Last Blog of November

My dear friends and followers,

I anticipate that this will be my last blog for a short while. As the season progresses my time diminishes, and I fear I have too little for blogging, at least for the foreseeable future. So I want to impart some words of wisdom as my Holiday Gift to each and every one of you, for what they're worth.

First, I got quite a nice response to my most recent blogs regarding spending and celebration. My dear friend Joanne put it most succinctly: "If we spend our time loving the life we have, not obsessing about what we don't have, we don't need Black Fridays or day-after-Christmas sales. We just need one another. After all, all we take with us when we leave for the last time is the love we have inside. Me? I want all I can get so I can share it with Jim when I see him again." Jim is Joanne's loving husband who passed away suddenly eight years ago. The point is clear: we have to love one another and hold on tight.

So that is my Christmas Wish: love one another. I didn't say it first. But in a world consumed by material things -- and that's another subject for discussion down the road -- Joanne is so right: those things remain of this world even when we move on. They're nice. I like my stuff. But they all could go away tomorrow, and if I still have the love of my wife Diane and all of you, I will be fine,

Now, as to the ghosts in my head, they have been stirring things up even as I have neglected them on paper. I love that -- the writing is going on at full tilt inside my head, mapping out the course it wants to take me; the characters are writing their own stories THROUGH me now -- and that is as it should be. The great William Goldman, author of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, once quipped (I'm paraphrasing): "If the writing is going badly it won't matter if you are in the most idyllic, quiet, peaceful setting in the world, and if it;s going well you can write in an elevator."

When it's the latter, life is exhilarating.

The ghosts have added a few things, They've been talking. They say, "It's well and good that you want to write about us, remember us. But what about your own ghosts?"

I was stunned. Of course! All of a sudden the book has unfurled like a family banner and I realize that all these people are connected --= to me. The story has layers that belong together, while I have been trying to figure out ways to keep them apart. It is a revelation. And when I think, in realistic tones, that this may be my last chance at a really good novel, I start to believe that Ghost Music may be the book I was meant to write all my life, whether anyone else reads it or not.

My favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, once said regarding his best known work, Slaughterhouse Five (and again I am paraphrasing): "Sometimes a writer writes about one thing so he can write about something else altogether." He meant, in his case, writing a SyFy novel based on the idea of a single person unstuck in time so that he could relate his own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, where he was being held as a POW. Now I think the same thing may be happening to me, and I am excited as hell!

The ghosts are talking. Listen . . .

Finally, it occurs to me that one of the themes of this book needs to be stated somewhere, so here goes. How much guilt does a person lay at his or her own feet for things they could not stop?

Thank you for listening, for caring, for being there. And if I don't see you, hear from you, or blog to you again -- or even if I do -- have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

It has that busy busy time of year, my favorite season. As once upon a time I looked a great deal like Santa Claus myself, and often was mistaken for the Jolly Old Elf by children on my postal route or in the local stores, his feast day, or the Day of Saint Nicholas, is a personal favorite of mine. Also, being of Dutch heritage (and birth), Saint Nicholas being the patron saint of the Netherlands, Saint Nick Day is a big deal to me. Diane agrees. This year we decided to do special Saint Nicholas Day presents for all the littler kids in our extended family. It has long been a tradition to give ornaments to our own children, who, even at 30 and up, still expect to get them every December 6. This year we added stuffed stockings to the mix for the kids -- and at Christmas we will be doing a very select gift exchange.

I think this could be a really good idea for the nation, if it ever could take hold: National Gift Exchange Day. It would serve several purposes, first of which is to get the commercial aspect of Christmas away from the day itself. Then, we give it in the name of Nicholas of Myra, that venerable man of the late Third Century whose generosity and love for children earned him a sainthood. Saint Nicholas in Holland became Sinter Klass, and the Dutch brought him over to the New World with them when they settled Niew Amsterdam. His name modified to Santa Claus. Third, we could take the commercial aspect of Christmas and bring it forward by several weeks. It might not affect overall sales, but it would give us all an opportunity to make Christmas a simpler, family oriented event not predicated on "What'd ya get?"

We'd have an app for that.

As for my beloved ghosts, they are gathering for the feast of Thanksgiving, and are being most kind and patient with me as I am distracted by the fun of the season and the pileup of the snow. Today, however, the snow is melting back a bit and I plan an hour or so on the book, so everyone will be happy.

The Ghosts Are Waiting

It is almost six pm Mountain time. I spent two hours shoveling snow off my driveway and walkways and porches this afternoon, after spending the morning first at work (4 am to 7 am) and then in Kalispell during a snow storm. My first experience driving in real winter conditions besides back and forth from my house to my or Di's work. The snow scares me -- I am not used to it. And the road to ouyr house goes pretty far up the hill, so I am always worried that I might get stuck climbing it. But the last two days have boosted my confidence greatly -- I can navigate snow covered, icy roads, and I can shovel snow for as long as it takes to get the job done. And I can drive down the hill at four in the morning in snowfall. Wow. I went into this week's work schedule frightened and anxious, and tonight I feel like maybe I can do it after all. Like I said, Wow.

But the ghosts have to wait. My energies have been elsewhere most of the week and will continue to be elsewhere much of the next holiday season. I have to mnake allowances. The first one is less writing for Helium, poems and reviews and such. Any spare time I find will go to my ghosts, and knowing that, they seem to have plenty of patience. Well, they're not going anywhere.

So happy Thanksgiving a few days early, and when you give thanks, remember your own ghosts with a smile.

Striking While The Iron Is Hot

I fully expected not to be writing at all this week. But my grandson got to stay over with his other grandparents yesterday and today, so I got a reprieve. And though the temperature outside dipped to 12 degrees (minus 11 Celsius) and never climbed above freezing all day, the snow has not fallen and the snow shovel is idle for the moment. I am on a learning curve here: winter has come early and I have to toughen up fast. Sometimes I don't think I can, but I have to, I have no choice. I drive into work down the hill tomorrow at four in the morning, and it's supposed to snow lightly. More learning.

We did have twelve inches of snow on Sunday last. Quick study. And they say it was unusual to get that much this early. But unusual seems to be my middle name.

As to the book -- the fictional composite character I mentioned last time took hold of me and I literally exploded with material. It has been a fruitful session that will keep me satisfied throughout the week until I can work some more. He was quite ready to share his story with me, and I hope I recorded it faithfully. As with bathrooms at my age, you should never pass up the opportunity when it presents itself.

Snow Flakes in the Ointment

Time to catch up. Please bear with; there are three bolgs below.

SATURDAY: Counting My Blessings
Today, someone new screamed at me. I don;t know his name, so I am going to give him one. I don't know his history, so I will provide it for him. I do known how his story ends. Funny -- I have always known that.

In my life, I have comfortable sheets and a flushing toilet, propane heat and freedom of speech. I tend to forget that, or take it for granted, which is the same thing. They would say, "That's the whole point. If you forget what you have, someone else will come along and take it away from you, and by the time you notice, it will be too late.

SUNDAY: Writing While Not
Off camera writing, so to speak, is more fun than editing. I feel like a stenographer trying to get everything said to me down before I lose it. I don't want to break the train of thought being hurtled at me by several anxious voices. So many voices that I have had to invent a character or two just to hold them, although most of the people in the upcoming book remain real people with real lives and real deaths.

But now, too, a fly has entered the picture: Xander, my grandson. He knows nothing of ghosts, yyet, and when he learns of them some day down the line, I hope it will be through books like the one I am writing and not in any way from personal experience. I already know that the prospects for his parents to have a better life than I did -- a father's goal for his children -- has been severely compromised. How must they worry for him? All I can offer now is vicarious ghosts. life will be hard enough.

We watch Xander next week while his parents are off for a few days to celebrate their fifth anniversary, and I know the writing will have to cease for three or four days, just when I am getting hot on the project. But this can be, and I will turn it into, an advantage. If the heat is still there after he goes home, then the stuff in my head is probably pretty good. But for now I will have to do my writing off camera. Such a sacrifice!

MONDAY: Snow Flakes in the Ointment
We've had our first real snow. I had the pleasure -- for me, first time -- of shoveling snow off the porch yesterday. Three inches accumulated, and it was pretty easy. But overnight a foot of snow accumulated and it took me twenty minutes to clear a path to, then liberate the snow from, my car. Driving down the hill was not too bad, but coming back up I lost traction and got stuck. AND I HAVE SNOW TIRES! So I just rolled back -- slowly -- until I could get traction and went the long way around to our house where the road is not as steep. But it's a challenge, and if winter is going to be like this maybe my enthusiasm for it will disappear with the sunlight. We will have to see.

Meanwhile, I get anxious about the white stuff -- another distraction. And Saint Nicholas Day is coming quickly. St. Nick is a big tradition in my house, and I have to prepare to play Sinter Klaus on his Feast Day. Another distraction! Yet, that part is fun. So the writing may slow down over the next little bit, and I have to let it. I just hope the ghosts enjoy hibernating over the winter.

Thanks for listening!

Busy Remembering

This one will be brief. I am just about to start a few hours working on my ghosts. And I was thinking about . . .

Our children are not taught to remember. They are taught to forget. Learn enough to take a test, pass it, move up, forget about it. They are told, You always can look it up. But how can anyone look up an answer if they've forgotten the question? No search engine is that good. And will anyone drive down the information highway if the fuel that drives them -- curiosity -- is in low supply and their tanks are empty?

Why is remembering so important? Does it get you a Job, the house, the girl (or boy)? Well, I knew what question to ask and so I looked the reason up. It is contained in George Santayana's famous quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

Humanity has gone through hell after hell of our own creating. And yet each generation seems more than willing to make the same mistakes, to enter the same bloody ventures, to go for glory not in the library but on the battlefield. Santayana also said, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

So, lets simplify, shall we? A slogan of sorts, short, not sweet:

THOSE WHO FORGET, REPEAT.

To Task

I just spent the last few hours pouring out ghost music onto the page. I am both exhilarated and exhausted. I did not want to write today -- I DID NOT WANT TO WRITE! I goit comfortablke on my couch and tuned in an NCIS I had not seen before, and was glued. The next one -- it's a marathon out there -- looked equally unfamiliar. But the book was waiting for me. I knew I would feel terrible guilt if I did not at least type in a sentence or two. Which led to three, then a paragraph, then a page, then some fact checking and some more writing and look out, about 4,000 words went in.

sometimes you just gotta tell yourself the ghosts are waiting. they're much more patient, by the way, than I would be.

More on the Dutch Girl

Hello, ola, 'allo, bonjour, and all that.

I wanted to mention that Mata Hari is not going to appear in this book I am working on now. It's already crowded, and deals with the next generation of victims. It's just that she is a recent, for me, example of innocent life lost to cover-up and national paranoia. She was held prisoner for months in filthy conditions kust to break her down and yet professed her innosence to the very end. They had only circumstantial proof, most of it based on falsified transmissions in a code both sides in the war knew had been broken, and other debatable sources and materials, and yet still they imprisoned her, interrogated her, tried her, convicted her, and executed her. It is sad, of course, but more than that: it is symbolic of what people with a great deal of power and a significant dose of righteousness can do to anyone they choose, and pretty much get away with it.

Part of the irony is that Mata Hari, born Margaretha Zelle, could not tell you where the troops were entrenched, even during the stagnant battle of Verdun, because she just didn't think about that stuff. And yet she was a spy?

One of the Ghosts

It occurs to me that when I talk about the voices in my head, it may make me sound a little unbalanced. Crazy, no? Well, sanity is highly overrated.

Please understand that I have encountered many stories in my 61 years of curiosity induced reading, and remember them. (Details -- I have a fine research library for them). I am busy remembering people I believe should not be forgotten ----- those are the voices in my head. I worry that when I am gone (and forgotten) that they will be, too, at last. The urgency of getting some of their stories down on paper grows when I think on that.

Like Mata Hari. I just read a bio on her. She was a woman of loose morals (for her day) convicted of spying on flimsy evidence as a scapegoat for French military failure. Then she was shot.

She was also a Dutch national. A cousin of sorts.

I read her story, the last half of which was about her arrest, incarceration and interrogation, and trial, and I think about how we hold people indefinitely on the suspicion that they are terrorists. I understand the paranoia behind that; I also understand that the government claims to have proof that each one is a dangerous person. But their rights are gone. And if only one of them is innocent, a Mata Hari incarcerated for who they are rather than what they did or did not do, then American justice is a joke for all of us.

History shows us many things. The worst lesson is this: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Work

I hope I am not repeating myself, but, hey, this is therapy for me as well as a chance to share with you. Writing is much harder work than I ever imagined. Maybe it;s because I am more serious about my craft now, or just that at last I have time to actually work on it. I do know that someone once said (sorry, can't remember who at the top of my bead) that a writer will do just about anything to put off writing -- I understand that now. It;s one thing to jot off a review of a film or book. It's also easy to start an idea and run it through a few paces. But the work comes in trying to make the material sing the right notes, true notes, and see it all the way to its conclusion, which lies down the road a fair stretch,

I have a responsibility to do the best I can by the voices in my head, even if they are all my own voice. Thursday I wrote/rewrote seven pages in three hours and felt drained afterward. But very happy with the results. So now I have set the bar. so, patience, all of you, it will take time. Patience, Me.

More on Ghosts

I ask myself: why do I spend so much time among the dead? The quick and quirky answer is that they don't talk back much and don't eat into my food budget, but that's glib. Truth is, they talk back a lot. Sometimes, they scream. I am busy remembering them. And learning what I can from them.

How do the dead help the living? Two things they have shown me clearly: Beware that love is not enough. And cruel people often succeed in attaining power and LOVE to do anything and everything they deem necessary to keep it.

How we are taught to be goes out the window.

More Ghosts, Just in Time For Halloween

I was talking about my ghost music, and the fact that I feel compelled now to write about the ghosts of futures passed. there is a long roll call. Not all of them are particularly nice or good, although some are, but all were victims in one way or other, most were silenced, many erased and nearly forgotten, and all stuck here in my head. They do not rage or fuss. They only remind me gently to remember them, especially whenever I hear a certain piece of music like the Sixth, or come across a name in the line notes.

The truth is, these ghosts will not let me go. They’ve had a hold on me for more than half a century, since I encountered the first of them staring up at me from the pages of a history book. I was curious even then – and they saw it, smelled it. They teased me, cajoled me, infiltrated my consciousness and my memory – acting as if my memory were their own, collected – and became part of me. Their ranks swelled; each encounter I had brought a lifetime of histories along with it, like a promiscuous lover. I am a walking dictionary of other people’s lives, because of them.

It is only natural, right, and necessary that I allow them out.

on a much lighter note -- and nice way to finish -- when i came home today the deer did not run away. They were grazing on my lawn and I slowly walked to my front door, talking softly to them, and for the first time they did not bolt and run, in fact staying in the yard wuite a while longer after I went inside. I always knew someday I would have the best grass in the area . . .

Happt Halloween!