Güd wrtr

I missed National Ampersand Day,
days ago, not that it matters
particularly, but dang,

it’s my favorite symbol
&&&&&&&&&
this Latin doohickey

“et,”, which, cleverly means
“and,” & to top it off is a
nifty ligature—two or more

letters combined to make
a symbol, an ancient one,
found in Pompeii graffiti

(after super-destructive
Vesuvius blew its top
in 79 AD).

I love that the word
is derived from
“and per se and”

(created by Marcus
Tullius Tiro, Roman
slave to Cicero) in 63 BC

& first appears as
a character at the end
of the Latin alphabet

in 1011 AD. Yes,
& was the 26th letter.
XYZ& !

Mostly I love to
whip a curvy & onto
a page, not to be

confused with the
even more elegant
& equally seductive

treble clef, though
they are kissing cousins
in symbology land,

their cute round
bottoms & curly
tops a delight to draw—

go ahead, try ’em
both (start at the
bottom & work your

way up) & see if
that just isn’t a
whole lot of fun.

(National Ampersand Day is Sept. 8.)

Look, I say to him as I water the last
of the hollyhocks, small bursts
sprouting from the yellow-stick stalks

that all summer long sported baby pink
frilly numbers fluttering like tutus.
I hope you’re up there—wherever there is—

offering a metaphorical hand to the newbies
so startlingly blasted out of their bodies
into whatever comes next. So many recently:

Margaret and Stephen and Joan and Christie.
I can’t feature an actual heaven with a
receiving line of the just-died waiting to get in

since y’all pretty much left your bodies
behind for us, the living, to deal with.
Thanks, by the way, for that. You couldn’t

just ascend, a la That Guy, and take your
old bones with you? And I feel his chuckle
rumble through my chest, his murmur

a cresting wave in my ears. Everyone
is received, Toots. Not to worry.
I sigh. OK, but how? Received into what?

Not something I can describe, Toots,
he conveys in that way he does. I expel
another heavy breath. And what about

those who are so close but can’t seem
to lift out of their pain-filled bodies?
Can you help with that? I feel his smile

right behind my own. They’re being
helped, Toots. And before I question
that, he adds, I promise. And before I

protest that it sure doesn’t look that way,
he directs my gaze to the two-inch-tall,
magenta hollyhock blossom adjacent

to the dead stalk I trimmed but did not
remove, just to see what might happen.
Because you never know.

Yeah, yeah, I say. We’ve been having
this conversation for decades now.
Growth. Something’s still living there.

He starts to drift, as he does in dreams
set by a starry stream, where I often
find him, where we’ve been talking,

chuckling, remembering. My heart longs
to follow like one or more of our dogs
and cats who’re always with him now.

His warmth caresses my ribcage
before whooshing away, leaving
what he always leaves with me:

Love, Toots. It’s all love.

who deeply misses his dearly
departed companion Dick Tracy—
not the comic book character
but an entirely real character—

who married Felicia long ago
and moved to her family‘s ranch
where she was raised, where she
raised her children and trained horses
and cared for the world famous garden
detective until he reached the end
of his long season.

Of course, they would name the dog Spencer
after the 1930s and ’40s movie star.
Of course, his canine namesake would trot
happily after his master,

who performed his own starring role
as Ricardo the Ranch Hand, piloting the ATV
around Emigrant Springs Ranch, performing
all manner of chores—

planting and tending the garden,
moving hay bales into fields,
shoveling all manner of poo,
milking sweet little Holly cow
and uncountable other duties.

We visited Felicia and Spencer today
on the ranch, all of us missing
the larger-than-life character/raconteur/
wicked funny journalist/author/garden writer.

Spencer ambled over to each of us for a pat,
then leaned on our legs and looked up adoringly,
wishing, we imagine, for the one he so loved
to amble out of the house, cowboy-hatted
and work-booted,

whistle for his faithful canine companion,
and set off together across those 100 acres
ready for whatever comes their way.

•••

Longtime Sacramento Bee journalist and garden editor Richard L. Tracy (whose byline was Dick Tracy), was a dear friend and colleague of Dick Schmidt (and later me, too). He was, among many other things, a UC Master Gardener, as well as a columnist for The Bee where he worked for 30 years, and, after his retirement from that paper, The Union in Grass Valley. Dick Tracy died at age 84 on Feb. 28, 2023, at Emigrant Springs Ranch, his home in Grass Valley, CA, which he shared with his beloved wife Felicia and dog Spencer Tracy and many other two- and four-footed ones over the years. Dick Schmidt and I and Dick Tracy’s family, friends and colleagues miss him deeply. You can read my poem about his passing here.

We come upon them,
stilled atop bright yellow
coneflowers near sunset,
settled in for the coming night,
so quiet they hardly seem alive.

But this is how bumblebees
rest, the females returning to
the nest, the males in need
of a safe haven to bed down.

We all look for a place of refuge
where we can fold our wings
and rest our fuzzy heads
full of a day’s business.
And if we can do so with
companions, more the better.

We fortunately retired worker
bees admire the assemblage
of more than a dozen snoozing
pollinators spread across a sprawl
of petals the color of sunshine,
careful not to disturb them.

May the day’s residual heat
keep them cozy overnight until
fresh sunlight arrives to warm
their wings, spirit them into
flight and buzz their way
back to work again.

•••

With thanks to Kathy Keatley Garvey for her Bug Squad blog posts that teach me so much about insects. And to Dick Schmidt, retired (Sacramento) Bee photographer, for his kindness in shooting on-the-spot assignments like this one.

Canary yellow fins of a kayak paddle
flash between the soft blue of sky
and teal green of Tahoe’s nearshore,

as a boy embedded to his waist in
the small craft masterfully maneuvers
under and around the pier where
his grownups sit sunning on a
sparkling September afternoon,
quieter now after Labor Day,

this hatted child paddling with
confidence much greater than his years,
a big sister and little sister in matching
lifejackets and striped shirts like his,
wading, calling for their turns,

the little one clambering aboard
to kneel behind her brother, her
hatless blonde head gleaming gold
into the day.

Take me back! she commands her captain,
who pilots her to a floating dock as she
urges, Faster! Faster! and he complies,
yellow fins blurring against the sky.

He’ll be negotiating rapids in a few years,
this young ferryman already chauffeuring
passengers on watery adventures, paddling
with the certainty of the female mallards
floating nearby,

all of them turning into small waves
moving shoreward, bobbing nose first
into what’s coming toward them.

for Cora Johnson

She once played a two-bit
dancehall girl in a small
Nevada town—a bit of
a floozy, Peachy Keen—

but we know her as
the most loyal of friends,
a gal who’d upend her life,
grab her best college buddy

from Colorado and fly
to Hawaii—nowhere near
a beach—to care for a fella
fresh from a triple bypass,

shivering in an unheated
rental house in the clouds,
the ladies bundling him up
burrito-style in a bedspread,

feeding and pilling him
like an ailing cat, toweling
him dry after showers,
coaxing him into short

walks down the block,
then flying him home
to me, the two of us
beyond grateful to

the two of them for
a half century of love
and friendship, for this
woman—who truly is

Peachy Keen.

•••

(With thanks and love also to Connie Raub, the other half of this dynamic duo.)

Lazy clouds meander like legless sheep
across the blue-eyed sky, pencil-pointed
peaks jutting into it, mountains we

haven’t seen in ages, ones swathed
so long in snow it seemed that their
rocky faces would never reappear.

But there they are, the old reliables,
Sierra sentinels that range north
to south for 400 miles, the western

backbone of the Americas. We drive
through these mountains that one
of us used to traverse on foot,

that feel like dear friends, spreading
their craggy arms wide to embrace
the great bowl of lake where we

will land for a while, where we
will sit ourselves on a bench
overlooking the shore to watch

a trio of ducks unzip the impossibly
blue water in their wake. We find
ourselves transfixed, resting,

just happy to be here, as my
blue-eyed love likes to say, in this
place that will certainly outlast

us reliable oldsters, young in
geologic time, rocky ancestors
beaming the day’s last rays at us,

like proud grandparents
whose cherished descendants
just dropped in for a visit.

No, Ma, you are not a size 14 or an XL—
you’re the incredible shrinking woman,
well below your high school weight
of 118, a whopping 101 now,

a size 8 at best and certainly
a petite. No, you’re not 5-feet-4
any more. I’m 5-feet-4, and look,
you’re at least two inches shorter,

so yes, that makes you a petite.
So here, I ordered you some
8P pants to see how they fit.
I know your 12s still sort of fit

thanks to the stretchy waists,
but you look like you’re wearing
bloomers—there’s so much extra
fabric around your hips and thighs.

Though size doesn’t matter, Ma.
Look at you on a typical Momday:
acupuncturist, then lunch and
chiropractor, then to Curves

to do all the machines twice, and,
come evening, singing baritone
at Sweet Adelines rehearsal.
There may be less of you, but

you’re wringing every bit of life
out of this one. Yes, I know
you hope for reincarnation,
and you plan to make it to 120,

but Ma, I’m having a hard time
keeping up with you. And see?
Those 8Ps fit you just right.
How ’bout that?

And look at you—going through
the too-bigs, letting me bag them
for donation, keeping some
favorites, ordering smaller sizes.

Smaller does not mean less
than, Ma. You’re a pint-sized
pack of strong woman, and
your daughters are taking

notes on How to Be a Vibrant
92-year-old. Yes, vivacious
too. Full of vim and vigor.
And with, God help us all,

no small amount of spunk.*

(*Lou Grant may have hated spunk,
but we love yours!)

(for Donna Gail)
•••
Granite Bay, summer 1966

We are fish out of water, little sister,
far from where we started:
flat land close to ocean
choked with palm trees
and orange groves, sidewalks
for roller skates and bikes,
Disneyland, four grandparents,
two aunts and an uncle and
two older girl cousins we adore.

Now we find ourselves
hundreds of miles north,
amid hills laced with giant-armed
oaks and long, waving grasses
that lighten under summer sun,
like our hair that grows more
blonde each day. Our skin pinkens,
too, with itchy poison oak
bumps that teach us:
leaves of three, let them be.

We live next to a big lake
that floats the wooden ski boat
Daddy built with Grandpa.
And next summer, after we
finish all our swimming lessons,
Mommy will float with us
in the deep blue, steady us
until we are pulled to our feet,
on long, wooden planks,
wobble a bit, then magically skim
across this liquid expanse.

We are girl fish growing gills
that allow us to breathe
this new kind of air.

Permission granted to:

• let your brain roll around in its hard shell
• grasp at this thought or that
• mull over the to-do list (or avoid it)
• allow your monkey mind to leap from branch to branch
until it settles into a perfect spot in a just-right tree,
to get itself out of the way & allow what wants
to emerge to emerge

Permission granted to forgive:

• the hard stuff
• the missteps
• the mistakes
• the blunders
• the embarrassing I-can’t-write/talk-about-this stuff
• the parent/teacher/adult in charge who got it wrong/yelled/
blamed you/made you feel less than/maybe didn’t mean to
• the adored one who said, It’s not you, it’s me
• the ones who were not the best choices
• the ones who were good choices but had some less-than-good moments
• your own less-than-good moments
• leaving when it got too hard
• staying longer than was wise
• the things you ingested/inhaled/imbibed that did not
serve you well
• the dying pet you had euthanized perhaps too soon—
or not soon enough
• the friends/family/lovers/spouses/partners/kind-hearted ones
whom you did not tell nearly often enough thank you/
I love you/you’re the best/I’m so lucky to find myself
in your orbit

Permission granted to:

• let go of all the woulda/coulda/shouldas
• love anyway
• apologize
• be forgiven
• cry if you want to (it’s your party)
• let the world work its healing magic
on your cracked-open heart
& (best of all)
• remember that it’s all story, so write it down
& watch those malleable words turn to art in your
kindly/capable/compassionate hands.