in hiring private eye Butch King to tail Millie after work each day. Although it had taken him a few weeks to spot the Thursday pattern, he eventually learned she exited Grant Thornton Tower at 2:30 every Thursday and walked four blocks to the Clarity Clinic. With some clever subterfuge Butch had discovered Kira Maharaja was Millie’s psychiatrist. With little doubt, even without considering the human interaction between Matt and Millie that Colton had observed at several office parties, including the BBQ at his home less than two months ago, Matt Quinn possessed invaluable information concerning Millie’s whereabouts.

He turned Millie’s note over and grasped the pencil she’d used to scribble her revolt. At the top of the page, Colton printed Matt Quinn. Then, he paused, closed his eyes, and nodded his head up and down, ever so slightly. Kira Maharaja was the next name he added to his list. It seemed the plan to escape, to run away, would be something a mentally ill person might share with her psychiatrist.

Who else would Millie talk to about her plans? Colton stood, walked to the coffee maker beside the sink and refilled his cup. He looked through the kitchen window to the house next door, its windows open, allowing gas fumes from the chainsaw to escape. He returned to his chair and drew a circle in the lower half of the page.

Who else was inside Millie’s circle? He paused, cocked his head as though an invisible hand was prodding him in a new direction. Molly also has a circle and the two don’t perfectly overlap. Colton again picked up the pencil and started printing. This time at the bottom of the page. Work, church, school, friends. He paused and thought. Millie’s best friend at work, other than Matt, is Catherine. What about Molly? That’s easy, she has only one. Alisha, Alisha Maynard. She lives in the Auburn Gresham area. Colton remembered driving Molly there for a sleep-over. That was a year or more ago. He could see the street, and the house in his mind’s eye.

Colton had just penciled Alisha, Harvard Elementary School, and was trying to remember Molly’s favorite teacher when he heard his cell phone vibrating. After his first cup of coffee he’d noticed it on the table beside his recliner. The battery had been dead and he’d plugged it into a charger. “Millie.” He said out loud knowing there was no way in hell she was calling.

He stood and walked into the den. It was his attorney, Cliff Blackwell. “What the fuck does he want?”

My God, It’s Full of Stars …

Here’s the link to this article. Please take time to read this masterpiece. It’s awe-inspiring, and deeply humbling.

My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the second of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER TWO

In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who changed our understanding of the universe long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard Observatory, singlehandedly measuring and cataloguing more than 2,000 variable stars — stars that pulsate like lighthouse beacons — when she began noticing a consistent correlation between their brightness and their blinking pattern. That correlation would allow astronomers to measure their distance for the first time, furnishing the yardstick of the cosmos.

Glass plate of Andromeda from the archives of the “Harvard Computers.” (Photograph: Maria Popova)

Meanwhile, a teenage boy in the Midwest was repressing his childhood love of astronomy and beginning his legal studies to fulfill his dying father’s demand for an ordinary, reputable life. Upon his father’s death, Edwin Hubble would unleash his passion for the stars into formal study and lean on Leavitt’s data to upend millennia of cosmic parochialism, demonstrating two revolutionary facts about the universe: that it is vastly bigger than we thought, and that it is growing bigger by the blink.

Art by Deborah Marcero from *The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble* by Isabelle Marinov

One October evening in 1923, perched at the foot of the world’s most powerful telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Hubble took a 45-minute exposure of Andromeda, which was then thought to be one of many spiral nebulae in the Milky Way. The notion of a galaxy — a gravitationally bound swirl of stars and interstellar gas, dust and dark matter — did not exist as such. The Milky Way — a name coined by Chaucer — was commonly considered an “island universe” of stars, beyond the edge of which lay cold dark nothingness.

When Hubble looked at the photograph the next morning and compared it to previous ones, he (I like to imagine) furrowed his brow, then with a gasp of revelation he (this we know for a fact) crossed out the marking N on the plate, scribbled the letters V A R beneath it, and could not help adding an exclamation point.

Edwin Hubble’s 1923 glass plate of Andromeda. (Photograph: Carnegie Observatories)

Hubble had realized that a tiny fleck in Andromeda, previously mistaken for a nova, could not possibly be a nova, given its blinking pattern across the different photographs. It was a variable star — which, given Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery, could only be so if the tiny fleck was very far away, farther than the edge of the Milky Way.

Andromeda was not a nebula in our own galaxy but a separate galaxy, out there in the cold dark nothingness.

Suddenly, the universe was a garden blooming with galaxies, with ours but a single bloom.

That same year, in another country suspended between two World Wars, another young scientist named Hermann Oberth was polishing the final physics on a daring idea: to subvert a deadly military technology with roots in medieval China and rocket-launch an enormous telescope into Earth orbit — closer to the stars, bypassing the atmosphere that occludes our terrestrial instruments.

It would take two generations of scientists to make that telescope a reality — a shimmering poem of metal, physics, and perseverance, bearing Hubble’s name.

The Hubble Space Telescope. (Photograph: NASA)

But when the Hubble Space Telescope finally launched 1990, hungry to capture the most intimate images of the cosmos humanity had yet seen, humanity had crept into the instrument’s exquisite precision — its main mirror had been ground into the wrong spherical shape, warping its colossal eye.

Up the coast from Mount Wilson Observatory, a teenage girl watched her father — who had worked on the Hubble as one of NASA’s first black engineers — come home brokenhearted. He didn’t know that his observant daughter would become Poet Laureate of his country and would come to commemorate him in the tenderest tribute an artist-daughter has ever made for a scientist-father. That tribute — the splendid poetry collection Life on Mars (public library) — earned Tracy K. Smith the Pulitzer Prize the year the Hubble’s corrected optics captured the revolutionary Ultra Deep Field image of the observable universe, revealing what neither Henrietta Leavitt nor Edwin Hubble could have imagined — that there isn’t just one other galaxy besides our own, or just a handful more, but at least 100 billion, each containing at least 100 billion stars.

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
by Tracy K. Smith

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

THE MAKING

Every poet is a miniaturist of meaning, building cathedrals of beauty and truth with the smallest particles of language. It is with a poet’s mindset that Brazilian graphic artist and animation director Daniel Bruson approached his contribution to The Universe in Verse. (Special thanks to On Being creative director Erin Colasacco for bringing Daniel into the project and for working with him and with composer Gautam Srikishan on making this symphonic cinepoem come alive.)

After I relayed to Daniel why I had chosen this particular poem (which Tracy read at the inaugural Universe in Verse in 2017) to illustrate the larger story of our search for cosmic truth — a search both made possible and made imperfect by our humanity — he grasped the nested layers of meaning with uncommon sensitivity, mirroring back his interpretation:

The Hubble tries to see or make sense of the Universe, the father tries to understand the Hubble, the daughter tries to make sense of the father, the decade, the world, and the poet tries to put this whole into perspective. All these efforts have to face problems of scale or distortion: something too big or small, too close or too distant, too dark or too familiar. Not to mention the original problem with the Hubble mirror.

This cascade of distortion sparked the idea “to use optics as a metaphor, to seek for these imperfect, unresolved and elusive, but also suggestive and alive images.”

Daniel set about creating his deliberately blurry cosmic animations frame by frame, painting each tiny detail onto a glass plate with nail polish, oil paint, glitter, acrylic, and other materials he mixed, scrubbed, smudged, and swirled with brushes and cotton swabs beneath the lens of a camera capturing the process of creation and destruction.

He magnified the optical enchantment by filming the vignettes through upside-down drinking glasses of various shapes and thicknesses.

In a crowning feat of ingenuity — itself a miniature masterpiece of engineering and composition — he built a tiny model of the Hubble out of cardboard, paper, and aluminum foil, dismantled it frame by frame, filmed the destruction, then reversed the footage to create the building effect. (I am reminded here of Bertrand Russell’s astute observation, made shortly after Edwin Hubble took his historic glass plate of Andromeda, that “construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it” — a truth as true of the universe itself, with its elemental triumph of something over nothing, as it is of the human endeavor to know it by building optical prosthesis of our curiosity.)

Something about Daniel’s process — the exquisite craftsmanship, the passionate patience, the tiny scale on which he made such beauty and grandeur of feeling — calls to mind Emily Dickinson and her miniature cherrywood writing desk, on the seventeen square inches of which she conjured up such cosmoses of truth, among them the poem illustrating Chapter One of this series.

01/18/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. It’s what I call my pistol route, which is my goal every day. But, sometimes cold weather says otherwise.

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

Here’s what I’m currently listening to: The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders

Sanders was a tremendously talented writer.

Amazon abstract:

Learn more–read this great review on Amazon by Pennydreadful

Drafting–Breakfast in Pittsburgh

When the bus driver shut down the engine Millie tapped Molly on the hand. “Wake up. Breakfast time.” The kid could sleep through a tornado.
Molly, startled, inclined her seat, removed her ear buds, and shook her curly hair out of her eyes. “I’m starving,” she said looking at her mother.
“Sally Ann’s your best option.” The anorexic-looking girl across the aisle was standing and politely waiting for Molly and Millie.

“Say again,” Millie said, smiling at the young girl who looked like she hadn’t eaten in years.

Molly glanced at her mom, unplugged her iPhone from its charger underneath the seat, and stuffed it into her book bag. “It’s a restaurant.” Molly whispered to her mother.

The girl motioned for Millie and Molly to go first. “The reviews advise staying away from The Pitts. That’s the fast-food joint inside the bus station.”

The three exited the bus and walked inside the rear double-doors of the terminal. The lobby was large, much bigger than Toledo’s, and, so far, much cleaner. The gray and black floors looked like they’d just been waxed. “How far away is Sally’s?” Millie asked, not that hungry but knew Molly was, as always.

“It’s just two blocks north on 11th street. I’m going. Join me if you like. My treat. By the way, I’m Tracey.” This confused Millie. Anorexic’s are opposed to eating. And, why would this skinny, yet attractive girl who neither her or Molly knew, offer to buy their breakfast?

“I’m Molly. This is Millie, my mom.” Molly grabbed her mother’s hand and squeezed, knowing she needed to take charge as Millie battled depression. “Sounds good to me.” Molly said, shifting her book bag to her other shoulder.

Tracey led the way across the lobby, out the main entrance, and onto 11th street. Nothing much was said during their five minute walk.

The restaurant was small, and crowded. Six booths and an eight-stool counter. Not an available seat anywhere. For a minute, the three stood inside the front door, staring at the menu on the back wall taped to the metal hood above the griddle, and pondering whether to leave or wait. “Take ours.” An older man said from two booths away. “Come on Mildred, time to let these nice folks have our table.” The woman, probably his wife, looked like Millie felt: alone, sad, helpless. “You’re lucky. Food’s great. Come here every day.” It took another minute or two for the man to coax his wife from her seat, slip on a wide red scarf, and lead her outside. Millie couldn’t help but think how lucky the two seniors were, to have each other, hopefully after a long, satisfying life together.

“Where are you headed?” Molly broke the silence after the waitress filled their water glasses and took their orders. Millie removed her phone from her purse and started typing Matt a long text. She’d promised to update him every day.

“The Big Apple.” Tracey said, pouring half a Splenda into her water glass, then two shakes of salt. “New York City,” she added to clarify, but you probably know that already.” She stirred and used a spoon to test her concoction.

“What do you do there?” Molly was uninhibited.

“I teach meditation, also known as mindfulness.” Oh my, Millie thought about the Moonies along Canal Street she’d see every Thursday afternoon during her walk to her psychiatrist.

“Sounds like woo-woo to me.” Molly had no filter. Millie eyed her daughter, shaking her head sideways.

Carrie Borders was a Moonie, and she was a paralegal at Winston and Strawn. She occupied a cubicle in Millie’s quadrant, and like her, reported to law partner Kimbal Deitrich.

Tracey chewed slowly as though garnering time to frame her response. “I teach Zen. It’s nothing to do with the metaphysical. Simply put, it’s an exploration into the nature of the mind, a tool to open completely to our lives.”

Millie wasn’t especially spiritual but for the last year had attended a small church in their neighborhood. The unspoken reason was to create more time on weekends away from Colton. She ate a bite of her bran muffin and recalled Friday’s at Winston and Strawn.

Once per week, if their schedule allowed, the paralegal staff was allowed to dress casual. Carrie would always wear a t-shirt that read, “I’m a Moonie and I love it”. Millie had tried to avoid Carrie as much as possible but sometime she’d be stuck with her in a conference room indexing depositions. There, Millie learned a near-complete history of the Unification Church. It’s founder Sun Myung Moon, was allegedly a Messiah, second only to Jesus, wholly sinless. Moon’s purpose, as was all his followers, was to replace Christianity with his mission which was, in essence, to unite all humans into one family under God bringing peace throughout the earth. Woo-woo for sure, Millie had always concluded.

Molly ordered a refill of orange juice and continued peppering Tracey. “Where have you been? Did your car breakdown?”

Tracey pushed back her oatmeal bowl and forked a slice of pineapple. “I love your inquisitive daughter.” Her eyes met Millie’s and lingered a long while. “Two or three times per year I go on retreat. I always travel by Greyhound. For me, it keeps me rooted to life, real people, and real dependency. But mainly, I’m selfish. Riding the bus creates a lot of time to meditate without having to worry about driving.”

Molly interrupted Tracey. “Where was your retreat. This time?”

The waitress delivered their ticket and waited. Tracey removed a card from her pants pocket and handed it to the voluptuous red head. “Ottawa, Illinois, One River Zen. The center is a beautiful Queen Anne Victorian built in 1890, situated on the scenic banks of the Illinois River.”

“How long are retreats?”

“They vary. At One River they’re either a weekend or a week. Mine was the latter.” Tracey ate two bites of cantaloupe, and swallowed some water.

“Does meditation cause you to be so skinny?” Again, absolutely no filter.

“Molly, that’s too personal, borderline offensive.” Millie hoped her daughter would grow out of this.

“Oh, I love it.” Tracey replied. “So natural. She’s got a bright future.”

“Millie activated her cell. “We best be going. It’s almost 5:45. We don’t want to miss our ride.”

The food had been better than great. Even Millie bragged on the eggs, although she’d only taken a bite from Molly’s plate, who had wolfed down a southwestern omelet and a side order of bacon. Tracey’s appetite was equally as strong as Molly’s although she chose oatmeal, fruit, and unbuttered toast.

Millie was surprised she ate anything at all.

Maya Angelou on Writing and Our Responsibility to Our Creative Gifts

“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”

Here’s the link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

Maya Angelou on Writing and Our Responsibility to Our Creative Gifts

“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words. Our gifts come unbidden — that is what makes them gifts — but with them also comes a certain responsibility, a duty to live up to and live into our creative potential as human beings. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin admonished in his advice on writing. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” That durational willingness to work at our gifts, to steward them with disciplined devotion, is our fundamental responsibility to them — our fundamental responsibility to ourselves.

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) considers what that means and what it takes in a wonderful 1983 interview, included in Black Women Writers at Work (public library).

She reflects:

I try to live what I consider a “poetic existence.” That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.

[…]

My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft. So I study my craft… Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh, even make them go to war. You can do this by learning how to harness the power of the word. So studying my craft is one of my responsibilities. The other is to be as good a human being as I possibly can be so that once I have achieved control of the language, I don’t force my weaknesses on a public who might then pick them up and abuse themselves.

With an eye to the abiding mystery of our creative gifts, she adds:

I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.

When asked how she fits her art into her life, Angelou responds:

Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.

Complement with Susan Sontag on writing and what it means to be a decent human being and Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech about storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Maya Angelou on courage and facing evil, identity and the meaning of life, and her cosmic clarion call to humanity.

01/17/23 Biking & Listening

Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.

Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. It’s what I call my pistol route, which is my goal every day. But, sometimes cold weather says otherwise.

Here’s a few photos taken along my route:

Here’s what I’m currently listening to: The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders

Sanders was a tremendously talented writer.

Amazon abstract:

Learn more–read this great review on Amazon by Pennydreadful

Drafting–Youngstown to Pittsburgh—Millie

Millie squeezed Molly’s hand and wondered if by daylight she would extend another act of kindness and love. The feelings of guilt and worthlessness were always the first signs the manic stage was over, that her body, mind, soul, and spirit had peaked and she was spiraling downward, out of control. She prayed, doubting it would do any good.

Six months ago Dr. Maharaja prescribed Latuda for Millie’s depression, worried that some of her symptoms fit a schizophrenia diagnosis, especially the voices she occasionally heard. Millie opened her purse, removed the bottle of Latuda pills, and placed one under her tongue. She didn’t want to wait until tonight to take one as prescribed. Now was tonight, she told herself as the bus picked up speed heading for Pittsburgh.

Five minutes later Millie couldn’t decide if she was dreaming or simply exploring her memories. Either way, the guilt and worthlessness were center stage, wrapping her inside a heavy cloak of mistakes that engulfed her reality.

Millie had grown up as the only child in a happy household on the outskirts of Sanford, North Carolina. Her father wanted her to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer. Although a good student at Lee County High School, Millie was an outdoorsy girl who liked to build things and, she wanted to travel. Uncle Dennis, her mother’s brother, was an expert welder and advised his niece to do what he’d done twenty-years earlier. He’d spent half-a-day at the high school and then rode a bus to Central Carolina Community College to learn to weld. After graduating he’d joined the local union and become a journeyman welder. “My job has taken me all over the country. If you want to see inside a nuclear silo, then become a journeyman welder. And, that’s what Millie did, to the consternation of her father.

In late summer 2006, a year after graduating from Lee County High School, Millie was given a four-month assignment at Belews Creek Steam Station in Stokes County, N.C. There, she met a dark-haired lumberjack figured man from North Alabama named Michael Lewis Tanner. Like Lewis, it was Millie’s fifth assignment as a union welder since turning eighteen. The two worked along with a hundred others side-by-side at the Duke Energy power plant during the day. Three weeks after meeting, simple and easy conversation and mutual attraction triggered a passionate romance. Time, touch, and talk came to a standstill when December came and new assignments appeared. Alabama Power’s Greene County Electric Generating Plant in Demopolis, Alabama for Millie. Nisource, Inc.’s Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield, Indiana for Lewis.

After a month of separation and a call or two per week, Millie sensed Lewis’ feelings were quickly waning and their intimacy had been nothing more than curiosity for the two nineteen year old inexperienced lovers. Then, Millie learned she was pregnant. This changed everything for Millie. There was never a doubt, she would become a mother and somehow raise her child; she would marry Lewis and they’d love their daughter (it had to be a girl) like her parents had loved her. But, a week later, when Millie finally got the courage to tell Lewis, he was cold, uncaring, and seemingly unwilling to shoulder any degree of responsibility. This had been the last time Millie and Lewis had talked, until August the second 2007, the day after Molly Leigh Anderson was born.

This time, Lewis was kind, sympathetic, open to a friendship, and willing to bear some of the costs of raising their daughter. However, things had changed for him. He was now a long-haul truck driver for J.B. Hunt, having completed his training in early July. The open road was now his life, and he’d come home, at most, once a month.

Lewis wasn’t the only one who’s life had taken a detour. In late April, after the Greene County job in Demopolis, Alabama ended, six months pregnant Millie returned to Sanford and her parents home. This time, she listened to her father, “picking up roots every three or four months is not the life for you and our grandchild. You need to go back to school, maybe become a teacher. You can live here with me and your mom and commute to my alma mater.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had to wait, but Central Carolina Community College was the place to start. It took Millie a year to complete the associate’s degree she’d begun as a high school junior, plus, during this time, she’d had Molly and begun working for her father at his law firm. The latter had silenced her desire to become a teacher and seeded a growing interest in someday becoming a lawyer.

However, by Fall 2009, a smothering home environment and mounting tension with her mother over the raising of young Molly was fueling Millie’s impatience and need to blaze a new trail. Her sympathetic father came to the rescue and moved his daughter an hour away to Chapel Hill and paid the full tuition for the school’s Paralegal Certificate Program although it was mostly taught online.

Millie was startled to wakefulness when the loud speaker above her head announced the need for a detour. “Sorry ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got to exit here to avoid an overturned truck up ahead.” She raised her chair to upright and squinted down the bus’s center aisle. She couldn’t see anything but the white dashed lines in the road.

“A live-haul chicken truck turned over at the Franklin Park exit.” The anorexic-looking girl across the aisle declared holding a weird looking device attached via cables to her ears. The two met eyes and Millie semi-smiled and nodded her head as though saying thank-you for the update.

She activated her cell phone. It was 4:50 AM, and she was suddenly hungry. As she knew Molly was although she was still in a deep sleep, ear buds in, as though she hadn’t heard the blaring intercom.

Millie affixed her own ear buds, activated an Art Pepper playlist, and reclined her chair. She wanted to complete the journey she’d started over an hour ago.

In January 2010, certified as a paralegal by the North Carolina Bar Association, Millie was contacted by a legal recruiting firm based in Chicago. A week later—over the objection of her father who wanted Molly and Millie to return to Sanford and work with him—Millie flew to the windy city and interviewed with three law firms. By far her first choice was Quinn Law Offices but they didn’t extend an offer. With some hesitation, she settled on Winston and Strawn, the oldest firm in Chicago.

It was at a deposition a year later that Millie and Matthew Quinn met for the second time. Her professionalism and graceful assistance during the next hour prompted his phone call the next day. Three weeks later, Millie moved to the seventeen floor of Grant Thornton Tower and became a paralegal apprentice for the man who would become her number one fan and supporter.

For the next five years, all had gone as perfect as Millie could have wished or imagined, including the 2013 purchase of a cozy home on S. Princeton Avenue, and Molly’s exceptional adjustment and ongoing thriving at Harvard Elementary School.

Life was near perfect for the hardworking, hard-playing mother-daughter team until Millie met Colton Lee Atwood. Even after he moved in, life remained good. For the first year. Then, all hell broke loose.

“Greyhound Bus welcomes you to Pittsburgh. We’ll have an hour layover. Plenty of time for a good breakfast,” the bus driver’s deep voice resonated over the intercom.

Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology (Joan As Police Woman Sings Emily Dickinson)

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”

Here’s a link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the first of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER ONE

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.

But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.

Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar. Once there were fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate. Animals savored the sugars in fruit, converted them into energy and proteins, and a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive.

Without flowers, there would be no us.

No poetry.

No science.

No music.

Darwin could not comprehend how flowers could emerge so suddenly and take over so completely. He called it an “abominable mystery.” But out of that mystery a new world was born, governed by greater complexity and interdependence and animal desire, with the bloom as its emblem of seduction.

In 1866, the young German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel — whose exquisite illustrations of single-celled underwater creatures had enchanted Darwin — gave that interdependence a name: He called it ecology, from the Greek oikos, or “house, and logia, or “the study of,” denoting the study of the relationship between organisms in the house of life.

A year earlier, in 1865, a young American poet — a keen observer of the house of life who made of it a temple of beauty — composed what is essentially a pre-ecological poem about ecology.

Emily Dickinson at seventeen. (Amherst College Archives & Special Collections)

She had awakened to the interdependent splendor of the natural world as a teenager, when she composed a different kind of ecological poem: In a large album bound in green cloth, she painstakingly pressed, arranged, and labeled in her neat handwriting 424 wildflowers she had gathered from her native New England — some of them now endangered, some extinct.

This herbarium — which survives — became Emily Dickinson’s first formal exercise in composition, and although she came to reverence the delicate interleavings of nature in so many of her stunning, spare, strange poems, this one — the one she wrote in 1865, just before Ernst Haeckel coined ecology — illuminates and magnifies these relationships through the lens of a single flower and everything that goes into making its bloom — this emblem of seduction — possible: the worms in the soil (which Darwin celebrated as the unsung agriculturalists that shaped Earth as we know it), the pollinators in the spring air, all the creatures both competing for resources and symbiotically aiding each other.

And, suddenly, the flower emerges not as this pretty object to be admired, but as this ravishing system of aliveness — a kind of silent symphony of interconnected resilience.

To bring Emily Dickinson’s masterpiece to life is a modern-day poet of feeling in music — also a keen observer of the house of life, also a passionate lover of nature, also an emissary of aliveness through art.

She is a composer, a multi-instrumentalist classically trained as a violinist, and above all a singer and writer of songs with uncommon sensitivity to the most poetic dimensions of life.

Here is Joan As Police Woman with Emily Dickinson and the centuries-old pressed flowers from her actual herbarium.

BLOOM
by Emily Dickinson

Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —

HOW WE MADE IT

Every true artist is a miniaturist of grandeur, determined to make every littlest thing the very best it can be — not out of egoic grandiosity but out of devotion to beauty, devotion paid for with their time and thought, those raw materials of life. When I invited the uncommonly gifted and uncommonly minded Joan As Police Woman to bring the poem to life in a typical Universe in Verse reading, this true artist instead transformed it into a soulful song — an homage that would have gladdened the poet, who in her teenage years took regular music lessons and practiced piano for two hours a day, and who grew up to believe that, in its most transcendent stillness, the world is “thronged only with Music.”

From the start, I envisioned using the teenage poet’s herbarium — a forgotten treasure at the intersection of art and science, one of my favorite discoveries during the research for the Dickinson chapters of Figuring — as the raw material for the animation art. Having collaborated on a handful of previous animated poems, I invited Ohara Hale — artist, musician, poet, illustrator, animator, maker of nature-reverent children’s books, choreographer of beauty and feeling across a multitude of art-forms — to work her visual magic on the poem-song.

In a small wood cabin at the foot of a Spanish volcano, she set about reanimating — in both senses of the word — Emily Dickinson’s spirit through her herbarium.

Ohara composed all the creatures — the bee, the caterpillar, the butterflies, the human hand — from fragments of the poet’s centuries-old pressed flowers: digitized, restored, retraced by hand, and atomized into new life-forms. Individual petals, leaves, and stamens make the wings, body, and antennae of each butterfly. Layers of petals, sepals, and anthers stripe and behair the body of the bee. A large leaf folds unto itself to shape the hand that wrote this poem and nearly two thousand others — poems that have long outlived the living matter that felt and composed them, poems that have helped generations live.

Strewing the animation are words from the poem, hand-lettered by the polymathic Debbie Millman in a style based on surviving museum samples of Emily Dickinson’s handwriting from the period in which she composed the herbarium.

In a lovely way, the art mirrors the music it serves. Joan’s composition is itself a time-traveling masterwork of layering: voice upon keys upon strings, feeling-tone upon feeling-tone, classical heritage beneath thoroughly original sensibility — all of it so consonant with the central poetic image, all of it “so intricately done,” all of it a triumph of that “profound responsibility” we have to the ecosystem of art and ideas abloom in the spacetime between Emily Dickinson and us.

It has been an honor to collaborate with these uncommonly gifted women on honoring an uncommonly gifted artistic ancestor and celebrating our common evolutionary ancestry with all life-forms in nature.