12/27/2007
Heading out to Cali for a quick visit with family and friends and a trip to Pasadena to watch our boy make his Rose Bowl debut ... as a member of the Marching Illini drumline! If you're up early on Jan. 1, make sure to watch the Tournament of Roses parade. Eric will be in the 24th unit of the parade. He'll be easy to spot as he drags his six-drum set of tenors down the parade route ... he's the stunningly handsome boy on the right outside of the tenor drums! See? One degree removed from celebrity!
Have a great New Year!
La familia Urrea
Have a great New Year!
La familia Urrea
(As promised, sorry for the delay!)
[Note: as mentioned a few weeks ago, this last chapter of the “Wastelander’s Notebook U.K.” vanished when our computers melted down this last summer. Though this entry is far out of time—the first two ran around August—you can look ‘em up if you’d like to—they’re in the archive—I finally got it back and found myself laughing as I read it. So I thought I’d give it to you. These are NOT poems, by the way. I don’t know what this writing is—sketches. Flashes. Writing-on-the-run, caught like a butterfly in a net of seeing. Fast, Bruce Lee style jeet-kun-do writings. If something here begins to rise to the level of a poem, it must be because God is kind and the fates felt giddy that day. Anyway, here it ends. See you in 2008. –L]
#
Later, that same day…
We go to renew our bus tickets.
The man in the ticket booth asks where we’re from.
His eyes light up. He
expresses profound enthusiasm
for Chicago.
Chicago!
Are you kidding?
“But you’re HERE,” I reason. “London!”
“Yes, but you’re THERE!”
he counters.
“Chi-Town!”
“How can you love Chicago so much?
You have London!”
“London! Blah!”
“But—but—but--!”
“Ah, Chicago!”
“But you have the Tower of London!”
“The Tower! Bah! You have Maxwell Street!”
“But, but, but--history!”
“You have the Blues!”
He mutters:
“Chicago is clean, man. London’s
a filthy city.”
We had just been marveling at how clean
London is—every street swept spotless
by gnomes with weird little sidewalk-tractors that no doubt
house sly cameras with face recognition
programs.
“Yeah,” I say. “The Blues. There is that.
They sang a different kind of Blues
in the Tower, eh?”
“The Tower. Bah.”
We fetch up on a friendly impasse.
As we leave, I say, “See you in Chicago.”
And he sighs:
“Please, God.”
#
It’s different here. We speak the same language,
sort of.
When I tell people we’re going on the
Queen Mary II, they express folksy sayings
I can’t for the life of me understand.
Sounds like:
“Gorr, it’s the QM izzit! I’ll flibber a right
gallon of skinless pickles, eh? You’re woggling
the frumsey wicket, innit, then?
I were spooling the bliggett, weren’t I!”
#
I’m getting sick—too many miles and too little sleep.
Drizzle now a constant on the top deck of the buses.
We ride till the end of the line and disembark near Marble Arch—
we’re total locals now, real regulars. Piccadilly Circus,
Oxford St. It’s like home.
Rain. Pelting rain. We dash
from awning to awning, soaked.
A woman on the street is hit by a truck, and we
gasp as the many emergency vehicles come, and the coppers
try to get her onto a back board. All of us standing
in the rain, aghast.
We buy a bag of pink jelly hog head candies called
Percy Pigs.
The kids don’t get that every day in Naperville.
#
Morning. Cindy grabs a big (tea) cup
instead of a small (coffee) cup for her cuppa joe.
A snooty American Anglophile
elaborately prepares tea in the proper cup in front of her
so she can see the err of her ways. Looking like he just
smelled an untended cat box. Joins his family with a sneer.
In my mind, the Yeoman Warder explodes from the floor and screams:
YOU! ARSE-HOLE!
YES!
YOU!!!
I take Caroline-of-the-Arran a Hummingbird’s Daughter and say,
“I brought you a gift.”
“Oh?”
“It’s my new book.”
She looks at it. Says,
“Is it any good?”
Have you read it?”
READ IT, I bellow,
I WROTE IT.
“Wot. You’re an author?”
YES!
She says,
“Brilliant.”
Out the door.
The endless rattling noise of London.
It’s like a perpetual Slade concert:
Cum on Feel the Noyze!
Buses! Lorries! Jackhammers!
Drunken yobs! Traffic. The dragonfly anti-terror
helicopters! The ten million restless.
spirits! Horns! Music! Feet. Feet. I have never
heard so many feet.
Coughing, sneezing. Rumpled and frumpled.
I drag my bag o’ bones behind my wife, Sheena of the Jungle,
the unstoppable
vacation machine. And she’s right—how could you let a cold
keep you from London?
We hustle to Buckingham Palace and peer through the gates.
We stagger to the royal queen’s shoppe and look at
Buckingham Palace dish towels.
Royal
aprons.
We see Peter Pan’s house.
Today’s small dose of eternity: Westminster Abbey.
#
How can you not feel awe and dread walking into Westminster?
Did they not call it Terrible in medieval days? Awful?
As in Awe-Full. Fear of God stuff.
Westminster: the West Church.
Edward the Confessor, king and miracle worker,
founded it. And here we are—pondering angry Darfur
picketers across the street and workmen
applying gold leaf to the fences.
Into the gothic vastness, the arches wrenching you
off the floor and dragging you unwilling and unready
into Heaven itself.
The high points of the soaring ceiling
hide God’s very eye in the shadows.
Yow! What a minster that there west minster be!
We rent the walking tour earpieces, and are soothed
by the measured tones of Jeremy Irons
mumbling about dead kings and choirs.
I say to Cinderella, with our kids in mind,
“Nice to hear Scar talking again!”
Hakuna matata.
We pause and gaze at The Confessor’s corner. We pause at the
Many many graves. There’s mean old Longshanks. There’s Richard.
I am thrilled to see Elizabeth, but not that happy to see Mary.
After all, she chopped off the head of my prom date,
Lady Jane Grey.
YES!
Poets and kings interred.
Byron, that bad bad boy. How did he get into the church?
Dickens. The tiny tomb
of our friend, Chaucer.
A touching sight: Shakespeare’s statue gazes fondly
upon the grave of Olivier.
Could any actor ask for more?
We are astonished by the coronation chair. So ancient.
So scarred. Just a wooden chair,
old as three or four
Americas.
German bomb damage in the corners.
Diana lay here, before the altar.
Though Ozzy Osbourne probably won’t.
#
In the inevitable gift shop, I buy green men—
oddly delighted and disturbed that such pagan mystery figures
seem to live at British cathedrals, knowing their
Dionysian secrets, breathing leaves and vines, grinning like horny Pan
among the saints and stained glass, the Druid marshes
of old west minster not relenting in their psychic whispers,
somehow the green man and Jesus at peace here…
overlooked by tireless gargoyles.
The hosts of Heaven and Hell presiding
over the ghostly alleys of the city.
Whoa. Way too cosmic.
We beat it into a pub near Parliament,
where Parliamentarians gulp pints and laugh.
So many Americans have come in
that they are out of fish and chips. This struck both
the waitress and Cinderella as hilarious. Is this,
I thought, like the taco-maker in Tijuana muttering,
not without affection, “Gringos cabrones”?
Steak pie, then! Pints!
Laughter!
Coughing.
Walking.
#
ANCIENT HISTORY OF LUIS URREA UNCOVERED AT WESTMINSTER—
Experts Baffled!
Dateline, London:
Luis Urrea’s gringo side is represented by the Woodward family,
the old Virginian, Washington DC, and New York family
of his mother. But they had roots in England.
And at Westminster, the semi-obscure author
happened upon the Woodward family crest—
on a refrigerator magnet!
Both the writer and his bride, Zsa Zsa, were amazed to find
a small yellow card attached to said magnet
that explained the history and meaning of the name,
“Woodward.”
It seems an incredible bit of synchronicity,
when one considers the author’s predilections, enthusiasms, and general
tree-hugging nature.
Quoth said fridge-magnet card:
‘The name Woodward is official, “the woodward,” meaning a forest officer who looked after a wood.
The word comes from the Old English “wuduweard,” meaning forester.
Early records of the time find an Aylward le Woodward living in Essex in 1273; a William Wodewarde is recorded in Somerset in 1318.
The ancient family motto was VIRTUS SEMPER VALET (Latin), meaning “virtue always avails.”’
Good ol’ Uncle Al in Essex!
#
Sicker by the minute.
Finally, by nightfall, I don’t even eat supper—
just pass out in the bed.
#
Morning coughing, rashers an’ eggs, hauling the 500 pounds
ollf luggage back down the Arran’s narrow stairs.
We sit in the little lobby with Caroline-of-Arran and the owner
of the hotel, enjoying a lively chat about the city and the journey
and writing books. Caroline-of-Cunard has sent a driver.
“He has a Kia,” we are reassured. A Kia? Will our stuff fit?
But Martin, our ace pilot appears, in an SUV. Aha!
Adieus and cheek kisses and hearty promises of returning and
cheerios and Martin loads the bags and we pile in and we speed off
out of the amazing city, to Southampton.
When you realize that London is only, really, a square mile surrounded
by villages and farms and towns and markets that became London,
and when you read that London was always smoky and dusty and foggy
and shadowed, Talking Heads burst into the mind, and what I thought
was faux-paranoid David Byrne humorous bluster
turns out to be antiquarian London history:
“London. Small city. It’s dark. Dark in the daytime.”
You could be looking at page 100
of any history book.
Good-bye, Boudicca, pagan queen! Good-bye, Lady Jane Grey!
Good-bye John the Conquerer! Good-bye Samuel Pepys! Good-bye,
Shakespeare! Good-bye, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Longshanks, Chaucer,
Jack the Ripper, John Lennon, Maggie Thatcher, Thomas More,
St. Anne, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Richard III, Cromwell,
Blodwyn Pig! Good-bye, Queen Mary, Elton John, Princess Diana,
Sweeney Todd, Johnny Rotten, Winston Churchill, Posh Spice, tour guides,
hoteliers, pub crawlers, beggars, bag pipers, palace guards, buskers,
pigeon feeders, bobbies, and Yeoman Warders! YES! Good-bye.
#
Countryside: green. Martin: pleasant. I don’t remember, though
because I can’t keep my eyes open. I am suddenly transformed
into the snoozing grandpa, head dropping, then SNORT! Hum,
SNARFFLE! “Ahem, huh, hack, yeah, right!” as if
I had been conversing the whole time,
And witty, too. Ha ha! My good man!
Though I have no idea what we’re talking about.
I go from psychedelic dreams to English cows whipping by.
“That’s the turn-off for Stonehenge,” Martin says.
I probably dream about Druids.
I know I dream about talking to Martin
Instead of actually talking to Martin,
though I do know at some point
I say: “We gave you
cowboys, and you gave us
goths.”
And into Titanic-haunted Southampton.
Beat blocks of working buildings and vast rusting
cranes along the bayside, yet here, too, an ancient-looking
fortress wall, and in a small triangular park
cool wet green in the rim of the city, pigeons and sparrows
among the trees; an old man and an old woman
leaning against each other on a small bench, white heads
tipped close against time,
whispering.
Docks and boats and smokestacks and ships
and towers and more docks and suddenly
Good God,
there is the Queen Mary II.
It takes up the near horizon
like a tsunami.
“How do you like that little boat?” Martin asks.
That’s not a ship,
it’s an entire city block.
(When you look in the ocean-going trivia books,
you see that the QMII is as long as
the Empire State Building is tall.)
As soon was we see her, we know
there won’t be a guy dressed in a felt
ships’ funnel-suit running around with rum drinks
and calling himself “Freddy.”
The QMII looks like it eats Carnival cruise ships
for breakfast; however, it says “Excuse me,”
and when it’s done, it says, “Thank you.”
No line-dancing waiters.
But this is a proud British ship: there will be plenty
of grog!
Sweltering heat.
Martin pulls into line and unloads our bags onto the curb.
We shake hands and he’s off for home—a 60 mile drive.
But look where he gets to drive.
Cunard’s gentlemen porters in jackets and ties
produce tags for Cinderella, and we fill them out and tie them on
and muscle a cart full of our tonnage down to stevedores who
heave the bags on the luggage treadmill that feeds the bags
into the side of the ship. We face the many long queues, baffled.
Cinderella tells a helpful lady that I’m one of the authors
because Caroline-of-Cunard has told us to announce ourselves and be
taken care of. The lady shows a deep-fried skepticism and tells us, basically,
“There’s the queue, Dear. Get in it.” I’m not a diva (a Devo?), but
I don’t know where I’m supposed to line up—do we speakers go over here, or over there? Fans try to turn the turgid air. Bods bubble and fume.
We step over to the question booth, and they helpfully toss us into a shorter line.
I get out my passport. “Where’s yours?” I ask.
“Isn’t it with yours,” she says.
“No,” I say.
The knell of catastrophe sounding in a small syllable.
“Don’t you have it?”
“Oh no.”
Her face goes white. Red.
She digs in her purse.
“It has to be here!”
It’s not.
“Oh no.
Oh my God.
I packed it.”
I keep our place in the line. She rushes to the stevedores,
but they have already sent the bags aboard.
Exhausted anyway, this is one of those snapping threads
that make you want to weep. I say, “We’ll handle it.”
Sounding bold. Thinking: well, the ship will sail
without us, and I’ll stay behind with you and go to the American
consulate and try to get a new passport while we stay
in a cheap hotel.
But hell no, I don’t say it.
We step up the the check-in desk, and I hand over my passport
to the lovely woman who looks like she stepped out of a
Mary Poppins production, or, in her uniform, could actually be
Lovely Rita Meter maid. “I say,” I begin,
“we have a small problem. Nothing, really!” I seem to think
I am Graham Chapman from Ponty Python.
“What kind of problem” she growls, gently.
“My wife,” I say,
throwing out my manful chest as if my very noble pose
could best British Customs, “has misplaced her passport!”
I smile! I chuckle! Behold, a small trifle!
The woman glowers at Cinderella, then raises her hands,
forms a rifle with them
and says,
“Pow.”
Hmm.
Okay.
This could be a small inconvenience.
“I’m sorry,” Cindy says.
The woman nods.
“You will be,”
she promises.
#
A uniformed QMII female officer of some sort stares at me
in concerned disbelief.
“We packed my wife’s passport, and it’s on the ship.”
“Can I go get it?” C asks.
“No.”
“Can we board without it?”
“Sorry.”
“What can we do?”
“Stand aside. Perhaps someone can find your bags.”
“But then they’ll have to go through them.”
“Sorry.”
“Can my husband board?”
“He may—without you.”
“Then what?”
“Hope he finds your passport before we sail. If not, we sail without you.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll go. I’ll find it.”
“You may not leave the ship once you get aboard, Sir.”
But, but—“
“You must go to the purser’s desk on the first deck
and have someone bring it to us.”
Lovely Rita reminds me that time is of the essence.
What a travel nightmare.
I get my ticket and try to bid C a bold farewell, but the
Crew member says to me, “Sir, really,
You’re holding up the queue.”
Off I go!
My room is ED27. The greeters, all in tuxes, stare at my ticket.
ED? Another steps forward and looks. “Ah, yes, the ED deck!”
Deck five, all the way into the bow. He says,
“It’s NARROW.”
What does that mean?
I hustle madly, lost in the labyrinth of the ship, when
A saint in a tux steps forward and asks if everything’s all right.
Wife! Lost bpassport! Must save her! Out there waiting!
Sailing without her! Imperative! ED27!
“Yes, Sir,” he says.
He leads me to an elevator, and takes me up. He points me in the right direction,
And says, “Go toward the bow, Sir. My pleasure, Sir.” I go.
ED—must stand for the entertainer’s deck, or something like that.
I walk up there to a spot where the frouy-frou of the ship ends
and the halls become bright but plain. Me and the dancers.
And our bags are in the room, waiting. I find the passport on
the first try. Arten, our ED steward, comes to the door and nods when I blurt
the story, then directs me to the purser’s office. They stare at me,
then send a kind young woman charging toward the dock with the
passport. They say, “Until she gets aboard,
stay in your room so she can find you.”
[Later, Cinderella will report that, while she waited
on the dock, amid the crowds, a snooty fellow of the upper class—
one of those Brit gents who had seating in the restaurants
to which we are not invited, pitched a fit over the lines and the heat.
Outraged, he bellowed and shrieked at the blank-faced dock workers.
It was one of those I WANT YOUR NAME kinds of fits. One of those
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM melt-downs. He apparently
reported to anyone who would listen that this was NOT Cundard quality
service! He demanded that one fellow give him a name, so he could go
to his SUPERIOR at Cunard and report him forthwith! “Sir,” the man said,
“I don’t have a superior at Cunard.” Now, in full John Cleese / Basil Fawlty mode,
the aggrieved snootimus maximus snapped, “No superior! What, are you the President
of Cunard? Is that who I have before me!” The man noted:
“I don’t work for Cunard.”
Cinderella was sitting on a bench beside a female tennis pro
who had perhaps also packed her passport, and they watched this scene.
The tennis pro turned to Cinderella and commented:
“What a dick.”]
I stagger back to the fifth deck, thinking: ED, ED.
Economy Drudge?
Erectile Dysfunction?
Elysian Druid?
In spite of my general paranoia, I note that the room is bigger
than our expensive Carnival stateroom. The bathroom
is huge. And we have a porthole.
Elephantine Dimwit?
Exclusive Dracula?
Excreted Dung-heap?
I stretch out on the bed and switch on the TV.
We apparently get Crew TV in the ED section. I am delighted
To watch Cunard’s White Star Service
video loop.
“Let us examine today’s service question,” the benignly terrifying
TV hostess says with a smile that suggests
Black Arts training from MI-6. A grouchy
Filipino crewman on the tape plops down
on a guest’s bed and says the ship
and the other staff stink. Our hostess
comes back on and asks, “Which of the Cunard`s White Star credos
has Raoul violated?”
Why, recalcitrant ol’ Raoul has violated credo #9—we at Cunard never
speak negatively of the crew, the ship, or the line itself.
I take #9 as a sign from God that I am to be an ambassador
of White Star Service when I venture forth
from ED27!
I also learn that the ship is not a boat, or worse, a CRUISE SHIP.
It is an Ocean Liner.
This is not a cruise,
but a Voyage.
There are no passengers,
there are only Guests.
Estrogen Delivery.
Edwardian Dandy.
Edible Doughnuts.
My bride finally arrives.
We gather ourselves.
We look sharp.
We don our life preservers and join the rest of the Guests
for the life saving drill.
Our lifeboat coach is one of the singers. Eric woulod be in love with her.
The Atlantic is calling us.
We will be passing over the Titanic somewhere out there.
We go out to the decks and watch England
slip away as we begin our
Crossing.
At dinner, our lovely table-mates include the dashing
ne’er-do-well, George,
and our beloved new friends, David and Jenny.
I am so giddy with all thing English, that it all
sounds like scenes from some great comedicstage play.
George: “D’you know what the Yanks say?”
David: “No, what?”
George: “Aluminum!”
David: “Aluminum! What’s that!”
George: “Aluminium!”
We all drink a toast as we sail into the night.
West, across the sea.
Going home, wherever that is.
VIRTUS SEMPER VALET.
End…July, 2007
A Christmas Meditation Not Just for Writers
[Note: as mentioned a few weeks ago, this last chapter of the “Wastelander’s Notebook U.K.” vanished when our computers melted down this last summer. Though this entry is far out of time—the first two ran around August—you can look ‘em up if you’d like to—they’re in the archive—I finally got it back and found myself laughing as I read it. So I thought I’d give it to you. These are NOT poems, by the way. I don’t know what this writing is—sketches. Flashes. Writing-on-the-run, caught like a butterfly in a net of seeing. Fast, Bruce Lee style jeet-kun-do writings. If something here begins to rise to the level of a poem, it must be because God is kind and the fates felt giddy that day. Anyway, here it ends. See you in 2008. –L]
#
Later, that same day…
We go to renew our bus tickets.
The man in the ticket booth asks where we’re from.
His eyes light up. He
expresses profound enthusiasm
for Chicago.
Chicago!
Are you kidding?
“But you’re HERE,” I reason. “London!”
“Yes, but you’re THERE!”
he counters.
“Chi-Town!”
“How can you love Chicago so much?
You have London!”
“London! Blah!”
“But—but—but--!”
“Ah, Chicago!”
“But you have the Tower of London!”
“The Tower! Bah! You have Maxwell Street!”
“But, but, but--history!”
“You have the Blues!”
He mutters:
“Chicago is clean, man. London’s
a filthy city.”
We had just been marveling at how clean
London is—every street swept spotless
by gnomes with weird little sidewalk-tractors that no doubt
house sly cameras with face recognition
programs.
“Yeah,” I say. “The Blues. There is that.
They sang a different kind of Blues
in the Tower, eh?”
“The Tower. Bah.”
We fetch up on a friendly impasse.
As we leave, I say, “See you in Chicago.”
And he sighs:
“Please, God.”
#
It’s different here. We speak the same language,
sort of.
When I tell people we’re going on the
Queen Mary II, they express folksy sayings
I can’t for the life of me understand.
Sounds like:
“Gorr, it’s the QM izzit! I’ll flibber a right
gallon of skinless pickles, eh? You’re woggling
the frumsey wicket, innit, then?
I were spooling the bliggett, weren’t I!”
#
I’m getting sick—too many miles and too little sleep.
Drizzle now a constant on the top deck of the buses.
We ride till the end of the line and disembark near Marble Arch—
we’re total locals now, real regulars. Piccadilly Circus,
Oxford St. It’s like home.
Rain. Pelting rain. We dash
from awning to awning, soaked.
A woman on the street is hit by a truck, and we
gasp as the many emergency vehicles come, and the coppers
try to get her onto a back board. All of us standing
in the rain, aghast.
We buy a bag of pink jelly hog head candies called
Percy Pigs.
The kids don’t get that every day in Naperville.
#
Morning. Cindy grabs a big (tea) cup
instead of a small (coffee) cup for her cuppa joe.
A snooty American Anglophile
elaborately prepares tea in the proper cup in front of her
so she can see the err of her ways. Looking like he just
smelled an untended cat box. Joins his family with a sneer.
In my mind, the Yeoman Warder explodes from the floor and screams:
YOU! ARSE-HOLE!
YES!
YOU!!!
I take Caroline-of-the-Arran a Hummingbird’s Daughter and say,
“I brought you a gift.”
“Oh?”
“It’s my new book.”
She looks at it. Says,
“Is it any good?”
Have you read it?”
READ IT, I bellow,
I WROTE IT.
“Wot. You’re an author?”
YES!
She says,
“Brilliant.”
Out the door.
The endless rattling noise of London.
It’s like a perpetual Slade concert:
Cum on Feel the Noyze!
Buses! Lorries! Jackhammers!
Drunken yobs! Traffic. The dragonfly anti-terror
helicopters! The ten million restless.
spirits! Horns! Music! Feet. Feet. I have never
heard so many feet.
Coughing, sneezing. Rumpled and frumpled.
I drag my bag o’ bones behind my wife, Sheena of the Jungle,
the unstoppable
vacation machine. And she’s right—how could you let a cold
keep you from London?
We hustle to Buckingham Palace and peer through the gates.
We stagger to the royal queen’s shoppe and look at
Buckingham Palace dish towels.
Royal
aprons.
We see Peter Pan’s house.
Today’s small dose of eternity: Westminster Abbey.
#
How can you not feel awe and dread walking into Westminster?
Did they not call it Terrible in medieval days? Awful?
As in Awe-Full. Fear of God stuff.
Westminster: the West Church.
Edward the Confessor, king and miracle worker,
founded it. And here we are—pondering angry Darfur
picketers across the street and workmen
applying gold leaf to the fences.
Into the gothic vastness, the arches wrenching you
off the floor and dragging you unwilling and unready
into Heaven itself.
The high points of the soaring ceiling
hide God’s very eye in the shadows.
Yow! What a minster that there west minster be!
We rent the walking tour earpieces, and are soothed
by the measured tones of Jeremy Irons
mumbling about dead kings and choirs.
I say to Cinderella, with our kids in mind,
“Nice to hear Scar talking again!”
Hakuna matata.
We pause and gaze at The Confessor’s corner. We pause at the
Many many graves. There’s mean old Longshanks. There’s Richard.
I am thrilled to see Elizabeth, but not that happy to see Mary.
After all, she chopped off the head of my prom date,
Lady Jane Grey.
YES!
Poets and kings interred.
Byron, that bad bad boy. How did he get into the church?
Dickens. The tiny tomb
of our friend, Chaucer.
A touching sight: Shakespeare’s statue gazes fondly
upon the grave of Olivier.
Could any actor ask for more?
We are astonished by the coronation chair. So ancient.
So scarred. Just a wooden chair,
old as three or four
Americas.
German bomb damage in the corners.
Diana lay here, before the altar.
Though Ozzy Osbourne probably won’t.
#
In the inevitable gift shop, I buy green men—
oddly delighted and disturbed that such pagan mystery figures
seem to live at British cathedrals, knowing their
Dionysian secrets, breathing leaves and vines, grinning like horny Pan
among the saints and stained glass, the Druid marshes
of old west minster not relenting in their psychic whispers,
somehow the green man and Jesus at peace here…
overlooked by tireless gargoyles.
The hosts of Heaven and Hell presiding
over the ghostly alleys of the city.
Whoa. Way too cosmic.
We beat it into a pub near Parliament,
where Parliamentarians gulp pints and laugh.
So many Americans have come in
that they are out of fish and chips. This struck both
the waitress and Cinderella as hilarious. Is this,
I thought, like the taco-maker in Tijuana muttering,
not without affection, “Gringos cabrones”?
Steak pie, then! Pints!
Laughter!
Coughing.
Walking.
#
ANCIENT HISTORY OF LUIS URREA UNCOVERED AT WESTMINSTER—
Experts Baffled!
Dateline, London:
Luis Urrea’s gringo side is represented by the Woodward family,
the old Virginian, Washington DC, and New York family
of his mother. But they had roots in England.
And at Westminster, the semi-obscure author
happened upon the Woodward family crest—
on a refrigerator magnet!
Both the writer and his bride, Zsa Zsa, were amazed to find
a small yellow card attached to said magnet
that explained the history and meaning of the name,
“Woodward.”
It seems an incredible bit of synchronicity,
when one considers the author’s predilections, enthusiasms, and general
tree-hugging nature.
Quoth said fridge-magnet card:
‘The name Woodward is official, “the woodward,” meaning a forest officer who looked after a wood.
The word comes from the Old English “wuduweard,” meaning forester.
Early records of the time find an Aylward le Woodward living in Essex in 1273; a William Wodewarde is recorded in Somerset in 1318.
The ancient family motto was VIRTUS SEMPER VALET (Latin), meaning “virtue always avails.”’
Good ol’ Uncle Al in Essex!
#
Sicker by the minute.
Finally, by nightfall, I don’t even eat supper—
just pass out in the bed.
#
Morning coughing, rashers an’ eggs, hauling the 500 pounds
ollf luggage back down the Arran’s narrow stairs.
We sit in the little lobby with Caroline-of-Arran and the owner
of the hotel, enjoying a lively chat about the city and the journey
and writing books. Caroline-of-Cunard has sent a driver.
“He has a Kia,” we are reassured. A Kia? Will our stuff fit?
But Martin, our ace pilot appears, in an SUV. Aha!
Adieus and cheek kisses and hearty promises of returning and
cheerios and Martin loads the bags and we pile in and we speed off
out of the amazing city, to Southampton.
When you realize that London is only, really, a square mile surrounded
by villages and farms and towns and markets that became London,
and when you read that London was always smoky and dusty and foggy
and shadowed, Talking Heads burst into the mind, and what I thought
was faux-paranoid David Byrne humorous bluster
turns out to be antiquarian London history:
“London. Small city. It’s dark. Dark in the daytime.”
You could be looking at page 100
of any history book.
Good-bye, Boudicca, pagan queen! Good-bye, Lady Jane Grey!
Good-bye John the Conquerer! Good-bye Samuel Pepys! Good-bye,
Shakespeare! Good-bye, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Longshanks, Chaucer,
Jack the Ripper, John Lennon, Maggie Thatcher, Thomas More,
St. Anne, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Richard III, Cromwell,
Blodwyn Pig! Good-bye, Queen Mary, Elton John, Princess Diana,
Sweeney Todd, Johnny Rotten, Winston Churchill, Posh Spice, tour guides,
hoteliers, pub crawlers, beggars, bag pipers, palace guards, buskers,
pigeon feeders, bobbies, and Yeoman Warders! YES! Good-bye.
#
Countryside: green. Martin: pleasant. I don’t remember, though
because I can’t keep my eyes open. I am suddenly transformed
into the snoozing grandpa, head dropping, then SNORT! Hum,
SNARFFLE! “Ahem, huh, hack, yeah, right!” as if
I had been conversing the whole time,
And witty, too. Ha ha! My good man!
Though I have no idea what we’re talking about.
I go from psychedelic dreams to English cows whipping by.
“That’s the turn-off for Stonehenge,” Martin says.
I probably dream about Druids.
I know I dream about talking to Martin
Instead of actually talking to Martin,
though I do know at some point
I say: “We gave you
cowboys, and you gave us
goths.”
And into Titanic-haunted Southampton.
Beat blocks of working buildings and vast rusting
cranes along the bayside, yet here, too, an ancient-looking
fortress wall, and in a small triangular park
cool wet green in the rim of the city, pigeons and sparrows
among the trees; an old man and an old woman
leaning against each other on a small bench, white heads
tipped close against time,
whispering.
Docks and boats and smokestacks and ships
and towers and more docks and suddenly
Good God,
there is the Queen Mary II.
It takes up the near horizon
like a tsunami.
“How do you like that little boat?” Martin asks.
That’s not a ship,
it’s an entire city block.
(When you look in the ocean-going trivia books,
you see that the QMII is as long as
the Empire State Building is tall.)
As soon was we see her, we know
there won’t be a guy dressed in a felt
ships’ funnel-suit running around with rum drinks
and calling himself “Freddy.”
The QMII looks like it eats Carnival cruise ships
for breakfast; however, it says “Excuse me,”
and when it’s done, it says, “Thank you.”
No line-dancing waiters.
But this is a proud British ship: there will be plenty
of grog!
Sweltering heat.
Martin pulls into line and unloads our bags onto the curb.
We shake hands and he’s off for home—a 60 mile drive.
But look where he gets to drive.
Cunard’s gentlemen porters in jackets and ties
produce tags for Cinderella, and we fill them out and tie them on
and muscle a cart full of our tonnage down to stevedores who
heave the bags on the luggage treadmill that feeds the bags
into the side of the ship. We face the many long queues, baffled.
Cinderella tells a helpful lady that I’m one of the authors
because Caroline-of-Cunard has told us to announce ourselves and be
taken care of. The lady shows a deep-fried skepticism and tells us, basically,
“There’s the queue, Dear. Get in it.” I’m not a diva (a Devo?), but
I don’t know where I’m supposed to line up—do we speakers go over here, or over there? Fans try to turn the turgid air. Bods bubble and fume.
We step over to the question booth, and they helpfully toss us into a shorter line.
I get out my passport. “Where’s yours?” I ask.
“Isn’t it with yours,” she says.
“No,” I say.
The knell of catastrophe sounding in a small syllable.
“Don’t you have it?”
“Oh no.”
Her face goes white. Red.
She digs in her purse.
“It has to be here!”
It’s not.
“Oh no.
Oh my God.
I packed it.”
I keep our place in the line. She rushes to the stevedores,
but they have already sent the bags aboard.
Exhausted anyway, this is one of those snapping threads
that make you want to weep. I say, “We’ll handle it.”
Sounding bold. Thinking: well, the ship will sail
without us, and I’ll stay behind with you and go to the American
consulate and try to get a new passport while we stay
in a cheap hotel.
But hell no, I don’t say it.
We step up the the check-in desk, and I hand over my passport
to the lovely woman who looks like she stepped out of a
Mary Poppins production, or, in her uniform, could actually be
Lovely Rita Meter maid. “I say,” I begin,
“we have a small problem. Nothing, really!” I seem to think
I am Graham Chapman from Ponty Python.
“What kind of problem” she growls, gently.
“My wife,” I say,
throwing out my manful chest as if my very noble pose
could best British Customs, “has misplaced her passport!”
I smile! I chuckle! Behold, a small trifle!
The woman glowers at Cinderella, then raises her hands,
forms a rifle with them
and says,
“Pow.”
Hmm.
Okay.
This could be a small inconvenience.
“I’m sorry,” Cindy says.
The woman nods.
“You will be,”
she promises.
#
A uniformed QMII female officer of some sort stares at me
in concerned disbelief.
“We packed my wife’s passport, and it’s on the ship.”
“Can I go get it?” C asks.
“No.”
“Can we board without it?”
“Sorry.”
“What can we do?”
“Stand aside. Perhaps someone can find your bags.”
“But then they’ll have to go through them.”
“Sorry.”
“Can my husband board?”
“He may—without you.”
“Then what?”
“Hope he finds your passport before we sail. If not, we sail without you.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll go. I’ll find it.”
“You may not leave the ship once you get aboard, Sir.”
But, but—“
“You must go to the purser’s desk on the first deck
and have someone bring it to us.”
Lovely Rita reminds me that time is of the essence.
What a travel nightmare.
I get my ticket and try to bid C a bold farewell, but the
Crew member says to me, “Sir, really,
You’re holding up the queue.”
Off I go!
My room is ED27. The greeters, all in tuxes, stare at my ticket.
ED? Another steps forward and looks. “Ah, yes, the ED deck!”
Deck five, all the way into the bow. He says,
“It’s NARROW.”
What does that mean?
I hustle madly, lost in the labyrinth of the ship, when
A saint in a tux steps forward and asks if everything’s all right.
Wife! Lost bpassport! Must save her! Out there waiting!
Sailing without her! Imperative! ED27!
“Yes, Sir,” he says.
He leads me to an elevator, and takes me up. He points me in the right direction,
And says, “Go toward the bow, Sir. My pleasure, Sir.” I go.
ED—must stand for the entertainer’s deck, or something like that.
I walk up there to a spot where the frouy-frou of the ship ends
and the halls become bright but plain. Me and the dancers.
And our bags are in the room, waiting. I find the passport on
the first try. Arten, our ED steward, comes to the door and nods when I blurt
the story, then directs me to the purser’s office. They stare at me,
then send a kind young woman charging toward the dock with the
passport. They say, “Until she gets aboard,
stay in your room so she can find you.”
[Later, Cinderella will report that, while she waited
on the dock, amid the crowds, a snooty fellow of the upper class—
one of those Brit gents who had seating in the restaurants
to which we are not invited, pitched a fit over the lines and the heat.
Outraged, he bellowed and shrieked at the blank-faced dock workers.
It was one of those I WANT YOUR NAME kinds of fits. One of those
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM melt-downs. He apparently
reported to anyone who would listen that this was NOT Cundard quality
service! He demanded that one fellow give him a name, so he could go
to his SUPERIOR at Cunard and report him forthwith! “Sir,” the man said,
“I don’t have a superior at Cunard.” Now, in full John Cleese / Basil Fawlty mode,
the aggrieved snootimus maximus snapped, “No superior! What, are you the President
of Cunard? Is that who I have before me!” The man noted:
“I don’t work for Cunard.”
Cinderella was sitting on a bench beside a female tennis pro
who had perhaps also packed her passport, and they watched this scene.
The tennis pro turned to Cinderella and commented:
“What a dick.”]
I stagger back to the fifth deck, thinking: ED, ED.
Economy Drudge?
Erectile Dysfunction?
Elysian Druid?
In spite of my general paranoia, I note that the room is bigger
than our expensive Carnival stateroom. The bathroom
is huge. And we have a porthole.
Elephantine Dimwit?
Exclusive Dracula?
Excreted Dung-heap?
I stretch out on the bed and switch on the TV.
We apparently get Crew TV in the ED section. I am delighted
To watch Cunard’s White Star Service
video loop.
“Let us examine today’s service question,” the benignly terrifying
TV hostess says with a smile that suggests
Black Arts training from MI-6. A grouchy
Filipino crewman on the tape plops down
on a guest’s bed and says the ship
and the other staff stink. Our hostess
comes back on and asks, “Which of the Cunard`s White Star credos
has Raoul violated?”
Why, recalcitrant ol’ Raoul has violated credo #9—we at Cunard never
speak negatively of the crew, the ship, or the line itself.
I take #9 as a sign from God that I am to be an ambassador
of White Star Service when I venture forth
from ED27!
I also learn that the ship is not a boat, or worse, a CRUISE SHIP.
It is an Ocean Liner.
This is not a cruise,
but a Voyage.
There are no passengers,
there are only Guests.
Estrogen Delivery.
Edwardian Dandy.
Edible Doughnuts.
My bride finally arrives.
We gather ourselves.
We look sharp.
We don our life preservers and join the rest of the Guests
for the life saving drill.
Our lifeboat coach is one of the singers. Eric woulod be in love with her.
The Atlantic is calling us.
We will be passing over the Titanic somewhere out there.
We go out to the decks and watch England
slip away as we begin our
Crossing.
At dinner, our lovely table-mates include the dashing
ne’er-do-well, George,
and our beloved new friends, David and Jenny.
I am so giddy with all thing English, that it all
sounds like scenes from some great comedicstage play.
George: “D’you know what the Yanks say?”
David: “No, what?”
George: “Aluminum!”
David: “Aluminum! What’s that!”
George: “Aluminium!”
We all drink a toast as we sail into the night.
West, across the sea.
Going home, wherever that is.
VIRTUS SEMPER VALET.
End…July, 2007
12/25/2007
Wish I wrote it. But I have read it for years and loved it--probably better that way. If I had written it, it would be dedicated to you. See you at the Rose Bowl. -- Ludwig Aethelbert Urias
#
To Tanya at Christmas
by Wendell Berry
Forgive me, my delight,
that grief and loneliness
have kept me. Though I come
to you in darkness, you are
companion of the light
that rises on all I know.
In the long night of the year
and of the spirit, God's birth
is met with simple noise.
Deaf and blind in division,
I reach, and do not find.
You show the gentler way:
We come to good by love;
our words must be made flesh.
And flesh must be made word
at last, our lives rise
in speech to our children's tongues.
They will tell how we once stood
together here, two trees
whose lives in annual sheddings
made their way into this ground,
whose bodies turned to earth
and song. The song will tell
how old love sweetens the fields.
Immigration Monday Christmas Hiatus
#
To Tanya at Christmas
by Wendell Berry
Forgive me, my delight,
that grief and loneliness
have kept me. Though I come
to you in darkness, you are
companion of the light
that rises on all I know.
In the long night of the year
and of the spirit, God's birth
is met with simple noise.
Deaf and blind in division,
I reach, and do not find.
You show the gentler way:
We come to good by love;
our words must be made flesh.
And flesh must be made word
at last, our lives rise
in speech to our children's tongues.
They will tell how we once stood
together here, two trees
whose lives in annual sheddings
made their way into this ground,
whose bodies turned to earth
and song. The song will tell
how old love sweetens the fields.
12/24/2007
Let us pause in this endless parade of suffering, hypocrisy, evil, malfeasance, incompetence, boondoggles, violence, murder, shame, idiocy, prejudice, propaganda, crimes, political chicanery, woe, horror, rage, filth, abuse, ugliness, guns, smuggling, rape, environmental degradation, racism, hatred and lies to wish everybody a Merry Christmas. Yahoo! There's happy low-watt solar Xmas lights on the border fence! The Minutemen have Santa hats! The Coyotes are putting toys under every poor child's tree! Rudolph is guiding the Border Patrol with his red nose! The KKK and the Nazis are handing out canycanes! The slavers are serving egg nog to their sexual prisoners! The undocumented are bringing frankincese and myrrh! It's the happiest time of year.
When I set out to post Immigration Monday about ten years ago--oh, wait, it's only been a couple of months--I felt that there needed to be a place you could go to find information. Data to form your own opinions. I still think that's needed. I don't know if I'm the one to do it or not.
I DO NOT LIKE IMMIGRATION STORIES, you see. I don't even find them all that interesting. After all, it is always the same story.
Imagine my utter shock, years after it was published, to be touring like a bar band on The Devil's Highway! To have it chosen over and over as one city/one book choice, or as the all-campus read at colleges! Imagine my shock, with the paperback even a year or two old, to get fresh reviews where some butt-head claims the book is all lies! Imagine my shock that the book sells better each year than the year before--reversing the usual publishing trend. And that people are paying me lots of money to still talk about this stuff. (Yo, my peeps--Across the Wire came out in 1993! I've been talking the talk and walking the walk a really long time.) See the stunned look on my face when Brad Pitt's office expresses interest in filming DH, and my impatience that the alleged film of same is perpetually "about to start shooting."
How come nobody wants me to come talk about Wandering Time of the nature/travel elements of Nobody's Son or the influence of haiku and Tom McGuane on my writing? Ha ha! Immigration. It's in the news. Every time one of those bloviating Mex-haters on cable TV and radio ratchets up the racist jargon to sell more Viagra, the book takes off again.
My family thanks you. The Ford dealership in St. Charles thanks you. Our realtor thanks you.
But I gravitate more toward hope and glory--I'm a sap that way.
If you could see the mulch pile of newspapers in my office, each one with some juicy border tale, you'd shake your head. Wow. Who knew? The border is the Big Story! I thought it might be, oh, terrorism, Iraq, Global Warming, the Patriot Act, the bankruptcy of America, stuff like that. I keep thinking I'll get to the border stack one day. Let us pause here for a rueful laugh.
I don't know whether I'll keep this little blog going, turn it over to somebody else, or what. Maybe I should just make it a full website of its own. Sell ad space and make money. (Immigration Monday Limited Offer! For a Short Time Only, GET Anne Coulter's New Book--Love, Kindness and the Gentle Heart: A Haiku Journey of Healing & Hope!)
I am not even sure anybody reads the blog.
What happens is, I'm supposed to finish my new novel and revise my poems and write a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle and proof read my intro to Rane Arroyo's poems and start Hummingbird's Daughter II and start getting ready to return to the classroom after an insane sled ride of a sabbatical...but I need to peruse the papers for IMMIGRATION stories! I need to surf the web! Check Drudge! Look at all the pinko-liberal fellow traveler sites! See what the mags say! Write to pols/cops/USBP guys/Mejicanos and see what they think!
It has been, I'll admit, revelatory. I could probably get some sort of post-grad degree in Border Boolshat. But, you know, it's more fun to talk about hiking, the garden, buffalo, God, marmots, poetry, buritos, London, Basho, Ed Abbey, the neighborhood wild turley, writing. So, here under the ice in the frozen midwest, I pause to consider what direction to pursue.
Team Urrea will be off-line for a few. Got the usual orgy of presents tomorrow. (Pastor Von tells me that when "Christ" is taken out of Christmas, all that's left is the palabra, "Mas.") Then we're off to Cali to see Eric march in the Rose Bowl. Ah, sun.
I'll leave you one good chunk--the last portion of the London Wastelander series. (If you haven't read the Wastelanders, you can find them scattered throughout the blog archives--chapters one and two of the London trip are back in, gee, August?) Cinderella will post it before we leave.
I hope you have everything come to you that you dream of. I hope you are warm and safe. I hope you have food to eat. I hope someone loves you and shows it. I hope no trucks come to send you away. I hope nobody is hunting you in a desert. I hope you have water to drink.
I hope I have given you a smile, or something to ponder, or some diversion over this last year. Wish I could be there with you in the morning.
If you pray, drop in a line or two for me.
See you in 2008.
Watch out for coyotes--
L
Fog On Snow
When I set out to post Immigration Monday about ten years ago--oh, wait, it's only been a couple of months--I felt that there needed to be a place you could go to find information. Data to form your own opinions. I still think that's needed. I don't know if I'm the one to do it or not.
I DO NOT LIKE IMMIGRATION STORIES, you see. I don't even find them all that interesting. After all, it is always the same story.
Imagine my utter shock, years after it was published, to be touring like a bar band on The Devil's Highway! To have it chosen over and over as one city/one book choice, or as the all-campus read at colleges! Imagine my shock, with the paperback even a year or two old, to get fresh reviews where some butt-head claims the book is all lies! Imagine my shock that the book sells better each year than the year before--reversing the usual publishing trend. And that people are paying me lots of money to still talk about this stuff. (Yo, my peeps--Across the Wire came out in 1993! I've been talking the talk and walking the walk a really long time.) See the stunned look on my face when Brad Pitt's office expresses interest in filming DH, and my impatience that the alleged film of same is perpetually "about to start shooting."
How come nobody wants me to come talk about Wandering Time of the nature/travel elements of Nobody's Son or the influence of haiku and Tom McGuane on my writing? Ha ha! Immigration. It's in the news. Every time one of those bloviating Mex-haters on cable TV and radio ratchets up the racist jargon to sell more Viagra, the book takes off again.
My family thanks you. The Ford dealership in St. Charles thanks you. Our realtor thanks you.
But I gravitate more toward hope and glory--I'm a sap that way.
If you could see the mulch pile of newspapers in my office, each one with some juicy border tale, you'd shake your head. Wow. Who knew? The border is the Big Story! I thought it might be, oh, terrorism, Iraq, Global Warming, the Patriot Act, the bankruptcy of America, stuff like that. I keep thinking I'll get to the border stack one day. Let us pause here for a rueful laugh.
I don't know whether I'll keep this little blog going, turn it over to somebody else, or what. Maybe I should just make it a full website of its own. Sell ad space and make money. (Immigration Monday Limited Offer! For a Short Time Only, GET Anne Coulter's New Book--Love, Kindness and the Gentle Heart: A Haiku Journey of Healing & Hope!)
I am not even sure anybody reads the blog.
What happens is, I'm supposed to finish my new novel and revise my poems and write a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle and proof read my intro to Rane Arroyo's poems and start Hummingbird's Daughter II and start getting ready to return to the classroom after an insane sled ride of a sabbatical...but I need to peruse the papers for IMMIGRATION stories! I need to surf the web! Check Drudge! Look at all the pinko-liberal fellow traveler sites! See what the mags say! Write to pols/cops/USBP guys/Mejicanos and see what they think!
It has been, I'll admit, revelatory. I could probably get some sort of post-grad degree in Border Boolshat. But, you know, it's more fun to talk about hiking, the garden, buffalo, God, marmots, poetry, buritos, London, Basho, Ed Abbey, the neighborhood wild turley, writing. So, here under the ice in the frozen midwest, I pause to consider what direction to pursue.
Team Urrea will be off-line for a few. Got the usual orgy of presents tomorrow. (Pastor Von tells me that when "Christ" is taken out of Christmas, all that's left is the palabra, "Mas.") Then we're off to Cali to see Eric march in the Rose Bowl. Ah, sun.
I'll leave you one good chunk--the last portion of the London Wastelander series. (If you haven't read the Wastelanders, you can find them scattered throughout the blog archives--chapters one and two of the London trip are back in, gee, August?) Cinderella will post it before we leave.
I hope you have everything come to you that you dream of. I hope you are warm and safe. I hope you have food to eat. I hope someone loves you and shows it. I hope no trucks come to send you away. I hope nobody is hunting you in a desert. I hope you have water to drink.
I hope I have given you a smile, or something to ponder, or some diversion over this last year. Wish I could be there with you in the morning.
If you pray, drop in a line or two for me.
See you in 2008.
Watch out for coyotes--
L
12/21/2007
Today, I am living inside a Chinese landscape painting. The snow on the ground and the low clouds press the sky from either side and it fills with mists. The mail truck goes by in echoes sad and mysterious as the cries of that last string of worried geese flying over my street. Everything is caught in a brief pause.
I am finishing my novel. I have written a whole sheaf of new poems to complete Songs of the Sacrificial Class. I am about to start Hummingbird's Daughter II. Rumor has it that the movie will start filming much sooner than expected. I stare out the window at the fog--small birds and sturdy cardinals move like fallen leaves. Shriekback once sang, "This big hush infects the world...."
I was looking at poems today. I found this in an e.e. cummings book:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
Art to Heal Your Heart--Rent a Movie
I am finishing my novel. I have written a whole sheaf of new poems to complete Songs of the Sacrificial Class. I am about to start Hummingbird's Daughter II. Rumor has it that the movie will start filming much sooner than expected. I stare out the window at the fog--small birds and sturdy cardinals move like fallen leaves. Shriekback once sang, "This big hush infects the world...."
I was looking at poems today. I found this in an e.e. cummings book:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
12/20/2007
Have you seen "Once"? Do you feel love, loneliness, yearning, and hope? Do you feel the magic in a friendship, or in making art? Rent it on DVD.
It's very still in its center. Subtle. And the music is amazing.
I'll bring the popcorn.
Immigration Monday, No Nonsense Edition
It's very still in its center. Subtle. And the music is amazing.
I'll bring the popcorn.
12/17/2007
Dec. 17, 2007
UC Davis Devil's Highway Interactive Map
For those who want to brave the walk the men in my book undertook, or those who admire amazing initiative, click here. Created by World's Brightest College Students, Derek Huntzinger and Nathan Couch in Glenda Egan Drew's digital design course at UC Davis.
http://devil.ucdavis.edu
Death
www.wsws.org/article/2007/jul2007/immi-18.html
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/15/national/main3263552.shtml
www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_702BRR.pdf
www.gao.gove/newitems/d06770.pdf
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14829443
polisci.ucsd.edu/cornelius/latimes10-1-05.pdf
On Border Violence
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121607A.shtml
Is It Getting Hot In Here?
www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1209pruitts1209.html?&wired
Yes, it's short but unsweet this week.
More next week.
Bye.
New Poem for a Cold Night
UC Davis Devil's Highway Interactive Map
For those who want to brave the walk the men in my book undertook, or those who admire amazing initiative, click here. Created by World's Brightest College Students, Derek Huntzinger and Nathan Couch in Glenda Egan Drew's digital design course at UC Davis.
http://devil.ucdavis.edu
Death
www.wsws.org/article/2007/jul2007/immi-18.html
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/15/national/main3263552.shtml
www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_702BRR.pdf
www.gao.gove/newitems/d06770.pdf
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14829443
polisci.ucsd.edu/cornelius/latimes10-1-05.pdf
On Border Violence
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121607A.shtml
Is It Getting Hot In Here?
www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1209pruitts1209.html?&wired
Yes, it's short but unsweet this week.
More next week.
Bye.
12/13/2007
It's all ice on top of snow here. The migrations really touched me this year. My cranes came over in fast wedges--no time left for dawdling in circles in the sky. The last geese and ducks are long gone. The last lone wild turkey walks around in a general snit as the freeze comes down. We see his footprints come across the white lawn and on our porch where he apparently peers in the glass door looking to see if anybody is going to toss him some cracked corn.
I'm less than 100 pages from finishing my new novel.
But I got an email todaty from White Eagle giving me Da Biz for not posting some beautiful writing this week. I don't know about beautiful, but here goes. A new poem. I was going to send it out to a lit journal, but hey--this is my own lit journal. You want me to publish one of yours? Send it my way.
In fact, I am going to follow the example of the old poetry teacher Judson Jerome and put this poem in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. If you have a lit jrnl out there that needs a poem, and whatever little bit of a "name" I have accrued, you hereby have my permission to take this poem and add it. Go ahead. But send me a copy. (Man, I am full of the Christmas spirit this week.)
Here goes:
#
The Duck
immense waves of flight
out from forests, out
from broken-mirror beaver
ponds of frozen mountains,
they fled from ice storms coming.
their shadows fell across the freeways
for days as I too migrated from frost
falling downslope and west,
looking to rest under a forgotten sun.
end of the continent--
it wasn't working. San Diego.
after this bad spell I had, after
one too many ghosts in my bed, you know
how you wake up some mornings with the smell of the
invisible on your fingers and the ruined broken plates
of your plans in slivers in the fireplace.
the first time I made these mistakes I was young
and poor: I was not young
anymore, but was still poor and making the same bad moves.
had enough for gas--1,000 miles: got to the house
of an old lover who stripped me naked
and drew me a bath.
I hoped
to find a home in the city I died in
for my first quarter century.
the water did not wash away
my sins.
she said: get
out. so I went out to see if my old home town
had anything as interesting as an aspen, anything
as good as glacier water or
buffaloes churning in the purple shadows of far
Nebraska.
down
to Mission Bay,
put the club
on the wheel in case some vato was in the market
for a snow-beat jeep, and donned my
Colorado Department of Wildlife baseball cap.
old body made older by the fabulous
hunks of southern California flesh jogging around the bay.
just my rusted ankles and aching back and stupid, dark
ideas in a splitting head. sewage
afloat in the bay, the famous California
brown trout--idiots from El Cajon sped away
on ski-do's yawping "YAHOO!"
my usual splendid pace.
feeling hideous.
you have to remind the body it exists.
it's not all bad dreams and drooping lusts.
I passed
old men staggering along
the bastards
until my rusted right ankle
threw red sparks into my bones and
caught fire in the kindling of my leg
and pulled me down on a rock
in the piss-yellow sand, feet in rotting seaweed
and heart in the guano.
the cool air felt wonderful.
a train rolling out of San Diego, going anywhere
I wanted to be
sounded its long cry and faded
north.
I walked to the water, put in my feet.
warm as a bath.
OK,
not bad,
I confessed.
fish fine as needles
tried to sew my toes
together.
near the effluent pipe
that carries tampons,
teardrops and coffee into the sea,
a duck.
just one.
a mallard male,
balding and ragged.
asleep.
I sat on my rock and said, 'hey."
he jumped. looked at me. wack, he muttered softly,
talking to himself. wack,
wack. I said similar things
to myself when I
typed or did
the dishes. he turned his head and watched the water.
so did I.
"all right," I said.
he looked back at me, clacked
his beak four times,
settled. he fluffed
himself and tucked
his head under a wing and went back
to sleep.
a loud wind-surfer rattled by.
"what the hell!" I said. waaaack!
he cried. wack-wack-wack!
our heads swiveled in unison
when the absurd slapping of joggers' shoes
went past us.
we watched them recede: we lost interest in their errands
at precisely the same moment
and turned back
to our meditations.
the wind ruffled his feathers.
the wind lifted my hair.
me and the duck:
compadres.
suddenly,
I understood
the winos
of my youth,
the filthy old men
in the plaza downtown
when a fountain gurgled greenish water
and they still called the town "Dago"
and sailors rushed up Broadway
looking for tattoos
and hookers:
those old men shuffling
their vague plaza circles
reeking of piss
and port, no cents
to get on a bus
out of there: tossing
stale bread
to the birds
of the sidewalks.
holy vermin,
all of them:
dead.
those lonesome rummies
with their beautiful pigeons
sharing daylight
before winter got there.
old men
and
their pals.
I couldn't stay.
I didn't know
where I had to get, but
I had to go
and never
come back.
wack,
he said when I said, "so
long."
I had miles to flee
before it
snowed.
I left him
to rest
before he too
rose
to his own
impossible
going.
[December 13, 2007: snow]
IMMIGRATION MONDAY
I'm less than 100 pages from finishing my new novel.
But I got an email todaty from White Eagle giving me Da Biz for not posting some beautiful writing this week. I don't know about beautiful, but here goes. A new poem. I was going to send it out to a lit journal, but hey--this is my own lit journal. You want me to publish one of yours? Send it my way.
In fact, I am going to follow the example of the old poetry teacher Judson Jerome and put this poem in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. If you have a lit jrnl out there that needs a poem, and whatever little bit of a "name" I have accrued, you hereby have my permission to take this poem and add it. Go ahead. But send me a copy. (Man, I am full of the Christmas spirit this week.)
Here goes:
#
The Duck
immense waves of flight
out from forests, out
from broken-mirror beaver
ponds of frozen mountains,
they fled from ice storms coming.
their shadows fell across the freeways
for days as I too migrated from frost
falling downslope and west,
looking to rest under a forgotten sun.
end of the continent--
it wasn't working. San Diego.
after this bad spell I had, after
one too many ghosts in my bed, you know
how you wake up some mornings with the smell of the
invisible on your fingers and the ruined broken plates
of your plans in slivers in the fireplace.
the first time I made these mistakes I was young
and poor: I was not young
anymore, but was still poor and making the same bad moves.
had enough for gas--1,000 miles: got to the house
of an old lover who stripped me naked
and drew me a bath.
I hoped
to find a home in the city I died in
for my first quarter century.
the water did not wash away
my sins.
she said: get
out. so I went out to see if my old home town
had anything as interesting as an aspen, anything
as good as glacier water or
buffaloes churning in the purple shadows of far
Nebraska.
down
to Mission Bay,
put the club
on the wheel in case some vato was in the market
for a snow-beat jeep, and donned my
Colorado Department of Wildlife baseball cap.
old body made older by the fabulous
hunks of southern California flesh jogging around the bay.
just my rusted ankles and aching back and stupid, dark
ideas in a splitting head. sewage
afloat in the bay, the famous California
brown trout--idiots from El Cajon sped away
on ski-do's yawping "YAHOO!"
my usual splendid pace.
feeling hideous.
you have to remind the body it exists.
it's not all bad dreams and drooping lusts.
I passed
old men staggering along
the bastards
until my rusted right ankle
threw red sparks into my bones and
caught fire in the kindling of my leg
and pulled me down on a rock
in the piss-yellow sand, feet in rotting seaweed
and heart in the guano.
the cool air felt wonderful.
a train rolling out of San Diego, going anywhere
I wanted to be
sounded its long cry and faded
north.
I walked to the water, put in my feet.
warm as a bath.
OK,
not bad,
I confessed.
fish fine as needles
tried to sew my toes
together.
near the effluent pipe
that carries tampons,
teardrops and coffee into the sea,
a duck.
just one.
a mallard male,
balding and ragged.
asleep.
I sat on my rock and said, 'hey."
he jumped. looked at me. wack, he muttered softly,
talking to himself. wack,
wack. I said similar things
to myself when I
typed or did
the dishes. he turned his head and watched the water.
so did I.
"all right," I said.
he looked back at me, clacked
his beak four times,
settled. he fluffed
himself and tucked
his head under a wing and went back
to sleep.
a loud wind-surfer rattled by.
"what the hell!" I said. waaaack!
he cried. wack-wack-wack!
our heads swiveled in unison
when the absurd slapping of joggers' shoes
went past us.
we watched them recede: we lost interest in their errands
at precisely the same moment
and turned back
to our meditations.
the wind ruffled his feathers.
the wind lifted my hair.
me and the duck:
compadres.
suddenly,
I understood
the winos
of my youth,
the filthy old men
in the plaza downtown
when a fountain gurgled greenish water
and they still called the town "Dago"
and sailors rushed up Broadway
looking for tattoos
and hookers:
those old men shuffling
their vague plaza circles
reeking of piss
and port, no cents
to get on a bus
out of there: tossing
stale bread
to the birds
of the sidewalks.
holy vermin,
all of them:
dead.
those lonesome rummies
with their beautiful pigeons
sharing daylight
before winter got there.
old men
and
their pals.
I couldn't stay.
I didn't know
where I had to get, but
I had to go
and never
come back.
wack,
he said when I said, "so
long."
I had miles to flee
before it
snowed.
I left him
to rest
before he too
rose
to his own
impossible
going.
[December 13, 2007: snow]
12/10/2007
The Immigration Monday Holy Crap! Edition
December 10, 2007
You're entitled to your own opinions. You're not entitled to your own facts.
--Daniel Patrick Moyniham
Last year at this time (December 2006), the "Harper's Index" in Harper's magazine had this interesting tidbit:
Cost, in one Mexican town, of a six-hour tour "full of obstacles and persecution" across a mock U,S.-Mexico border: $14
Estimated percentage of the town's population that has illegally crossed the real border: 90
Holy Crap!
By the way, in light of our border fence, this other little jot of data caught my eye:
Minimum number of checkpoints Mary and Joseph would face today on their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem: 10
Holy Crap!
#
Holy Shit!
Last week, the BBC announced that Panama has made Chinese mandatory in all its schools. You want to know where "the rest of the story" on our borders lies, look there.
#
God Is Weak on Immigration, Part One.
Have you looked at the Bible lately?
www.churchworldservice.org/Immigration/bible-as-handbook.html
#
Whoa, Big Fella!
Lou Dobbs said that 1/3 of imprisoned criminals in the U.S. are "illegals aliens." But the real number is 6%, not 33%. Lou? Amy Goodwin would like a word with you, young man.
www.alternet.org/columnists/story/69769/
#
Firm Resolve! Well, Maybe Not So Much....
The Republican debate on Univision. Tom Tancredo didn't like it. And, really, where did all the bold rhetoric go?
http://news.aol.com/elections/story/_a/republicans-temper-anti-immigrant-talk/20071210063809990000000001
#
Did Somebody Say "Tom Tancredo"?
Here's a dirty trick--a Tancredo hater posts a website attacking our fervent anti-immigrant immigrant candidate and makes it look loike a Tancredo For President website! Damn Mexicans! Oh, wait--it's a good American.
www.tomtancredo.org
#
Crackdown in Arizona.
Arizona's illegal-hiring law.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071208/D8TDDFLO0.html
#
That Darned Illegal--But Don't Worry, Nobody Thanked Him.
My awesome UIC student, Matt Kelley, forwarded me this story expanding upon the amazing tale I mentioned here last time. Hiow the "illegal" saved the boy in the desert. But don't worry, y'all--we still arrested him and booted his ass out! Why didn't somebody waterboard that potential terrorist?
www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/11/29/news/state/15_43_4511_28_07_.txt
#
Somebody Call Tom Tancredo!
Gosh, immigration makes everybody testy. Giorgio Bettio, in Treviso, Italy, had a great hard-line solution to the immigration problem. A final solution? Hey, it's a start.
www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0563062920071205?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=22&sp=true
#
Lou! Lou! I said, "Whoa, Boy! Whoa!"
www.fair.org/index.php?page=2867
#
I Said It Last Week, And I'll Say It Again This Week--Thank God I Live in America. And Furthermore, If You Still Need To Understand Why 90% of that Mexican Village Came to the U.S. Look No Further. As A Correlation: Expect a Lot of Undocumented Lounge Singers and Rock Bands. Note to Border Patrol: You'll Know Them by their Guitar Cases and Glittery Cowboy Jackets.
Murder/torture wave in Mexico targets singers.
www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8TCO1LG4&show_article=1
#
Mitt Romney: Hard Line on Immigration Except When We Need Domestic Help at Our Mansion.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071205/D8TB4DFG0.html
#
Oh, Wait--You Mean Tom Tancredo Did it Too?
www.alternet.org/rights/69391/
#
God Is Weak on Immigration, Part Two.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/270781_tony19.html
#
Ah...the sweet smell of apocalypse.
"Show me one man who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him." --Bob Dylan
Next week, some hard scary numbers on the actual deaths on the border. And, don't tell anybody, but there's a big immigration conference happening and...oh crap...it looks like they might announce that the U.S. benefits from "illegals" more than it loses. Research. It's such a problem--facts suck!
Honestly, I'm not convinced, but I'll be delighted to see what they say. I'm leaning that way, and not just because I'm an America-hating defeatist beaner lovin' Mex communist Bible-thumper. It simply seems that the voices that attack the poor are the voices that tell you there is no sneaky conspiracy in oil companies making record profits when you can't afford to drive to Aunt Biffie's weenie-roast.
Remember: the Politics of Fear and Control need an OTHER.
There is no OTHER.
There is only US.
WWJD--Who Would Jesus Deport? He would be too busy forgiving Pancho Villa's sins to rev up his big truck or get out the Mossberg pump shotgun.
If anybody asks--I did not write this.
L
Thank You, World
December 10, 2007
You're entitled to your own opinions. You're not entitled to your own facts.
--Daniel Patrick Moyniham
Last year at this time (December 2006), the "Harper's Index" in Harper's magazine had this interesting tidbit:
Cost, in one Mexican town, of a six-hour tour "full of obstacles and persecution" across a mock U,S.-Mexico border: $14
Estimated percentage of the town's population that has illegally crossed the real border: 90
Holy Crap!
By the way, in light of our border fence, this other little jot of data caught my eye:
Minimum number of checkpoints Mary and Joseph would face today on their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem: 10
Holy Crap!
#
Holy Shit!
Last week, the BBC announced that Panama has made Chinese mandatory in all its schools. You want to know where "the rest of the story" on our borders lies, look there.
#
God Is Weak on Immigration, Part One.
Have you looked at the Bible lately?
www.churchworldservice.org/Immigration/bible-as-handbook.html
#
Whoa, Big Fella!
Lou Dobbs said that 1/3 of imprisoned criminals in the U.S. are "illegals aliens." But the real number is 6%, not 33%. Lou? Amy Goodwin would like a word with you, young man.
www.alternet.org/columnists/story/69769/
#
Firm Resolve! Well, Maybe Not So Much....
The Republican debate on Univision. Tom Tancredo didn't like it. And, really, where did all the bold rhetoric go?
http://news.aol.com/elections/story/_a/republicans-temper-anti-immigrant-talk/20071210063809990000000001
#
Did Somebody Say "Tom Tancredo"?
Here's a dirty trick--a Tancredo hater posts a website attacking our fervent anti-immigrant immigrant candidate and makes it look loike a Tancredo For President website! Damn Mexicans! Oh, wait--it's a good American.
www.tomtancredo.org
#
Crackdown in Arizona.
Arizona's illegal-hiring law.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071208/D8TDDFLO0.html
#
That Darned Illegal--But Don't Worry, Nobody Thanked Him.
My awesome UIC student, Matt Kelley, forwarded me this story expanding upon the amazing tale I mentioned here last time. Hiow the "illegal" saved the boy in the desert. But don't worry, y'all--we still arrested him and booted his ass out! Why didn't somebody waterboard that potential terrorist?
www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/11/29/news/state/15_43_4511_28_07_.txt
#
Somebody Call Tom Tancredo!
Gosh, immigration makes everybody testy. Giorgio Bettio, in Treviso, Italy, had a great hard-line solution to the immigration problem. A final solution? Hey, it's a start.
www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0563062920071205?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=22&sp=true
#
Lou! Lou! I said, "Whoa, Boy! Whoa!"
www.fair.org/index.php?page=2867
#
I Said It Last Week, And I'll Say It Again This Week--Thank God I Live in America. And Furthermore, If You Still Need To Understand Why 90% of that Mexican Village Came to the U.S. Look No Further. As A Correlation: Expect a Lot of Undocumented Lounge Singers and Rock Bands. Note to Border Patrol: You'll Know Them by their Guitar Cases and Glittery Cowboy Jackets.
Murder/torture wave in Mexico targets singers.
www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8TCO1LG4&show_article=1
#
Mitt Romney: Hard Line on Immigration Except When We Need Domestic Help at Our Mansion.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071205/D8TB4DFG0.html
#
Oh, Wait--You Mean Tom Tancredo Did it Too?
www.alternet.org/rights/69391/
#
God Is Weak on Immigration, Part Two.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/270781_tony19.html
#
Ah...the sweet smell of apocalypse.
"Show me one man who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him." --Bob Dylan
Next week, some hard scary numbers on the actual deaths on the border. And, don't tell anybody, but there's a big immigration conference happening and...oh crap...it looks like they might announce that the U.S. benefits from "illegals" more than it loses. Research. It's such a problem--facts suck!
Honestly, I'm not convinced, but I'll be delighted to see what they say. I'm leaning that way, and not just because I'm an America-hating defeatist beaner lovin' Mex communist Bible-thumper. It simply seems that the voices that attack the poor are the voices that tell you there is no sneaky conspiracy in oil companies making record profits when you can't afford to drive to Aunt Biffie's weenie-roast.
Remember: the Politics of Fear and Control need an OTHER.
There is no OTHER.
There is only US.
WWJD--Who Would Jesus Deport? He would be too busy forgiving Pancho Villa's sins to rev up his big truck or get out the Mossberg pump shotgun.
If anybody asks--I did not write this.
L
12/08/2007
Ah, more snow. So the fighting Illini got whupped by Arizona today. We were there because Eric drums for the Illini. The drunk punk-ass Arizona fan in front of us dumped his whole beer glass on the Chicago guy in front of him. We thought there would be a real Chi-Town tune-up on the Wildcat fan, but it turned out to be a mild-mannered guy who threw his hands in the air and cried out, as if to the gods themselves, "Dude, you just ruined our whole day! I hope you enjoy the game!" Oh snap.
But Eric, if you follow college sports, and why should you, is going to the Rose Bowl. Yay. Except now Daddy gets to spend thousands of dollars! Air fares! Hotels! Rental cars! Grand stand tickets! Game tickets! Oh heck--in for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well take the girls to Disneyland so we can watch New Year's Eve fireworks. Man, I'd better write another book.
All by friends from So Cal who have been asking me to come home did not have this in mind.
However, we will be back this summer. It is the Urrea Catastrophic Emergency Writing Service all over the USA this summer. I am the FEMA of writing in '08. Perhaps I will see you in one of these locations. Solana Beach, CA, is doing Devil's H as its all-city read, so we're trying to organize with them so I can hit town in June. Then on to Santa Barbara to their lit fest. Then up the coast, poikng around in Bigfoot country, and over to holy Wallowa Valley, Oregon, for Fishtrap. I've been talking Fishtrap up to you for years--well, here I go again! From there, down to AZ and the Hassayampa writing institute. I limp home from there and fly to Vermont for Breadloaf. Why am I doing all of these? I don't know. I have lost control. I'm like the gal in "Oklahoma" that can't say no.
The plan is that Hummingbird begins filming in September. I get much wealthier. I start to make noises about retiring.
Everybody in my house is screaming with laughter. We're all crazy here. It's cold, but we're warm.
I'm thinking about........................................gratitude.
L
Snow Day Writing Meditation, 12/05/07
But Eric, if you follow college sports, and why should you, is going to the Rose Bowl. Yay. Except now Daddy gets to spend thousands of dollars! Air fares! Hotels! Rental cars! Grand stand tickets! Game tickets! Oh heck--in for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well take the girls to Disneyland so we can watch New Year's Eve fireworks. Man, I'd better write another book.
All by friends from So Cal who have been asking me to come home did not have this in mind.
However, we will be back this summer. It is the Urrea Catastrophic Emergency Writing Service all over the USA this summer. I am the FEMA of writing in '08. Perhaps I will see you in one of these locations. Solana Beach, CA, is doing Devil's H as its all-city read, so we're trying to organize with them so I can hit town in June. Then on to Santa Barbara to their lit fest. Then up the coast, poikng around in Bigfoot country, and over to holy Wallowa Valley, Oregon, for Fishtrap. I've been talking Fishtrap up to you for years--well, here I go again! From there, down to AZ and the Hassayampa writing institute. I limp home from there and fly to Vermont for Breadloaf. Why am I doing all of these? I don't know. I have lost control. I'm like the gal in "Oklahoma" that can't say no.
The plan is that Hummingbird begins filming in September. I get much wealthier. I start to make noises about retiring.
Everybody in my house is screaming with laughter. We're all crazy here. It's cold, but we're warm.
I'm thinking about........................................gratitude.
L
12/05/2007
In a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. --George Orwell
Immigration Monday Road Report
12/02/2007
Sunday, Dec. 2.
Just got back from UC Davis. Yesterday, I delivered a keynote talk at a literacy program for "minority" parents and immigrants. Those evil illegal monsters our heroes in the anti-immigrant uprising are targeting. I would hate to reveal my liberal bias by commenting on how kind and hard-working and sincere and sweet those folks were. Or how heroic a program Gear Up is--how it promotes literacy and education and and progress and Americanism. Oh hell no! This was all Black and Latino people, so screw them! Damn it, I think I might have met a couple of gay people too. I just know there is somebody in Homeland Security I can call.
I feel guilty at moments like this, because Gear Up is a professional organization and they pay for their speakers to come. They do not ask for hand-outs. They may not pay as much as the generous and powerful UC Davis, but they pay. Now, you ask yourself what to do in cases like this. Do you give back the money, or buy a few CD and DVD box sets? Do you take the money, but use it to buy books for the participants? I have been guilty of all three. However, Gear Up had already provided amazing collections of books to their participants. Libraries--including English and Spanish editions of my own Hummingbird's Daughter.
What do you do? Well, here's what I chose to do this time. I took their money! Yes I did. And I added it to the money I was sending Pastor Von and Spectrum Ministries (see Across the Wire) to help him with Christmas costs for the poor and forgotten and hated and despised and reviled children of Tijuana. My home town.
Am I a saint? No. But they are. Yes--I mean Spectrum, and I mean the forgotten unloved masses.
Those bleeding-heart conservative Baptists might just help a cold, hungry, ill, hopeless, coatless, shoeless boy or girl not die, not succumb, not surrender to hopelessness and fear. What if Von inspires one more year of hope and effort? What if Von gets a few more kids into school? Into jobs? Into better houses? What if those children do not come here? What if they work on saving the border and Tijuana and Mexico? What if they don't have to come into Gear Up and wonder how I got out and they didn't?
What if? It's about Hope, isn't it. As Duane, my Sioux brother, reminded me in a sweat-lodge years ago: Hope is prayer.
#
So you wake up some mornings feeling famous, and on others, you feel like dog-squat. I can vary on the scale, from Turd to Tudor. If you have a teenage daughter in your house, you are already on my continuum. Some days, she clearly thinks it would be swell if your plane went down in flames. On other days, you don't seem to cause her to want to kill herself, but barely. Then, there's the unexpected sunburst of joy that you can't quite fathom. Thus did I head for Sacramento. Baffled Dad and deeply troubled and fed up with this border bullshit.
I got there and United had lost my luggage. Hmm. The total pro artiste handler for UC Davis, Emily, scooped me up and got me to the hotel in Davis. I got there just as their restaurant closed. No supper for Dad. But they did let me have a toothbrush. I swiped an apple from their apples basket and went off to my room--an amazing two-story thing with lots of TVs.
I waited around for my luggage. I read cheap paperbacks and ate cheap food and drank evil hotel bathroom-counter coffee out of that little gasping burping pot you get. The clothes came just in time for me to head out to my NPR interview back in Sacra. Off we rushed, and the show was great and the host had actually investigated my blogs and knew I was friends with Shawn Phillips and was suddenly playing Shawn on the radio! Wow. I felt like I was falling backward in time.
Back to Davis for my afternoon talk with students. On the way, I spied a wallet on the ground and Gary Sue Goodman and I took it to the gallery that was featuring a photo show inspired by Devil's Highway. I told the women it was my ferocious Border Patrol tracking instincts that allowed me to see the wallet. I felt all saintly--the young woman who dropped it left credit cards in it. Saved!
Off to the talk. A hundred (?) or 150 (?) students. Spoke for a couple of hours, I guess. Then I went to supper with the faculty. It was wonderful--I got to hang with Francisco X. Alarcon, whose poetry I greatly admire. Etc. etc. blah blah blah. This sounds like an episode of Access Hollywood.
The next day is the point here. I got up and decided to go for a walk. I figured I'd find food somewhere. I was waiting for Yuma Sheriff Ralph Ogdne to arrive. Ralph was going to face the crowds with me later. And my ol' pal and desert compadre, Brian Andrew Laird (Bowman's Line and To Bury the Dead). So I was hoofing it around Davis, enjoying the morning, following my nose as it tried to sniff out eggs. However, all it found were closed Gaps and bars. But I did find a Borders. Now, it suits my self-image to think of myself as a guy who goes looking for poetry before he finds breakfast. Sort of a trade from Hog-Man to Haiku-Boy. I went in snufflking and rooting around in the poetry shelves.
Now, you will forgive me for telling you here that many writers reach a baffling stage in their careers. I am apparently pulling into that train station. It is a change from How nice, you're a writer (which, by the way, was preceded by You're a writer--and I care because...?) to this new weitd thing which is: Oh my God, it's you! The man behind the counter looked at me and cried, "Oh my God, it's you! You're you!" I felt trapped by the Migra. I said, "I am! Me!" "Luis Urrea!" he cried. "Yes!" I agreed. The Muslim couple behind me in line started laughing. The clerk said, "What you do! It's so IMPORTANT. To the NATION. And great WRITING." I signed my credit card receipt. "Wish I had something for you to autograph!" he shouted. I pointed out that I had just autographed the receipt. "That's LUIS URREA!" he said to the couple, but fortunately, I got out the door before they said, "Who?"
I was hoohin' it down the street, now pretty certain that my poetry books would have to be my breakfast, when my next ancounter with the fame border patrol occurred. I walked into the gallery with the Devil's Highway show. I was after Christmas presents for Cinderella. Here's the absurd conversation I had with the Gallery Matron:
She: Nice gifts.
Me: Yes.
She: Are you a visitning scholar?
Me: Scholar? No. But I'm here visiting. I have the show tonight.
She: Show.
Me; At UC Davis, you know.
She: So you're a visiting professor.
Me: No. I'm a...writer?
She: You wrote an academic book?
Me: No. No-no-no.
She: Ah, well! You should look around the gallery. It's a non-profit. We are currently featuring an amazing installation focusing on immigration!
Me: Yes, I know. That's my book.
She: (squinting at me) Oh. You're the devil-person?
Me: Yes.
She: Oh. (Turns away.) If you were Stephen King, I'd say wow.
Me: Uh.............................................................if I were Stephen King, I'd say wow too.
I burst out of there and couldn't stop laughing. Davis had encapsulated an entire writing career in two blocks! "I'd say wow" is now one of my cherished mottoes.
#
Enough of the eprsonal notes! The Sheriff arrived. All ten feet of him, and huge mustache, and cowboy hat and boots. He slayed all of 'em--everybody there was in love with Ralph. I love him, too, and was thrilled he would come to this event and hang out with me. Plus, I figured if anybody had come to give me any shit, Ralph would smite them. He slipped me a Yuma Sheriff's Department medal. "For service above and beyond the call of duty," he quipped. As always, God found a vector to bring me back to earth--this time, it was good ol' Laird who said, "That will impress everybody--in Yuma." Bastard.
The UC bookstore had sold over 1900 copies of the book. 1400 people came to the talk. The signing line was so huge that I spent nearly two hours signing books.
You know it's a hit if you sweat through your shirt and your jacket from signing books and shaking hands (and hugging women and being photgraphed). It's like the world's craziest Homecoming Dance or Senior Prom. LOUIE, SIGN MY YEARBOOK! You know it, sweetie, gimme a hug....
People are still lustening out there. The Davis students did a miraculous thing--they took the GPS coordinates from the book and made a 3-D internet map. You can walk the whole route of the book in day or night conditions. I hope to put the link to this interactive site on next week's I.M.
Along with the amazing experience of UC itself, Ralph Ogden, and Brian "God of Thunder" Laird, was that the executive produce of Hummingbird's Daughter also came. You leave an event like that feeling soem hope. And then you get home and go to Gear Up. How can we not still offer Thanksgiving?
Humanity, even "illegal" humanity, prevails.
Of course, the on-line student paper (The Aggie Online), waited till I left town and ran a review of Devil's Highway in which the student reviewer announced that I had lied the entire time, that the book was a work of fiction, and that it was sad there was not one iota of truth in the whole book.
If I were Stephen King, I'd say kiss my ass.
#
Back to the trenches. Got to write. Many things waiting for my attention. There's snow and ice on the ground here. I have my medal from Ralph Ogden. I have my integrity. I have my family, even if one of them isn't always sure I have the proper papers to reside in her world legally. You and me, we are warm tonight. Not everybody is, you know. No, almost nobody.
I will return next week with data and news.
WWJD? This week, Jesus Would Deport The Aggie Online!
L
Just got back from UC Davis. Yesterday, I delivered a keynote talk at a literacy program for "minority" parents and immigrants. Those evil illegal monsters our heroes in the anti-immigrant uprising are targeting. I would hate to reveal my liberal bias by commenting on how kind and hard-working and sincere and sweet those folks were. Or how heroic a program Gear Up is--how it promotes literacy and education and and progress and Americanism. Oh hell no! This was all Black and Latino people, so screw them! Damn it, I think I might have met a couple of gay people too. I just know there is somebody in Homeland Security I can call.
I feel guilty at moments like this, because Gear Up is a professional organization and they pay for their speakers to come. They do not ask for hand-outs. They may not pay as much as the generous and powerful UC Davis, but they pay. Now, you ask yourself what to do in cases like this. Do you give back the money, or buy a few CD and DVD box sets? Do you take the money, but use it to buy books for the participants? I have been guilty of all three. However, Gear Up had already provided amazing collections of books to their participants. Libraries--including English and Spanish editions of my own Hummingbird's Daughter.
What do you do? Well, here's what I chose to do this time. I took their money! Yes I did. And I added it to the money I was sending Pastor Von and Spectrum Ministries (see Across the Wire) to help him with Christmas costs for the poor and forgotten and hated and despised and reviled children of Tijuana. My home town.
Am I a saint? No. But they are. Yes--I mean Spectrum, and I mean the forgotten unloved masses.
Those bleeding-heart conservative Baptists might just help a cold, hungry, ill, hopeless, coatless, shoeless boy or girl not die, not succumb, not surrender to hopelessness and fear. What if Von inspires one more year of hope and effort? What if Von gets a few more kids into school? Into jobs? Into better houses? What if those children do not come here? What if they work on saving the border and Tijuana and Mexico? What if they don't have to come into Gear Up and wonder how I got out and they didn't?
What if? It's about Hope, isn't it. As Duane, my Sioux brother, reminded me in a sweat-lodge years ago: Hope is prayer.
#
So you wake up some mornings feeling famous, and on others, you feel like dog-squat. I can vary on the scale, from Turd to Tudor. If you have a teenage daughter in your house, you are already on my continuum. Some days, she clearly thinks it would be swell if your plane went down in flames. On other days, you don't seem to cause her to want to kill herself, but barely. Then, there's the unexpected sunburst of joy that you can't quite fathom. Thus did I head for Sacramento. Baffled Dad and deeply troubled and fed up with this border bullshit.
I got there and United had lost my luggage. Hmm. The total pro artiste handler for UC Davis, Emily, scooped me up and got me to the hotel in Davis. I got there just as their restaurant closed. No supper for Dad. But they did let me have a toothbrush. I swiped an apple from their apples basket and went off to my room--an amazing two-story thing with lots of TVs.
I waited around for my luggage. I read cheap paperbacks and ate cheap food and drank evil hotel bathroom-counter coffee out of that little gasping burping pot you get. The clothes came just in time for me to head out to my NPR interview back in Sacra. Off we rushed, and the show was great and the host had actually investigated my blogs and knew I was friends with Shawn Phillips and was suddenly playing Shawn on the radio! Wow. I felt like I was falling backward in time.
Back to Davis for my afternoon talk with students. On the way, I spied a wallet on the ground and Gary Sue Goodman and I took it to the gallery that was featuring a photo show inspired by Devil's Highway. I told the women it was my ferocious Border Patrol tracking instincts that allowed me to see the wallet. I felt all saintly--the young woman who dropped it left credit cards in it. Saved!
Off to the talk. A hundred (?) or 150 (?) students. Spoke for a couple of hours, I guess. Then I went to supper with the faculty. It was wonderful--I got to hang with Francisco X. Alarcon, whose poetry I greatly admire. Etc. etc. blah blah blah. This sounds like an episode of Access Hollywood.
The next day is the point here. I got up and decided to go for a walk. I figured I'd find food somewhere. I was waiting for Yuma Sheriff Ralph Ogdne to arrive. Ralph was going to face the crowds with me later. And my ol' pal and desert compadre, Brian Andrew Laird (Bowman's Line and To Bury the Dead). So I was hoofing it around Davis, enjoying the morning, following my nose as it tried to sniff out eggs. However, all it found were closed Gaps and bars. But I did find a Borders. Now, it suits my self-image to think of myself as a guy who goes looking for poetry before he finds breakfast. Sort of a trade from Hog-Man to Haiku-Boy. I went in snufflking and rooting around in the poetry shelves.
Now, you will forgive me for telling you here that many writers reach a baffling stage in their careers. I am apparently pulling into that train station. It is a change from How nice, you're a writer (which, by the way, was preceded by You're a writer--and I care because...?) to this new weitd thing which is: Oh my God, it's you! The man behind the counter looked at me and cried, "Oh my God, it's you! You're you!" I felt trapped by the Migra. I said, "I am! Me!" "Luis Urrea!" he cried. "Yes!" I agreed. The Muslim couple behind me in line started laughing. The clerk said, "What you do! It's so IMPORTANT. To the NATION. And great WRITING." I signed my credit card receipt. "Wish I had something for you to autograph!" he shouted. I pointed out that I had just autographed the receipt. "That's LUIS URREA!" he said to the couple, but fortunately, I got out the door before they said, "Who?"
I was hoohin' it down the street, now pretty certain that my poetry books would have to be my breakfast, when my next ancounter with the fame border patrol occurred. I walked into the gallery with the Devil's Highway show. I was after Christmas presents for Cinderella. Here's the absurd conversation I had with the Gallery Matron:
She: Nice gifts.
Me: Yes.
She: Are you a visitning scholar?
Me: Scholar? No. But I'm here visiting. I have the show tonight.
She: Show.
Me; At UC Davis, you know.
She: So you're a visiting professor.
Me: No. I'm a...writer?
She: You wrote an academic book?
Me: No. No-no-no.
She: Ah, well! You should look around the gallery. It's a non-profit. We are currently featuring an amazing installation focusing on immigration!
Me: Yes, I know. That's my book.
She: (squinting at me) Oh. You're the devil-person?
Me: Yes.
She: Oh. (Turns away.) If you were Stephen King, I'd say wow.
Me: Uh.............................................................if I were Stephen King, I'd say wow too.
I burst out of there and couldn't stop laughing. Davis had encapsulated an entire writing career in two blocks! "I'd say wow" is now one of my cherished mottoes.
#
Enough of the eprsonal notes! The Sheriff arrived. All ten feet of him, and huge mustache, and cowboy hat and boots. He slayed all of 'em--everybody there was in love with Ralph. I love him, too, and was thrilled he would come to this event and hang out with me. Plus, I figured if anybody had come to give me any shit, Ralph would smite them. He slipped me a Yuma Sheriff's Department medal. "For service above and beyond the call of duty," he quipped. As always, God found a vector to bring me back to earth--this time, it was good ol' Laird who said, "That will impress everybody--in Yuma." Bastard.
The UC bookstore had sold over 1900 copies of the book. 1400 people came to the talk. The signing line was so huge that I spent nearly two hours signing books.
You know it's a hit if you sweat through your shirt and your jacket from signing books and shaking hands (and hugging women and being photgraphed). It's like the world's craziest Homecoming Dance or Senior Prom. LOUIE, SIGN MY YEARBOOK! You know it, sweetie, gimme a hug....
People are still lustening out there. The Davis students did a miraculous thing--they took the GPS coordinates from the book and made a 3-D internet map. You can walk the whole route of the book in day or night conditions. I hope to put the link to this interactive site on next week's I.M.
Along with the amazing experience of UC itself, Ralph Ogden, and Brian "God of Thunder" Laird, was that the executive produce of Hummingbird's Daughter also came. You leave an event like that feeling soem hope. And then you get home and go to Gear Up. How can we not still offer Thanksgiving?
Humanity, even "illegal" humanity, prevails.
Of course, the on-line student paper (The Aggie Online), waited till I left town and ran a review of Devil's Highway in which the student reviewer announced that I had lied the entire time, that the book was a work of fiction, and that it was sad there was not one iota of truth in the whole book.
If I were Stephen King, I'd say kiss my ass.
#
Back to the trenches. Got to write. Many things waiting for my attention. There's snow and ice on the ground here. I have my medal from Ralph Ogden. I have my integrity. I have my family, even if one of them isn't always sure I have the proper papers to reside in her world legally. You and me, we are warm tonight. Not everybody is, you know. No, almost nobody.
I will return next week with data and news.
WWJD? This week, Jesus Would Deport The Aggie Online!
L
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